Jogger's Nipple

I haven't posted my cumulative miles cycling this year yet, but without doing that now I'll just say that I'm really outdoing myself this year.

One side effect of that I'm experiencing is nipple soreness. I've noticed this before after some of my longer Saturday workouts I do during the winter at the gym on the cross trainer. I just shrugged it off and figured it was because my shirt rubbed. I never knew this had an official name until I recently looked it up on the internet. They call it jogger's nipple. It happens to marathon runners and joggers mostly but I guess anyone else really that's doing something athletic that would cause their clothes to rub. Even if the movement of my shirt across my chest is slight I can attest to the fact that it's enough after an hour and half or two on a bike that it gets to be irritating. I'm not bleeding like the dude in this picture but it's no picnic either. I'd call it relatively low intensity pain...maybe 1 or 2 on a 10 scale unless I forget about it and rub my towel across my chest after my shower. Then it's more like...I don't know...a 5 on a scale of 10.

The guy in this picture switched to NipGuards and I'll bet he's glad he did. I think I'm going to give the petroleum jelly method a try. I don't like the idea of slapping an adhesive anything to that part of my body.

Photo Dump

Since my last post didn't have any photos I decided I should throw up a post with a few.

This is Manuel Uribe. I think this is a "before" photo when he weighed 1234 lbs. I've seen this guy on TV on Sunday night on The Learning Channel a couple times. There's an entire one hour show about when he went on the Zone Diet and lost 440 lbs. I wonder what effects all that fat has had on his skeletal structure. From what I've seen on TV it appears that the way he sits is like doing the splits. His exercise is rolling around on his bed. Toward the end of the show he goes outside for he first time in years. A friend gets his bed up on a flatbed with a forklift and they go cruising around in his tiny little Mexican town. It's a big party.

It's amazing to me that this guy is still alive while at the same time there are sometimes athletes out there that die from heart defects that go undiscovered until it's too late.

This photo gives new meaning to the old adage, "You mess with the bull you get the horns". You can see the horn in there clear up to his knee. Once the adrenaline wore off that must've hurt like mad. Remind me never to go running with the bulls.

This is a wet cat. I don't have much to say about this other than I think that it's hilarious. I recommend a visit to to Google's image search page and conducting a search for, "wet cat".

Dark Stain

So from a post about a professor I never had, but maybe wish that I had, to a post about a professor I consider a dark stain on my experience at UW-Whitewater. I've always been a believer that your education is, in large part, what you make of it. Talented, knowledgeable, and respectable professors are good things but I think it's possible to come away with something from a course even if the professor sucked.

Doug Eamon is a dark stain on UW-Whitewater. This guy was the least objective professor I ever had. I first had him for a statistics course which I bombed. I wasn't able to overcome his crappy teaching. I later retook the course with another professor and had no problems at all with the material. I think about a year later I had professor Eamon again for a course they called "Experimental Psychology". The course was about conducting experiments, using statistical methods, and writing up papers with the results. It was a 5 credit course rather than the usual 3 credits. We had lab hours to conduct our experiments in addition to the lecture hours. During the 16 week semester we had 3 experiments to run and 3 papers to write about them. This course was essentially the "big one" that all psych majors needed to complete in order to graduate as a psych major. It must've been that he was the only professor that taught this or I'm sure I would have scheduled it some other way.

At the start of the semester he gave a real serious speech about cheating. He said he was going to do everything in his power to get anyone he perceived to be cheating expelled from the University. So this is where my story begins. About midway through the semester I got my second paper back and it didn't have a grade on it. I think it said "see me" on the second page somewhere and it had a big line on it. So I went to his office and he asked me where I got a portion of my paper from. He was accusing me of plagiarizing the entire introduction page of my paper. Since I couldn't give him an answer to his satisfaction he requested copies of all of my sources with highlighting on the areas that were pertinent.

His logic, as he explained it to me, was that my writing style was different than that of my first paper that I had turned in for his course. So my question was always this then....how did he know that I wrote my first paper? Of course neither of them were plagiarized, but I was learning first hand that logic wasn't one of professor Eamon's strengths. The fact of the matter was I had written my paper over a matter of weeks and the intro was one of the first items I had written. My writing process went from the beginning of the paper to its'end, and each day as I progressed I began by tweaking the wording around for everything I had previously written. By the time my paper was done I was very much satisfied with the beginning portions. I considered them to be very clear and concise. I had spent a great deal more time on this paper than I had my first. I agreed that they didn't have the same style. But why did that equate with being written by a different person in my professor's mind? Nevermind that he had never read any other papers of mine. Two writing samples was enough for him to come to the conclusion he had.

After I turned over all of my sources and explained how each of them did or did not relate to our experiment and what informational aspects of them ended up in my paper he still was not convinced. He continued to attempt to pressure me to confess to something I could not. At one point he said something to me like, "So I guess we've reached an impasse".

I spent some time familiarizing myself with the procedure that was undertaken when a student is accused of misconduct. I don't recall the details of it now anymore, but it involved the department head of psychology, a student representative...some sort of panel and so on. It never did get that far. Perhaps he got a second opinion and was laughed at. There was no way on earth he ever would have prevailed in such a setting. His position wasn't based on facts and since evidence simply couldn't exist, he would've had to fall back on this foggy logic about 2 papers that didn't seem to have the same writing style...and therefore must not have been written by the same person. I looked forward to the panel and to humiliating him but alas I was denied the opportunity.

Sometime before my third paper was due I requested feedback from him on my second paper so that I could proceed in proper form for my third paper. Eventually as the semester end was coming up he gave me a grade on my paper. There was something illegible written on the side near the beginning of the paper. If I had to guess what it read it may have been, "mistake". I think he said he graded my paper without regard to the portion of it he viewed as questionable. If I recall correctly he gave me a B or a B-.

I've discovered in recent years that the staff at UW-Whitewater can post webpages which I presume are hosted on University servers. The content of most of the pages relates directly to courses taught by the professors....course materials, the syllabus, etc. Some pages go further. One look at Prof. Eamon's page and it is apparent where he stands in the political spectrum. To the left would be an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised. To my recollection this was never apparent in the classroom, but then again that would have been back in 1995...smack in the middle of the Clinton era and long before Haliburton was a household name. I wonder where he stood when Ward Churchill came to speak at the Whitewater campus a few years back. Was he aware of the academic misconduct his ideological co-hort was involved in? Misconduct which ironically includes plagiarism. Only it's the real kind with evidence and everything.

Paula (P.B.) Poorman

I read in the paper recently that a psychology professor from UW-Whitewater was killed in a car accident. I was immediately drawn to read on since I am a UW-Whitewater alumni and I was a psych major. Turns out I never knew this professor but that would make sense since I graduated in '96 and I think the article I read said she'd been at the University for 10 years.

She was hit by 19 year old woman who was drunk, high on cocaine, and traveling at 120 mph. Her car was hit from behind and sent spinning out of control and rolling over into the oncoming lane. That's grim for sure.

http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/8215087.html

https://guestbook.uww.edu/

http://www.legacy.com/StarTribune/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=89877312

I failed

I went to my emission test last week for my truck. I passed the first part fine but I failed the gas cap test. Now I have to get a new gas cap and drive back to retake the test. Apparently my original cap doesn't form a good enough seal or whatever. I've been unknowingly allowing gas fumes to escape into our atmosphere. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's) they are according to what I read. I should send Ford the bill for putting such a crappy one on in the first place.

My car passed the test earlier this year. I got photos off of my computer again. I bring up the website on my computer before I leave and then when I get back I sort thru the cached internet files and pull out the images for the time period while I was in line. Shows here I was first in line for nearly 15 minutes while 5 other cars in the '96 or newer lane got to pass through. Maybe next time if it looks like I'm going to have to wait a while I'll get out and sit on my hood or do a little dance in that open middle lane like Napoleon in Napoleon Dynamite.

$$$ Money $$$

Lately it feels like I've been spending money faster than I can make it. After my new computer, a brake job on my truck, and an auto insurance bill all at the same time, I don't seem to hear anything jingling in my pockets. I've done some re-evaluating and I've concluded that all of this is in my head. I'm good at planning out my finances and I really can't complain about my position.

My assets that I have invested in the stock market are doing better than ever even after recent market declines. I have 2 accounts, one that my broker handles and another that I handle on my own. I pretty much let my broker buy and sell whenever and whatever he recommends. My account that is more under my direct control, I have with OptionsXpress. In the past my broker has burned me on a few stocks...Worldcom comes to mind, but we've made progress on a few others. I've burned myself on a few stocks too but I've made up the difference and more. These charts show 2 of my recent successes, Sunpower and Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold. I like to stare at them sometimes. (Click on them for the full-size chart.)

Sunpower was my broker's idea. This one wasn't on my radar at all. I got in at 38.18 last November so that puts me up almost 30 points if I sell it now.

Freeport McMoran was my idea. I found this one using my online stockpicking tool. I got in at 68.51 and in again at 75.12 on a little pullback this June.

Although it is very tempting, I don't spend any of my gains I just reinvest them. Yesterday was a real sweet market day for my stocks. I made more money in my OptionsXpress portofolio than I do in 8 hours of work. I wish that happened everyday.

I've heard Jim Cramer pushing FCX which can't hurt either. I watch his show on CNBC sometimes. He's more entertaining than anything else. I get some ideas on stocks from the show. Some investments he recommends I wouldn't touch, while others are genuinely good buys. I think the intro and bumper music for the TV show sounds a lot like a riff from the Led Zeppelin song, "How Many More Times". It's not exactly the same but there's a few bars in common in there. It's not as close to the same as Queen's, "Under Pressure" and Vanilla Ice's, "Ice, Ice Baby", but it's not so dissimilar that it wouldn't be noticeable to anyone familiar with the first Led Zeppelin album. There's a good chance too that it was someone else's riff before Led Zeppelin used in on that album. At the moment, Cramer likes Haliburton. I don't own it but I've been looking at it. I'm leaning more toward XTO which I've owned in the past.

Build1

This is my first post from my new computer. I built it myself. This was one item on my list of summer projects. My old computer seemed to be getting slower and slower for some reason. I didn't use a book or instructions from anywhere on how to build a computer I just figured that since I'm familiar with the various components inside a computer, how hard could it be? It wasn't really that hard at all. The only thing I did wrong was I didn't reset the bios to the defaults after I flashed to the most recent version. I just flashed the bios and then installed Windows. The only effect that it had was that my onboard audio didn't work. I was going mad trying to figure that one out. Windows just said that there was no audio device detected. I had all the bios setting correct and I checked and rechecked them. I thought at first I had gotten a defective motherboard but when I finally decided to reset the bios to the defaults and reinstall Windows everything worked out after that. Windows found the onboard audio before I got as far as the reinstall and it's been smooth sailing ever since. It doesn't say anywhere in the motherboard manual that you should reset the bios to defaults after you flash them. That seems sort of strange since I never changed any of the settings in the original bios to being with. Whatever. Rookie mistake I guess. I don't really feel bad that I didn't know that. Build #2 should be even easier now....whenever that is.

I gotta say this new computer really rocks. I don't wait for anything. Programs and documents load in an instant. Mainly I got this going because of another project I have in mind which is to transfer some videotapes to DVD. My grandfather used to shoot a lot of home movies with a film camera. This was before the days of regular VHS video cameras. When I was little we used to watch a lot of them on a projector screen when we got together on Sunday evenings. He had film of vacations my grandparents took and a lot of other family get togethers. All that sort of stuff that people take with video cameras now, only then it was film. Sometime in the early 90's he transferred a lot of what he had to VHS. Some of his films were getting old and deteriorating. He had this done at a camera shop and he did like a commentary track over it. We have 10 videos altogether of family history going back as far as 1938. I thought it would be an interesting idea to play around with transferring some of this stuff to DVD but my older computer just doesn't have the processing power to do that very efficiently. One time I authored a DVD out of a couple of movie trailers I ripped from some DVD's and it took several hours. I tried that same thing with my new computer recently and it took maybe a minute.

build1 details:
Case: Ultra Grid ATX, clear side
Motherboard: EVGA nForce 680i SLI; socket 775
Video Card: EVGA GeForce 7900 GS KO; 256MB PCIe w/Dual DVI
CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6420; 2.13Ghz
CPU fan: Zerotherm
Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2; 2GB
Drives: Seagate 80GB and
HP 16X SATA DVD+/-RW with LiteScribe
Power: Ultra X-finity 600W
OS: Windows XP Pro
Monitor: 22" LCD Samsung SynchMaster 226BW
Mouse: Logitech MX Revolution
Keyboard: none yet; using borrowed Dell keyboard from work.
Speakers: Altec Lansing VS4121

I shopped at Dell first to customize a computer system to see what one might cost these days. I put together a pretty decent system and noted the dollar amount. Then I went shopping for parts and did the same thing. I decided to spend around the same as I would have on the Dell only I got a lot more computer for my dollar. Yeah it took some doing, getting it all together with unboxing everything and putting it all together getting up and running and all that, but for what I spent I think I did pretty good. On top of all that, now I have a feel for what I'm doing and knowing what I know now, I probably won't buy a prebuilt computer system ever again.

TigerDirect deserves some credit. They have great pricing, fast shipping, and the product reviews on the site were helpful when I was choosing components. They are worthy of a new link on the right side of my blog.

Happy Birthday U.S.A.!

You type. She speaks.

Link here. I had her say, "Eat cake!". Then she called me a stud. I don't remember typing that.

Similar thing here only without the visual.

Rena Sofer

I didn't know who Rena Sofer was until I looked it up. I was watching Heroes that I taped from TV a while back when I realized that flying man Nathan Patrelli's wife is the same person as Marilyn Bauer on 24. I watched 24 at 8:00 on Mondays, but in order to watch Heroes too I had to videotape it because it was on at the same time. If that's not a sign I watched too much TV over winter I don't know what is. So anyway, I'm watching Heroes from my videotape and I came to the realization that the same actress is on both Heroes and on 24. It took me until around the final 2 episodes of these shows to figure this out. That can't be all that common for an actor or actress to be on different shows at the same time that air at the same time on 2 different network TV stations. Technically neither role was a main character but still it can't be that common I wouldn't think.

I was completely wrong about Jack being dead at the end of 24. He's still alive but at a crossroads or something. The last 15 minutes of the finale was pretty lame. It was supposed to be all dramatic or something but instead it was really just boring and disappointing. Kind of a lame season of a good show. That's my opinion. Now it's over and so are most of the other TV shows I watched over winter. All of them except for The Shield and The Riches from FX which I think end next week. Then I can officially get off the couch and on with my summer and a bunch of projects I have lined up for myself.

Jessica McBride Fired

Jessica McBride was fired by WTMJ. I fixed my link to her blog on the right side of my page back to the link to her original blog from before it moved to the TMJ site. Her firing had something do to with a segment from her WTMJ evening radio show. She had invited Journal-Sentinal liberal columnist Eugene Kane to discuss the murder of a 4 year old girl in the inner city. He wouldn't come on her show so instead she did a fake interview where she asked the questions anyway but in the place of Eugene Kane's responses she played the sound of a chicken clucking.

24 Season 6 finale prediction

I'm predicting that Jack will die at the end of this season. The preview shows some kind of explosion. If it's not apparent that he dies I think his fate at the end of the finale will be ambiguous. In my opinion this season didn't measure up to the level of other seasons of 24. I still think the show is better than most of the rest of TV though and this season did have a few great moments. I'm still in shock that Milo got shot 2 weeks ago. That was a stunner...proving once again CTU headquarters is not a safe place to work.

I had a dream last night a Chinese man died right in front of me. It was at some kind of park like one of the Disney parts and I was there with some friends. I recognized him as a bad guy who had some connection with nukes and terrorism. It wasn't part of my dream but now that I'm awake I think it was probably Cheng from this and last season of 24. In my dream he melted to death like the wicked witch only it was much more graphic. The best way I can describe it is that his blood turned acidic and ate away all his flesh and bones. It was frothy and everything until there was nothing left but a puddle of blood trickling into a sewer drain. Everyone present was real shocked but relieved. I somehow doubt that's how Cheng will die in tonight's finale but I'm predicting he'll die tonight also. Perhaps in that same explosion as Jack they show in the preview.

My Bucket

Club on the Club

My dad and I went to the Brewers game on Friday compliments of ABF. I haven't been to a Brewer's game in like forever. I think I went the first year the new stadium was open but that's the only time I've been to Miller Park for a game so far. The Club on the Club area that we had our tickets for was first class. It's new at Miller Park this year. I've never been in one of those luxury boxes which is what I originally thought we were going to be in. This was similar to that only there was no glass. It's all open. It's more like an outdoor cafe overlooking a ball field. In addition to the usual ballgame food (brats, nachos, burgers, etc.) they had tons of other good food...a couple of buffet tables full. The food and 2 drinks were free and after that you paid for just the drinks. Two drinks were plenty for me but ABF had a tab going even if it wasn't. We have a new rep now so maybe we'll get to do this more often. I'm really hoping so.
Friday at the game they gave away bobble heads of Cecil Cooper. The Brewers are giving away bobble heads of the 1982 Brewers team as a promotion this year. The box it came in says there are 13 all together but I think that means 13 players. I think it's really 26 total because each player will have a bobble head with both a home and an away uniform. My dad and I both got away uniforms on our Coopers. This is picture I took of mine.

I just found this on the Brewer's web site:

All fans in attendance will receive a collectible 5 inch Brewers bobble head doll, featuring former Brewers player Cecil Cooper. 5,000 of the dolls will feature Cooper in the powder blue uniform, and the rest of the dolls will showcase the pinstripe uniform. This is the second in a series of 13 collectible bobbles featuring former Brewers players from the 1982 team.

No wonder I saw that guy on the way out looking for a trade if only 5000 out of the 50,000 or so they had were the powder blue uniform. I'm sort of glad I didn't make that trade. It would be cool if I could collect all of these but that probably won't happen. The Brewer's in '82 will be something I'll never forget. I was 9 and it was the first time in my life I was learning to follow baseball and to top it all off the Brewers went to the series that year. I can still remember all the regular players and their position on the field but the batting lineup is a little foggy now after 25 years.

American Idol

Before this season I never watched this show for more than a combined total of 5 minutes. I heard a lot about it of course but never watched it. This year I started watching right near the beginning when all of the delusional folks are trying out for a chance to go to Hollywood. Those try-out shows are hilarious. I can't sing to save my life but at least I know it. After Hollywood I watched a couple of the episodes where the women competed and then I tuned in for the eliminations too. I'm a guy after all so there's no reason for me to care about the episodes where guys compete. Now that they're eliminating only 1 per week I just don't have the patience to sit through watching it. I'll maybe start watching it again when it gets to be the final 3 or 4. Melinda Doolittle is going to win this thing for sure if you ask me. Sanjaya finally went down last week. Lots of pre-teen girls probably ran off their rooms crying. That guy was strange. I was afraid for a while the world might end up with another Michael Jackson type. I remember when Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire on the set of a Pepsi commercial and it was the biggest news item at the top of all local the broadcasts. I think I was in 5th grade. Anyway I'm relieved Sanjaya's gone from the competition.


I don't know if it's been like this in other seasons but there were some real attractive women in the top 24. Alaina Alexander I thought was uber cute. She didn't sing that well when compared with the others so I wasn't surprised to see her go. She could barely get started singing after she got eliminated she was breaking down big time. When I first started watching the show this year that struck me as odd that they did that to people. They tell them they're out and then barely a moment later shove a mic into their hands and expect them to sing again. Alaina might've fared better with a commercial break inbetween or something.

Easter Sunday

Today when I arrived at our family gathering for Easter my niece was so excited to show me the eggs she found that she accidentally dumped the tray they were in and they broke open on the kitchen floor. It turns out the eggs weren't hard boiled enough. The insides were semi-solid. We had to clean them up off the kitchen floor and throw them out. She didn't seem that disappointed. I think there were only 4 of them in the tray so it wasn't too terrible of a mess.

My mom made a cake for our dessert unlike I have ever seen before. It was a layer cake and it had chocolate and vanilla sections in a checkerboard pattern. She said she probably wouldn't make it again because it was a lot of work. She seemed pretty sure it wasn't going to be very good but it tasted OK to me. It was less moist than most cakes but we had ice cream with it so it balanced out fine.


I found this using Google's image search. (What did people ever do before Google?) My mom's cake looked almost exactly like this only I don't think it was quite as high. I wonder if a checkerboard cake is like some sort of pinnacle of cake making. At one end of the spectrum are simple microwave cakes and at the other are checkerboard cakes. If this is the case I've never endeavored beyond the microwave cake. To my recollection I've only made one cake in my entire life, and it was a microwave cake. I was 18 and I made it for my girlfriend for her 19th birthday.

New Videos Widget

I'm trying out the new videos widget over on the right side of my blog page. I don't have much control over the specific videos that show up but I can enter search terms in the configuration settings and it will fill out videos from YouTube and Google videos that match those terms. Until I can figure out how to tweek this new videos widget I just have some trials videos over there. Maybe I'll change it around once a while or maybe I'll get rid of it altogether I'm not sure yet. I'm not sure I like the fact that I can't control which videos are over there. It would be better if I had more control. Maybe I just haven't figured it all out yet.

Interesting Parallel

Yesterday before I left for Target to get some batteries and cat litter it occurred to me that battery sizes and bra cup sizes correspond with each other almost exactly. Other than the fact that there aren't B or A batteries...at least that I know of...it's pretty much exactly parallel. AAA batteries are even smaller than AA. I don't know why this has never occurred to me before but now that I thought of it, it seems very obvious.

I found some pictures on the Internet and put them together to illustrate. I might not be right on with with regard to the models but probably close. I found out that it's not as easy as you'd think to find clean examples of models of varying sizes. It was an interesting venture nonetheless.

???

Am I Smarter than a 5th Grader?

Now that 2 months has gone by since I went to Florida I've finally gotten through all of the nearly 200 photos I took and sorted them out and cropped them and all of that business. I took this picture of alligators on that safari ride at the Animal Kingdom but the thing is, is that now I'm not even sure these are alligators. They might be crocodiles. I'm 34 and I'm not certain of the difference just by looking at one. I bet a 5th grader could tell me. I think it has something to do with the snout but otherwise I think they're pretty much the same thing. I'm 95% sure these are alligators.
http://www.fox.com/areyousmarter/

Florida 2007

Two months ago when it was snowing and cold in Wisconsin I got to go on a trip to Florida. The company I work for is in its' 25th year, so to celebrate the anniversary and to reward the dedicated employees that have made it possible, the company paid for everyone and a guest to fly out to Florida and spend Friday to Monday at Disney World (official site). We stayed at the Contemporary Resort and we had our meal plans paid for and everything. It was pretty much all expenses paid. I don't think I even spent $20 the whole weekend. It worked out real nice because you could get just about anywhere either using the monorail which went right through the middle of our building or by taking a bus. There aren't really many other places the company could have taken us where that would've been the case. We had park hopper passes for the whole weekend so we could visit all the major parks...Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and MGM Studios along with Downtown Disney. The highlight for me was Animal Kingdom. It's like a big zoo but it has a lot of animals that our zoo here doesn't. I took the vast majority of my photos there. Plus it has a safari ride and a roller coaster.

The accommodations at the resort were more than I expected. It was much more than your average hotel that's for sure. They had a flat panel monitor with a laptop type keyboard right in the room. It had a Disney intranet setup where you could look up park hours and get directions and details about attractions and the parks and things like that. Plus you could access the Internet from it besides which was real nice. The bed was super comfortable. Now I'm thinking about a new mattress for here at home like that one I slept on there.

These photos are from the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom from Friday night. After we got in Friday we walked from the resort over to get something to eat. Shortly after that they had these fireworks. I think they had them every night at 7:00.

Rhinoceros

Anteater

?????

Sunday night our whole group gathered together for dinner at the Ohana. One of our co-founders is retired and lives in Florida and she and her husband were able to join us which was real cool. I took this picture of the grill at the Ohana.