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The news that every Best Western hotels in the US will have free wireless is awesome! I became a Best Western fan when Ahu and I were travelling through Europe on our honeymoon. We could pretty much count on finding a BW in almost every city we went and could rely on the quality being relatively good in each one. The fact that they are offering free WiFi now makes it a good choice for us in the US as well. I am hoping that this will encourage other hotels to provide similar service and pricing. Nothing I hate more than going to a hotel and having to pay a $10 or more daily free for Internet access.

I've been working out a lot lately and pursuing my physical goals (loss of bodyfat and a 365 bench press) as fast as I can. If you look a couple of articles back you'll see that I just had my body composition tested. This is actually something I have been doing for a long time. When I was still at Illinois State, I used to go to the athletic department and pay them to do a dunk tank body composition test every once in awhile. I believe the technical term for this is hydrostatic weighing. I was curious to see how much I have changed since then so I searched and have now rounded up two printouts from my body composition tests at ISU.

I received a package from Amazon.com the other day with a bunch of books I ordered. I tend to order three or more books at once from Amazon. I "stock up" on the books I am looking forward to reading. I only buy books that I have had on my Wish List for awhile. I have a 6-page Wish List so I won't run out of candidates for purchase anytime soon. But when I opened the box up, I had a flashback to my childhood and the excitement of receiving a package from the Weekly Reader Book Club.

Looking down the list of articles on my website you will find my resolutions for 2004. One of them says that I want to get my bodyweight down to 185. Well, I had a bit of a reality check tonight. I went to Bally's to workout and got my body composition tested. The results were quite surprising to me. The stats they needed to do the test were weight, height, and age. I'm 31, 5 feet 9 inches tall, and currently a whopping 225 lbs. The test is done with electical impedence and is known to be slightly inaccurate for muscular individuals but the percent error is not really material so I am okay with the results. The results were as follows:

There is a great article online which debunks many of the myths you hear about doing squats. It additionally goes on to attack leg extensions as a cause of knee injuries. I find this very interesting because in all my years of lifting weights, I have never had an injury to my knees or leg muscles which was from doing squats. Now I know why. And I used to do quarter squats with 855 lbs (that's nine 45 lb. plates on each side of the bar, folks). I have also never, ever wrapped my knees even once. I also never used a weight belt until I started squatting above 315. I had been holding off on doing squats as part of my regular workouts because I was thinking maybe as I get older they weren't such a good idea anymore. Now I know better and am really looking forward to getting my legs back to their former strength levels. Update Found another really great article on squatting myths.

Saw this movie while Ahu and I were getting over the flu. I'm assuming it's the first movie that Brittany Murphy was ever in. It's not a bad film but there really wasn't that much to the story. Yet another, non-thought-provoking way to blow off a couple of hours.

Wow, we are having a heat wave in Chicago today! It's almost 35 degrees warmer today than it was last Thursday or so. That's the good news. The bad news is that we are still below freezing. That's right. The temperature is 35 degrees warmer and still below 32 degrees. Thursday it was -7. There is just something totally wrong about living in a climate where the temperature can vary so greatly and still be so freakin' cold. Totally, totally wrong...offensively wrong...

I first saw this movie in high school shortly after it came out on video. It is a French film (Le Grande Bleu) that totally bombed in the United States. In fact, I was planning on seeing it at the theater but it came and went so quickly that I did not have the chance.

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