Gold’s Gym Dance Workout

So, part of the Mean Girl Cleanse Exercise this week talked about Being Impeccable With Your Word which really resonated for me because I have not been impeccable with my word to myself. One of the things I committed to at the beginning of the summer was moving my body more and while I certainly did improve in that area, I didn’t reach my goals exactly and the last couple of weeks I’ve been really slacking off.  I’ve felt guilty about it and that’s only made it worse.  You know how that goes right?

So yesterday I was thrilled when this came in the mail!  It’s Gold’s Gym Dance Workout for the Wii, by Ubisoft.  I love to dance and really don’t do it like I used to – you know,  back in the day – (yeah, I said it).

So, this morning when I woke up and once again the weather wasn’t cooperating for pool cardio, I decided to give this a whirl.  I popped it in the Wii and went through the instructions.

It’s compatible with the Balance Board, but not necessary.  I don’t love the balance board because… well, I’m unbalanced.  Seriously though, it’s just not big enough to dance around on. I was surprised by the idea of using two controllers, but I picked them both up, filled out my profile info, picked a trainer and started to play.  Also, a much appreciated feature or lack thereof is that your avatar doesn’t get all “fluffy” when you put your real weight in – Hello Nintendo, I’m talking to you.

I did some Latin dancing and some boxing, both of which were a great workout and a lot of fun.

Then I started to explore some of the mini games.

Here I am, dodging the bulls in Matador.

And here I am practicing my sword fighting moves.  So Jedi.

All in all there were great, fun workouts and lots of instruction if you run into a problem. There was plenty of content to keep your workout varied and keep you (me) from getting bored.  Boredom is my worst enemy, but this looks like it might be a great tool for keeping myself on track.

I was selected by Ubisoft and Clever Girls Collective to be part of the Ubisoft Champions social media program. While Ubisoft provided me with this game to review, the opinions I’ve expressed here are solely my own and represent my honest viewpoint. Ubisoft and Clever Girls Collective promote Blog With Integrity

SimpleMind Xpress

I’ve been talking a bit about my experience with the 31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge and I thought I’d share a little bit more about how I’m implementing some of the ideas.  On day 11 we worked on coming up with 10 post ideas; basically taking previous posts and expanding upon them in future, planned posts.  This is commonly referred to as mind mapping and it’s something I do on a regular basis for not only my blog, but other areas of my life as well.

Apparently it’s genetic, because when my father was here in June, I noticed him doing the same thing, but on his iPhone.  Intrigued, I asked him what he was doing and he told me about the app he was using.  It sounded great, so I asked how much it was.

It’s free.

I immediately downloaded it for the iPhone and it works beautifully on the iPad too. It’s called Simple Mind Xpress by Simple Apps and it’s a free download in the iTunes App Store. It works exactly like you would expect it to, exactly the way I used to do it on paper. Except it’s prettier.  You can choose from different color schemes and drag and drop all over the page, making room for new ideas or putting similar categories closer to each other.

You can save your map to your desktop, save to your camera roll, cut, copy, or export to the paid version of SimpleMind which is only $6.99 and I might just upgrade to support the development of this kind of app. I just love it.  There’s also a desktop version that I haven’t really explored…

And then I put them into one of my favorite plug ins, “Post Ideas” and when I’m in the mood to write, theoretically (if I’m following my own advice), I’ve got quite a few relevant topics to choose from.

*This is my opinion only, I received no compensation, monetary or otherwise, I just liked the app and thought you might too.

Broken Link Checker

Recently I participated in the SITS version of Probloggers 31 Days to a Better Blog which was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my blog.  One of the most eye opening exercises was Day 27 which was “Go on a Dead Link Hunt“, which I had never done because the idea of going through posts dating all the way back to 2002 was more daunting than I was willing to deal with.  Fortunately Kat recommended the Broken Link Checker plug in (duh Christine, of course there’s a plug in – has anyone else noticed that I look for more difficulty when there are simple solutions?!).  As is usually the case with WordPress, installation of the plug in was a breeze and it started looking immediately.  The results show up right in your dashboard and by the time it was done, it had found close to a thousand dead links. I’m still not done going through them, but this has been so worth it.  I’m chunking the task, doing a bit every time I get some down time, but I could not believe the dead links!  The vast majority were links to blogs that no longer existed, which was sad – but some were to news stories and opinions that I may or may no longer agree with and some were to photographs that seem to have disappeared over the course of server changes, and subdomain to primary domain and every thing in between.

I’ve deleted quite a few of the posts.  (how did I ever post 4 and 5 times a day?!) Memes, quizzes, silly little filler things, I’ve made some of the posts private as I didn’t want to completely delete them, but they weren’t relevant any longer.  I fixed links, created forwarders when necessary and at this point, I have less than 100 left.  Yay me! *update* they’re all fixed now!

One of my favorite results was concerning a post from February, 2004.  We had a wonderful trip to the Florida Keys and I had the gallery stored under a domain name that I no longer own.  I was able to find the gallery on an old hard drive and it’s now connected and online once again. If you’d like to see, it’s here.

Eye Fi and Shutter Snitch

About a month ago, I got the notification that I was one of the ten chosen as an Eye-Fi Big Shot.  I was so excited, I couldn’t believe it.  A week or two after that I received my welcome package – which had some great information, business cards a lanyard and a gorgeous, brand new Eye-Fi Pro X2.  I think I might have actually squealed when I opened the package.  So now I’m a very lucky girl with two Eye-Fi Cards!  The new one and the the original Explore Video Card.  I love the original, but this new one.  Oh. My. Ad hoc networks, works with RAW files, 8 (8!) GB!  I love my new card.

There’s a card for every budget and if you take pictures on the road, or at events, you should really look into it.  There’s a great support forum fueled by other users and a community of people who are trying to extend the usability of this idea. Which brings me to the reason for this post; Shutter Snitch. This is one really cool app.  ($7.99 in the app store) For the iPad and iPhone, but I’m focusing on the iPad, right now.

This took me a bit of time to figure out.  Honestly, once I really thought about the technology and what it can and can’t do right now, it made way more sense.  From the developer:

Wirelessly transfer images to your iPad from your Eye-Fi card, soon Canon, Nikon or other filetransmitter that supports uploading to an FTP server.
When a JPEG arrives, ShutterSnitch analyzes it and warns you if anything differs from the rules you’ve set up.
For now shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, and light level is checked – but more will be added in the future (suggestions are appreciated).

The set up instructions are super easy and the developers notes are very clear – if it’s not working, disable relayed upload.  Unfortunately, that means that you can’t upload to online services – you can switch the settings back and forth, but since I’m lucky enough to have two cards, I use the older card for Shutter Snitch and the newer card for online sharing.  So far it’s working perfectly.  I take my pictures, protect the ones I want to transfer (you can choose to transfer all pictures, but I take a lot of pictures and they’re not all share worthy!), open shutter snitch…

Choose your device and set up Eye-Fi access (you only have to do this once, unless you change the settings on your card)

Open, or create a new collection (you must be inside a collection to receive images)

Then wait.  It takes sometime for the images to start transferring.  The developer mentions this, but I kept thinking there was something wrong.  It does take a while.

But then, like magic, there are your images -

I love the way the gallery looks, it’s so elegant and smooth – you can rate your images, view the histogram, set up rules about your images, such as warnings when your shutter speed or aperture is not what you’re looking for. I don’t really understand much of that yet – but I will… you can email your images, export them to flickr or an FTP server location, preview them… I can see how a professional photographer might use this to show a client previews from a shoot.  I love this app- it’s so well done and it makes me feel like a pro -

That’s the peach pineapple salsa from yesterdays post.

Eye-Fi Hot Spots

Yesterday I was taking my daughter to her guitar lesson which is in a lovely town nearby, called Dunnellon.  The neighborhood we were driving through was so lovely and there are quite a few undeveloped lots that have not been cleared.  Looking at them I was inspired to take a few pictures, so I pulled over and took a couple.  If I weren’t so deathly afraid of snakes, alligators and the ginormous spiders that are so common here in Central Florida, I might have ventured in and taken a lovely walk.  But I’m petrified, so I stayed in the road.

After Haley’s lesson, we were driving home when I spotted a McDonalds.  I had read that McDonalds is a hotspot and has wireless access, so I decided it was time for a little experiment.  I pulled into the parking lot and parked as close to the building as I could.  I turned on my camera, protected the pictures that I wanted to upload and sat for a few minutes talking to my daughter about her guitar lesson and all that she’s learning.

Using my iPhone, I checked Flickr and sure enough, my pictures were automagically uploaded.  Don’t you love technology?  Take pictures on the road, pull into a place with free wifi and share your pictures with the world!

Thanks to Eye-Fi, McDonald’s and Flickr I can’t overshare my images as well as my words!

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