I feel like I should talk about the results of having Wii Fit for a week. What complicates it is that I'm having back problems, and I don't think it's due to Wii Fit (in fact I think it's helping), but I can't rule it out.
Here's my basic capsule summation of the Wii Fit: I think it is fun and I think it's a great addition to an existing fitness regimen. If you aren't exercising I think trying to get a real workout out of the Wii Fit is just going to be frustrating.
In both my case and Karin's we already have exercises that we're doing, so the Wii Fit is mainly for tracking and for a little variety in exercises. There's also the yoga portion, which impresses me. I've never done any yoga study, although there's some overlap with tai chi in terms of the breathing exercises. I think the balance board really helps with yoga because the virtual trainer can tell when you're doing something wrong balance-wise. Eyetoy:Kinetic was much less effective, since it was trying to see you, as opposed to measuring weight shifts.
I was (well I still am) tracking my weight manually and updating a spreadsheet every month, but the Wii can give you daily feedback. That's sort of a double-edged sword and frankly I think they could have done better with some of the commentary. The truth is that a shift of a pound or so in a day may just be random fluctuations. They mention that but it will still express disapproval over a half pound gain, which could easily be just a few extra glasses of water over the last day. It's also a bit odd because it asks if you are wearing "light" or "heavy" clothing and it considers "light" clothing as 2 pounds. Well my sneakers are 2.5 pounds by themselves, so I have to use the "heavy" option, even if I'm wearing T-shirt and shorts. It does have a custom option as well, but that seems like a slight hassle to weigh everything. It also doesn't track completely accurately versus my digital scale. It does most days but I've had one day where the Wii said I lost weight and the scale said I gained. Maybe my T-shirt that day was extra light, I dunno. It also uses Body Mass Index (BMI) which I gather can be somewhat inaccurate. According to it I should be trying to lose almost half of my body weight, which can't be that healthy. I'm overweight sure, but I don't know if a doctor would sign off on me losing over 100 pounds. I suppose I could go ask one, but who wants to do that?
The biggest problem with Wii Fit is that there's no real exercise program. If you do some exercises it will suggest they pair well with another exercise, but they don't even tell you where to find that other exercise (So far I've only seen like three of those and they were always pairing a yoga exercise with a "strength exercise". I suspect that's the case because the other categories are aerobic and the balance games.) There's certainly nothing you can do that amounts to "give me a half hour workout". For instance I'd like to gently stretch this back muscle that's giving me grief, but I just have to pick and choose exercises based on overall muscle groups, or based on prior experience. The aerobic exercises seem particularly fruitless because you only get a couple of minutes of exercise and then you're back to the menu to pick something else. Getting an actual elevated heart rate for a significant period of time would either be really difficult or a real danger sign of poor physical condition.
The balance games are fun, but there's an odd neither fish-nor-fowl problem here as well. You can't say "OK we're going to have three people take turns on the Slalom and compare the scores". You have to just keep hitting retry and comparing the scores yourself. It tracks high scores for Karin and I, but that doesn't work if we were wanting to play at the same time.
It does seem spot on in balance analysis. I was pretty close to centered left-to-right when I starting using it, but I really stood with my weight back on my heels. At first I thought I was standing on the board wrong, but over the last few days I've realized it's correct and that I'm a little more comfortable if I consciously shift forward more. I'm not convinced there's a real health benefit from that, but it's certainly interesting to know.
The final analysis is this: I haven't really been losing any weight this year, in fact I went up a little bit (around 2 pounds) over the holidays and I've held pretty firmly at that mark for about 8 months now. The Wii Fit sees a slight downward trend over the last week and my manual chart seems to agree. I think adding half an hour or so of Wii Fit work has A ) gotten to some muscle groups that I wasn't exercising, and B ) been the final kick to my metabolism that may actually trigger more weight loss. At least I hope so :-)
As a peripheral the Balance Board is certainly neat. I'm not sure how many really good games will actually use it. While the Fit is selling out in the US, I'm not sure how many units that really amounts to. I sort of doubt it's really enough to really lure 3rd party developers to do really good work for the board. I'm know there's been at least one other game that uses it (We Ski) and there are a couple coming up that do. But I suspect it's going to be a lot of half-assed "you can play like this if you want to" implementations where some programmer spent a week on it right before alpha.
I guess at the end of the day I'd love to see a Mario game that used the board, but I'm not sure if that will happen.
Read moreWow
Anyone who owns a Wii and doubts Nintendo's utter contempt for North America should go watch the Mario Sluggers promo on Wii (currently on the "Nintendo channel"), overdubbed by whatever AP didn't go to lunch on time the day the Smacker-encoded video arrived from Japan.
Yeesh. The game itself might be fun, but fist-sized macro-blocks (not an exaggeration) and Buehler?-esque narration makes enthusiasm difficult. Which is peculiar, because even the Gamecube had better video codecs, and my assumption is that this video was built for Japan - where broadband is supposed to be faster than here.
Read moreNice Bug in OS X Ruby
If you use Ruby and REXML on OS X you should know there's a bug that prevents writing REXML documents to a file. Take a look at this bug report, but the file you want is in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby/1.8.rexml/document.rb
Read moreA Triumph of Materialism
Yesterday was a particularly successful day of technology acquisition. I ended up buying and configuring an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi + network storage for backups) as well as a Wii Fit. Of course setting all that up took a big chunk of time, but there you are.
I needed to acquire some more data storage and I had been debating a Time Capsule or biting the bullet and getting a Drobo. But in the last week I had several network outages that ended up being fixed by rebooting the Airport Extreme (my router), so it seemed like the Extreme needed to be replaced. As a bonus that meant I could move the Extreme as a relay in my office (the iPhone has been having some problems lately getting a good signal when I'm in my office).
The thing about configuring WiFi is it's always a mess. There are three nodes in the network - the new Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express (which also streams music to the kitchen). Getting the Time Capsule to replace the Extreme was pretty straightforward, but getting the Airport Express to reconfigure took well over an hour. And the frustrating thing is that I can't say what I did differently. I'd swear I configured it the exact same way three or four times and then suddenly the last time it went "Oh, you want me to join the existing network? I can do that." And the Time Capsule insisted that my previous WiFi password wasn't the correct length so I had to change the WiFi password and then go teach it to all of the relevant devices. Whee. But now I've got a Time Capsule and can backup Horton (the Mac Mini) and Lorax (my new laptop) using Time Machine.
On Wii Fit, they are fairly difficult to find (surprise! Stupid Nintendo!) On our recent vacation we checked out a fair number of Wii games, and Wii Fit, which is only sort of a game. Karin ended up wanting WarioWare and a Wii Fit, and neither is very easy to find. (If you want WarioWare the only choice I found was ordering it from bestbuy.com. It wasn't in any local stores and it's not available from Amazon or Gamestop.com.) Several Amazon Marketplace stores are selling WarioWare at higher than MSRP, so it must be out of print. And what is up with that? If I grudgingly accept some sort of hardware issue with Wii supply and then with Wii Fit, but WarioWare? That's just a DVD for crying out loud!
The Wii Fit had worked out that I was just calling a few stores every week and trying places like Target or Best Buy when I was there anyway. We were at Target on Sunday and I figured I'd ask in the electronics department and they seemed to have just discovered they had "two to four units" in the back. Which makes no freaking sense, but whatever. There was a guy already waiting for one, a girl asked for one while I was waiting for them to find the stock in the back. So if they had four they sold three of them before they could even get them.
Frankly I have trouble believing that the Wii Fit board is tough to make. It's a neat piece of hardware, but there's nothing cutting-edge inside it. Nintendo really needs to stop screwing around and get their manufacturing sorted out. I'm done trying to guess what the problem is, but it's really getting ridiculous now. Having WarioWare not be in the stores is just absurd. They have plenty of shelf space in the stores for crappy third party titles, and it seems like WarioWare is a game that people might actually want.
Read moreHave I mentioned lately how much I like Rep. Lofgren?
Washington, D.C. – Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) recently introduced H.R. 6588, which prevents customs officials from using the pretext of border searches to conduct groundless search and seizure of Americans’ laptops and other electronic devices when they return from overseas travel. The bill does not prevent the search or seizure of laptops or other electronic devices when legitimate law enforcement purposes justify that search or seizure.-- Rep. Lofgren's web page While I'm still stuck with Senators that are in the RIAA/MPAA's back pocket, at least I have a Representative who continues to do useful work that I can support. One out of three ain't bad?