Tag: life

I blogged last year about getting an Apple Watch and the 23rd of this month marked a full year of owning it! I’m extremely pleased to say that I’m now fitter, healthier, and stronger than I’ve ever been in my entire life. 💪🏻 I’ve also closed all three activity rings on every single day since I bought the Watch!

I mentioned in that post that I was down to 70kg, after that (but prior to COVID) I hit 69kg, which I haven’t been since I was in my very early 20s. After we started working from home full-time in mid-March, I settled into a really good exercise routine: during the week I finish work around 5:30pm, then on every day but Monday and Friday I’ll go for a burn on the elliptical while watching an episode of something on Netflix (Saturdays and Sundays are also elliptical time, but at whatever point I feel like doing it during the day). It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you’re not concentrating on the fact that you’re exercising. I’d started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to COVID, but went through the episodes much more quickly after it, and finally finished it last month.

Fun side note, I thought I’d watched way more episodes than it turns out I have… as I was making my way through the episodes, I’d remembered seeing the pilot episode before, then a random smattering of maaaaybe five to ten episodes in the middle, and then the series finale, but that was it. It was pretty fun to watch the progression of the series, and I think at this point I enjoy Star Trek more than I do Star Wars. After I finished TNG, I took a brief Trek break to watch Warrior Nun (IMDB’s blurb says “After waking up in a morgue, an orphaned teen discovers she now possesses superpowers as the chosen Halo Bearer for a secret sect of demon-hunting nuns.” HIGHLY recommended, I loved it), and have now started watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’m only a few episodes in, but again, I’ve definitely seen the first episode before but none of the other four I’ve watched thus far.

The elliptical has its own calorie counter in it, I have no idea how accurate it is because it doesn’t take into account your weight, and the Apple Watch doesn’t take into account the fact that I’ve got the incline on the elliptical at 14 degrees and the resistance set to 14 out of 22, but regardless it’s a hell of a workaround. After a typical 45-minute episode of a TV show, the elliptical says I’ve burnt around 650-700 calories, and the Apple Watch says 425-450 calories.

On Mondays and Fridays, instead of using the elliptical I do some weight training. I bought a pair of neoprene-coated 4kg dumbbells and have been doing twelve of each of the exercises from this article, three times each. I really like that Women’s Health Magazine article because it’s not pretentious and just says “Hey if you want some toned arms, do these things.” Pretty much all the ones aimed at men that I found were all of the “RARRRR GET RIPPPPPED BROOOO” which I just… just, no. 😑

As a result of all of this, I’ve actually gained weight and am now 71kg, but it’s all muscle mass, aw yiss. I’ve never actually had properly visible muscles, so this is a new look for me. 😛

On the odd occasion that I’m feeling a bit pooped-out for whatever reason, rather than using the elliptical or doing weight training, I’ll just go for a brisk walk on the treadmill and listen to part of a podcast. (Speaking of podcasts, I’ve basically entirely stopped listening to them except for when I’m occasionally using the treadmill… my commute into the city was my podcast listening time, and with that gone, I just don’t really do it anymore).

My primary use for the Apple Watch is still definitely fitness, but I’ve also really enjoyed the little notification buzz you get on your wrist when you get an iMessage or SMS. It’s totally unobtrusive and as someone who leaves all of their devices muted at all times, it means I don’t actually miss messages that need a timely reply, but if it’s not important I can just ignore it. The other handy thing I’ve found is using Siri to set custom timers. I don’t have any of the “always listening” Siri stuff on on any of my devices, but I have the Watch set to activate Siri when you hold the digital crown in for a couple of seconds. It’s super-handy when I’m timing my bread-making or barbecuing to just say “Set a timer for four minutes”, or whatever non-standard time it is, rather than having to futz around pressing things.

A year on, the Apple Watch is still one of my favourite gadgets and I’m keen to see what sort of additions Apple makes to it in the coming years!

We bought a new car today! A shiny new 1.5-litre Toyota Yaris in white.

We’d been thinking of selling the old (2000 model!) Corolla and getting a new car for a while, and a friend of a friend of Kristina’s had an urgent need for a replacement car so we actually sold the Corolla a couple of months ago and have been managing with just the Cerato in the meantime.

We decided to go test drive the Yaris, and Kristina immediately loved it. The turning circle is hilariously tiny, and the visibility is fantastic, so we put down a deposit in early November, and went and picked it up today! It has a surprising amount of pep for a 1.5L engine, more than what the old Corolla’s 1.8L had — though granted that was also 19 years old. You definitely feel less like you’re sitting in the car compared to the Cerato… with that, you’re down in the seats whereas the Yaris has a much higher-feeling seating position. We’re getting a carport added to the front of the house so the Yaris isn’t sitting out in the open all the time (we’re still going to be parking at the station), but that won’t be until early January, so hopefully we don’t get any hail before then!

Today twenty years ago marks the earliest point I can find of where I started going by “VirtualWolf” online! That’s over half my life. 😮

I had posted previously back in 2009 (back when this blog was on LiveJournal) about being VirtualWolf online for around ten years at that point but it was pretty vague in terms of dates, and I’ve since consolidated all my old websites and put them up online. Further digging reminded me that I have a whole bunch of other sites that I never actually finished — I should add those to archive.virtualwolf.org too, now I think about it — and there was one called “DevlinSlayer’s Imperium” from February of 1999 so it was clearly after that.

The earliest mention of VirtualWolf I can find is from my Realm of the Wolf site from the 28th of June 1999, and the name of the Myth II map I’d created, “Realm of the VirtualWolf”. Unfortunately that file has been lost and I cannot for the life of me find the original anymore. I was able to recover all but one of my Marathon maps from various places, but I can’t even find the original pre-compiled image files for the Myth II map. The only image related is the overhead map view from the website I created after Realm of the Wolf.

Since that point, it’s been all VirtualWolf, all the time. I’ve owned the domain virtualwolf.org since the start of 2002, and have made a point of ensuring all the old links to images I’ve posted here and on Ars Technica still work even now.

Here’s to me making a post in twenty years saying “Forty years of VirtualWolf!”. 😛

I’d posted back in May of 2013, just before we moved into our house, that I was really enjoying my nighttime cuppa, and nearly five years later we’re now at the point where we have an entire shelf of our pantry that has nothing but tea on it!

We’ve got a handful of loose-leaf teas, but I tend to forget about them because they’re buried at the back and it’s a bit of a pain to clean up afterwards. A cup of herbal tea after dinner is glorious, especially when the weather has cooled down. The brand “Celestial Seasonings” has quite a few very tasty ones, and we’ll frequently pick up a new interesting-looking type when we’re out at the shops too (hence the whole shelf of tea that we now have).

I still don’t tend to drink a lot of black tea, mostly because it’s not caffeinated enough compared to coffee, but we discovered McVitie’s digestive biscuits thanks to a British documentary series (called “Inside the Factory”) about how they’re made, and ohmygod they’re so good dunked in a nice hot cup of black tea! ?

We bought a brand-new car today! \o/ It’s an extremely handsome-looking Kia Cerato hatchback in dark metallic grey.

We’d been toying with the idea for a little bit, then Kristina came across some videos of crash tests comparing somewhat older (from ~2000-ish, which is exactly what our current Corolla is) cars impacting with newer ones. They’re nothing like the utter crumpling of the cars from the 1970s, but still somewhat alarming. She did a bunch of research and found that the current Kias are extremely well-regarded and reliable, and it turns out there’s basically nothing else in the same price range that offer as much power and features; the equivalent cars like the Corolla and Civic and such were all several thousand dollars more, with less power and fewer included features. The Cerato has a 7-year warranty as well, which seemed to be more than most other cars.

Speaking of power (112kW and 192Nm to be exact), we took one for a test drive on Sunday… I put my foot down and was accidentally doing 70km/h almost immediately! There’s a hell of a lot of room as well, it’s only marginally larger on the outside compared to our Corolla, but it’s so spacious inside. I’m excited about having a hatchback again too, there’s been a few situations where we were trying to put something into the boot and it just wouldn’t fit. Now we can go to town and put the back seats down and put EVERYTHING in it! *maniacal laughter*

We’re going to keep the old Corolla for a while just to go to and from the station in, because parking there means the car is permanently covered in dust thanks to all the construction going on, and when it rains everything turns to mud and the trucks going along the road just splash mud across everything.

Last time, Leo came over to our house, so this time we visited him. It was quite a warm day and Beanie and Leo were just trotting around outside not really doing a whole lot of playing together, but as soon as we went inside where it was noticeably cooler they started absolutely rampaging around! (The full set of photos is here).

One of the dogs at Beanie’s dog training, Leo, got on particularly well with Beanie, so we exchanged phone numbers with his owner and they came over for a visit today! There was a lot of butt-sniffing and humping and general running around. Of course I took some photos.

We went to a doggy training class today, on the suggestion of the dog trainer we had over a couple of times. She thought that he would do fine whereas we thought he’d just melt down as soon as he saw the other dogs and we’d immediately have to leave.

We’ve never been happier to be wrong! He was initially extremely barky when the first dog arrived but as soon as he got a good butt-sniff in he settled right down. It was quite incredible! I took a few happy-snaps on my iPhone, of course. At the end the next class arrived, which was a puppy class, and Beanie was happily running around and snuffling them as well.

The actual “training” part didn’t go quite so well, mostly because he was more interested in running around with the other dogs than paying attention to us, but still!

The subject has come up on a few occasions recently of how long people have been married for (three years, two years, two months!), and my mind is blown anew each time when I point out that as of today we’ve been married for seven years!

I picture seven years in my head and I think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty good length of time”, but then I realise that’s how long we’ve been married and it just does not even remotely feel like it’s been that long. It’s witchcraft! Before we got married we always used to joke that we had time-warpy powers because we’d be doing something and a bunch of time would pass and it wouldn’t feel like it’d been several hours. The same powers have clearly continued into marriage!

<3

Growing up, we’d frequently go over to my grandma’s house on a Sunday evening for a full roast dinner. Roast beef, roast veggies, gravy, the works. Her roast potatoes were always amazing, they were wonderfully crispy on the outside and I never knew how she did it. Whatever my parents’ method is pales in comparison as they never get them at all crispy.

I made roast potatoes tonight following a recipe from Taste.com.au entitled The Best Roast Potatoes, and my god, they’re not joking. They’re almost identical to how my grandma’s used to come out! If you’re a fan of roast potatoes, you should definitely give that recipe a go.

1. Preheat oven to 200°C or 180C fan-forced. Peel potatoes and cut into 5cm chunks. Place into a large saucepan. Cover with cold water.
2. Bring to the boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 5-10 minutes or until partially cooked (potatoes should be only just tender when pierced with a skewer).
3. Drain potatoes well. Return to saucepan over low heat until any remaining water evaporates. Shake saucepan vigorously to rough up surface of potatoes (this will make them crunchy when roasted). Alternatively, scrape surfaces of potatoes with a fork to create a rough texture.
4. Pour oil into a large roasting pan. Place roasting pan into oven for 5 minutes or until oil is hot. Working quickly, add potatoes to hot oil. Use tongs to turn potatoes to coat in oil, then return roasting pan to oven.
5. Roast potatoes for 40 minutes. Turn and roast for a further 30 minutes or until golden and crisp. Season with salt. Serve immediately.

There’s certain things that are comforting by virtue of having done or seen them many times before and thus you know exactly what to expect.

Diablo III is like that for me, specifically the story mode. The original Diablo III had you go through the (very linear) story multiple times, once for each difficulty level, and by the time you hit the maximum level of 60 you’d generally done it at least three or four times. Combine that with the five different classes you can choose, and that’s a lot of repeats. When the Reaper of Souls expansion came out, Blizzard did away with that whole repeat-the-story-many-times in favour of Adventure Mode. It’s varied and certainly less repetitive than the old story mode, but I do enjoy going back every now and again and starting a new character to play through the story from the beginning. It’s definitely comfortable.

A couple of years ago—a couple of months after we moved into our house, actually—I bought C25K, a couch-to-5K training app. It took me longer than I’d have liked, but I eventually got up to the full 5km, though only at 7km/h which for me is barely faster than brisk walking (a comfortable brisk walk for me is 6.5km/h; I know these speeds because I do my running on a treadmill at home). I stopped for a while and decided to start it again but from the beginning at a faster pace for the running sections, but fairly quickly lost interest.

Then the subject came up at work, and a colleague mentioned a thing called Zombies, Run! that combines an actual story with your running. It turned out they also made a couch-to-5K version and it’s really well done. There’s an audio story that plays, almost like an old radio drama, that puts you in the position of a new runner to an outpost that’s survived the zombie apocalypse and they need you to train up in order to be able to complete reconnaissance missions and to go get supplies from other bases and so on. It’s done in the form of periodic radio transmissions to you, but in between you can have your own music playing. The voice actors they’ve used are extremely good; there’s none of the cringe-worthy voice acting you’d often get in the video games of yesteryear. I’ll freely admit that I’ve been fairly slack, I only completed Week 4 yesterday despite having begun the program in May last year, but it is very neat and definitely a more interesting alternative to your bog-standard couch-to-5K program!