I've seen it suggested in various places that horse stall mats make great, cheap exercise mats. Looks like the rumors are true! Tractor Supply Co. carries a 4' x 6' stall mat for $40. It's 3/4" dense rubber, and really heavy. If you want one, it's entirely possible there's a Tractor Supply Co. store near you. Transporting it's not too big a deal; it rolled up (although not real compactly) and fit in the back of my Subaru Outback easily (with the seats down).

If you've ever wished you could deselect a radio button this hack is for you. Here's the way radio buttons usually behave:

See how once you select one, there's no way to get back to a state where no radio buttons are selected? Well, here's how to fix that:

• Use Firefox, not IE.
• Install the Greasemonkey extension and restart Firefox.
• Click here to install my "Clear Radio Button" Greasemonkey script.
• Try the radio buttons above again to observe the revised behavior (select a radio button, then click it again to deselect it).

Sorry, bit of a link backlog:

• I'm kinda late with this one, but another big holiday is right around the corner. De Vany on holiday binging:

  And, in case you say "I will binge just this one day," note that the high insulin spike from a meal full of stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and other starches and simple carbs will amount to a massive assault on your insulin sensitivity. The footprint of that meal will be there for a long time. You will be curiously vulnerable to carb temptations for some time after because your sensitivity is diminished and your circulating insulin will remain elevated.

• Two via Straight to the Bar (who I'm poaching from with regularity these days): Joachim Bartoll's weblog (I read the fish oil post first, and immediately decided it was worth adding to my aggregator) and this BBC story on desk jockey posture. Maybe my programming slouch isn't such a bad thing!

This is pretty cool (if you play Ultimate and read the same weblogs I do): Crossfit gave women's division champs Fury a nod.

I've mentioned this before, but Jim at Beast Skills really does incredible work both in the gym and on his weblog. Top-notch tutorials. Happy day, he has a new One-Legged Squat (Pistol) tutorial up!

Two more quick videos before I hit the sack: among all the impressive campusing videos on MoonClimbing (a few pages in), I was probably most taken with Doubles. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion I've posted this already, but even if so this acrobat training video is worth a rewatch.

Straight to the Bar always runs good stuff, tip o' the hat to them for these two videos. First, insane balancing and body control demonstrated by Rodney Mullin's skateboarding. Second, the Secret Service Snatch Test (SSST) involves snatching a 53 lb. kettlebell as many times as you can in 10 minutes (does the Secret Service really do that?). Anyway, Dustin Silveri scores 195 repetitions. The guy moved over 10,000 pounds from his knees to over his head in 10 minutes. I'll have to give that one a try (with a DB) one of these days. I bet it's a helluva workout.

I wanted to be able to easily count up my Netflix returns (630 over the past 5+ years), so whipped up a quick solution. Here's what you do:

• Use Firefox, not IE.
• Install the Greasemonkey extension and restart Firefox.
• Click here to install my "Number Netflix History Rows" Greasemonkey script.
• Visit your "Returned Rentals" page at Netflix and enjoy the newly numbered rows.

Crossfit Jersey Shore has an interesting approach to sandbag construction: they use old (and free!) truck tire tubes. Cool!

Happy Thanksgiving, gang!

A buddy of mine didn't like the way Word decided which folder he needed when opening documents:

This one has always bothered me. Again, I'm writing along, and I need to open another Word file. I have a thousand folders within folders, because I have notes and papers going back years, organized by time and within that by the course I've taught, the research project, etc. At this level my organization is actually good, I can find things when I want them very quickly.

The folder I want, most frequently, is the same one within which I'm currently writing. For example, I'm working on lecture notes for tomorrow, and I need to check the syllabus in the current course.

But when I hit CTRL + O, of course, it takes me way back up to this high level, to "AlecDox," which is how I renamed whatever uber-macro folder the machine gave me initially. Then I have to open the current semester folder, the current course folder, then the doc I want. Wasted steps. Sometimes, it goes to whatever folder I Opened most recently. But *every time* it restarts, sleeps, or auto-logs me off, which of course it does all the time, it takes me back to the big high AlecDox folder.

Can I tell my computer to respond to every Open command by opening the folder within which I'm currently working -- that is, within which the currently-open document, if there is one, resides?

This is what I ended up having him do to make Word behave this way. Give it a go if you want the same behavior:

1. Open a Word doc.
2. Go to "Tools" ⇒ "Macro" ⇒ "Macros..."
3. Under "Macro name", type:

   FileOpen

4. Click Create.
5. Some code representing the current FileOpen behavior will appear in a code editor. Select all of it and delete it. Replace it with this (largely stolen from a guy named Larry):

   Sub FileOpen()
   On Error GoTo ErrorHandler
   If ActiveDocument.Path &lt> "" Then
   ChangeTo = ActiveDocument.Path
   ChangeFileOpenDirectory (ChangeTo)
   SendKeys “+{TAB}”
   End If
   Application.Dialogs(wdDialogFileOpen).Show
   Exit Sub ' Exit to avoid handler.
   ErrorHandler: ' Error-handling routine.
   Application.Dialogs(wdDialogFileOpen).Show
   End Sub

6. Close the code editor.

Seems to do the trick! And it turns out I prefer this behavior as well, so set up my own copy of Word to work this way.

My Inbox has been very fun over the last 24 hours. It all started with a recommendation from a coworker of this Weird Al video ("not for the crappy song but for the amazing Flash animation"). I had to reply with another Flash video with the word "Creep" in the title: the Radiohead acoustic video that made the rounds awhile ago. Worth a rewatch if you caught it then, and if you've never seen it, click through now. The same coworker then kicked in this sketch by Rowan Atkinson doing the naughtiest roll call ever (NSFW). How he pulled that off with a straight face I'll never know.

Okay, new coworker, new paragraph. His contribution was this unique juggling routine, Conic. YouTube then recommended other routines by the same guy: Orthogonal is fantastic, the Hemisphere preview is enticing, and may lead you to the full award-winning routine. Finally, a little playful bit: Nestled Boxes.

All reminiscent of Michael Moschen's work (certified genius). In particular check out Triangle, Threeball, and Light (yes, he was David Bowie's arms in Labyrinth).

Last, from an entirely separate quarter, a friend passed along this link: Lords of the Logistic. I've seen a few things like that in person, and it stopped me in my tracks every time.

Cameraphone video of UCLA student visiting library getting tasered for not showing ID and refusing to leave. Holy crap. What I don't understand (among many things) is if the guy went limp, as reported, why didn't they just drag him out? They certainly had enough guys there to take the path of least resistance.