“Sally” isn’t one of the official CrossFit workouts, meaning that it wasn’t created by CrossFit HQ and posted on crossfit.com. My gym got it from CrossFit One World, who apparently got it from CrossFit Hardcore. It’s very similar to “Nancy”, which is an official workout. “Sally” is five rounds of a 400-meter run and 15 hang power snatches at 95/65 pounds, and as soon as I saw it last night I knew I’d be doing it rather than today’s CrossFit Football workout.
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Bottom line: I achieved my goal. There were 947 male entrants in the Northern California region, and my final rank is 387, putting me in the top 40.65%. I’m pretty happy with this, even though I felt that most of my individual performances could have been better.

I would also have liked to have finished in the top 50% of those who did all six workouts, but that’s not the goal I set in January, and in any case I didn’t know in advance if I’d be able to make it through all six. Overall a success, and one I’m proud of—last year I finished 244/256, or in the “top” 95.31%, and an improvement of just under 55% in my placement is no small thing.
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Last workout of the CrossFit Open. And for me, the worst. Not as gruelling as last week’s 20 minute grinder, but more dispiriting: rising couplets of sets of three of 100-pounds thrusters and chest-to-bar pullups.

I did it twice, and they were demoralizing in different ways.
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Workout five was the longest workout of the competition so far, and it appears to have been my worst, at least judging by the results I’ve seen up to this point. It wasn’t a big step up in terms of weight or movements, unlike three and four, but it made up for that by being 20 minutes long. 20 minutes of 5 power cleans at 145 pounds, 10 toes-to-bars, and 15 wall balls (20 pounds, 10-foot target).
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Workout four was simultaneously the toughest and easiest workout so far, the first workout where I had no hope of finishing a round but also the first where I hit my target. This time the increase in difficulty wasn’t through more weight, but through the addition of muscle-ups: the workout was 10 minutes of 60 “bar-facing burpees”, 30 overhead squats at 120 pounds, and 10 muscle-ups.
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This workout (three of six) was quite different from 1 and 2. Another “as many rounds as possible” effort, but with significantly more limited movements and a considerably heavier weight: five minutes of squat clean and jerks at 165 pounds. That’s enough weight to eliminate quite a few people who were fine in the previous two.
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As I’ve done a few times before, I’m trying the paleo diet for a while; this is my longest time on it yet, as I’ve been doing it since 24 January and intend to continue at least until the end of April (which is when the CrossFit Open 2011 ends). I’m considering extending it further.
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The second workout wasn’t that different from the first one, in that it also measures work with no or light weights over a given time period. This one was 15 minutes, and the rounds consisted of 9 deadlifts at 155 pounds, 12 pushups (with the requirement of lifting your hands from the ground at the bottom), and 15 box jumps (24").

I don’t particularly like this one, because I think deadlifts for time are inherently dangerous. Admittedly it’s a light weight, but even so it seems dubious to encourage poor form (form inevitably degrades when you’re tired and rushing) in a lift that can put so much strain on the lower back. I also don’t like pushups, but that’s because I’m not very good at them.
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I tried the first workout again on Saturday, but did worse rather than better. I’m not that happy with my score, but it’s good enough to put me ahead of my goal of top 50%.
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When I first got my landline in San Francisco, it was with PacBell. They got bought by SBC, who were bought by AT&T. When I first got a cellphone in 2006, my service was with Cingular. They got taken over by AT&T. I stuck with AT&T for a while, with plenty of gripes, before escaping to T-Mobile. I’ve been very happy with T-Mobile.

So, naturally, AT&T now intends to buy T-Mobile.
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This year’s equivalent to Sectionals is a very different approach to the problem of qualification for Regionals. The whole Games structure is still three-tiered, with a qualifying stage for Regionals which is the qualifying stage for the actual CrossFit Games event. But whereas last year Sectionals were events themselves, taking place over two days, this year we have the CrossFit Open, taking place over six (now actually seven) weeks without any central location. Competitors can either compete at registered affiliates or video themselves doing the workouts.
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Cities have always been centers of capital; I don’t think you can have cities without something (in our history, initially agriculture) to produce surpluses of goods that can (must?) be stored (hoarded? selectively distributed?), and the centralization that such storage encourages has always been a fundamental part of why cities exist.

I love cities. I love them for their concentration of people and culture (the modern form of which, it could be argued, arises out of the former), for the intermingling they encourage and for the aspects of cultural and social choice they provide. I’ve always disliked other aspects, however: the concentration of capital and the power dynamics this creates, and the shaping of cities as feeding/breeding grounds for capitalist/consumerist expenditure/exploitation. I don’t care that these dynamics have thus far been prime drivers for the existence of cities; an optimist (yes, really) about human potential, I believe it’s possible for us to reorganize cities to have the good without the bad. In any case, cities have always had this tension (among others) between capital and people, but they’re still understood largely as spaces for inhabitation—that is, as places for people.

This may be changing.
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From 1999–2000 I lived in a Berkeley apartment, and was recently reminded that it was rented from a criminal sex offender who would ultimately plead guilty to, among other things, the transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity.
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This is actually a little painful to go through: a list of Apple hardware prices combined with what that many dollars’ worth of Apple stock at the time would be worth today.

I bought a PowerBook G4 800 DVI-Ti in 2002; it was and remains the most expensive machine I’ve ever purchased. It’s certainly served me well, and I still have it, but if I’d put that money into Apple stock at the time, my Apple stock would now be worth a shade over $72000.

Even though I’m posting it, I’m not sure what the point of this chart is. It’s not useful for predicting the future, so really it seems like a comprehensive exercise in enabling regret, but regret is one of the least useful states of mind. It might fire our dopamine receptors and convince us we’re gaining information, but it’s low-value information. Despite this realization, my feeling of “why didn’t I even consider buying Apple stock at the time?” is strong enough right now that I’m going to post it anyway.

Registration for this year’s version of Sectionals, the CrossFit 2011 Open, is now open. I registered this afternoon, and am looking forward to competing and to seeing what the logistics of the competition are like—there’s no one central location per region anymore, instead any affiliate can run qualifying sessions, and in addition competitors can submit workouts on video. Another change is that it’s spread out over six weeks, with workouts announced every week starting 15 March. Workouts are the same of everyone everywhere, although regions still matter for qualification.

My goal is still to place in the top 50% in my region, and I don’t think that’ll be an easy goal to achieve. Like every competitor, I have to hope that none of the workouts contain major weaknesses for me—and that I’m able to finish all of them as specified, because no scaling is allowed.

I’m in much better shape, especially in terms of strength, than last year, but I’m not sure it’ll be enough.

I’m still trying to cut down on the number of books I have in my apartment. That still feels wrong, but the shift to ebooks is making it a little easier. Now I’m getting rid of books that aren’t big favorites of mine, weren’t given to me as gifts, and aren’t in the poorly-defined category of “classics I want to keep”.

Because I’m a pack rat and a data geek, I have a hard time getting rid of books if I haven’t recorded the metadata about them I want to record. Unfortunately, I’m not always diligent about noting that info as I read the books, so the majority of the books I wanted to give away or sell were books where I hadn’t done so—and I really didn’t want to go through them one by one.

Modern technology to the rescue…
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Since adding reCAPTCHA to my comment forms, the amount of spam comments I’m getting has dropped. Initially it dropped to almost nothing, but now it’s back up to several a day, which is annoying but not unmanageable. Still too high, and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t have email on my phone.

Before the current point of manageable spam was reached, however, I had accumulated 15,000 pending comments for my blog.
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I’m in a phase of appreciating music a lot right now, and thought I’d share some of what’s been looping through my playlists.
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I don’t always enjoy running. Sometimes I’m sluggish and leaden. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes I feel agile and fleet. It’s difficult to predict which of those a run will bring.
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I haven’t been tempted to buy any expensive items for a while now. I’ve been buying smaller stuff, and am hardly immune to the siren call of consumerism, but haven’t been inclined towards any major purchases; that seems to have changed this week.
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I received a kind of monetization offer for this blog today, one that I hadn’t encountered before: a service that would pay me to put up articles that they would provide. The kicker would be the links at the bottom of these articles (no porn or gambling, they assured).
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Long-time readers of this blog will know that happiness is a recurring concern of my posts. Recently, I seem to have made some kind of significant step, or crossed some important line, towards happiness.
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I hate giving up on projects. Especially projects that I’ve spent a lot of time on, that have had some success, and that have come close to being finished without making it the final, crucial steps. I really wanted to get a new version of sfmagic.org written, in Python, with good web development practices from top to bottom, but it’s far past time to let that go.
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