Energy flows where attention goes. The self is a continuous manifestation of endless reality.

What happens when you take ten thousand tiny steps in the right direction?

was about finding a good place to start altering your diet and getting into a more active lifestyle, especially after finding yourself "off the health wagon" for some time. So, now you have made several small changes over time to your diet, and have been gradually and steadily increasing the workout intensity and frequency, maybe even changing walks into jogs. You're ready for more and are about to take the next step, but have some lingering questions. Now it's time to take the conversation a bit further, and explore a few of the hurdles in the approach to nutrition when stepping up the ante and delving into a more serious workout program, like P90X. My last post

I have written before about some cool things you can do with Rhythmbox Music Player in linux, and it's no secret that I love to find ways to make my desktop experience merge with my server/online presence. So I was particularly happy when I found a great third party plugin for Rhythmbox that can post the now playing info to just about anywhere you want it to.

Ever wanted to trick out a forum signature, or a profile on a website you frequent? Or are you (like me) just looking for neat ways to make your personal website a bit more snazzy? In walks the rhythmtoweb plugin and this "need" is filled. Fret not, it's pretty straightforward to set up.

A little while back I had a mind to set up a Twitpic account, so that I could post photos from my Centro directly to the microblogging service of kings, Identi.ca. But for some reason, either my mobile provider, or mobile platform didn't want to play well with Twitpic, so I set out to find a different solution, thinking how nice it would be to self host this solution.

I've done workouts when sick before, and they made me feel quite a bit better, so I just kept to them. It makes me feel like life is worth living beyond the cold! But is this a good idea? Should I "walk it off" or should I take to the couch and "let my body heal"? The "common sense" of things seems to contradict itself, so I thought I would address the major issues I find myself concerned with when I have to confront this issue.

First of all, I need no research to tell me that if you're sick, stay out of the gym. Don't go exposing yourself to congested public places, and the people in those places to your cold, if you don't need to. This is just politeness. Ever catch a cold and, wondering how you got it, remembered that sick dude at work, school, or the gym and think to yourself, "Why didn't they just stay home a day or two?" I work out at home, so this is never an issue for me.

To be blunt, you should never do some crazy, exhausting workout if you are suffering from a cold. You should, at the very least, pull back a little. Focus on some light cardio, or reduce your weights some if you are circuit training. Take it easy. But, the good new is you don't have to stop working out, just because you're stuffed up! That's right, you have no excuse! A lot of people use a little head cold as an excuse to "take a break" from their routine, and never get back into it. This is just a way out for the uncommitted. The truth of the matter is, working out dilates the blood vessels and helps clear congestion, so it will make you feel better, but research shows that working out will not speedy the recovery process. It just makes it a bit more bearable. Likewise, the cold will not affect your ability to work out, it will just make it a bit less bearable! Just don't take it to far, working out too hard will prolong any cold.

While it's never a good idea just to stop working out because of an injury or head cold, but better to find a way to work around your injury or illness, there are some situations when you should just put a pause to your routine. Let's look at these:

• As far as the common cold/flu symptoms go, do the neck check! If your symptoms are above the neck only, then just continue on as described above and be happy. But, if your symptoms are below the neck (ie,nausea) then you need to take a break, and let your body heal itself. In other words, if it's just stuffiness and a runny nose, you're good to go.
• If you have a fever of any degree, stop working out. You are going to do nothing more than stress out your immune system and make matters worse, and this could even lead to myocarditis (inflammation of the heart).
• If you have any sort of "body aches", including a headache., stop working out.
• Lung congestion, hacking cough? No work out for you, my friend. Take a break, and let your lungs fight the battle.
• If you experience any fatigue, listen to your body and rest. Don't feel guilty for not working out here, you are tired because your immune system is burning all of your calories working overtime to fight that virus. Let it!

Naturally, you're getting your rest and remembering to meet your nutrition/hydration needs, and before long, you're feeling you're over the hump of the cold's course. Keep to these rules as a good measure until it's out of you entirely, if you need to do something, go for a calm walk, or do a stretch. Finally, after you've followed these rules, and you're feeling over your cold, don't go full tilt back into your routine, take it easy at first, and build back up into it!

So, one day shy of exactly one year ago, I posted a quick article about making it one whole week without any tobacco intake. It was not an easy decision to make to quite smoking cigarettes...for good, and here I sit, over one whole year later, an accomplished man. In that post I pointed out how I was coping with the tension and withdraws: by working out. Weights and cardio all the way. That was my approach. It was health that I was after, so putting the focus on actively doing healthy things instead of the negation of unhealthy things just seemed to make sense to me.

What does online community mean to you?

Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community organizer, is working on a new project The Art of Community. This new project revolves around the creation of, and discussion of a book, which Jono is releasing under that same title, and licensing with a Creative Commons Liscence. The main marketing strategy seems to be a "get the word out" campaign, utilizing the already thriving Ubuntu community, and other online networks. Creating a community around projects in order to attract a fan-base, especially a project about community, is a particularly novel concept, and just seems to make sense. Mr. Bacon has a history of standing up to make a buzz about free software, and copy-left, his recently released Severed Fifth album is a great example of this. His implementation of "Street Teams", composed of music enthusiasts, and supporters of the work in general, is a great example of how community can replace traditional marketing. Here we have a relatively high profile individual, capable of attracting a certain level of attention, releasing work created with open source software under a Creative Commons license, and hopefully inspiring other people to do the same.

It's not just that getting the word out about F/OSS is difficult in a closed source economy, but combating the negative attention from stories like this one is an ongoing uphill battle. In light of this, to show people that it is possible, easy, and rewarding to embark on the path of open source publishing is a great thing in my world. People would benefit to grasp the energizing fact that the open source world is a very ENABLING reality, it creates opportunity to function simply by the virtue of its own existence.

One of the problems we were running into in our home was the distribution of media files, specifically music. My desktop has a nice 300+ Gigs of hdd space on it, so it's fairly easy for me to host all of the music on separate partitions (pretty useful when the smaller systems in the house need to update, or fresh install), but the transferring of files over the lan got tiresome, and my wife likes quite a bit of my music collection, and is really out of room on her laptop. Likewise, my daughter's desktop is in serious need of hdd space, and she has a growing musical "habit". Also, I want my music in places other than the room my desktop is in, other than the apartment my computer is in, and I don't have an mp3 player large enough for all of my files.

The solution was to find a way to host all of the files on my desktop, and to allow access to them in a nice streaming sort of way. I didn't want to just open up lan access to my partitions, I only share out one small folder for samba, and like to keep it that way. So I went out and found me some Ampache! And it was good...Ampache is a PHP based music server that uses a MySql database to store its information. It allows users to browse online music collections, build playlists, stream content to a desktop music player, or even download the tracks. There is quite a bit of flexibility with Ampache, it's theme-able, providing a nice user interface, has album art support and all the bells and whistles you could want. You can add users through the web interface and set access levels, so security is a no-brainer. There's a working demo here to get a feel for how it plays.

I simply installed the "AMP" portion of the LAMP stack on top of my existing Ubuntu desktop installation (this is easily done using the tasksel command from the terminal), installed and told Ampache to catalog all of the files in my music partition, and ran it from there. Then the hits kept on coming, I found a nice plugin for Rhythmbox that connects to the Ampache backend and loads your Ampache catalog right in your music browser! Happy, if you like Rhythmbox. Also, in Amarok2 there is built in support for subscribing to Ampache servers. Neat. So, after enabling the plugin on all of the client computers, all they have to do is fire up Rhythmbox, and they all have seamless access to my entire music collection. They get thier music fix, I look like a wizard!