James Chamberlin

It’s been a while since I made any new blog entries. I’ve been working on another guide for IGN Guides and have just completed it. I haven’t had much time to watch TV recently, so I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Last night and this morning, I added several more of my old episode reviews to the site. I’ve still got several hundred left to add. It’s a rather slow, tedious job.

Needless to say, I haven’t put much work into the other sites I’ve got planned. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to that sooner or later.

As you may remember, I made a post or two about how I have been visiting the gym. I’ve been going every weekday unless something comes up and interrupts my plans. I’m disappointed in my progress for weight loss, but it’s my own fault. I haven’t been doing enough cardio. Balancing cardio with weight lifting is difficult. Cardio is great for burning calories and fat, but weight lifting isn’t, and that seems to be what I’ve been concentrating more on.

Anyway, I’ve increased my bench press from about 145 to 215 since I started visiting the gym. I made the 215 mark this morning after battling for weeks to get past 205. My persistence has paid off!

Although I do a number of exercises, the only one I’ve been working really hard at is the leg press. It’s great for the legs. Anyway, I’ve managed to lift 1000 pounds on that, which I’m proud of. In high school, I did 1000 pounds once, but I used a very limited range of motion to achieve that lift. I currently use a full, proper range of motion.

If you’re curious what this exercise looks like, here’s a still photo I found on Google Images:

Now that I’ve got a new pair of shoes, I intend to return to doing more cardio, as I’d like to burn more fat and calories and drop some weight. Wish me luck. 🙂

It seems that I’m back to blogging again (I hope), as I have completed two more guides for IGN: Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third. These games are more in the action/adventure genre, one which I don’t regularly play these days. But I enjoyed playing them and figuring my way through them both. The part I don’t enjoy about the job is actually typing up the guide. I take notes on paper and take screenshots and then put it all together on the PC.

This became quite difficult this time around. I had completed the Spider-Man 3 guide and began playing Shrek the Third and all of a sudden I had problems with my PC. It turns out the fan which keeps the CPU cool died on me. I tried cleaning out the dust and re-seating it, but it didn’t work. I considered removing the side of the case and putting a box fan nearby, but I didn’t really like that idea.

With my PC being a Dell, the broken fan used a proprietary housing of some kind, so I couldn’t replace it with another case fan I had lying around. I contacted a fella in Dell’s India HQ and he was able to send out a technician who was able to replace the fan. I’ve been back up and running ever since.

I still haven’t gotten around to posting my reviews for the season finales. I’ll have to look around for the notes I kept. I know they’re around here somewhere.

Last week, I turned a year older. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really enjoy birthdays very much anymore. Sure it was nice to see family and friends, but I just don’t enjoy them like I did when I was younger.

I also found out my gym teacher from high school and grade school passed away about a week ago. Mr (Greg) Martin was one of my favorite teachers. He was always polite and had a great sense of humor, which is great for any sort of learning environment. He was only 57 years old. RIP.

If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been around much. This is rather unusual for me. I’m usually posting daily reviews for TV shows. Well, for those few who are curious about what’s going on, I’ve been busy. I’ve kept up with watching my shows, but haven’t had time to actually type up the reviews.

I’ve been working on two projects for IGN. I completed the first one today (Sunday at about noon) and have yet to actually start on the second. I’ve got a lot of work to do on that one, obviously. I’ll be back when I’m caught up, and I’ll post my reviews.

Ogre, what did you think of the Heroes season finale?

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m working on a fan site for a TV show here. Ogre and Ross know about it, but I don’t think I’ve discussed it here in public much. Well, progress on it has been pretty slow. I suppose it’s because I haven’t done a very good job at utilizing my free time in the last month or so.

I’ll have a little less free time very soon as I’ve got another writing job with IGN. I should be pretty busy for a week or two, but it’s enjoyable work.

I’ve already made two posts about The Mummy 3, but it’s been a while. A week or two ago, there was a news report about the movie series, but I never got around to mentioning it here. It turns out Rachel Weisz won’t be involved in it. I have to admit I was disappointed in this, as she’s been very good for the series thus far; not to mention she’s beautiful.

Anyway, judging by her IMDB profile, she’s busy as heck right now and through the next year or two. It’s no wonder she had to pass on it.

I was browsing a usenet indexer the other day when my PC became infected with a virus/malware/whatever.  I was getting pop-ups (advertisements) saying my PC was infected and I should install a program to get rid of it.  How ironic, I thought.  After some searching, I learned I was hit by Vundo, a nasty little exploit.  I cleaned out my TEMP folder, my internet cache files, etc, but that didn’t help.  My search turned up a number of others who have been hit by the same thing.  I got mine through browsing binsearch.info, a site I was able to trust until just now apparently.

Although I have since been able to get rid of the nasty little bugger, I was rather upset by the whole thing.  I had been rather proud of the fact that I’ve not had problems like this in years.  I hope binsearch gets their site/ads fixed, because I wouldn’t be surprised if others get infected by going there.

That’s got to be the lamest title I’ve had so far for this blog, but I frankly couldn’t come up with anything. I used to just use dates like this when I blogged on TV.com, but since then, I’ve tried to use titles which were specifically related to what I intended to write about.

I got my taxes in the mail this morning, after finishing them yesterday. Afterwards, I went to the gym to work on my chest. While sweating my butt off, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl I knew from junior high and high school come in and work out. I hadn’t seen her since high school… about eight years ago. My, how people change. I’ve only run into a few people I knew since high school, and they’ve all changed their physical appearance by quite a lot, but they’re still recognizable.

This morning, my blog was down AGAIN. I also have a few other sites on the shared server from Dreamhost, and they were down too. Although I don’t have an important site hosted yet, I still get aggravated every time I see things are down. I try to keep in mind the fact that I’m not paying much for the hosting, so I can’t be too mad; you get what you pay for, I suppose.

As I told Ogre once before, once I have my network of sites ready to go, I’ll go ahead and buy a dedicated server. Right now, the cheap shared hosting plan is fine for my development sites. Speaking of which, I’ve made some progress on one of them. It’s slow going, but it’s good to be coding HTML again.

With taxes due soon, I had to work on those this morning. Fortunately, it didn’t take long. I just had some trouble tracking down a few receipts which I didn’t save in the places I thought I did.

I had planned on completing my taxes back in February, but I kept putting it off. I wish I would have gone ahead and done them back then instead of waiting until the last minute like this.

Weather here in the midwest has been a little strange, but it tends to happen during seasonal transitions. For a few days, it was in the 60s and even reached 72, but since then, we’ve seen temperatures range from highs of 31 to 57 or so. A snow storm is now making its way through the area now, and the ground temperatures are still a little warm, so much of the snow is melting instantly. This has created a lot of water and slush on the streets. Unfortunately, the city did a terrible job about planning for the snow. Early estimates suggested we’d get 8-12″, but that’s significantly lower now (1-3″). I wish the city would have put down a layer of salt first, as that would have improved the melting. The streets are going to get really ugly once that slush freezes tonight.