Sparkling red wine?

I was out with some friends a couple weeks back. After a filling dinner, we stopped by Finale's by Park Plaza to grab some desserts and drinks. While checking out the wine list there, we came across a sparkling red wine. It was the Imperial Star "Black Bubbles", a sparkling Shiraz. Now I don't love wine, but I do like it. And I've never had a sparkling red wine. According to our server, it would not only be carbonated, but chilled as well. That sealed the deal. We ordered a bottle with some other drinks and dessert.

The bottle came to the table and our server distributed the bottle among the glasses. I took a sip and boy was I surprised. The wine was delightfully chilled and the bubbles leaves a refreshing feeling in your mouth. It was unlike any red wine I've ever had. I'm not sure if it was because it was chilled or because of the bubbles, but the Shiraz didn't have that acidic cut that most red wines have. It felt light enough to go along with our dessert.

So next time you go to Finale's, go ahead and try the "Black Bubbles" out.

Okay week last week

It was an okay week last week. I managed to keep up with my mini-workouts at work, but I slacked over the weekend and didn't really get to do another BBS routine. I was out most of Saturday with friends then was busy with some DIY work on Sunday. Plus I was recovering from drinking on Saturday night at a get-together for a friend's sendoff.

Monday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each), front raises (8, 8, 8), bent over rows (10, 10, 10), shoulder press (10, 10, 10), biceps curls (10, 10, 10), hammer curls (10, 10, 10), ab work
Tuesday: Pushups (40, 40), calf raises (75)
Wednesday: Squats (20, 40), lunges (20 each)
Thursday: Pushups (40, 40), calf raises (75), dips (20)
Friday: Squats (40), lunges (20 each)
Saturday: Chinups (10, 5), pullups (8, 3)

I really need to get more workouts in outside of work, especially on the cardio area. Weather's getting colder now, so running outside would soon be difficult (cold air and mild asthma does not mix). I'm supposed to be getting back to the Y soon, so hope to continue cardio and possibly aquatics there. We'll see.

Current weight:
180.0/183.0 lb

I cracked

So the BBB thing is supposedly in progress. But my cousin makes a very valid point. I don't think a large corporation like HP will really care what BBB says about them. A bad report would be like a speck of dust compared to the volume of business they do. So I gave in and called my case manager last night.

I gave Steven the updates of my four-beep situation, and he setup another repair order. He did tell me it might be longer this time because the repair center is in Houston and they still don't have power or water yet. I've waited three months; what's another week? I'm holding Steven to what he said too when I first spoke with him. He told me that they will keep repairing my laptop till it's done. So I'm going to keep calling him until it's resolved. I need this HP situation resolved. I won't stand down.

I cancelled my Acer Aspire One preorder too. I don't want to buy another machine until this HP thing is resolved. And I'm not sure if the Aspire One is where I want to go. So, it's more waiting. We'll see what happens October 8 too. That's the deadline BBB gave for HP to resolve the complaint. I kinda doubt anything will happen.

Just cranking away

Last week was okay again in terms of working out. I'm having a really difficult time fitting in cardio as you can see. In fact, I barely fit in any workouts as it is. I'm only relying on my mini-workouts during work, before I go out, or before I head to bed. I really need to work harder at squeezing some runs in and some quality workouts in too. Here's the breakdown:

Monday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each)
Tuesday: Pushups (40, 40), calf raises (75, 75)
Wednesday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each), side raises (8, 8, 8), rear lat raise (8, 8, 8), front raises (8, 8, 8), bent over rows (10, 10, 10), shoulder presses (10, 10, 10), biceps curls (10, 10, 10), hammer curls (10, 10, 10)
Thursday: Pushups (40, 45), calf raises (75)
Friday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each), parallel pullups (4, 4), chest dips (25)
Saturday: chinups (10, 8), pullups (8, 5)
Sunday: side raises (8, 8, 8), rear lat raises (8, 8, 8) <--started a BBS circuit, but didn't finish

I did some more plumbing work on Saturday. A faucet I replaced had a leak, and while looking for the leak, the washer on the old hot water supply valve broke, clogging the hot water line. Since they were soldered on, I had to saw off the supply valves (did the cold water one while I was at it). This was no easy task as the cabinet was really cramped, and I only had a couple of inches of room to move the saw. Then I had to file away the old solder, and that took awhile. Then I found the "leak" and fixed that. It was a long day of work, but I think I resolved it. Or at least I hope I did. Anyway, all that labor got my arms and hands really sore. I can see how some contractors have the arms they do. They're always "working out"!

Anyway, let's see how this week goes in terms of trying to fit more workouts in.

Last weigh-in:
180.5/183.0

Don't need to be a hacker to hack an email account

I'm sure most of you have heard that GOP vice-president candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was "hacked" into. Well, apparently the hacker didn't even need to resort to actual hacking. The hacker with help from the group he belongs to used Yahoo's password recovery feature. It's a pretty standard one. You set security questions and answer them. Once correct, it lets you in and you can change your password. Palin used questions that referred to her birthdate and where she met her husband. Quick searches on Wikipedia and online yielded the answers.

So what's the lesson? If you are famous or just pretty active in the online community (Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc.), try not to use questions with answers that can be researched quickly. My favorite strategy is to pick a random question like "What is the name of your dog?" and answer it with a totally unrelated word. So the name of your dog could be "Lemon Herb Roasted Chicken" or something equally ridiculous like "Your mama". That should do the trick.

In this day an age, you can't be too careful with your online security!

Contacted the BBB

So I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I haven't heard back from my case manager Steven. Emails to the PR guy only result in replies stating that he will contact HP and see what happens. Repairs to HP don't amount to anything. Meanwhile, I'm left sitting without a reliable workable laptop for nearly three months! This is just ridiculous.

I find it unbelievable that:

1) HP cannot fix my laptop after three trips to their repair center
2) My laptop came back from its second repair without half the RAM
3) My laptop came back from its third repair with a loose RAM chip in the memory compartment (I would compare this to a surgeon leaving forceps in your body)
4) HP sends a cardboard box each time I send my laptop back even though I told them I have the old boxes. So environmental impact for sending a laptop back that HP can't repair: three large cardboard boxes, six pieces of foam, three large plastic bags, three smaller boxes to hold accessories, and labels. And keep in mind that HP has no problem paying to ship my laptop to and from SIX TIMES overnight via FedEx, pay technical support gosh-knows-how-much per hour to not-repair my laptop, pay phone support to pickup my calls and not help me out, but won't refund or replace my laptop.
5) HP support is HORRENDOUS. They never call when they are supposed to. They read from a script. They don't really understand the torment you are going through. THEY. JUST. DON'T. CARE.
6) Through all this and many more with others (Google "HP Sucks"), HP is still the #1 computer manufacturer/seller. Amazing. CEO Mark Hurd must be doing something right for the shareholders. I suppose if I were to buy stock, why not buy HP? They have horrible customer support/service and still remains #1!!! They're at $48.41 a share today, up $3.08 from yesterday!

I hope the BBB does something. I'll try to call Steven again too, but I feel he's just going to make me send the laptop to them, have their repair center "fix" it, send it back, and then I'll open it to find that it's not been fixed. What a wonderful cycle to look forward to.

Chinups are goooood

It was an okay week last week. Didn't get to do any cardio, so that sucks a lot. I was hoping to squeeze at least two runs in. I hope I can do better this week.


Monday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each)
Tuesday: Pushups (40, 40, 40), calf raises (60)
Wednesday: Squats (20, 40), lunges (15 each), side raises (6, 6, 6), bent over rear lat raise (6, 6, 6), front raises (6, 6, 6), bent over dumbbell rows (10, 10, 10), shoulder press (10, 10, 10), biceps curl (10, 10, 10), hammer curls (10, 10, 10)
Thursday: Pushups (40, 40), calf raises (60)
Friday: Squats (40), lunges (15 each)
Saturday: Chinups (10, 7), pullups (8, 3), chest dips (5, 15, 5), biceps curls (10), hammer curls (10)
Sunday: Pushups (40, 40)


I did manage to start my chinups/pullups routine again. Used my heating pipe in my living room. Might have been a bit much for my right shoulder. It's a bit tight, but seems to be more about soreness from the exertion than an injury. The tightness is on the outside rather than inside. Stretching it helps too, so I'm not worried about it. My back is a bit sore too, but it's because I haven't done chinups and pullups for quite a while. Those bathroom pullups just aren't the same as using a horizontal bar/pipe.



I'm noticing some slight changes in my body. I feel more compact, but I really doubt that much changed. Just a bit. I hope to continue my cardio and look to add in some more core work. I'm thinking I should do Ab Ripper X 2-3 times a week. Ab Ripper X is part of Tony Horton's P90X program. It's a pretty good routine for the abs, and I've never been able to do the complete workout with the reps they do. In fact, I've never went through 90 days of P90X. Maybe I'll do that in the winter when it's cold outside and when I'm sure my body is healthy again. I did a couple weeks before and P90X is intense.


Here's the update:
181.5/183.5 (no change)

Will he call?

So after my call last night, I tried what the HP rep told me to do. I opened up the memory bay and moved the 1GB RAM stick to the second slot. Closed bay, reinstalled battery and hit power. The laptop lighted up and I heard my optical drive initialize, then the drive initialized again, and again...and again... I forced the laptop to power off (hold power button). This time I took the 1GB RAM out and put the two 512's in, one in each slot. Hit power. Same thing. Infinite loop. Took the 512's out and put the 1GB in the first slot. It booted up fine (as I expected since I hadn't turned it on from the night before). After a while of surfing, it froze up again. Forced power off and rebooted. Four long beeps again (the HP rep explained this meant a memory issue). This is the fourth time.

The question now is, will my HP case manager call me today. He supposedly received a message and an email from the other guy that "helped" me out. The other question is, what if the "solution" did work? Is HP satisfied that they solved my problem by moving my RAM to the non-defective slot? What does this say about their level of customer service? It seems to me that all HP cares about is making machines that barely last their 1-year warranty while making as much money as possible. Their customer and technical support sucks. Their "repairs" barely make it past their 90-day warranty, which I still find ridiculous. I know you can't extend the full warranty that much, but HP can't even guarantee their own repair for 1-year? Can't they just extend the warranty on the area they repaired?

I'm not the only one that doesn't like HP. Go ahead, Google "HP sucks". You'll get results about issues from way back up till today. So it's not a fluke. I'm surprised they're on the top of the list for top US computer manufacturer's.

All-in-all, I've spent way too much time on this issue. If Steven doesn't call, I'm going to do what I said last time and involve some consumer advocacy group, most likely the BBB.

Will it never end????

So for the third time since my laptop came back, it froze last night. I wasn't doing anything intensive. Just surfing. I powered it down and tried rebooting. Same four beeps and then nothing. Boy, is HP really getting on my last nerves. So I called HP...again.

I called asking for my case manager Steven. He had left for the day. So I spoke with this dude. I explain my issues which include how HP sent my laptop back with a loose memory chip and how my computer freezes periodically. This guy suggests plugging the 1GB RAM in the other slot to see what happens. He also suggest I try the two 512MB sticks (I told them I received extra RAM). He then told me he will leave a message and email Steven to have him call me back tomorrow.

I guess I'll go home and try the whole other slot thing. As I've said before, I've tried the 512MB in the second slot with the 1GB in the first slot. But I guess mixing the RAM could cause it not to boot. I'll try the 1GB in the second slot. If that doesn't work, I'll try the two 512's. If it works great. If it doesn't, well I guess HP has to do something about this huh? Even if it does work on the other slot, I think I deserve two workable slots in case I want to upgrade right? Seems fair.

We'll see. In the end, whatever HP does to solve this whole fiasco, I'm not keeping this laptop. I'm just waiting for my Acer Aspire One to ship now.

Budweiser no longer American?

This is pretty old news. Anheuser-Busch, one of the US's largest breweries was taken over by In-Bev, a foreign brewery that brews Stella Artois and Beck's. It was a pretty big deal when that deal was announced. A lot of people were pretty annoyed that another US company is being taken over. Well, some people are suing to try to have that deal blocked. It makes some sense.

In a time where people are paying more attention to the economy than ever, this is a time to try to keep businesses. With this takeover, we are funneling even more money away from the US. We don't export much anymore. We're importing more than ever. Then we have all those outsourcing/offshoring jobs. We have a lot of manufacturing in China. I mean, what do all these moves sound like? Sounds like the big business men padding their wallets without any regard to the bigger impact they are making on the others and the US economy.

I'm not saying that blocking this deal would solve our economic crisis right now. There are so many factors that pushed us into this situation. I have no idea how we are going to fix this. It just sucks to lose a large US corporation. But then again, what do I care, I drink a lot of imports and drive a Toyota. But my Toyota was assembled in the US. Does that count?

Still crossing my fingers

I've had my HP laptop back for about a week now. I've been using it everyday to make sure the it's not going to do something and die on me again. So far it's acceptable. There were a couple times where the machine froze. Rebooting only resulted in the machine beeping at me 4 times (looked it up; something about system timer or 64K something). But letting it sit for a bit fixes the problem.

HP hasn't contacted me since I got my laptop back. Nor did the PR guy that told me he would contact me too. Some response, huh? I think I'm going to call my case manager anyway. Remember how HP shipped that extra RAM? Well, I plugged one of the 512's into the second memory slot and guess what happens? The system won't boot. I know they made me "whole" again in their eyes by giving me a stick of 1GB RAM, but I think I would like to have two memory slots that work. I mean, unless the RAM they gave me were different types.

I spent some time last night "optimizing" Vista. Took out silly programs from my startup menu. Went into the graphics part and disabled silly effects like fade/slide windows when minimizing and maximizing. That eats up memory that I can't afford to lose. I disabled the Sidebar awhile ago. It was just flashy; I barely used/referred to it. I also found out why my system was slow around 1-2AM sometimes. Turns out Vista Defrag was scheduled to weekly at 1AM on Wednesdays.

I pre-ordered the Acer Aspire One yesterday. I stopped by Microcenter on Monday to check out the 120GB model so I could test the keyboard and make sure I was really okay with the size. It was pretty decent. Screen wasn't too crazy small, and I was able to run Windows Media Player, MS Word, IE, and Mozilla at the same time. It seemed okay. I mean, I won't be doing anything crazy at home with it either, so it should be fine. I just have to wait for it to ship now.

Back on Invisaligns

So I picked up my set of Invisaligns today. This is the "refinement" part of my treatment. After my initial treatment, I couldn't close my jaw all the way (the front teeth made contact before the molars did). So I have 22 weeks of wearing aligners 20-22 hours a day. Yay... After that, it's a lifetime of wearing retainers at night. Double yay...

I did notice that this set is different than the ones I had before. The "buttons" they put on your teeth to hold the aligners on are much bigger and more rectangular. I had a bit of trouble removing them for lunch today. I thought I would break them before I removed them. I must say, this set fits much tighter, but that could be because they're moving my teeth again.

The plus side of wearing aligners again is that it limits my snacking. When you have to remove aligners and afterwards brush your teeth, floss, and rinse just to eat a snack, that snack just isn't worth it. My initial Invisalign treatment helped me cut down snacking. Wound up losing 5lb! So this might drop my weight a bit too. I can't really drink anything besides water either. If I want to drink anything else, I have to do the same ritual of removing my aligners, then cleaning before putting them back on. Another plus side is, I feel like I'm wearing a mouth guard 24/7. Try knocking out these teeth!

"Rehabbing" the shoulder

So last week was all about bringing shoulder exercises back in with a reduced weight. Exercises that heavily involved the shoulder joint (side and front raises, bent over rear lat raise, shoulder press) were performed with 10lb dumbbells instead of the usual 30-pounders I used. After one workout with 10lb dumbbells, I was able to up it to 15-pounders the next workout. I want to slowly keep adding until I'm back to pre-injury state. Seems to be going well. Every now and then I would feel some tightness, but nothing to crazy. While this was happening, I started to add more pushups and up my mini-workouts a bit.

Monday: Side raises (10, 10, 10), front raises (10, 10, 10), bent over rear lat raise (10, 10, 10), shoulder press (10, 10, 10)
Tuesday: Squats (40), lunges (10 each)
Wednesday: pushups (30, 30), calf raises (45), 20 min run (1.67 mi @ 5.01 mi/hr)
Thursday: Squats (40), lunges (10 each), side raises (10, 10, 10), bent over rear lat raises (10, 10, 10), front raises (10, 10, 10), shoulder press (10, 10, 10), bent over rows (10, 10, 10), biceps curls (10, 10, 10), hammer curls (10, 10, 10)
Friday: pushups (35, 35), calf raises (60)
Saturday: 19 min run (1.67 mi @ 5.30 mi/hr)

As you can see, I was able to start running again. I haven't ran in the longest time, so I picked a loop near my place. It's a short loop, but with two laps it's not so bad. I need to bring my cardio endurance up anyway, so starting slow is good. I opted for running instead of biking, because it burns more calories and it's easier than going to my parents' place to grab my bike.

What I did too over the weekend was change some plumbing fixtures. Let me tell you it's quite an arm workout removing those old faucets with the stuck nuts. Working on your back in cramped areas doesn't help either.

Well, that's the update. Here's the current weight:
181.5/183.5

Oh look, a survey!

Guess who I just got a survey from??? HP!!! I am sooooooo gonna have fun with this.

Well, it's back.

I got my laptop back from HP on Wednesday along with another box with a stick of 512MB RAM. I opened the laptop box and pull out my system. I read the sheet attached and again, no description of what actually happened and how it was fixed. I check my AC adapter and my battery. Still here. Then for some reason, I decided to shake my laptop. There was a rattling noise. I opened up the memory compartment and I find two sticks of RAM in there - one in the slot, the other just freely hanging out. If I had booted up my laptop, I could've fried the whole thing. Nice one, HP.

Anyway, I check the loose RAM. It's a stick of 512MB. I pull out the installed stick and see that it's a 1GB stick. Now I'm confused. I now have an installed stick of 1GB RAM, a stick of 512MB RAM that was hanging out in the memory bay uninstalled, and a stick of 512MB RAM that came separately. HP must have some serious organizational and communication issues. I'm also wondering why they installed one stick of 1GB RAM. Is it because the other slot is defective? Why won't they just tell me what was wrong with my laptop?

I boot up the system and it actually works. After a quick stop at System Restore, everything looks normal. I didn't play around with it that much, since it was late and I was tired. My landlord's internet is down anyway, so I didn't have any desire to stare at my desktop. I hibernated the system and now it sits in the corner of my coffee table.

I suppose my thing with HP is over. Who knows? I'll spend some more time with my system over the weekend and see if the issue will pop back up again. I never heard back from that PR guy or HP after my email. The only thing this whole experience has taught me is that HP stinks. My laptop has been supposedly repaired, but it still stinks. I have a feeling that at day 91, it'll stop again and HP won't repair it for me anymore.

The good thing about this whole ordeal is that it's taught me how little I use a computer at home. I find the main things I need a computer for are photo storage, music storage, internet usage, and email. I migrated some of my important functions to solutions online (Google docs for documents, online finance software versus MS Money on my system, etc.). So, my next computer doesn't have to be a powerhouse. I'm thinking a netbook. I like how it's ultra-portable and still offers a lot of what I need. After looking around at some of them, I think the Acer Aspire One is pretty nice (I already eliminated the HP Mini-Note because of this whole HP mess. Learning something HP? Brand loyalty is very important.). I've read up on the Asus EeePC, the MSI Wind, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, and even the Lenovo one, but the Acer Aspire One seems to give me what I want for a decent price; it even runs XP (no more Vista!). The one I looked at would set me back $399.95 on Amazon, so it could be cheaper elsewhere. I don't know when I would buy one, but at least I kinda have an idea what I want.

We'll see what happens as I use this HP crap a bit more. I hope it lasts a bit longer until I scrounge up some money for the Acer. So cross your fingers. I know I'm crossing mine.

Can't run? Walk!

Last week was a pretty good week for me. I did my normal mini-workouts and added some upper body exercises that didn't heavily involve the shoulder joint too much. I was able to add some walking too, which was pretty cool in the sense it was something extra and it was nice to just walk around the area. Here's the breakdown:

Monday: squats (30), lunges (10 each), 45 min walk (2.34 mi @ 3.13 mi/hr)
Tuesday: pushups (20, 20), calf raises (45), 60 min walk (3.59 mi @ 3.59 mi/hr)
Wednesday: Walk total 4.72 mi in dress shoes during errands at average of 3.04 mi/hr
Thursday: pushups (20, 20), calf raises (45), 55 min walk (3.26 mi @ 3.56mi/hr), coffee table triceps dips (to test shoulder stability and to stretch - 10, 10), biceps curls (5, 5, 5), hammer curls (5, 5, 5)
Friday: squats (30), lunges (10 each)
Sunday: pushups (30, 20), situps (40), coffee table triceps dips (15), biceps curls (8, 8, 5), hammer curls (8, 8), bent over dumbbell rows (8, 8, 8), 1 hr bike ride (8.25 mi)

Again, I was able to start my upper body exercises again. Mostly exercises that didn't involve the shoulder too much - pushups, curls, dips. I normally do 40 pushups at once, but wanted to start easy with my shoulder, so I split it up 20, 20 on Tuesday and 30, 20 Sunday when I felt a bit better. The right shoulder tightened up a bit here and there, but no real pain. Doing the dips helped since it stretched it out a bit. I did the curls more because I wanted to make myself feel good about missing so many opportunities for an upper body workout.

The walking was very nice. It was nice to be able to do some sort of cardio. Not the most intensive, but having it pretty regular was good. Hope to up it to running soon. One thing I did find out with all this walking is that walking long distances in dress shoes is not a good idea. I had Wednesday off to attend to an insurance appeal and to run some errands. Figured I skip the T and walk around everywhere except to go home. Boy did that hurt.

I also had a pretty good bike ride Sunday afternoon with my cousin. I started a bit too fast, but did better with pacing after letting my cousin lead. I hope to do that route here and there. My cousin and I wanted to do some of those organized bike rides, but we would definitely have to train a bit for the longer ones.

Anyway, this week I'm going to rehab the shoulder. Instead of the 30lb dumbbells I normally use, I'm going to start off with maybe 10-pounders until I'm sure the shoulder can take the strain. I hate to get back to working out only to hurt the shoulder again. Better safe than sorry, because if I hurt the shoulder, that would be 2-3 weeks before I can do anything. Here's my current weight:

Weight fully geared before dinner: 182.5 lb
Weight fully geared after dinner: 184.5 lb (I'm sure I didn't eat two pounds of food; it's probably a combo of food and water)

I weigh myself this way, because that's how I originally weighed myself at the time of the bet. Fully geared just means clothed (minus shoes) with all my "gear" - keys, cell phone, knives, wallet. My gear usually adds 0.5 lb to my weight. I weigh at about the same time to ensure further consistency. So, considering I weighed 187/189 at the start, we're looking at a 4.5 lb loss. Nothing too crazy yet, but I have about two months left in terms of the bet. Relatively speaking, my weight now only amounts to a 2.4% loss.