Hello readers, this is Dr Whateley posting because... well I'm a tad bored and the Artiste is sleeping. I just wanted to pat myself on the back real quick because I feel a bit spiffy. I don't remember if the normal author mentioned this but we recently invested in some home exersize equipment. We decided to get something really nice and high end because we could afford it (our company has been very recession proof thus far), and I don't believe in messing around when your going to do something like this (like computers, I don't buy top of the line when I get a new one, but I spend a fair amount of money. And because of that they tend to last a bit longer, especially with a few key upgrades along the way).

Anyhoo, I've been at it for 6 or 7 weeks now, and I'm not sure what has happened in terms of inches. But I'm 10 pounds lighter than I was. So huzzah to me :)

People at work keep griping that they need to have more healthy snacks there for purchase. To which I think before I started exersizing more often I did quite a bit to cut back on my bad eating. I switched from soda to tea. My vise is I still have a Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea every day, but for 4oz more it has far less sugar and calories than a can of soda (http://www.sweetleaftea.com/). But if I need more caffiene during the day I just go make some Green Tea. I switched to whole wheat everything, stopped eating red meat pretty much all together. Made an effort to have more salads, with dressings that aren't just liquid fat (I miss ranch a lot). Yeah I tried the whole "if I eat better I won't get fat" diet that people seem to think works. You know what, I still ended up weighing the most I ever have because all I do all day is sit on my butt and look at a computer. Which I think proves something that everybody keeps saying but nobody wants to believe. You don't lose weight by eating better, you need to get off your buttocks and move around a bit. I'm not a sports guy, so I just work out on an eliptical 3 to 4 times a week for an hour or so, while watching Science Fiction and horror movies I get from netflix. Not only is it a nerdy way to work out, but I have lost at least a pound a week doing it, and I haven't changed my diet.

Anyhoo I'm going to go kill zombies in Left 4 Dead now, thanks for listening to me.

One of the things we inherited from buying our house was a slow cooker. Two of them, actually. I finally put one to use. We had gotten an onion-and-garlic-marinated pork loin from Costco awhile back, and after sitting in the freezer for awhile, I decided to experiment and cook it in the slow cooker. Let's just say, I've been researching slow cooker pork loin recipes for days.

Pork loin's not the best type of meat to cook in a slow cooker since it has relatively little connective tissue, and it's fairly dry. Well, I put it in the cooker with a bottle of beer and went to work today. We came back to the house smelling amazing. Basically, all the fat rendered out but the wet cooking method kept the meat moist. We just shredded it. We had invited our friend Xeowolf over, and he and Whateley ate the pork by piling it on top of nachos. I just put them in pita pockets, the first one with some hot sauce and soy sauce, and the second with lots of barbecue sauce. Let's just say, shredded pork goes really well with barbecue sauce. Yum.

The meat did need a little more salt, though. Next time, we'll add some salt to the cooking liquid so it'll have 8 hours to soak as it cooks. Actually, I want to try cooking a more appropriate cut of meat too. Brisket seems to be a good choice. And being in Texas, brisket is king for some odd reason.

My next cooking experiment, though, is finding a good noodle to go with curry. I just don't think Italian pasta is the way to go. We got some Asian ramen noodles, so hopefully that'll taste appropriate. I would like to have gotten rice noodles, but they only seem to come in the really thin kind. Like vermicelli. Maybe I'm just being too picky.

Life's been the same, I guess. We were finally taken off mandatory overtime, so Whateley and I have been enjoying our full weekend. Though today we had to work overtime, and I'm afraid we might end up on it again. Sigh. Well, it's better to have too much work than none at all.

I've been prohibited from listening to NPR at work by Whateley cuz he says it makes me all paranoid about the economy. (But I do anyway. I just try to avoid listening to too many "how has the bad economy screwed you" stories.) I am pretty grateful to be at a company that's still doing well. Whateley got a call from a high school friend back in California who got laid off recently. Apparently, he was thinking of moving to Austin since a few of his friends had done so already. We're meeting a lot of ex-Californians here. Lots.

With our Christmas bonuses, we bought an elliptical exercise machine. A pretty fancy one, too. But all our research tells us that for a complicated machine like an elliptical, with a lot of moving parts, it's best not to cheap out cuz it'll break after a few years. Whateley's also... well, on the heavy side, so the cheaper machines can't support the pounding he'll give it.

Anyway, we've had the machine for a bit over a month now, and we've been pretty good about keeping up a regular exercise routine. No weight loss yet for me (sadly) but Whateley's already lost a few inches. I've lost just a bit of fat here and there, and Whateley's already lamenting that my butt has gotten smaller. I wish I could keep it there and in my boobs, but alas, biology is cruel. I'm sure the last fat to go will be the thighs and stomach. Curse you Mother Nature!

On a completely different note, the University of Texas is on Spring Break which is also coinciding with the South by Southwest Festival. I should probably go to it one of these days, but we've got time. But what I do love about it is there's no morning traffic! We live by an elementary school and I think all the school districts schedule their Spring Break for the same week as UT, so we haven't had to deal with parents dropping their kids off. And on the freeway, where there's usually rush hour traffic in certain parts of the freeway, it's free sailing with virtually no slowdown. Our commute got cut down from 45 minutes to 25. Crazy!

Living in a college town is bringing back memories of my years at Berkeley. I wonder if all the locals got annoyed by the college kids too.

And speaking of college, we got season tickets to the Broadway Across America series, where the University Performing Arts Center is one of their venues. We saw Spamalot last week. It was hilarious! The story is ripped pretty much from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though they made changes here and there and the ending is different. It's funny how they handled the fight with the Black Knight, running away from the French, and the killer rabbit creature, of course. The songs are funny, though I wouldn't call them musical masterpieces. Of course they have the song "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

Next month will be Avenue Q. It's suppose to be about muppets singing about really wrong things. This is the show from whence came the classy song "The Internet is for Porn." Youtube it if you wanna hear it.

There's been multiple articles out there about whether or not running a guild in WoW can help you get a job or not. Some say that WoW sucks up your life, so you'll never get full commitment from these people and they're more likely to pretend to be sick to play or something. Others say that managing a guild builds valuable management skills and shows that you can successfully handle the needs and wants of many people while still accomplishing a goal.

I'm not sure what the verdict is, though I do have to say both can certainly apply. There have been many minutes wasted at work when we should be concentrating on work stuff but we've been distracted by guild drama. But on the other hand, running a guild, especially a raiding guild, has been so very difficult and we've had to work extra hard to make them work.

For those of you non-MMO-gamers out there, raiding is basically where you have a group of 10 or 25 people gather together at one time to run through an instanced area with set encounters. Back when WoW first launched, it used to be 40 people, and that was difficult to organize.

Luckily for us, now that you can raid with just 10 people, we can actually go through these raid instances with our guild. We currently have about 13 to 15 people that can raid on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, as you can do the math, that means that not everyone can go. And there are certain roles that need to be filled, such as the tanks (the ones who take the damage and keeps the bosses focused on them), the healers (the ones who heal all the damage people take), and then the DPS (that's WoW's term for the damage dealers). So right now, we've got quite a number of tanks, not enough healers, and a fair number of DPS, though only a few really good DPS. It's been a management nightmare since the few healers we have then have to go to the raids, and we only need 2 tanks per raid but we've got more than we need, so of them we take the ones that can actually do the job well, and then making sure we have enough DPS, and hopefully of them there will be enough good DPS.

So in a nutshell, here are the management nightmares: the people who play healers have to raid all the time and can't get a break. There are too many tanks but only a few have the gear to actually tank a raid successfully. So we end up taking them all the time, and the other tanks don't get a chance to get the gear to be able to tank. And then the DPS (of which there is the largest number in a given raid) are unreliable because if there are too many not-as-good DPS, then it takes us forever to run an instance. Otherwise, some people sign up, but think that since there's plenty of DPSers, there will be someone who can take over their spot, and so they just don't show up.

So meanwhile, it's like pulling teeth getting 10 people to all sit down together and devote 4 or 5 hours of their lives, and not have people be late, or not show up, or be hurt that they can't join, or whine that they didn't get the loot they wanted. And all the while, we have to motivate them to just suck it up and do the best they can for the greater good of the guild.

And people say this is just a game.

Hey, I'm not saying it's not fun. It's fun to see my character decked out in nice gear, and see the huge numbers flying around my screen, and to take on a boss challenge and win (eventually). But it's not fun dealing with people's egos, and whining, and other drama. It's not fun having to tell a person they're benched cuz they just can't deal enough damage. It's not fun telling someone we've got 11 people signed up for a 10 person raid, and they're the weakest link (so good-bye). It's not fun gathering everyone together and wondering where that 10th person is, scrounging around trying to call them, only to find out they overslept, or forgot they signed up and made other plans, or didn't feel like coming, or you just can't get ahold of them outright. It's not fun hearing people whine about how they had to pass on so much loot and they never get anything.

But that's the price of leadership, I guess. Cuz since we run the raid, it means we get to set the time, determine who gets to go, determine who gets what loot. And Whateley and I signed up for guild leadership because in the end, we want to see this content, to participate in these raids, and the best way to get them to happen is to do it ourselves.

It would be nice, though, if we can get at least a little gratitude for the work we put in.