One of my recent hobbies (read distraction for when I get stressed) is genealogy. I got interested in charting where I came from about ten years ago, but technology wasn't such that it was easy to do back then. You either had to do it the old-fashioned way and track down county records in dusty rooms or order databases that may or may not have been useful to your search. Now a lot of stuff is online and its much easier to get leads.
I've been using the latest version of Family Tree Maker, which is pretty much the monolopy product in genealogy. It wasn't really that good when it first came out (I used version 4 originally), but with 16 versions, anything can get good :). Now it integrates with the Ancestry.com databases, which give you US census records from 1830-1930, which can be incredibly useful. They list every person who lived in a particular household, which at least for the male line, can often give you the whole line across this period if you line up birth dates and locations. The other datasources have not been nearly as useful for me, but have the potential if you get lucky with what they have scanned in (like obituaries).
The most interesting thing about this hobby is that it has slightly changed the way I look at the world. Now whenever I hear a name, I wonder about where it came from and if I'm somehow related to it. I look more closely at historical markers on the side of the road. It also gives me a feeling like I'm much more connected to my past and goes a bit of a way to lessen my fear of mortality. Even if this turns out to just be a phase, I think I will have gained something great from it.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Hill Training
I've recently gotten back into training for racquetball. I feel like my game dropped a bit during the last semester due to me getting slightly out of shape, so I'm determined to get back into shape for my final semester playing racquetball. In addition, I want to be able to dive...
If you watch racquetball at the pro level or even at a good amateur level, they all dive. Yes, diving is no substitute for good shot prediction or court placement, but there's always three or four shots in any game that are just an inch or so beyond my racquet that I know I could get with a dive. However, I really have trouble motivating myself to do it. I'm not a heavy person, but I'm not really light on my feet and I'd like to change that to make it easier to convince myself to go for it.
So for that end, I decided to work on a regimen to both lose a bit of weight and strengthen my leg muscles. I went with hill running, mainly because I really hate it so I imagine that its good for me :). My body really does not like pushing itself up a steep hill. Give me flat ground and I can plod along all day, but put me on an incline and its a whole different story. Also, hills are much better for leg strengthening than flat ground. Conveniently, I live on a hill so that makes it easy to find a place to run.
More revolutionarily, I decided to stretch my workout across the entire day. For one thing, I really can't run up a steep hill that many times in a row. And secondly, a recently read a magazine article on how short distance running was actually better for losing weight since it allowed you to push your body harder and get your heart rate up more across longer time periods. Therefore, once an hour I run up my hill. Ideally I wanted to do this eight times a day, but that never really happens. Its more like four or five times a day. And while in total this only gives me about 15-20 minutes of activity across the day, I believe that actually does more for me than the 20-30 minutes of continuous flat running combined with hours of sitting at my desk that I used to do. We'll see if that pans out over more time.
If you watch racquetball at the pro level or even at a good amateur level, they all dive. Yes, diving is no substitute for good shot prediction or court placement, but there's always three or four shots in any game that are just an inch or so beyond my racquet that I know I could get with a dive. However, I really have trouble motivating myself to do it. I'm not a heavy person, but I'm not really light on my feet and I'd like to change that to make it easier to convince myself to go for it.
So for that end, I decided to work on a regimen to both lose a bit of weight and strengthen my leg muscles. I went with hill running, mainly because I really hate it so I imagine that its good for me :). My body really does not like pushing itself up a steep hill. Give me flat ground and I can plod along all day, but put me on an incline and its a whole different story. Also, hills are much better for leg strengthening than flat ground. Conveniently, I live on a hill so that makes it easy to find a place to run.
More revolutionarily, I decided to stretch my workout across the entire day. For one thing, I really can't run up a steep hill that many times in a row. And secondly, a recently read a magazine article on how short distance running was actually better for losing weight since it allowed you to push your body harder and get your heart rate up more across longer time periods. Therefore, once an hour I run up my hill. Ideally I wanted to do this eight times a day, but that never really happens. Its more like four or five times a day. And while in total this only gives me about 15-20 minutes of activity across the day, I believe that actually does more for me than the 20-30 minutes of continuous flat running combined with hours of sitting at my desk that I used to do. We'll see if that pans out over more time.
Welcome
I seem to be on a blog frenzy these days. Rest assured that I'm not that good of a blogger. Anyway, in order to keep my other blogs fairly free of personal issues or random ones, I'm creating this blog as my own personal blog. Therefore, it will contain life events, random philosophies, and other things that people most likely don't want to read.
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