Last week in yoga class we ended the class with Bow pose.  This is the pose where you lay on your stomach, grasp your ankles with your hands, and pull your chest and feet off the floor.

We did Bow three times in a row.  The first time I grasped my ankles and pulled off the floor, no problem.

The second time, the teacher came over, gently took hold of my ankles, and pulled back.  My chest opened wide and  lifted off the ground and I felt my whole body move upwards about three times higher than my previous attempt.  The teacher asked, “Too much?” and I responded, “No, it’s fine.”  And strangely it did feel fine.  The post was probably more strenuous, but I felt the front of my body open in a way it never had before and my legs and back felt incredibly strong.  After a while the teacher said to rest.

The third time I pulled back and felt my body reach the same deep bend as before, only this time my muscles were doing all the work.  I was at the limit of my own abilities, but it was invigorating to see how a year of yoga had changed my own limit.  Strangely, I actually enjoyed the deeper third bend more than my first attempt, since the third bend was a sign of how far I’d come and how far my body could now bend.  It felt great to be able to do a deep pose using my own power, without any prompting or assistance.

Thinking back on this practice, it occured to me that I’ve extended a lot of my personal ”limits” over the past year.  I think part of this growth is due to yoga practice – feeling my body push past its physical limitations helped prepare me to overcome spiritual and mental obstacles. 

Here’s hoping I can expand my boundaries in the coming year as easily as I stretched my body in bow pose.

Here are the latest pictures from my kitchen redesign – three supports to create a granite countertop over the bar.

Nice work from Home Experts (the installers working with Home Depot).  Unfortunately things are about 3 months behind schedule but we’ll see how it ends up.

	All taken from my ongoing Kitchen photo gallery in Google’s Picasa.

I’ve always liked to read spoilers – short synopses of movies and books that reveal the twist ending and explain what all the mystery is about.  Some people think I’m weird, but I think that there’s so much media out there that I don’t have time to watch a 2 hour movie or read a whole book just to see what happened.

Over the summer, the producers of the TV show Lost developed an Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience” that slowly released clues about the show – about the Hanso Foundation, the Numbers, etc.  The only issue was that the clues were so scattered that you had to spend a lot fo time hunting them down, assembling them, and keeping on top of the game.  I’m a fan of Lost, but not enough of a fan to spend 24 hours tracking down the backstory of some minor character.

Imagine my joy at finding http://www.lostpedia.com/, which answers every major mystery on Lost.  Fans who played the Lost Experience and combed the Internet for clues assembled them all into a coherent, well-developed story that explains away a ton of the larger mysteries on the show.

I won’t spoil the mysteries here, but Lostpedia includes the following pieces of information:

• An explanation of what the Numbers mean
• What the DHARMA initiative was developed to do, and how the island figures into it
• Photos (and video!) of Alvar Hanso – his explanation of what DHARMA is, and where he is today
• A full list (with YouTube links) of all the Orientation videos, including some which haven’t appeared in the TV show but have appeared in the Lost Experience
• A full list of Dharma logos and stations

The only (minor) issue to having everything explained is that the only thing I have to look forward to is more backstory on the main characters of the TV show, and that’s probably my least favorite part of the show.  How much more can I found out about Jack’s divorce, or Sun and Jin‘s marital troubles, or why Sawyer and Kate might make a good couple?  Most of my interest was in finding out answers to the larger mysteries, and now that I have the answers there’s not much more to find out.

This seems like wiki culture at its finest – using a group of unrelated, geographically distant researchers to assemble and the information and present it in a coherent way.  The YouTube clips (see example) with transcripts alone are amazing – I wish all my company’s media was tagged this well!

[youtube]_PPCCcXarkc[/youtube]

I’ll keep watching the show for now, but I hope the pace picks up soon.  If not, I’ll just skip the watching and read all the answers on www.lostpedia.com.

The following Firefox extensions were recommended by my web design instructor:

• Web Developer toolbar – see elements on page
• Live HTTP headers – show headers as they’re loaded on the page

Blogging from a web design class. I’ve found that sometimes I need to make a note to myself and refer to it later. I need a Miniblog – a smaller blog of running text to appear on the right side of the page. I’ll tag entries as “Note to Self” until I set one up.

Of course, Google already has a “personal notes” widget for its personalized home page, but that wouldn’t require as much geekery.

In the post below, I wondered if it was possible to customize feeds from my central blog to different feeds. 

The reason is that I have logins for Facebook and ELGG.  Two different web sites: Facebook is a social networking site for college students and alumni, and ELGG is an “online social network for those interested in education, learning technology and new approaches to teaching and learning.”  Both allow you to import content from your own blog.

I was concerned that my ELGG colleagues might not want to read about my connection to The Departed, and my Facebook buddies might not be interested in IMS Content Interoperability.

Turns out there is a way to customize my blog for both sites, using 3 RSS tricks!

Trick 1: WordPress category URLs

When you create a WordPress blog, you set up “categories” that you can use to tag each post.  For example, this post is tagged with “WordPress tricks,” “ELGG,” and “Facebook.”  If you go to www.jobriga.com/journal/ (the address of my main blog) and click on “WordPress tricks” on the right, it’ll bring up all the blog entries tagged with “WordPress tricks.” 

You can also note that the URL changes to string below:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4 

This means that “WordPress tricks” has an ID of 4, and so the URL is saying the following:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4

Trick 2: WordPress RSS feeds

WordPress also allows you to easily set up a RSS feed for your blog.  RSS feeds convert your blog into a format that can be read by other news aggregators.  You can see the RSS feed for this blog by adding ?feed=rss2 to the URL:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?feed=rss2

Trick 2.5: Combining Category URLs and RSS feeds

If you combine these two tricks into a single URL string, you can create a RSS feed for a specific category:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4&feed=rss2

which says:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4 & feed = RSS 2 (really simple syndication 2).

So, it’s possible to create a RSS feed of a specific category (e.g. all the categories related to “WordPress tricks”).

Trick 3: Importing the RSS feeds into other sites

Facebook and ELGG both allow you to automatically pull RSS feeds from other sources into your account.  Facebook calls them “Notes,” and ELGG calls it a “blog.”

I created two new categories in WordPress: one called “ELGG” and one called “Facebook.” I then got the URLs for each of these categories

All entries tagged with “ELGG” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2

All entries tagged with “Facebook” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2

I then logged into ELGG and subscribed to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2, and logged into Facebook to subscribe to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2.  Now, every entry I tag with “ELGG” shows up in my ELGG blog, and every entry I tag with “Facebook” shows up in my Facebook Notes. 

This makes it easy for me to determine where my content goes – now I can publish the content once, and send it to multiple places.  I can also target my blog to the appropriate “channel” of content. 

Publishing in the 21st century.  Nice!