First Impressions

“first impressions are the most important” is something I have heard all of my life. It is what many people hold to be a strong truth, but in placing so much in them, are we depriving ourselves of a greater understanding of the world? Every person is different and with a more loose social movement occurring it may be harder to understand much about a person when you first meet them. The more I age the more I find that I am usually wrong in my first impressions. It is very easy for a person to give me reason to not like them when I first meet them, but in general I like everybody, once I know a little about them.

First Attempt at Rocktop Trail

Yesterday (February 29, 2008), I attempted a new trail, Rocktop. It is a 1.5 mile strenuous trail that is mostly upward with many hazards associated with mountain climbing. The trail is quite nice. On Pinnacle you can only see the mountain ahead of you and the trees that you have already passed, but on Rocktop you get many opportunities for some very nice views as you ascend the mountain. At about the middle of the trail you can see the radio and other communication towers that are located at the peak. That is where the hike ended for me. I have for a long time had a fear of heights. This fear occurs only when I can see the ground below me through a straight line descending down, such as while hiking up a trail without many curves (Rocktop). While I turned back this time, next time I intend to take the trail all the way to the top.
And now for some GPS data….

The overall trail. The trail to the west of the road is the first half of Crowders trail. Once crossing the road there is an option, continue on Crowders (a less rocky, but more winding trail to no where… ) or go to the right and head up Rocktop. On this map, everything highlighted to the east of the road is Rocktop.

This is an elevation profile like the one in my previous post. It shows with its curve and with color, the level of height

Here is a new way to look at it, it is overlayed on the same map as the usual Google Earth maps. The altitude is shown in varying colors, indicated by the key on the side.

This is a speed profile that shows how fast (or slow) I was going during the hike. Obviously, as the hills become more steep, I became more sluggish. There are also a few points during which I stopped to take a break.

If you are interested in all of the details of the hike, they are located at http://www.livecurt.net/gps/20080229.html.

Elevation Profile of Hike

Now that I have had a little more time to play with the data obtained during my hike on Monday, I have found a few tools that will allow me to show interesting things from the tracklogs. One of my favorite things so far is the elevation profile, which shows the change in elevation during the hike. This isn’t likely to be something that I generate for every tracklog, since most of them are either flat and boring, or they are on such a tiny scale that every mild incline looks like a mountain (they look like an EKG, which doesn’t show a balanced or sensible geographic profile). The thumbnail of my first elevation profile is below. As always on my blog, click the image to see it big.

Average Masturbation Per Week

Somehow someone ended up on my blog after searching Google for “average masturbation per week”. The answer wasn’t previously posted on my blog, but I became curious myself, so I did a little research. A survey of 10,000 males returned an average of 6.85 times per week for men between the ages of 20 and 35, decreasing by about 1.2 times per week for every 10 years after.

Desire for Self Improvement

I have been sitting beside my bookshelf for the past hour while working on various things online, primarily taking care of some course related stuff. The bookshelf sits in this room, usually undisturbed unless I’m pulling something specific from it, usually for research or adding something to it, usually some book I will get to reading eventually.
Directly to my left is the reference section (I own about 3 fiction books, total), which contains numerous books on personal health and fitness. These are books I have been collecting until I can have a plan of attack which includes them and I think I am approaching that point. I don’t work out well because I don’t have a plan, I become bored because all of the exercises that don’t require special equipment are all the same. I am going to change that. First, I think it is time to build a pull-up bar unit outside and it is also a good time to get back into either walking or jogging EVERY night. I have become too stationary again, like so many times before. I work very well when I have a plan and a schedule, so thats what I am going to do. I am going to set goals for myself, based on the United States Marine Corps basic fitness requirements. My longterm goal will be to obtain the highest score possible on these measurable tests. For the short term I intend to use the tests as a guide for where I need to be as far as fitness. Once I have gotten into motion towards the long term goal, I will also add in some other goals, such as working towards my ideal body look. My Polish genetics will be hard to adapt for in this plan, but I am going to do my best. I am fairly short, but almost maximum height for a Pole, so the only thing I can do is work on areas such as my obliques to get my width under control, which shouldn’t be a problem. I can deal with the broad shoulders and wide hip bones as long as my obliques give me some definition.
My guides for this goal will be:
-USMC Guide Book of Essential Subjects (0-967-51236-0)
-Anybody’s Guide to Total Fitness (0-7872-9878-1)
-Men’s Health Hard Body Plan (1-57954-229-8)
-Men’s Health Book of Muscle (1-57954-769-9)
-Complete Book of Abs, The (0-375-75143-2)
-USMC Workout (1-57826-158-9 (maybe, if I get up the balls to do it)
and for balance I will seek guidance from:
-The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development (0-8264-0787-0)
I will spend some time this week preparing for this and then I will begin execution of it no later than next Monday.

Creating Suspicion in a Bot

I have had quite a bit of fun reading over the server log files for this blog over the past few days. My most frequent visitor has been GoogleBot. It would appear that the GoogleBot has noticed that the blog has changed and is now attempting to re-index the several hundred (1,077) pages of my blog, one page at a time. It didn’t take very long after my change of theme for the blog to get the bot curious.