Insanity Injury: Continue the programme or start from scratch?

Ouch. Somewhere in between all that squatting, thrusting and mad crazy leaping into the air plyometric stuff, my back has decided to complain. Loudly. One week of Insanity and I’m already injured!

At the end of last week, I reluctantly decided to stop exercising. I’d pulled something at the top of my inner thigh/groin, and my back was starting to grumble about five days of intense back-to-back workouts.

Today, my back is still stiff and sore. Part of me is tempted to do a Plyometric Cardio routine and see if this loosens things up. It probably won’t, though, meaning a few days of Ibuprofen and frustration about breaking the flow of the Insanity programme.

 

Beachbody Insanity, Day 5: Pure Cardio (plus an injury?)

Hola, Insane amigos! Today’s round of Insanity was one that even the formidable Shaun T said he was nervous about. Pure Cardio is a fast-paced round of exercise that’s made a fair bit harder because there are virtually no rest breaks during the routine. You stop as normal after the warm-up and stretching routines, but when the workout starts, you’re riding the rollercoaster right to the end!

On this fifth day, many of the moves in the warm-up, stretches and workout itself are becoming familiar – the suicide drills and ‘level 2′ routines are all starting to seem familiar. Which is good, because most of the workouts we’ve done in this first week are repeated over the next four weeks. That should address a lot of my concerns about form, which I feel is important…

 

Beachbody Insanity, Day 4: Cardio Recovery

A lightning fast update on yesterday’s Day 4 of Insanity. Day 4 is Cardio Recovery, which is a calmer, shorter session that doesn’t leave you dripping like a leaky hose on a hot summer’s day.

Instead, the moves are more about stretching and toning to allow you to recover from the previous two days of craziness. And to prepare you for Day 5′s dreaded Pure Cardio routine, which is 40 minutes of non-stop cardio designed to sweat the living daylights out of you. Drink lots of water!

 

Beachbody Insanity, Day 3: Cardio Power & Resistance

Day 3 of the Insanity workout. The day when our neighbour stopped my wife in the street and asked her what those anguished cries coming from our house were. You know, the howling, the strained panting, and finally the crying at the end. I was hoping that Lisa would’ve told her that we were indulging our passion for S&M while the kids were at school, but instead she told our neighbour that she’s now an “Insanity Widow”.

I predicted yesterday that I’d be pretty sore after Day 2. Yeah. Stiff and sore. In my inner thighs, shoulders, chest and calves. Remarkably, not so much across the abs. Which makes me wonder if my form needs some attention.

Now, today I felt pretty exhausted before I even started the Cardio Power session. So, even getting through the warm-up was a struggle. Just a note on the warm-up routine – like everything else in Insanity, you repeat the circuit three times, increasing your intensity each time. So, by the time you get to the end of the warm-up, you’ll be feeling pretty depleted already. Don’t give up though – because the stretching routine that follows allows ample time to recover before starting the workout proper.

 

Beachbody Insanity, Day 2: Plyometric Cardio

Ah, now Insanity has begun in earnest! If yesterday’s fit test lulled me into a false sense of security, Day 2′s Plyometric Cardio session was a taster of what Insanity is really like. Here’s a quick run-down of what to expect from Day 2. But first:

The aftermath from Day 1: Nothing serious. Yesterday evening was fine, but I woke up this morning with a mild stiffness in my shoulders and inner thighs. No biggie. But I reckon I’ll be stiffer tomorrow!

 

Beachbody Insanity, Day 1: The Fit Test

You probably already know what Insanity is. And no, not the glib definition involving straitjackets and sedation (which incidentally, sounds like a regular week night in my bedroom). Insanity is a 60-day intense workout programme fronted by a guy called Shaun T. Probably because having more than one letter in your surname is inefficient. I’ve already started calling him Shaunty.

Why Insanity?

I’m doing Insanity because I need a focused workout series to:

1. Lose a few more kilos to bring me down to my goal of 75kg. Starting weight today was 78.9kg.
2. Tone up and finally achieve the definition in my abs that I’ve been shooting for.
3. Challenge myself to reach a new level of fitness.

 

Who Am I?

Hi there – thanks for tuning in to my WordPress blog.

A little bit about me: I’m Gerard McGarry. I’m a blogger and web designer from Northern Ireland and the co-founder of the UK’s biggest reality TV blog, Unreality TV.

When I’m not slavishly staring at a laptop screen, I’m a husband and father of three adorable, funny kids. And when I’m not doing that, I love nothing more than running, working out in circuit classes and climbing mountains.

And when I’m not doing that, I play bass with a bunch of good friends in a band called Revolver. All in all, I believe in living a fun-packed, positive life and I love connecting with people on the web and chatting about television, music and movies. If you’re into the same things I am, subscribe to this blog, hit me up on Twitter, or contact me through my personal website.

What I’m up to right now: I’m currently working on the USA version of Unreality TV, writing about music, movies and television for the site.

 

Loving this P2 theme – I can see a lot o…

Loving this P2 theme – I can see a lot of application for it. Although on Skewster, there’s no toolbar above the status update area – whereas on WordPress.com, there is.

I wonder if it’s smarter to link Skewster to this WordPress account rather than doing another self-hosted option? I’d like to change the design though, so that might be a consideration…

 

Changing up my theme

I abandoned this blog a while back, but the account exists to provide me with awesome Akismet keys.  Anyway, I used the microblogging themes in order to test cross-posting from Twitter and Facebook via Ping.fm.

While it all worked rather well, it resulted in a pretty cluttered interface that looked rather crap. So, I’ve mixed things up a little bit, decided to use the P2 theme which allows for rapid input as well as threaded responses from commenters. I’ll probably just add my thoughts and links to stuff I’ve written around the web for the moment and we’ll see how it goes!

 

Testing Live Writer

I’ve been dying to use this Live Writer thing for a while now!

 

Idea

I’ve been mucking around with a domain for a while now, somewhere I can build a collaborative blogging effort for people like myself. It’s not ready for primetime just yet, but its getting there. PopOpinions.

Two big things about PopOpinions that I want to share:

1. The collaboration thing is so that the blog doesn’t depend on any one blogger – the community powers the site. I’ll build in some more social features along the line to support interaction between the members.
2. It’ll be mostly about OPINIONS and cover a variety of topics – politics, entertainment, showbiz, religion…you name it. I want this to be a place where people can let rip their ideas about whatever takes their fancy. You can review stuff, or you can shout about something you heard on the news today.

Anyway, that’s all I’m saying for the moment. If might accept beta testers if anyone’s interested. Drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.

 

Extending Unreality

Unreality TV has been going great guns for the last 6 months. SEOmoz (a huge Search Optimisation company in the US of A) recently published their monthly stats and I was overjoyed to discover we were whomping them month on month!

I love the SEOmoz blog, by the way.

Anyway, we’ve been toying with other blogging ideas and the most likely at this juncture are blogs on music and regular telly. So let me introduce you to two of our works in progress:

1. Unreality Music – Soon to be a place of music reviews of current tunes and past classics. I’ll be taking the lead on the music blog, and I want it to feature not only established acts, but unsigned acts a la MySpace. We’ll also be accepting guest reviews and contribution, particularly of recent gigs.
2. Unreality Primetime – Lisa’s going to be taking the lead on this new blog, looking at other popular TV shows like The OC, Desperate Housewives, all that stuff. It’ll be a much bigger blog than the reality TV one, but it’s good to watch alternative shows too!

You can conclude from this that Lisa has definitely got square eyes. As do most of our readers! But we love them all and they love us back!

There will be boards on the Unreality Forum to support all of the new areas we’re covering.

We’re excited about how the Unreality blogs are unfolding. We’re going along to press conferences, working with production companies, getting 300,000+ eyeballs on our blog each month, not to mention the thousands of comments people have been compelled to leave for us and even for reality show contestants. These additional blogs will hopefully complement what we already have while creating a spot for people to discuss different types of music and television.

If you want to become a contributor to Unreality, please do get in touch with me.

 

Migrating From Dreamhost

Well, after my well-documented gripes with Dreamhost, I’ve started to pull the plug. I’ve signed up for the Media Temple Grid Server service, which will comfortably combine all my domains (up to 100 sites, actually) under one account.

Fantastic!

Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a little instructional for those who are considering moving away from Dreamhost too.

 

Drupal and Me

Finally….I get my own domain.

Actually, I’ve had it for some time now, but I’ve been sitting on it without any idea what to do with it. Now, I’ve moved it to my new Media Temple account and I’ve done an installation of Drupal. I came across Drupal at first on the Performancing site, and I’m intrigued at the mix of forum/blogs that it allows you to create.

So, as a long time WordPress aficionado, I’m crossing into uncharted territory with this labyrinthine content management system.

 

Pleased With Myself!

I am grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat this evening, for earlier today I did my first ever interview for Unreality TV, with Lucy, one of the singers from The Unconventionals.

Initially I tried to record it so that I could do a podcast, but I had such a small timeframe between setting up my computer and starting the interview that I couldn’t get it right. I’m using a combination of Skype and a program called PrettyMay, which helps you record Skype conversations among other things!

The lesson to be learned is to prepare for this in advance. Although I was given a remarkably quick timeframe today, I’ve wanted to look into podcasting before now, but haven’t bothered. I’ll have it nailed next time!

Anyway, the interview was great fun. The Unconventionals were one of the finalist acts in this year’s X Factor, and they were booted off last night’s show by Simon Cowell. I thought they were very original and was disappointed they went out of the competition so soon.

Lucy was great to interview, very chatty and natural and more than a little surprised in the interest in her and the group. I hope they go on to better things!

I love this part of my job!

(satisfied sigh)

 

Dreamhost & The PR Nightmare

I notice that Dreamhost is still having trouble bouncing back from their recent network troubles.

Reading the comments in their blog post, I was surprised by the number of people who were sticking up for the company on the strength of a couple of blog posts issued after the disaster. Some folks seem oblivious to the fact that downtime of the sort Dreamhost has suffered recently is actually unacceptable.

I wonder if some of these people are blog kiddies who don’t appreciate the importance of uptime for a business website. Who ignore the issues of lost revenue and reputation an online business can face. Dreamhost didn’t deal with these issues in their blog post. Apparently belated openness will soothe the complaining customers!

Dreamhost Dropping Negative Comments

The reason I’m writing this post is because I tried to post a comment on the blog today and received a message that I’d triggered a spam filter. Bizarre? You bet. No profanity in my post at all, no links, nothing that I can think would trigger a spam filter.

Anyway, I’ve decided to repost my entire comment here, lest Dreamhost conveniently delete it from their filters instead of allowing free speech on the blog:

I’m surprised at the immaturity of some of the people posting here. Attacking Karen for expressing her point of view is wrong – she has perfectly valid points.

While I applaud Dreamhost for their blog updates, they’ve conveniently sidestepped the issue of compensation for business customers who’ve lost income through this downtime (and my sites were hit hard).

And yes, there’s a veiled admission of incompetence in this post that doesn’t give much confidence in how the network will be rebuilt! There’s a group of DH users running around with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to this!

And you can make all the claims you like about ‘getting what you pay for’, but when I signed up I didn’t see any warnings on the front door saying “Not suitable for business users” or “Unreliable uptime – non-critical sites only”.

I do hope you get the problems ironed out once and for all, but like others I’m shoping around.

Update: I actually forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago, but checking for my comment as detailed above I notice the Happy Dreamhost Sneaky Comment Deleting Team have sneakily deleted my comment. So much for opening conversation in the blogosphere between customers and suppliers!

What would Mr Steve Rubel have to say about that?

 

Me Around The Web

Brian asked me about the number of blogs I had the other day when we were out visiting him. It got me thinking I’ve been using the Interweb for over a decade now and my various profiles are all over the place.

So, in an effort to rein in some of my online activities, this is the big list of me…on the web:

My Blogs

• GerryBot: This blog – my personal one.
• Unreality TV: My reality TV blog and music, now primetime television as well.
  
• The Northern Ireland Guide
• Scribble Designs: My web design site
• Family Of Five

Professional Profiles

• Currently using LinkedIn as a way of promoting my professional skills online. It’s a great social networking site, and if you’re a member, please look me up or add me to your network. My LinkedIn profile.

Social Bookmarking

• StumbleUpon: Embarrassingly, I managed to email everyone in my contacts list from Stumbleupon – I will insist it was software misdirection, not user malfunction, until I die.
• Del.icio.us: The daddy of social bookmarking tools and still my number 1!
• Reddit, an up and coming social bookmarking site. Similar to Digg but not so many a**holes.
• Ma.gnolia
• Digg: A more tech oriented site, lots of interesting articles and discussions. Can be juvenile.
• Shadows: An interesting social bookmarking, let down by too many spam links.
• Simpy: Not the prettiest online bookmarking tool.

Blogs and Forums

• Performancing
• Digital Point Forums

Photography

• My Flickr Page and Profile

Reality TV

• Unreality TV Forum
• Popsugar Profile

 

The UK’s Biggest Reality TV Blog!

Late last August, totally on a whim, Lisa and I threw together a reality tv blog called Unreality TV. I did a quick WordPress theme and some cartoon-type illustrations and we were live within a couple of days.

From September onward, Lisa spent her evenings blogging about the 2005 series of X-Factor. I approached the site as an experiment in Search Engine Optimisation, dividing up categories and giving pointers on how to make best uses of keywords in each post.

From these inauspicious beginnings, we continued to put on new posts diligently and keep the site up-to-date.

Now, almost a year later, it’s high season for reality tv shows in the UK: Big Brother is in full swing and Love Island has just started. Unreality TV has taken something in the region of 114,000 hits in June and at this mid-point in July, we’ve had 64,000 visitors. Traffic has been building month upon month and we’ve just opened the doors on our long-awaited reality tv forum.

We’re interested in taking Unreality TV to greater heights. Two things we want in the immediate future:

1. Sponsors/Advertisers: We’d like the site to be earning a decent living so that we can concentrate on creating better content and forging better links with the reality tv industry. To that end, we may have to kill Google AdSense in favour of direct advertising.
2. More visitors: We’ll be focussing on getting Unreality TV more visible and encouraging participation. The forum is in it’s early stages right now, but I’ve already started using it to point out other great reality TV writing on the web.

This part of things is definitely outside of the old comfort zone: getting this amount of hits so far has been amazing, but pushing it further is new territory for us. It’ll be exciting to see how things progress!

 

The Music of Brian T Mullan

I was over in Downpatrick recently and visited the talented and aspiring media mogul Brian Mullan. I’ve known Brian for just over 10 years now, and we played in a band (Outhouse Cookie) together for what seems like a lifetime. I’m not sure how long the band actually lasted for.

Anyway, Brian kept plugging away with his music and recorded new material with Gary Connolly back in March, in a studio in Dublin. He’s posted two of his Outhouse Cookie-era songs on MySpace along with one of the new tracks on which he sings.

The two Outhouse Cookie songs are Love Declared and No Guarantees, featuring a guitar solo from Seamy “Asmodean” Meredith that still gives me goosebumps today. I wish I could conjure up Seamy Meredith one last time and tell him that. He seems to have disappeared from the Internet, though…

Anyway, check out Mullan’s music over at MySpace and let me know what you think. Whenever I get a moment, I may post the other Outhouse Cookie songs here.

 

The Northern Ireland Guide

Lisa and I have been talking about doing a guide to Northern Ireland for the last couple of years now. We’re out and about most weekends seeing what the province has to offer.

Contrary to popular belief, Northern Ireland is a fantastic place to live! I personally don’t think there are enough websites spreading this message. We are not oppressed, repressed or depressed people, so don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Take it with a pinch of salt!

So, without further ado, we present to you The Northern Ireland Guide – our journal of everything Northern Ireland: culture, events, tourist attractions, things to do and place to eat, sleep and party.

The site has only been live for a couple of days now, but we’ve had a positive response from quite a few people who’ve come across the blog and want to help out, either by way of providing backlinks or submitting material to the site. I’m glad, and I hope the support continues.