More From Saturday

So a few things I forgot along the way ...

On Saturday morning I converted my normal Curves membership for their new Smart Membership, and today was my first full workout. Oh my gawd, I nearly killed myself! So for those of you who don't know, let me start at the beginning. I switched to Curves (from good ol' Virgin Active) at the start on May this year and although the results haven't been amazing, I have stayed pretty consistent in my weight and measurements (which is always better than going up!). Curves is a circuit of machines which you do twice and takes half an hour (there is a audio tape telling you when to change and everything). And then a stretch-routine to finish. My kind of workout, only half an hour and there's no thinking involved, I just go and do. I suck at gym because I let myself off the hook too often and don't know what I'm doing most of the time.

So anyway, that was the old. Now they've installed monitors in every machine and we insert our little tag for every one of them and it records our workout (per machine) and if our range of motion and speed is up to scratch (as per our programmed personalised settings - that's the bit I did on Saturday morning). And then you use your tag in the main machine afterwards and see an overview of your whole day's workout (and your workout history). So far I'm loving it ... okay, it has only been day one but anything that comes with progress reports and gives me up-to-date feedback as I work out (and isn't an actual Personal Trainer) is a plus in my book.

The other thing I forgot I'd done on Saturday was that I spent a lengthy amount of time in front of my computer (and it wasn't playing Farmville on Facebook!) I was learning about batch processing in Gimp so that I could make some animated gifs from my Canada trip. Unfortunately the files are still *huge* ... 3.5Mb and up, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to load the up here, but I'm going to try :) It's "uploading ...." as I type this. Finger's crossed!

Okay so I got it uploaded only to have it not freaking animate ... and this is because all Blogger images are stored in Picasa and "the Picasa program won't show animated gifs". Grrr. Off to hunt for an alternative solution.

So I tried to sign-up for a Yahoo account and upload to Flickr. No luck there either. But I will say I was impressed at how easy deleting both accounts were :) 1 up to Yahoo (although the thought of using them actually filled me with horror ... I'm such a Google-girl!) I found some advice on trying to display it via Google Docs, but that didn't work either cause the upload size limit for Google Docs is 500 Kb :P

Finally, SUCCESS! I uploaded it to Photo Bucket and I can see it animating perfectly :)

Oh, and another thing I forgot ... I finally (almost a year to the day later) got round to updating my Nextstop.com profile with recommendations from the rest of my Spain, Portugal & Morocco trip as well as Zanzibar & Canada.

Ps. scuse the image quality in this last animation, but I tried to get the file size down as best I could and it's still huge :P