Mattsapundit

I’m trying to turn over a new leaf in the health department. Accordingly, I got up early today and headed to the gym.

Going to the gym isn’t exactly a new leaf; going to the gym first thing in the morning definitely is. I generally go after work, but it’s busier then, and I have to wait longer for a machine.

Anyway, I did my stretches, knocked out a half-hour of cardio while watching Fox & Friends, and topped it off with a stint in the sauna. I’m gonna have to visit the sauna more often, and bring a book. It’s really relaxing, and you feel great coming out of there.
It’s sort of like the joke where the guy smashes his thumb with thumb with a hammer over and over, and his friend says “Dude, why are you doing that?” And the guy says, “It feels so good when you stop!” The quacks at Harvard Medical School have this to say about saunas:

“All in all, saunas appear safe for the body, but there is little evidence that they have health benefits above and beyond relaxation and a feeling of well-being,” says Dr. Harvey Simon

But what the hell do they know?

Anyway, then I headed home and whipped up a smoothie (2 cups skim milk, half a pound of strawberries, a banana, half a cup of Fiber One and a scoop of Nitro-Tech). I’ve heard great things about Nitro-Tech, but it doesn’t taste too good. I’ll have to pick up some sugar-free chocolate or strawberry syrup to kill the nasty aftertaste.

Then it was off to MattCo to begin another week of adding to GDP. This week is going to be a bitch, too. I’ve got a meeting today for the St. Pius X jubilee, a roundtable at the Chron tomorrow, I have to take Diane car shopping on Wednesday, and I’ve got a pretty busy work week. Plus, this weekend I get to help Diane and her roommates move, and we have to do it fast so that we can be done by the time the Irish game comes on.

Matt Bramanti | August 28, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Posted to Personal

7 comments

It’s just about time for football season, folks. Here’s the schedule for the 2006 campaign:

• 9/2 - At Georgia Tech
• 9/9 - Penn State
• 9/16 - Michigan
• 9/23 - at Michigan State
• 9/30 - Purdue
• 10/7 - Stanford
• 10/21 - UCLA
• 10/28 - at Navy
• 11/4 - North Carolina
• 11/11 - at Air Force
• 11/18 - Army
• 11/25 - at USC

Here are some excellent resources for following the Irish.

• The House of Twelve: a blog by a bunch of my buddies from Notre Dame, including a former Observer sports editor.
• FanBlogs’ Notre Dame Blog: a quick roundup of Irish news stories.
• Blue-Gray Sky: Another great Irish football blog.
• The Rankings: AP and Coaches’ polls.
• ESPN Clubhouse: Roster, news, photos, standings, all that stuff.

By the way, here’s the Notre Dame Victory March as performed by the Dixieland Ramblers. Very New Orleans sounding, but without the gunfire and failed welfare state.

Matt Bramanti | August 25, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Posted to Audio, Sports, Blogging, Notre Dame

5 comments

…On a Crane!

…On a Jane!

…On a Pane!

…In the Rain!

…On a Lane!

…On a Mane!

Matt Bramanti | August 22, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Posted to Stupidity, Movies, Photos

1 comment

Today, I decided to add to my music collection. Drastically. I looked around and found quite a few sites that offer free, legal downloads of unrestricted music, mostly from indie labels. Some of the sites are traditional labels, some are net labels, some are blogs and some are fansites.

I got a ton of leads from E.C. Brown’s link archive. It’s about as comprehensive as you can get. Here are some of the sites I found with the largest number of free MP3s:

• 3Hive: Indie blog, lots of genres.
• Oddio Overplay: Several themed compilations.
• Comfort Stand Records: Lots of electronica and samplecore.
• Big Neck Records: Tons of rock.
• I Wanna Be Your Dog: A few dozen covers of Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
• The Crutch: Big indie-rock archive.
• You Ain’t No Picasso: A very-frequently updated review blog.

Here’s the cool part. I discovered a feature in Download Accelerator Plus that lets you mass-queue downloads. The download manager is integrated with Firefox, so when you come across a page with a bunch of links (a discography, for example), you right-click anywhere on the page and select “Download all with DAP.”

This brings up a dialog box listing every link in that HTML document. The list is sortable by type. So you sort, pick all the MP3s, and add them to the download queue. DAP uses a proximity test to pick the fastest server, and away it goes. When I started this post, I had 1,617 files in the queue. The vast majority are single songs, though there are quite a few albums and compilations in there.

Now the queue stands at 1,811. I figure there are probably about 2,000-2,100 songs in there. Add that to the 270 I downloaded today and the 3,100 already in my iTunes library, and that’s a pretty good-sized catalog.

Matt Bramanti | August 17, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Posted to Tech, Music

4 comments

I read about Windows Live Writer on Lifehacker this morning:

Windows only: Microsoft has just released Windows Live Writer to write to multiple blogs, insert photos, play with maps, and more goodies.

Less than 24 hours old, this product is still in beta, so there are sure to be some bugs; plus, you’ve got to download the .NET framework to even get to it.

We’ll see how well this works. It’s kind of cool, in that it shows my post in live preview, just how Mattsapundit displays it (red links, blockquote style, all that stuff).

Categories are in random order, though, unlike the alphabetical list I’m used to.

Let’s see what happens with an image.

Hmm. I don’t really care for how it handles images. It doesn’t let me center them.

I probably won’t be using this again. It was worth a shot, though.

Matt Bramanti | August 14, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Posted to Uncategorized

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Might be ‘offensive’ to 7th-century Islamofascist savages.
This is bullshit:

A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders.

Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country.

This is the real threat from Muslim extremists. I’m not really worried that they’ll conquer the free world by force and chop off our leaders’ heads. Instead, they’ll capitalize on our fear of offending anyone, back that up with subtle threats at violence, and gradually erode our liberties in the name of “sensitivity.”

Screw that. Got any bare-shoulder pics? Send ‘em my way, and I’ll put up a montage here and at Lone Star Times.

Angelina sez: “Up yours, savages!”

Matt Bramanti | August 14, 2006 at 10:32 am
Posted to International, Stupidity, Religion, Islamofascism, Photos, Travel

1 comment