We celebrated Giovanni’s 10th birthday this past weekend. Four of his friends closed in on our home on Saturday night for a sleepover. It’s amazing what these kids are talking about. They spent hours with nerf guns and plastic swords, cutting each other’s heads off and blowing each other away. They were non-stop action-heroes out to either save or destroy the world. This is stark contrast to what you might find at a pajama party for girls of a similar age.

This week has been busy at work. Through some basic back of the napkin calculations, I find that between regular hours and late-night VPN sessions, I work approximately 65 hours a week. If you add 10 hours for my commute, we get 75 hours. I’m pretty sure that sucks by anyone’s standards.

Work-life balance has been a tough thing. When I have an opportunity to get home early, say by 6:30 or 7:00 (I know!), I am faced with whether to go to Tae Kwon Do or to see my kids. This fall, more often than not, I chose to hang out with my kids. This means I only go to Tae Kwon Do once a week, on Saturday morning. This is not a good exercise program, folks. As a result, I gained a lot of weight in the past 6-9 months and started to feel pretty crappy. I even tipped over 200 pounds for my company’s annual weight-loss competition. Shit.

So, for the new year I made a resolution. First, I would not stress out about going to Tae Kwon Do once a week. Family comes first and in these hard economic times, work comes second. But, and here’s the good news, I decided to design my own at-home workout and I was committed to doing it every single day of 2009 (I wind up doing it 5 times, bleh)

The workout is pretty simple. I do things in this order:

• 200 jumping jacks
• 40 wide push-ups
• 50 crunches
• 200 reps of the jump rope
• 30 narrow push-ups
• 50 more opposite-knee crunches
• 30 right-side crunch thingies and 30 left
• 200 more jump-ropes, backwards
• 10 diamond push-ups
• 25 real sit-ups
• 10 kicks on each leg: snap kick, roundhouse, drop, back, and back-hook (100 in all)
• Then I do my 11 Tae Guk forms

The whole thing takes almost exactly 45 minutes. Things are really looking up. I should have done this a long, long time ago. After doing this workout about 20 times so far in January, I’ve seen marked improvement in all of my technique.

Once it gets warmer, I need to start training for the NYC Triathlon in July. Lots of people are doing it at work and my brother and I are going to start our swim training in 2 weeks.

Stay tuned for more pictures on flickr as I’m way behind in updating my feed. I also picked up a copy of iLife ’09 and will probably be talking a lot about my projects in iMovie. Right now, iPhoto is running through my collection of 27,000 photos and identifying people’s faces ;-)

These folks know quality television…

This is the funniest thing I have every see in my life. Or stupidest. Will likely be replaced by something else tomorrow. Whatever, just watch already.

Some cool slow-mo paint-balloon effects:

Blue Thousand and One from Blue Man Group HD on Vimeo.

Lots of different time-lapse videos packed into this bad boy.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

ASYV Flyby Video

Here is a flyby video of the ASYV, in Rwanda. Created with Google Earth and Jing from TechSmith. I exported the mp4 to iMovie and published to YouTube from there.

As I mentioned yesterday, the cub scout Pinewood Derby ran last night. The good news is that my kids placed first in every heat they ran. The bad news is that they never faced up against the fastest cars because they didn’t place overall.

They were very excited about the event and it was funny to see how they talked trash to each other when their number came up with a friend’s.

The organizers were serving hot dogs, pretzels, coffee, and cocoa there were at least a few hundred in attendance (scouts + parents). Fun was had by all. I’ll try and post some pictures tonight when I get home.

The annual cub scout Pinewood Derby race is tonight. I spent most of the weekend working with the kids, preparing their cars for the race. This year we did everything ourselves. In years past, I leveraged the tools and expertise of my friends. This year, I bought a coping saw, a pair of Irwin Quick-grips since I lack a proper workbench and vice, and made sure I had the right types of sandpaper.

I’ll have pictures tomorrow, but the cars definitely came out better this year than they did in year’s past. The bodies are more complex and we did a more sophisticated paint job. The better results are certainly not because I’m more skilled than those who have helped me in the past, but more that I was able to take more time with it.

The kids had a hand in using a coping saw to rough our the body and learned about different types of sandpaper and how to best use them. On the paint job, we did a gradient this year and the cars look cool. Giovanni chose silver going to black and Antonio blue to black. We also use stickers to customize them further.

I set the wheels myself because there is no axle and inserting the nails into the slots is a very stressful operation because any misalignment will mean the cars won’t roll well. I didn’t think the kids could handle this yet. I doubt any parent gives this jjob to their child. Maybe next year I’ll let them do it and I’ll just make adjustments, which are easy to make.

The speed test I do every year with these cars is to race them against one another. I take a book and push them both on a wood floor. I figure if I can tune them to both finish equally in many trial runs, then neither will have a major resistance problem. Either luck or this strategy has helped us in the past since we placed 2^nd in the first year and 3^rd last year. Who knows what will happen this year.

The whole process took 2 weekends. I did the rough work last weekend and the painting and finish work this weekend. I probably spent 6–7 hours total.

Details on the race should be posted tomorrow.

In about a month, I have the opportunity to go to Rwanda to help set up the computer networks  (and whatever) for the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village. My company, Liquidnet, sponsors the village as part of their Global Social Engagement program, a fancy term for our philanthropy program. Liquidnet gives 1% of revenue to charitable causes and I’m glad to be a part of that.

For the past year and a half I’ve been working on the ASYV Website, donating my time to help out where I can. In July, I’ll be running in the Nautica New York City Triathlon and all of the money I raise will go toward the village so I’ll probably hit many of you up in a month or two ;-)

I’m super excited for the opportunity to go on this trip! As I know more details, I’ll write about them. I’ll also be blogging during the trip.

If you want to see pictures from past trips, visit the ASYV Website or visit some of the photo galleries, like this one on flickr.