Going UP in the World

I really have no idea what I wanna blog about today, but I already missed a week so I'm gonna just have to go for it and see what happens. Hang on for the ride! ...Or just keep reading...

Last weekend when I was in Vancouver (yet again), I visited my good buddy Nicole at the Apple Store, and she introduced me to the Jawbone UP! Remember last year at Comic-Con when I got that Nike+ FuelBand and was all excited about it? Well this is kinda like that, but BETTER!

Much like the FuelBand, it's a band you wear on your wrist that measures your movements and tells you how many steps you've taken and works that out into calories burned and makes a pretty little graph in the app that goes with it. So far it sounds pretty familiar. Nothing too terribly exciting right? Might as well just have a step counter. But WAIT! There's MORE!

You also wear this thing to bed and switch it into sleep mode, and it somehow records your sleep! When you wake up in the morning and sync the band to your iPhone app, it pops up with a cool little graph showing you how long you slept, how much of your sleep was light versus deep, and it shows you how many times you woke up. I'm not sure how it works, but it's really cool.

The app also lets you input your other activities, like biking, cross training, weights, and a bunch of other things, and then tells you approximately how many calories you burned. You can also put in all of the food you've eaten throughout the day. This one is a really big thing for me. You put in the nutritional information of what you ate and it compares it to what you should be eating, and then I feel guilty for having way too much sodium and not enough fibre, or whatever. Did you know that EVERYTHING you eat has sodium? Even water.

One of the really interesting features of the band is the "smart alarm." I mentioned before that it somehow can tell when you are in a light sleep versus a deep sleep. Well, you can set an alarm on the band with a window to wake you up. You can set it to wake you at 7:30am, with a window of half an hour. The band will then find a point between 7am and 7:30am when you are in a light sleep stage and wake you up then so you'll be less groggy. The band vibrates on your wrist, which worried me at first, but it's not a bad way to be woken up. It's pretty interesting. It seems pretty effective, but me being me, I still set an alarm on my phone. And my alarm clock. But maybe I'll change that after I test it a little longer.

There are a lot of fun features in the UP app. You can add your friends to your "team" and see their activities and comment on them, cheer each other on. I've got a few friends on it, and I love that. It's nice to have friendly encouragement. You can also look at a timeline of everything you've done since you started using the UP band, and you can compare your sleep and activity on different graphs. And the app pops up with helpful tips and information based on your activities.

All in all, I'm really enjoying the Jawbone UP so far. It's pushing me to get more active again, and that's something I need. Plus it's fun AND pretty. And I think you should get one.

New Year, New You?

Alright! It's 2013! First blog post of the New Year! Woohoo! ...Yeah, it's not really that exciting. Sorry. I'm tired, and apparently excitable in my writing.

So! It's a new year, which is when most people make a bunch of silly resolutions to do things that they break within a week or two. I don't believe in resolutions, but I do believe it's good to set goals for the new year. Nothing too crazy, nothing necessarily finite, but general goals about lifestyle.

For example, last year, I set a few goals. I knew I needed to make some sort of decision in my relationship status, and that happened. I also decided I needed to be more active. And while I didn't turn into an Olympic level athlete, I did greatly improve my activity level. Started going to the gym and took up running.

This year I'd like to build on that goal of being more active and be more consistent with my activity levels. I need to get back to the gym, and try to push through this wintery lethargy. I had a sudden burst of energy the other night and did a bunch of push-ups and abs exercises. I was feeling pretty frustrated at the time which is always a good motivator for me, but I've been longing for the snow to disappear so I can go for a run outside again. Find a playground and do some pull-ups. I really just need to go to the gym. That's what the facilities are for.

Anyway. A lot more important of a goal for me this year is to try to be a better friend. I hadn't really realized it was happening, but I've drifted away from many of my friends, including some of the most important people to me. I hope it's not too late to fix things, but I've never been good with confrontation, so I'm not sure how to go about approaching the problem. I guess the best way is to just talk, and hope she'll listen. I probably shouldn't talk about it here anymore, but it's on my mind and I really can't stop thinking about her.

Uuuh... So where was I? Goals? There's a few other goals I have. Be better with my money. Visit family more. Be more productive. All vague things with no finite measurable levels of success. Also, I want to figure out exactly what I want to do with this blog. Right now it's basically just my little outlet of nerdiness, but I want it to be more than that. I'm not exactly sure how to make that happen. But I guess I'll just keep plugging away and I'll figure it out eventually!

King of the Nerds

Day 5 of the trip, day 3 of Comic Con. Saturday? What day is it today? Right, Sunday. So yeah, yesterday, Saturday. Can you tell I'm having trouble keeping up with my blogging?

Saturday had a pretty great start. We were able to sleep in a little bit, and made it to the convention centre about 9:30ish? I don't remember precisely. But we made it in time for what we were going for.

At 10am at the Legendary booth, the king of the nerds himself, Chris Hardwick, was signing autographs and meeting the fans. And we made it! He was dressed as the tenth Doctor, and he seemed pretty excited when I handed him my ticket from the previous night's podcast to get signed. I was pretty excited to get my picture taken with him.

Andrea of course was very happy to meet him, she's been a fan forever. And he was great! He even took a picture with Anne! I don't think I mentioned previously, but our friend Anne couldn't make it to Comic Con with us, so Andrea crocheted a doll of her to bring along so she was with us in spirit. So yeah, Chris Hardwick now thinks we are crazy.

After that, we went to the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton beside the convention centre to catch the Geek & Sundry panel. I had no idea what it was, but Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton? I'm there! So we listened to them talk about all the cool stuff happening with their Geek & Sundry YouTube channel. I think I'm going to have to subscribe to that! The cast of the Guild was also there, with a couple other special guests. It was pretty fun!

After that, it was the Nerdist panel! We were totally getting our Nerdist on. Chris Hardwick and a bunch of other people talked about all the exciting stuff coming up. Most exciting to me: Celebrity Bowling with... wait for it... the Doctor Who cast! So awesome. Looks like I'll be watching a lot more YouTube in the future!

Outside between the Hilton and the Convention Centre there was a thing selling burgers and hotdogs, and a cool Batman setup. Burgers and Batmobiles! We grabbed burgers and then went to look at the different ones. There were 5 of them. Two versions of the Bat-tank (or Tumbler as its ACTUALLY called) plus three older batmobiles. It was kinda cool.

Once we got back to the convention centre, we walked right past Felicia Day, just walking along in the front lobby area of the building. I was all, " Is that Felicia Day? Did we just walk RIGHT PAST Felicia Day?!" You probably don't realize this, but I love Felicia Day.

Anyway, next: coffee! And then the Avengers vs. X-Men panel! I love Marvel panels. Again, there wasn't all that much info that I hadn't already heard about, but it definitely got Andrea excited for comics again. Sadly, I was foiled in asking my question in the panel due to the question line being cut off directly in front of me. And the guy was an idiot. He asked a question that EVERYONE already knew the answer to. And I had a much more interesting question. But oh well.

After that, we decided to check out the line for Hall H. There was a panel for Iron Man 3 that looked interesting, and the line didn't seem so bad, so Andrea and Neil got into line, and I took off. We had 2 hours to wait, so I went to explore the floor again.

Went and said hi to Steve and Shane in the Artist Alley again, but they were both pretty busy so I took off to hunt down some elusive swag. No luck though. Sorry Paul. Everything is getting sold out so fast too! I guess it's not that surprising. I wasted a good half hour or longer playing Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance at the Square Enix booth. On my way back across the room I walked by a Doctor cosplayer that I thought was actually Matt Smith for a minute, and then I saw the guy that played Gunn on Angel at a booth. Someone told me to tweet it, but I had no wifi, so I couldn't do it. Oh darn.

After that, it was about 5:30, so I headed back to the Hall H line, and by a stroke of luck, Andrea and Neil spotted me and I jumped back into line with them. However, we didn't make it into Hall H, so about 6:15, we took off back to our hotel and had dinner.

At that point, it should have been the end of the night, but with so much sitting in panels, I didn't reach my fitness goal for the day, so I went and walked laps around the hotel grounds for half an hour. Thanks Nike+ FuelBand. Thanks a lot.

It Begins...

So! The San Diego Comic-Con 2012 adventure has begun! And thus begins my attempt to blog the whole thing. Here goes!

I guess I will start with Monday. Monday wasn't actually all that exciting. It involved a short work day, a quick flight to Vancouver, a long wait for luggage, some Game of Thrones, "Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All," some very awesome hosts letting us stay the night, and of course, the long awaited reunion with the wonderful Andrea!

Tuesday was a very early start. 5am early. Yeah. Ridonk. We got up, got ready, and hit transit for 6am. I didn't realize how much is involved in international travel. Last year we took a shuttle over the border and it seemed a lot less complicated. This year we took a direct flight out of Vancouver, and we got to practice our queuing quite a bit. Baggage drop, security, customs, all in a row. But it was all pretty easy to go through. And one three-hour flight later, we were in beautiful San Diego!

So, we made it to our hotel really early. I guess check-in time is 4pm. We were here at noon. So we stored our luggage and took off on an adventure to find the mall nearby. And as luck would have it, the one and only Nike store in San Diego just happened to be in said mall. If you've been reading lately, you know I've been getting more and more into fitness. The other day I realized that I need new running shoes, and I found the ones I wanted, but they were only available in the States. Well, luck shone down on me haha. I found the shoes I want (Nike LunarGlide+), plus I got the Nike+ FuelBand I wanted (which is only available in Nike Stores in the States). So my first big purchase of the trip was something athletic and not geeky. I think I might be failing at this nerd trip thing.

Or not. After a little more shopping and some food, we stopped in at a Lego store! I've never been to one so it was pretty exciting stuff for me. I wanted to leave with the whole store, but I resisted buying anything. And then we went to see Amazing Spider-Man! It was such a good movie. Andrew Garfield makes a much better Peter Parker/Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire ever did. Admittedly, the movie seems a little slow getting into things 'cause it has to reestablish the whole origin story, but I still really enjoyed it.

After that it was a pretty uneventful evening. We got back to our hotel, checked into our room, and just relaxed for a while. Went for dinner at the little burger place attached to our hotel, and then went for a walk down the road a bit before heading back and crashing in our room again. So the boring part of the trip is over. We've got some time to waste this morning, but this afternoon we'll go pick up our badges for Comic Con and we get to do the Preview Night thing, so that should be fun. I'll continue my SDCC 2012 blogging experience tonight! Or maybe tomorrow morning...

Filler

So, I leave really soon. Like, 2 days soon. It's a little ridiculous. I can't wait for Comic Con! It's going to be fantastic! There are a few things happening before that though!

This weekend is gonna be pretty great I think. I work today, however, I have a bday party for a friend of mine to go to after work, soon followed by the PG Gay Pride dance. I haven't been to one of these in six years, so I'm kind of excited to go. Then! Hopefully I'll be functional tomorrow morning so I can go hang out with my mom and my niece and whatever other family I get to see. And then, packing!! So exciting. In a completely sarcastic kinda way.

I really can't think of anything else fun to say today. I haven't been to the gym in over a week, but I did run/walk 5km yesterday. Half uphill, half down. And I managed to run a pretty good chunk of the uphill, not just the down. The university hill here is kind of fun to run on.

Sorry this post hasn't been nerdier. Just wait, there will be plenty of nerdy on its way in the coming week!

Athletic Nerd - Oxymoron?

Today I'm gonna stray from the usual nerdy topics and talk about fitness. Who knew "nerdy" and "fitness" would ever come up in a sentence together, other than, "The nerdy guy looked like he'd never even heard of fitness."

I'm sure most of my readers (do I have any?) won't be surprised to learn that, as a child, I was not very athletic. I was the kid that hid in the basement playing video games when the sun came out. I was in sports as long as my parents could make me do them, but in highschool I wasn't on any teams. And I was happy. Chubby, but happy.

So now I'm 27 and I've finally realized that I CAN be both a nerd and into fitness. I've definitely taken my time easing into this. I started going for long walks/hikes around town over the last couple summers, always intending to turn it into running. It never really happened. Until now.

After so many years saying I needed to get back into the gym thing, I've finally joined up and started going. It's been difficult, I won't lie. The first few times, I'd wake up two days later and not be able to get out of bed. Just ridiculous. But it feels so good! I already see a lot of improvement in myself as well! And I've got a great little group of gym buddies helping me along. Friends are great motivators. Plus: I've started running. I'm nowhere near doing a marathon, but I've started, and I can only improve from here.

Now for the crazy. Three of my gym buddies are currently in Whistler awaiting their turn to compete in Tough Mudder with their team. When they first told me they were doing this, I thought they were nuts. It's this insane obstacle course thing designed by British armed forces or something. Look it up. Seriously. It's crazy.

Crazier? I wanna do it next year. I seriously want to do it. Anyone that knows me will think I've gone nuts saying that. I don't like to get dirty. I don't like to run and climb and get wet and all that. I'm a nerd. But I want to do it. I'm gonna have to start training hardcore, but I've got a year to get in shape for it. Seems like such a crazy idea, but I think it will be awesome.

So there you have it. Nerds can be athletes too. Who knew?