pushups - take 2

I forgot to mention the main reason I was writing a blog tonight. I decided to jump back into the hundred pushup challenge, I know you're thinking "but you did that already and completed it" and you are right but I feel I am getting out of shape and want to do it again. This time I'm also doing the 200 situp challenge and the 200 squat challenge. Did the initial tests for pushups and situps on Monday night and did my first official night of them today. Due to my initial test I am starting the pushups on Day 1 of Week 3 at the highest rank which means I had to do 80 pushups today. Due to my unimpressive situp test I am starting in week 1 day 1 at the lowest level so I ended up doing 2o situps today. When I was done I didn't feel done so I jumped into the squats test, last time I did squats I couldn't do more than 5 and even those were tough, tonight I did 31 squats which puts me in the top tier of day 1 / week 1. I will start the first official day of those on Friday when I do my 2nd day of situps and pushups.

In Pittsburgh

Has it really been almost a month since I've posted a blog?! I guess so.. Anyway.. Last week I was in Santa Clara CA, I woke up to my alarm and literally seconds after it went off a co-worker called me to tell me he was also in Santa Clara. I very rarely see him since his main office is in Irvine CA so it was nice that he was in town too, we hung out 3 of the 4 nights I was there. I was feeling crappy and wanted to eat somewhat healthy, first night I had a shrimp, veggie brown rice bowl at the Yard House which was very tasty and mostly healthy. I don't remember what we ate the 2nd night honestly, but it was not very healthy. The third night I told him to meet me after dinner and I went to Good Karma Cafe which is a vegan restaurant in San Jose, after dinner we bar hopped along a street that was closed to traffic, they were showing Princess Bride on a screen setup in the street so they had closed the street to cars. I would say that was the best night I spent in Santa Clara/San Jose but I don't know if I can really say that.. The last day I got out of class early and headed west to the ocean, I drove up and down the mountains through the red woods with the windows down and no cell phone service. I got to Santa Cruz and sat on the beach for about 2 hours before heading to the airport, I felt so much better getting on the flight because of the nature hike. The mountains and red woods of California are NOT to be missed, if you have the means I recommend getting out there to see them. There is nothing like driving up a winding mountain road having to make 180 degree turns around a tree in the road, and when I say tree in the road I don't mean a laying down one but a standing tall enormous tree!

While I was out in CA I got a call from my boss that they needed an emergency change of instructors for this week, end result is I'm here in Pittsburgh this week. Pittsburgh is a very pretty city (nature wise) with lots of hills and forest (not CA redwoods forest, more east coast "normal" forest), it's so cool to see the buildings sticking out among the trees and the roads (even new ones) that wind in and around the hills and trees. The hotel I'm staying at is on Neville Island which is a little strip of land in the middle of the river, the island is pretty lame as it's mostly old industrial buildings but it's nice to be surrounded by water. The view out of my window is of a very "old style" bridge spanning the river, what's better is the hotel has a sitting area along the river with a hammock and fire pit. I went out there last night to sit by fire and look over river and my relaxing experience was ruined by a drunk old guy, he was talking to me and it was clear he was WAY drunk, he apparently bought a case of Bud Light and was trying to finish it off in one sitting.. /sigh

The first night here I went to Primanti Bros, which is a world famous sandwich shop, and got a steak and cheese which came with french fries on the sandwich as well as coleslaw and tomato, it was very good but left me feeling rather fat.. Last night I went to the Double Wide Grill which is an old gas station turned sports bar/restaurant, they have lots of vegan options as well as 65 beers on tap! I had the Meatless Stroganoff which used mushrooms as its "meat" and was OMG tasty! Tonight I went to Hofbrauhaus which is clearly a German restaurant, I had a roasted pork tenderloin in a wine and bacon sauce with bacon strips and a potato dumpling, may not be healthy but MAN was it good!

Work unblocked Hulu and Dailyshow so I've been catching up on TV, I watched the whole season of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution over the last two days which may sound like a lot but it was only 6 episodes. I really think everyone MUST see this, he does an amazing job and it's very eye opening to see how people fight the concept of eating (and serving) good food. If you haven't seen it check it out on Hulu.

Last thing I will mention before turning this blog in is.. Apparently it's not so hard to score 15 runs in a game when you play American League style ball, for all those who say the American League is better just remember that the DH is the reason why you see inflated stats all across the league..

Patience

Patience is a virtue right? I certainly learned a lesson in patience this week. Lynz posted a link on facebook saying that Verizon was going to start sending the new Android OS to the phones starting on Friday the 27th. Friday came and my phone didn't upgrade, come to find out they were only pushing it to a select number of phones as a "soak test", feeling left out and impatient I found the leaked OS on a website and loaded it to my phone.. Yay to the internet? I thought so..

Anyway, they officially released the new OS and it turns out it was a newer version than the one I had.. I had 588 and they released 596.. D'oh.. No problem right, just do a quick upgrade, or not.. Because I was not on the soak list my phone wouldn't upgrade via the Verizon phone upgrade. In the meantime I decided I wanted my phone to get emails from work, I put in a request to get Active Sync turned on and on Tuesday set up my phone to receive work emails, in doing so I inadvertently locked my phone via corporate settings. Corporate settings = no pattern lock, must use pin lock of 5+ characters, can't browse certain websites and worst of all, can't get gmail?! Can't get gmail on my google phone, wtf!! Removed work email account but could not get the remote administrator and corporate policy off my phone. To the internets..

Only way to remove corporate policy is to wipe my phone?! Had to revert phone back to factory settings and re-install all my applications. After doing all this I found out the next day that I couldn't upgrade my phone because of the pre-release OS.. Back to the internets.. so frustrating, spent most of last night researching before finally finding a download of 596.. Bitch was I couldn't install it unless I was back at Froyo or rooted.

For all of those who are afraid of rooting the phones, it's super easy.. You download an application called GingerRoot and run it, GingerRoot is a one click rooting tool. Click, reboot, done. Now had a to grab another application to do boot strap recovery and loaded 596. Rebooted, unrooted and back to normal. Should have just waited the extra 2-3 days.. Oh well, lesson learned.

In terms of corporate email, I got a tool called Touchdown. It sections off a portion of the phone to be a "corporate run" area, it takes the corporate policy and applies it to email only.