I’m on week three of the one hundred pushup challenge. I hadn’t been keeping up with my other exercise goals so I figured this one can be done in a few minutes a day, 3 times a week. I’m currently on the 2nd day of the week 3 regiment.

There are 3 tracks you can choose from which basically correlate to a beginner, intermediate and advanced track, based on how many pushups you can do before the challenge. I was doing about 20-25 a couple of times a week for a long time but never really pushed myself to do more.

Each track has you do 5 sets of pushups, 3 days a week. Each set is different in number, but is designed to push you to max out in the last set.

I started on the highest track and the first week was relatively easy. Week 2 started to get a little harder but I was able to complete every set.

After week 2, you do another test to see how many pushups you can do non-stop. If you can do more than 26, you are on the highest track, which I remained. Ow. Day 1 has you do sets of 25, 17, 17, 15, 25+. I got through this with a little exhaustion and barely made it to 25 in the last set. Day two is even rougher with 27, 19, 19, 15, 25+. I unfortunately barely made it through the 4th set and could only get to 15 in the last set. I’ll see how day 3 is and maybe do week 3 over again depending on how I do.

The goal of course is to get to 100 pushups in one set. I think by the end of week 6, I’ll be doing something like 250 pushups over 9 sets. That is, if my arms don’t fall off by then.

Now I just need to find a 6 pack ab challenge somewhere.

I’ve updated the site a bit. It is a work in progress but the majority of the elements I wanted to update are complete. I want to add in an updated header and footer but at least the bulk is up for now.

I’ve added my latest twitter post in the bubble and rotating tabs for feeds on the right. I may add in a couple more for tv or poker as we go along.

If you don’t know what twitter is, you can go to twitter.com. It is basically a micro blog and the concept is basically to answer the question “what are you doing right now?”. I will mostly use it for poker updates and little tidbits of info or cool links I come across.

I will hopefully keep this updated a lot more now since I’ve put in the time to redesign it.

I’ve taken my wife’s old computer (2.4ghz, 512MB ram) and turned it into a personal video recorder. It only has a 30gb hard drive so I took another old 30gb hard drive and added that in.

I’ve installed a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 tv tuner card to plug in our cable line.
I am using the free GB-PVR software to function like a media center, complete with tv recording like a VCR, tv guide downloading, music and video libraries.

Because the cable is split, we only get the basic cable channels, but this is the way we had our VCR set up anyway.

I control the computer using UltraVNC, a free remote desktop control software, so that I can add in things to record from my laptop.

For good quality recording, each hour of video takes about 2gb of hard drive space. Right now, we only record a few shows a week, so the 30gb hard drive should be ok for now. 15 hours is still better than the 6 you get on a VCR tape.

I have a streamzap remote control for the PC that I want to hook up to it as well one of these days but with ultravnc, it is not imperative.

It isn’t the perfect setup since I can’t record things off HBO and other digital and HD channels, but it is much better than having to set up the VCR, fast foward and rewind tapes and then key in all the things you want to tape. A few clicks now and we’re all set.

I don’t know why, but I love using filehippo’s update checker.

It’s fun finding new versions of software and hoping that there is something new and improved. Plus I used to suck at keeping up to date with them. Most softwares check for new versions automatically but this is great for the ones that don’t and also shows new beta versions as well.

It’s just an exe that you can double click on whenever and doesn’t need to be installed.

There are lots of great free pieces of software. PC Magazine created a list of 157 of the best free software tools for PC, Mac and Linux.

You can read the whole list of free software here.

A couple others I highly recommend:

MailStore Home – Back up mail from most mail clients or POP emails.
Taskbar Shuffle – Ever want to move the buttons on your taskbar around? Now you can!