I haven’t blogged about my new diet and weight loss because I figure you don’t care. Nor have I blogged about the fact I’m running again, but I’ve decided it is time.

The week before Memorial Day I decided to start running again. I don’t actually remember why, though realizing I was getting fat was part of it. When I decided to start I decided to use The Maffetone Method because it make running easy and fun.

The Maffetone Method was something I heard about from my Austin Chiropractor and Tony Robbins a number of years ago. It is a method of aerobic training focused on running by heart rate and time and not by distance. I did it somewhat in the past, but not very strictly and therefore didn’t get the promised effects. This time I did it by the book.

What is The Maffetone Method

Here’s an article by Phillip Maffetone himself explaining it. Here’s my break down of it.

1. Calculate your target heart rate using the 180 rule. Basically, 180 – your age. Your training range in 10 point under that. For me that means my range is 121-131 BPM.

2. Spend 15 minutes warming up to that range. When I started this was all walking.

3. Spend 15 minutes running in this range. The amount of time in this range can be increased once you are totally comfortable with it, but not more than once every 2 weeks.

4. Spend 15 minutes cooling down back under your heart range.

5. Run 5 or 6 days a week. For me first thing in the morning.

6. Once a month test yourself using a MAF test. Basically run a mile in your target heart range and record the time.

I didn’t do a MAF test at the beginning, but I did something similar a couple of weeks into it. I ran a 2.1 mile loop after warm up in my target zone. Doing a little division, that turned out to be a little over 17 minute miles.

The idea is that if you run at a particular heart rate for a number of weeks you will get where you are faster at that rate. I’ve found that to be true, but that you don’t really see it until you’ve been running about a month. I did a MAF test on Saturday and my mile was 16:12.

Even since that run I know I’m having to running faster to maintain the heart rate. I seem to have broken through some barrier and now every time I run I’ve got to run faster.

No Discomfort.

My running never hurts. Never feels horrible. I often feel like I could run forever.

When I have felt some discomfort I’ve learned it means something is wrong. Normally either I’m getting dehydrated, or I’m overheating – something easy to do in Houston’s summer heat.

When my feet gave me a little problem – something was rubbing on one of my toes – I took this as a sign something needed to be fixed. I’m pretty sure it was my socks, because I’ve tried a couple of different running specific socks and haven’t had the same problem.

Pain is an indicator something needs fixing.

My Ultimate Goal: The Houston Marathon.

I’ve decided I want to run a marathon. I know I’m signing up for Houston’s marathon in January. I’m not sure if I’ll really be able to do the whole thing, mainly because I’ve very slow and you have to complete in under 6 hours. But I’m going to start training for it. I may only do the half. Matter of fact there is a half in November that I plan on running and finding out if I can do the full from that.

I know Shawn and Nick from the Internet Business Mastery Academy and am honored they wanted me on their show. We talk about success and failure. Actually a lot about failure really.

Well I must have joined a cult.

I retook the Myers Briggs today and found I’ve changed from an INTJ to and ESTJ.

The biggest change to me was the Introvert to Extrovert. Being an introvert has been part of my personality for so long I’m shocked it has changed.

I blame The Game.

I wrote before about the book The Game, and how I wasn’t really into picking up women but I learned a lot from it. I hadn’t realized just how much it had changed me. And remember, the Game doesn’t teach you pickup. It is about the pickup community and living inside it, but it opened a world of possibilities to me. I’ve been learning “pickup” ever since.

It showed me you could learn how to “work the room” as I now call it. I’ve now done it enough I no longer fear opening – approaching strangers and starting a conversation. Matter of fact I don’t consider going out any fun if I’m not opening. It gives me something to do.

Last Saturday I went to a Meet and Greet for models and photographers at a local night club. I took two buddys with me and I don’t think they talked to anyone but a waitress. I talked to every model and wanna be model there, as well as most of the photographers, and the bar staff.

Gosh, maybe I have become an extrovert.

The first episode went out and I subscribed to it in iTunes by entering the Feedburner RSS feed. And the name for the podcast was wrong. It was “Glamour Apprentice >> podcast.

The reason for this is the RSS2 template in WordPress uses the blog’s title, desciption and URL for the header information in all of its RSS feeds. I’m not positive this is the way to handle it if the feed is a category feed, but that’s the way it is.

Looking for a Solution.

I went looking for away to change this information for my category feed. I found this article on how to change the RSS title returned by hacking the feeds.php file in your WordPress installation.

That would work, but you have to remember to save your feeds.php files every upgrade. And since that can happen automatically, that’s a pain. You just shouldn’t change any file outside of the wp-content directory in WordPress.

The Solution

Now that I know where to look, I realized there were hooks to change these same routines without editing them directly. I’d hoped maybe I could just change things in my theme, but that didn’t seem to be possible. Plus the right solution would be theme independent.

The solution is to write a very simple Plugin. Which is what I did. Here’s the source:

< ?php
/**
 * @package Podcast Category RSS Name Changer
 * @author Ron Davis
 * @version 0.1
 */
/*
Plugin Name: Podcast Category RSS Name Changer
Plugin URI: http://www.glamourapprentice.com/
Description: Hack to change the name of my podcast category RSS to the name of the podcast
Author: Ron Davis
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://www.glamourapprentice.com/
*/

function changeCat() {
     if (in_category('28')) {
        echo 'The Shooting Beauty Model Photography Podcast';
     } else
     {
     	echo get_wp_title_rss();
     }
}

function changebloginfo_rss($result='', $show='') {
     if ( in_category('28') )
     {
 		switch ($show) {
			case 'name':
				$result = '';
				break;
			case 'url':
				$result = 'http://www.glamourapprentice.com/podcast';
				break;
			case 'description':
				$result = 'Engaging interviews with photographer and models discussion the art and collaboration.';
				break;
			default:
        }
        return $result;
     } else
     {
     	$result =  bloginfo_rss($show);
     }
	return $result;
}

add_filter('wp_title_rss', 'changeCat', 1);
add_filter('bloginfo_rss', changebloginfo_rss, 1, 2);

?>

Warning: it is just a hack. It is very specific to my blog, and if you use it you are doing so at your own risk.

What I wanted to do was get rid of completely the blog title, and then instead of the category name, use the podcast’s title. While investigating I discovered it was using the blog’s description and URL, which I also wanted to change.

You need to know the category number. You can find this in your WP Dashboard under Posts->Categories. You enter that in the lines 17 and 26. My podcast’s category was 28. You could use the name of the category, but you might change that later and it would break the plugin.

On line 18, you enter the title of the podcast. This will replace the BlogName >> CategoryName default.

Then you would replace the information name, url, and description with your values.

Upload the text file with a name like “podcatchanger.php” into your plugins directory on your site, then activate the plugin in your Dashboard.

That should be it. Your RSS feed should have the correct information in it now.

This could be made more generic, maybe given an interface, but I don’t have time for that.

The characters are all themselves reinterpreted by new actors. They are all a lot smarter, this is most obvious with Uhura, who is now a specialist in linguistics. Really she reminded me more of Hoshi on Enterprise as far as her job went. She’s also much more central to the plot.

Scotty is another example of a character smarter and more interesting. A lot of the interestingness of the new characters comes from their back story. Those back stories always pay tribute to TOS.

The production design was great. The look of the Enterprise interiors was very cool in places and industrial in others.

It did seem Star Fleet itself was a little less perfect than in previous episodes. The 4 on one fight scene was a little distrubing for Star Fleet cadets.

Ultimately the story was all about Spock and Kirk.

And they did something totally amazing that I can’t talk about. Arg!

I have a Kindle.

For the most part when I buy a book these day I buy it for my Kindle. I love the Kindle for all the reasons I talked about before. The problem is for the most part, you have to buy your books from Amazon. No one else is producing electronic books for it.

The glowing exception is Baen books, and lucky for me, most of the books I read are from Baen. That means I download from them anytime I can. Also they don’t offer their books via Amazon anyway.

I have Amazon Prime.

When a I do need a physical book, I can get it shipped to me for free because I’m an Amazon Prime user. You do pay a yearly fee for this but it has always worked out in the past. Now with the Kindle, it may need to be reconsidered, but I’m not the only one in the house who buys books.

This also makes moving to another bookstore more expensive because they don’t have the equivalent of Amazon Prime. B&N does seem to give free shipping on most orders, so that makes a difference.

Everyone else is more expensive.

I’m going to New Orleans for a weekend trip and wanted a physical book for the trip. I’m getting physical book because it is on photography and the Kindle just isn’t up to displaying that kind of graphics.

The book is The Hot Shoe Diaries. Here’s the pricing:

The really shocking part to me was the $10 difference between online B&N and in the store. Borders isn’t even trying to compete.

It is possible these prices will go down because the book is brand new, but Amazon is using the lowest price from the get go.

So a much as I’d like to tell Amazon to stick it, it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe if I thought Amazon would feel some pain if my sales stopped coming, but they won’t even notice.

There was one other thing I remembered. They said when your kids got to be seniors in High School, going off to college the next year, you should take away all the rules you have on them. Actually they said you should gradually be taking the rules away and by the time they are a senior they should be on their own.

Why?

Because next year they are going to be on their own, and you won’t be there to see how they handle it and to help them if they make mistakes. Letting them do it while at home means you can help them.

My eldest is going off to the University of Texas in Austin next year. I sent off money to reserve his dorm room last week. The dorm we decided on doesn’t have a cafeteria. Plus my son is a picky eater and doesn’t really eat much of a variety. Matter of fact to him, eating at Taco Bell every day would be heaven.

We decided to just give him a budget for living expenses, including food, and let him decide how to spend it.

As a result, yesterday we gave him a week’s allotment and told him to go shopping, he’s on his own. We have a little mini-fridge that we put in his room, and he is to store his food there. That’s pretty much like his future dorm room. He’s not to eat our food and if we go out, he’s to pay his part of the bill.

Just like it will be next year.

It should be interesting.

His first purchases were, peanut butter, bread, and a 12 pack of Sunkist soda.

The book was not what I expected.

Let me back up a second. As you know I greatly like Neil’s book The Game about the secret underground of Pick Up Artists. Most people say it is about how to pick up women. Really it isn’t. It’s about his experience living in the world of pickup artists and becoming one. But along the way you learn some of the basic structure and technique.

Emergency is to survivalism, what The Game is to pick up.

Despite the subtitle, “This book may save your life”, it is unlikely to…unless it inspires you to go on the same journey Neil did. There isn’t a lot of technique in it, probably less than in The Game. Most of the actual technique is in the comics between chapters. I do want to try using a soda can to unlock a Masterlock.

So if you don’t go into the book expecting a survival manual, is it a fun read?

Mmmm….that’s a tough one, but I think it would be a good read for a lot of people. But some won’t make it through the first section. Let me explain.

Turns out left wing wackos can become just as attracted to survivalism as right wing wackos. Basically the book starts with Neil becoming paranoid as a result of the Bush administration, and ends with a party in a foreign country because Obama was elected.

If America is becoming a totalitarian/oppressive/fascist/socialist country, – both sides of the political fence believe this is happening, just in different ways – then the obvious solution is to move to another country. But when I ask myself where to go I can’t find a good answer.

Neil searches for one and finds it. By applying for citizenship on the island of St Kitts, ultimately becoming a duel citizen.

You can see how many survivalism orient people would find this disturbing, myself included. Abandoning America for another country?

I’m not going to go more down this path because I don’t want you to think I’m negative just because of the Neil’s politics.

So after searching for another country to run to, Neil starts wanting to learn skills to survive here, and to me that was where the book started getting good. He ends up getting lots training in various places in everything from guns, to tracking, wilderness survival, urban evasion, to becoming an EMT.

This is where a survivalist can learn from this book.

Sometimes I think most survivalist start with guns, stockpiles, bugging out and end there. If you got 10,000 rounds of ammo for all 10 of your guns you’re ready to survive the apocalypse. Since Neil doesn’t come from gun culture, he takes a more practical approach we could all learn from.

One thing I want to do is go through the book and make a list of all the skills and training he ended up getting.

In The Game you learn that to some extent pickup is about personal development. A guy has to change and grow in order to become the kind of person who is interesting to women. Neil carries that into survivalism.

He becomes the kind of person who will survive.

That to me is the theme of the book. How he must change in order to become a survivor. And he ultimately learns that you aren’t going to survive on your own. More than that, once you become a survivor, you will become drawn to being a servant. Or to use survivalists favorite metaphor, you become a sheep dog.

If you can get past the politics, and there is a lot to learn about just how controlling our government has become in that section, Emergency is a good book about an interesting journey. Its not a survival manual by any stretch of the imagination, so do go in looking for that.

Personally I think he gushes a little about me, but you might find it interesting. Sadly, I wrote my responses in a hurry and included a number of typos, please forgive me.

MasterMind Ron Davis – The Adagio Blog

One thing I might have mentioned is how hard it is to deal with distractions like starting new businesses. I’ve got a new one in my head and can’t think about the one I have now. Arrgh. I’m not sure if working on the new one would clear my head, or just take me further away from the one I have.

If you’ve read this blog for long you know I’ve got a lot of interests. Photography, guns, pretty girls, computers, filmmaking, writing, personal development, etc.

My wife says I have a tendency to cycle through them. I’ll get gung ho on guns for a few months, and then get into photography again. I think I’ve settled to doing a number of them at the same time now and just cycle through focus. And I’ve figured out how to combine them. Now business, photography, and pretty girls are combined in Glamour Apprentice for example.

But since I was a wee lad, I’ve been into what was called survivalism when I got into it in the late 70s and early 80s. I wasn’t dedicated enough to move out to the country and live off the land, but I had plans for when the Shit Hit The Fan (SHTF).

I blame Robert Heinlein, and I do for a lot of my philosophical early development. As a teen I read Solider of Fortune and Survive magazines. Books like Lucifer’s Hammer, Farnham’s Freehold, and The Out Of The Ashes‘ series were fodder for my imagination.

So naturally when I read the prologue to Neil’s book I was hooked. This paragraph in particular hooked me.

But that wouldn’t happen anymore. Today I can draw a holstered pistol in 1.5 seconds, aim at a target seven yards away, and shoot it twice in the heart. I can start a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together. I can identify seven hundred types of footprints when tracking animals and humans. I can survive in the wild with nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back. I can find water in the desert, extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hotwire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters, suture a bullet wound, kill a man with my bare hands, and escape across the border with documents identifying me as the citizen of a small island republic.

I thought. “That’s cool I want to be able to do all that.”

I’ve bolded the ones I can already do competently. Those I’ve at least done and/or trained for.

It reminded me a Heinlein quote, which I had to search for.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Again I’ve bolded the ones I can already do competently. Those I’ve at least done and/or trained for.

Now Heinlein’s quote is by a fictitious science fiction character, but I still find it somewhat unrealistic. Or at least fuzzy and I’m not sure why I need to know how to write a sonnet. And do I have to be able to do it well? We learned sonnets in High School, but I’m not poet. I’ve never pitched manure, but really is it a “skill” I need to learn? Or is he talking about the mindset that will do what needs to be done.

Now I’m curious, and we’ll start a little meme here. Write a blog post with these two lists of survival traits with those you can do bolded. Then trackback ping this post, or comment with a link to your post below.