Crossfit this morning at 0600, last night at 1830, the day before at 1830, and tomorrow at 1830. I wanted to hit the Yoga class today, but I was pretty sore. We did back squats and while I didn't add any weight at all (so just a 65-lbs bar), the motion has left me with some pretty wicked muscle pain in my low back. I am hoping that I can keep exercising that muscle and it will heal. Something's gotta give here; I can't just be a cripple.

In other news, for the second time in two months, I have torn a tire off a wheel. The rear left tire came off this time and shredded the sidewall. I just bought these tires eight weeks ago, and I have a feeling that all the tail-dragging-around-turns and hammer-down slides might be unseating the tires in this weather. They're Potenza RE-11's, and they are most definitely summer tires, so they might be getting hard and brittle in the sub-30F weather. But really, how am I supposed to get them warm if not by burning out??


Talked to the wife about the skydiving thing for 2012. She's on board (or realizes she probably can't convince me otherwise), so now all that's left is the doctors' clearance.

Oh, and for the curious, I drag raced her Core i5 (1.6ghz) 11" Macbook Air and my Core 2 Duo (1.8ghz) Macbook Air with R this evening. By sheer computation time, it happens that the Core i5 is about 8% faster for the benchmark I was running. But the really curious thing about the benchmark is it seems to be faster because it has higher memory bandwidth. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that you'd be hard pressed to notice a difference between the two machines doing day-to-day work. And I do Photoshop stuff on my Air with no problems. Big bonus to the Core i5 machine though: backlit keyboard. That alone makes me covet the thing. One thing I didn't test, but I should, is disk I/O. I am curious as to whether Apple has changed the storage. I've got a 25,000,000 row database that should do the trick for I/O tests on these little demons. People don't give them much credit, but an Air working on storage is way faster than my Macbook Pro (quad i7) is running off its stupid rotational media.

Anyways, back to reading. Currently reading The Weird, (edited) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Note that I had to switch my Kindle (read: kindle app on my iPad) physical address to one in the UK (I just used the address for the Ministry of Defence) before they'd let me download it. I could buy the paper-and-ink copy in the US, but apparently Amazon can't sell me the kindle copy in the US. Note that The Weird is seven hundred and fifty thousand words long. That's, like, ten Charlie Stross books. I bet that's all of Harry Potter and Twilight put together. Do I really want that on paper??? No. Amazon, this is stupid. The bits never went to the Ministry of Defence, they went to my damned kindle. I would have thought you guys would be smarter than this. And I don't want to hear any whining about "oh the publishers make us do it!!" because really, who are you kidding? You're the 800lb gorilla, you're a monopoly, and you are telling people what to do. Keep doing that, but try not to be a) stupid or b) dicks about it.