Having spent months of my life in Europe while travelling in the last few years, I have compiled a list of differences that an American will find interesting. I’m not sure that all of these are present in every European country but all were present on my recent trip to Austria. There is no “No Smoking”. When you go into a restaurant or a cafe, be prepared to breathe second-hand smoke.

Those who know me know I hardly ever watch television. I don’t have time for it. I work my 40-45 hours a week, come home, and then I work on Narrative all night or work out. Sometimes I turn on the TV over dinner. Tonight I did that and caught The Apprentice with Donald Trump. I’m not a big fan of reality shows but I was very impressed by this one.

Ever since I started writing .NET code, I’ve been irritated that there seemed to be no way to programmatically set the TITLE tag of a web page from the code-behind. Certainly you can do things like <title><% = msTitle %></title> but I never found a way to set it in the code-behind. Always seemed to me that there should be something like Page.Title = "My Title"; Today, thanks to someone’s posting on GeeksWithBlogs.

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’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 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.

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.

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.

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.