I made it to the gym two days in a row. Excellent. This time around it was the treadmill on intervals for 25 minutes. I also walked my commute today, for another 20-25 odd minutes of exercise. On the downside, I had coffee and a brownie for lunch, but you have to pick your battles.

The soundtrack to my exercise life was provided by the second half of Random Signal #61 - Can Voldemort Stop the Rock? and Wicked Good Podcast #63: The Kids Meals Come With a Body Bag (apparently #64 wasn't available when I synced my iPod last night.

Matt Asay discusses the seemingly incongruous rise of the proprietary Mac in open source community. He makes a lot of good points, including the ability to quickly evoke terminal and run Unix apps while at the same time maintaining an attractive desktop interface, but I think this statement sums up why many have switched:

At a certain point, I just want something that works well.

After a dismal week in which I only made it to the gym one day out of seven, I'm redoubling my efforts to do better this week. I'm shooting to get to the gym five days this week, partly to make up for last week, partly because vacation's coming up and I need to get in as much exercise as I can before gorging on beer and steak at GenCon, and partly because I bought my first pair of waist 36 jeans in 10 years ... and I'm hyper-motivated.

Steve Eley of Escape Pod lays down his Ten Laws of Twitter. #1 is probably the best:

RESPECT. Every message consumes people's time. Don't twitter what you wouldn't be happy to spend 10 seconds of your own life reading.

But they're all worth reading, and are applicable to more than just Twitter -- Facebook wall updates, Pownce, whatever -- short, sweet and meaningful is the best way to go.

Bill Gates want to give you free money? Mutant flesh-eating bananas threatening your supermarket? Don't believe it? Then check out the legendary "Snopes.com" which debunks just about every hoax, scare e-mail and urban legend ever propagated onto the Internet.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

I missed out on gaming last week, which makes me overly eager to throw some dice tonight. We'll eschewing our normal role-playing campaigns in favor of a a round of the most excellent board game Arkham Horror, this time with the very cool-looking expansion, The King in Yellow.

We have one, maybe two role-playing sessions left before we go to GenCon, and we'll be focusing on finishing up the current leg of the Khalez-Mar campaign. Meanwhile, my Mutants & Masterminds campaign continues to simmer, and should be returning to the front burner sometime in late August or early September.

Three people were killed after an explosion during an oxidizer test at Scaled Composites this week, two yesterday when the explosion happened, one today from complications afterwards. Scaled Composites is the company that won the X-Prize for the successful sub-orbital flight of its spacecraft, SpaceShipOne. The crew had been testing engine components for SpaceShipTwo, the private craft being built for Virgin Galactic, the suborbital spaceflight arm of Virgin Atlantic.

This month is the centennial celebration of Robert Heinlein's birthday. In honor of it, the Wall Street Journal has this opinion piece by Taylor Dinerman celebrating the author's legacy. It provides a good overview of Heinlein's career, though it ignores the sexual weirdness that factored into much of Heinlein's later work (e.g. his obsession with incest in Time Enough for Love).

Where do Rainbows End? Find out in Episode #53 as I review Vernor Vinge's near-future science fiction thriller in which a 75-year-old man awakens to find his Alzhiemer's cured, his body rejuvenated to that of a teenager ... and the world transformed almost beyond belief.

I also talk about what I'm reading (Pushing Ice, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and watching (The 4400, Doctor Who, Season 2, vent about some gadget repairs that aren't going well, and obliterate two Windows hard drives with secure deletion tool DBAN.