Item 22.1 on Wednesday was some more fall TV premiere planning. Mostly getting my “tracker” set up so I know when shows are on, if I want to watch something live.
Item 22.2 was going out for dinner with Andrea for her birthday followed by dessert afterwards.
Item 22.3 was figuring out the stupid passport-on-my-phone links. I do not know what is going on with my iPhone as there are two things lately that SHOULD be working one way but when I try to access those menus, it throws up its hands at me as if it has never heard of those options. I got the files there no problem, but trying to create simple links to them on the home screen was WAY more complicated than it should have been.
Item 23.1 for Thursday was an appointment for Jacob. This was a crapfest unfortunately for outcomes. What we thought was a simple fix to his orthotics has turned into a need for other appointments first, which we can’t get until later this fall/early winter. Which leaves him without his AFOs for the foreseeable future. Which leaves him with limited endurance. Admittedly, Andrea did most of the legwork on this one, I was just the chauffeur.
Item 23.2 was related to the first one…I called the physiotherapist we used previously with Jacob and tried to book someone to help us figure out some detailed / targeted stretching for him. Guess I’ll wait for a callback.
Item 23.3 was giving Andrea her birthday presents. I confess that Jacob and I had been relatively stumped for a gift idea since she doesn’t want “stuff” that takes up space in the house. Jacob had the idea for a Van Gogh puzzle, and while we couldn’t get it in the exact size we wanted, we managed to find two other puzzles that were a bit interesting. So we passed those over tonight…a day late, unfortunately. Sigh.
I ran out of time on Monday and Tuesday to blog this week, partly as I’ve been under the weather. I took yesterday and today off work, and I don’t really feel like I’m whole again yet.
Item 20.1 was a bit of fall TV premiere planning. Every fall, like a fantasy football league or something, I look at all the new shows coming out and predict whether or not I think they’ll make it to S02. I hadn’t had a chance to really go through them for 2021/22 yet, but I went through 27 of them for a quick review. My “sources” didn’t have all the shows in them, but they had most. There are at least another six that I’m tracking for possible review, while ditching another ten that are just too niche for my tastes.
Item 20.2 was a related item as I actually took some time last night to watch 3 new shows and 1 returning show. Right up until the TV service cut out for some needed maintenance. Now I have to watch the ending of what I missed. Oh well, it was fun to just veg.
Item 20.3 was a light stretching workout as I basically got Jacob and Andrea organized so they could do a routine.
Item 21.1 was the decision to call in sick today. I was feeling like crap this morning and I ended up going back to bed until almost 11:00. Feeling somewhat better now, so probably just a light bug.
Item 21.2 was active blogging. Notice above that I said I “planned” my shows and watched three new ones? Well, I also did the reviews for them today.
Item 21.3 was forcing myself to workout today properly. I worked out on Saturday, so I skipped Sunday, and didn’t even do my stretching. Yesterday (Monday), I slipped as I was getting out of the shower, and I felt like I compressed my lower spine on the left side. Nothing super serious, but it hurt for a few minutes. Jarring almost. So I stuck to just a light stretching routine (mentioned above). But today, I really needed to get back into it, and I did the full stretching routine around lunch and a full workout around dinnertime. I almost felt like it was time for a nap, but I applied some new planning levels for # of reps, sets, total weight, etc. It went well. I pretty much doubled my routine from last week as I was comfortable doing two sets of reps for all of the exercises, and for two in particular, I also either upped the reps per set or for bench press, I actually upped the reps and sets. I’ll likely hold at this level now until November 1st. Seemed like a good set up today.
Sunday, a time for light reflection and spending time with your PC. I mean, family. But when your son would like to kick you to the curb in favour of Minecraft servers, well, you roll with it for the day.
Item 19.1 was a bit more tweaking of my website. There are two things that annoy me a little with my setup and plugins. The first is really small…when I post a new article/post, my site sends an email copy out immediately as a newsletter to subscribers. For this site, there are only a couple of people; for PolyWogg, it barely cracks double digits. Most people get their fix either through FB or Twitter or other feeds. But the option is there. Except, because of the way the software works, if I use too many special “blocks” in the article, the formatting may or may not go a bit wonky for the person receiving the newsletter. Since I can’t control how the plugin reacts to non-standard formatting, there’s a simple solution to that problem — don’t send the whole post. In fact, that is also a best practice — just forward the excerpt, thus encouraging them to click to the site to read the article rather than just in email. Click-through conversions, yay me (no, I don’t really care about that, not as relevant if I’m not monetizing the site). Anyway, that’s all well and good, but I used to send the post to myself so I would have an email backup of the post. Now that it’s only the excerpt, it’s not quite the same. Until it occurred to me, why not just create a second newsletter that ONLY goes to a smaller distribution list (population: ME!), and which sends the whole post? Sweet. So I set it up on this blog and completely forgot to do it for PolyWogg too. Oops.
The other bugaboo is sharing automatically to FaceBook. If I copy and paste the link to FB, the pasting will take my image settings for either the featured image or the first large image. The SEO for it is a bit finicky, and sometimes doesn’t seem to hold for every featured image. I bypassed the problem with a plugin that auto-posts for me, but it wasn’t sharing the image. I read their online setup, the PRO version DOES force it to share a specific image source, so I upgraded. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, installed, posted, annnnnnnnd, same deal. It was NOT sharing the right image on FB. Don’t get me wrong, it was sharing an image from the post, just not the right one by default. Dang it. I was about to open a ticket, after all I just paid a decent sum for a lifetime membership, and it wasn’t working. But as I worked through the help files, I discovered that it was NOT a problem with the plugin NOR my site. It’s a setting in FB. In essence, I need to verify my website with FB. In the past, you had to create your own FB mini-app to link the two, and getting those set up if you weren’t a paying business was a pain in the patootie. If you were Joe Schmo, personal user, the company wasn’t even TAKING applications for a really long time. I blew through 3 other plugins trying to crack that nut, looking for ANY solution to sharing properly. Nada. But I found info on how to do it on the site for the new plugin, and it looked like it was active again. Actually, it’s a different way to do things, but I followed the examples, and dang if it didn’t work. I tested two posts, first one didn’t work, second one did. So I ran a test later with a real post from PolyWogg and it worked PERFECTLY. Woohoo! They’re small tweaks, but I’m really happy with them.
Item 19.2 was about TV watching for the fall. I treat premieres almost like fantasy football, picking winners and predicting losers. I managed to work my way through the plans for 47 new shows from Entertainment Weekly’s coverage, and while it isn’t everything, it’s a start. I even blogged about it. https://polywogg.ca/early-thoughts-on-the-2021-2022-tv-premieres/
Item 19.3 was about helping Jacob with his Minecraft setup. He plays Minecraft with a bunch of his friends online, and they are sometimes a bit clique-y for who can play or not. Most of the time they let Jacob in because he’s nice and doesn’t cause anyone any problems, but other times they’re fighting lags on the free servers of two of the other kids playing. And it was frustrating them to no end. So they were all trying to figure out a way to download it and run it from their own computers, hoping that would solve the lag problem (it generally wouldn’t, but they didn’t know that). Anyway, mostly the problem was the low quality of free public servers, so I checked the price to run your own personal server for Minecraft. About $5 a month. Jacob and his friends found a server they liked, it was popular and had good settings, and I set it up for him late this afternoon. They all logged in, there was no lag, everyone’s happy for now. I admit I have a bit of a Machiavellian side to my decision too…if he’s the one running the server, it’s not like they can kick him out if they’re trying to manage numbers. A small cost for his major hobby.
Saturday dawned seemingly early this morning. I was hoping to sleep in longer, but alas, that was not to be.
Item 18.1 was a bit about tweaking my website graphics. I was doing a posting about something, tweaked my sidebar, and realized that one of the images was not showing quite right. I checked in another place, and it too showed it slightly cropped. Odd. I had fixed ALL of that about 18-20 months ago. I resized ALL of the images to a specific size, they should be all showing perfectly. Weird. So I checked it out in WordPress. I thought it was 150×150 px to match the default thumbnail size for theme layouts. Nope, it was 150×164. Umm, that’s not right. I rescaled it down at the same ratio to 136×150. Still showing cropped. Dang it. I played with WP settings for awhile, asked a Q on my favourite help site, and then decided to do it “properly”. I pulled up 37 images that were just slightly off-size, a side effect of exporting from PowerPoint apparently that I didn’t catch previously. Anyway, I opened them all in GIMP, resized so the largest size (w or h) was 150, and then resized the canvas behind it to 150×150, leaving any extra area as transparent, recentred them horizontally and top align vertically, exported them, uploaded them to replace the existing images, and voila. Problem solved. A bit annoying, but not problematic. While I was already in the site, I took the time to tweak a newsletter setup that was bothering me too. Oh, and I tweaked my sidebar layout (look to the right!).
Item 18.2 was about being organized for my workout routine, with handout versions for the stretching and BowFlex routines. Jacob joined me today for a full workout, and we went for a walk afterwards too. I blogged about it earlier. (Changing my body – Stretching, workouts and walking)
Item 18.3 was a bit more research around walking, with a deeper dive than I had hoped on MapMyWalk. My account is kind of futzed at the moment, so I’m hoping Under Armour can reset it for me. But it was a start at least.
So I went a bit overboard today on my planning function for my workouts. For Stretching, I took the 16 low-difficulty exercises, figured out which order to do them in that makes sense, and prepared a simple 4×4 table in Word that shows the pretty pics and names of the exercises. And then I used it today for the first time. It worked perfectly.
I wasn’t surprised I liked the layout, I had pretty much already done the same thing for the Bowflex routine (9 exercises in the 20 minute full body workout).
I used it for the second time today, and it also worked well. I have both sets of exercises on my phone so I can log the activities in my exercise app.
Annnnnnd then I went down a rabbithole for figuring out how far I’m going to start walking. When I went to the MapMyWalk website, I found out that I have apparently used MapMyWalk on three prior occasions.
First, back in 2008, I did some initial routes around my old house. I set up three or four routes, did a couple of them, but mostly I was laying them out as potential routes to see how far they were.
Second, I did a bunch in 2014, and that time I think I was expecting to be a bit more ambitious, as I set up some really long ones.
Finally, in 2016, I did a couple of ones around the neighbourhood that I had walked, and then mapped them afterwards to see how far I had gone. I can’t believe I ever did them, as the thought of doing them now fills me with dread. They are SO much farther than I am capable of right now, by a factor of ten at least.
So, it’s 2021, and I thought I would clean up some of the old routes and plot some new ones. Start small, keep some of the old ones for future inspiration. Ditch the ones where I was just trying to figure out how far it was, such as walking all the way to or from work, as I would never plan to actually do that route. It was just for info.
But I went to my profile settings and nada. It wouldn’t load that part. Umm, okay. So I went to the past routes, there they all are, great. Scroll down to one I don’t want, over to the right is an option for COPY / EDIT / DELETE. So I try deleting it, it asks me if I want to delete it on a pop-up, I say yes, and then it just sits and whirs at me endlessly. It doesn’t delete it and it doesn’t “end”. Eventually, I have to reload the page. I tried clearing caches, resetting passwords, logging out completely, etc. And no dice. The app on my phone shows me the same data, but you can’t actually delete from the phone, just the website, so that doesn’t help. I have a sneaking suspicion that my account is somehow dormant or something, or it’s confused with some old ones I had, but in the end, I had to email Under Armour and hope they’ll reset my account next week. If they want to erase the account and start over, I’m okay with that.
Mostly what I was surprised about was how many times I’ve done the same thing before. Started a new “habit”, set up some routes with the same tool, and then when life intervened, stopped using the app. Ultimately, I have no interest in the app for tracking, as I already KNOW the routes in advance. I have a separate workout logger where I’ll put in the distances for example, and then when I do the route, I just do the route. I don’t need a phone or FitBit to tell me my progress or distance, the pre-programmed route is already “known”.
When MapMyWalk crapped out, I went looking for a replacement app, and I found one (which also uses a website), but it is a lot more basic. If Under Armour can get me going this week, that’s probably the easiest option.
What is different about this round is that I know what I’m planning to do. For each of those previous occasions, it was more like I was trying the app out then actually tying it into my workout plans. This time, I already have some ideas of how I can set progressively longer walking goals too. And some of the old ones reminded me of some possible routes that would be really good to work up to over the next year. So far, my immediate routes are pretty embarrassing for distance. It doesn’t take much for my left hip / lower back to start screaming at me, regardless of the stretching in advance. I could put BioFreeze on it, and go further, but for now, I’ll stick to the short distances.
In the meantime, I at least have stretching and weights figured out; walking routes are pending; and then it will be on to the exercise bike setup!
