So, what persuaded me to purchase a Nintendo Wii? I’ll admit it. Wii Fit Plus.

While I loathed P.E. in high school, I am not averse to exercise. Not in the slightest. I have a short background in gymnastics (falling on my head in front of 12 year olds lost its appeal after a while… kids can be really bitchy), subscribe to the – er – amazing podcast Yogamazing, and even today, I have tried to find an adult cheer or dance class (not in the Armpit, I won’t).

I believed that the Wii Fit would simply serve as a central recording spot for my workouts, encouraging me and giving me some helpful, electronic monitoring of my posture and progress. Boy, was I wrong. The Wii Fit is a cruel, cruel master.

Sure, it has a cute, squeaky little voice. “Step on me!” it urges, only to jab you in the ribs by letting out a tiny yelp when you plant your bare feet onto the Balance Board.

A series of annoying health and safety warnings flash onto the screen before you can actually do any of the exercises. You’ll spend a lot of time clicking through things – mostly patronising lectures about “train just a little every day” and “Oi, meatsack! Did you know that crossing your legs will cause your pathetic little spine to twist and irrevocably damage your posture?”

It’s serious about that “train every day” part, too. Skip a day and before you can start back up, the smack-worthy Balance Board character will ask: “Were you busy yesterday, Aeryn?” That nasty, bile-coloured puddle gathering under your T.V. isn’t just in your imagination. That little bugger is Nintendo’s answer to Clippy, except you can’t turn it off.

I’d enjoy the exercise if the damn thing would stop nagging me. I don’t want to be lectured because I’ve barely been in the house long enough to have a cup of tea for several days in a row.

But my biggest annoyance with the Wii Fit is its reliance on what must be one of the most inaccurate indicators of fitness: BMI.

Body Mass Index, which states that is you are a certain height, you should also be a certain weight, is completely ridiculous, and no indicator of health. I should know – thanks to the aforementioned gymnastics and a childhood spend climbing up trees and playing bumper tag on mountain bikes, I am a size 8 and yet possess muscles. Big ones, which I have to work to maintain lest they go flabby and give me bingo wings and saggy thighs in my 20s.

The BMI reading also thinks that my father – who is quite short – should only weigh 9 and a half stone. Er… no. Anorexia isn’t a good look.

I knew I should have done more research. It seems people have been complaining about this for years, and yet there is no sign of Wii Fit Plus 2. I’d quite like an option to enter the information from my bathroom scales (or those machines in Boots), which can also tell me my body fat and muscle percentage.

Luckily, I have found a temporary solution to this BMI problem. The Wii now thinks I am 5ft 5… those extra 3 inches make all the difference!

Technorati Tags: fitness, gadgets

Ah, Northern Snail. Your trains are slow, noisy and usually filthy. This morning, I was jammed into one of your three-carriage rush-hour trains, in a corner of the doorway (no seats to be had), making Uncomfortable Proximity Friends with the Yeti Beard Guy (ever seen that Friends episode? Yeah, he was like that).

I happened to be reading your brand new magazine, Northern. It makes your company look glossy and friendly, when in fact all I have experienced is grumpy staff, dirty trains and grumpy customers (due to the previous two).

Yeti neighbour from Friends

I don’t want to have to wait for the Transpennine Express trains just to get a train that is clean, comfortable, well-insulated from noise and fresh-smelling. There’s always a diesel smell on your trains and the engine noise is normally coupled with disturbing rattles and bumps as they make their journeys – slowly, judging by the way other companies’ trains whip past (making the windows rattle and the doors suck outwards). It’s not the best way to start my morning.

And then there’s the bus company. You’ve decided to withdraw the Sunday service completely through my (not tiny) village. And you’ve put the prices up despite making the Mon-Sat service every half hour instead of every twenty minutes.

At least I’m sitting on a nice clean seat as I endure the company of screeching teenage girls, or try to fend off the legendary “Six ‘o’ Clock Nutters Club”, who, as their name suggests, begin appearing on the buses from 6pm onwards. For some reason, these people always want to talk to me. No, I am not interested in your grandson being locked up for drug dealing. He might be a nice boy to you, but to me he’s probably a potential mugger.

All of the above means I am usually in a foul mood by the time I reach Armpit City. When I am trying to continue a course which is getting steadily less friendly with my love of food and sleep, being told that more and more of the work will be group-based is not good news.

Hey, universities: some of your students commute and cannot simply hop out of bed to meet people and practice working with equipment. When I’m paying you so much, how about a little consideration for the fact that my commute works out to about 40 minutes and costs a fortune?

In the meantime, all I want for Yuletide is a comfortable, affordable public transport service. Which I can sit down on. Please?

{/rant}

[image credit: Northern Rail Class 142 Pacer, by Ian Britton, via FreeFoto.com.]

Technorati Tags: buses, public-transport, student-life, trains

The word ‘nomophobia‘ was coined back in 2008 to describe the feeling of panic that comes from being without your phone. I now understand that feeling.

All those 12 year olds out there who haven’t got phones while all their friends have? I now have such sympathy for them. Never before have I been struck by such an urge to text somebody. I worried that the two or three important phone calls I was waiting for would happen while I was out. I even lost the ability to tell the time – I am one of those people who checks the time on their phone and doesn’t wear a watch.

Most strangely, I started to really notice other people’s phones. More than I usually do, I mean.

Now, I’m in the market for a new phone due to fact that the 3, 6 and 9 keys on my previously-trusty old Samsung D600 have started playing up. On my list of contenders: the iPhone (obviously, considering I’m a total geek) and the Samsung Tocco/Lite.

Both of these phones have apparently taken over my university campus, resulting in lots of worried students noticing my sudden stalkerish tendencies. How does the screen scroll on the Tocco? How’s the reception on the iPhone? I observed from afar and probably freaked a lot of people out.

Those important phone calls? As my bad luck would have it, one of them came when my phone was languishing on the sideboard. The person concerned said they would call me back the following day, except…

The day after, to add insult to injury, my mobile phone suddenly stopped receiving any signal. Orange, Orange, I love your 2 for 1 cinema tickets and 300 free text messages which mean I only need to top up £10 every other month (I’m more a texter than a talker)… but I want service, damnit!

Here’s hoping that when Orange and T-Mobile complete their merger, they will end up with a heavenly combination of T-Mobile’s price plans and customer service and Orange’s freebies.

Especially since they are soon to carry both the Samsung Tocco and the iPhone. Shame I’m a Libra… making choices is not my strong point!

[image credit Cell in grass by Guido_capi via stock.xchng]

Technorati Tags: cellphones, mobile-phone, nomophobia

Classes started this week at Armpit City University, and it didn’t take me long to realise that university is not set up for commuters. These kids carry practically nothing with them! How on earth do they manage? Oh, right, they’ve all got iPhones to check their email and can drop in to the dorms to pick up and unload stuff. I’ve got to carry everything with me. Learning to downsize my bag is one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn this week. No, Aeryn, you really don’t need to bring your netbook every day. You’ve got public access computers all over the place. Suck it up and use them, preferably without doing an Adrian Monk and wiping down the mouse.

My first proper lecture went pretty smoothly, and the other people in my classes seem really nice. I even made a contribution. Where did this sudden fear of public speaking come from? Me, the tiny five year old girl singing and dancing to entertain the other customers in the hairdressers’, and then going on to join the local youth theatre? During the five hour(!) gap between my two classes, I even typed up my notes and submitted a piece of homework well before the deadline. How very studious of me.

It has occurred to me that university is a lot like a flat-pack piece of furniture. Imagine receiving a furniture catalogue through your front door and spotting the perfect piece that will finish your whole living space for good. The holy grail of furniture. It’s expensive – so much so that you are going to have to take out a large loan to cover the cost, but you decide that the benefits this furniture will bring to your life are worth it.

So you send off the form and a few weeks later, a van pulls up outside your home. Delighted, you rush out to meet the delivery guys, only to have them hand you a flat box. You have to put this furniture together yourself.

“OK,” you think, your trepidation growing. You paid all that money, and you don’t want to waste it, so you tell yourself that learning to put the thing together will be doable.

But upon opening the box, you find a piece of paper from the manufacturers.

“Please note that the following piece of furniture is incomplete. These instructions will only help you so far, and not all of the pieces are included in the box. Please proceed immediately to your preferred DIY outlet and purchase the following: 1 Philips head screwdriver; 1 monkey wrench; 1 Allen key, 30 20mm screws…”

I can’t imagine you would be too pleased. Then, reading further down the note, you see that you will also be expected to obtain a large piece of wood and use a jigsaw to cut out the shape for that wonderful frontpiece you fell in love with in the catalogue. Followed by a tiny, almost unreadable diagram.

Well, a degree is a lot like that. You pay a lot of money for it, only to be told that you still need to buy all your textbooks (the screwdrivers, screws, etc) and that your lecture notes won’t be of any help to you at all when it comes to the assignments. You’ve got to teach yourself (carving out the frontpiece yourself). Sort of makes you wonder why they call it a “tuition” fee, if the stuff they teach you in lectures isn’t enough to, you know, actually teach you what you need to pass this degree you’re paying them so much for.

And that is why university education is like flat-pack furniture from Hell.

This week also brought with it the unwelcome and yet inevitable news that the bus fares have gone up again. I can’t wait until I can (finally!) drive. Driving might not be eco-friendly, but it is certainly cheaper per mile. Hey, Government – if you want people to get out of their cars and onto public transport, stop letting them put the fares up! £1.45 to go around 2 miles one way is not on…

[image credit: Doodled desks by igoghost via stock.xchng]

Countless trees have been felled and turned into probably non-recyclable glossy leaflets, which are thrust under your nose at every turn. Those irritating people with clipboards should take lessons from some of these kids. They stand right outside the main entrances to the buildings, move in, shout something (“Free alcohol!”, “2 for 1 drinks at the union bar!”), throw a leaflet at you and turn to their next target.

Many of the leaflets just end up in the bin. Many more end up littering the floor, spoiling ‘your’ city. The urge to throttle each and every one of the purveyors of this face-to-face spam rises.

One company – you don’t bother finding out which – has employed a girl to hand out stickers declaring “I Love Breasts!” You wonder if it would be worth moving within stickering distance to ask if she really feels good about objectifying not just herself, but her entire gender. You are ‘given’ a leaflet for one of those School Disco dress-up events; the creepiness of the sexy schoolgirl uniform hit you a long time ago when the pervs used to hang around the school railings.

Around 20% of students’ loans and grants have disappeared into the electronic ether. None of your modules of study are showing up on your student profile, and as everyone in the same boat tries to solve the problem, the computer system responsible crashes.

Half the class hasn’t even been able to make it through online enrolment. Your seminar groups will be “up on the board” by the end of the week – they hope. Until then, you don’t know where you’re going to have to be and when. You’re looking at another expensive train fare to check said board for ten minutes. And you end up with your head in your hands, weeping in despair.

One talk starts with someone from the student health team saying that you are probably going to catch swine flu. Or meningitis, which you will mistake for swine flu, then die… and it kind of goes downhill from there.

The kids don’t seem too bothered by any of it. They dress like they’ve stepped off the catwalk and jump at every chance of free alcohol (“Where’s the free lemonade for people who don’t drink alcohol?” you think irritably). For them, it’s just an extension of the system they’ve only recently left. You worry about the workload and its potential impact on your stress levels. Your back seizes up and your feet hurt.

The most important thing to remember, you tell yourself, is to work through it all one step at a time. You read every GTD article you can get your browser on. Most of it goes over your head, but the bits you manage to understand actually turn out to be kind of helpful. Your Remember the Milk list explodes with tasks. Check this, fill out this…

Then, just as soon as it all started, it’s over. You’re still missing two of your class times, and keep hitting the Refresh button on your email. There is no calm after this storm.

Welcome to university.

Technorati Tags: college, student-life, university

This site fell into my browser window while I was looking for one-bag travel tips – I wanted to see how to get the most wear out of as few items as possible.

“OK,” I thought. “There’s an idea here. But…”

She’s pledged to wear one dress for a year for sustainability reasons. Except she’s not wearing one dress. She’s wearing seven copies of the same dress. Why not just buy seven different dresses at the same price point?

The proper way to do it would have been to buy just one of the dress. Let us know how it holds up to all that washing. What to wear on laundry day?

Have I missed the point?

Technorati Tags: sustainability

This highly gorgeous theme is FREEmium, courtesy of FreebiesDock.com. It won’t stay looking like this forever… I have plans to customise it, as soon as I can find my designer hat. For now, the default look is more than pretty enough to hang around for a while.

In Other News

Everyone in the UK is now aware that there is a heatwave going on. Ubiquity tells me that it is 25 degrees C where I am right now, but no thanks to the humidity, it feels much hotter.

Here’s a few tips I’ve gathered from a few places which are supposed to help us all bear this meltying (typo, but I like it!) heat:

1. Stay indoors, especially during the hottest parts of the day (11am to 3pm). Especially my fellow asthmatics (damned humidity that comes with British heat).
2. If you must go out, wear sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat.
3. Drink lots of water.
4. Close the shades on your south- and west-facing windows.
5. Find the coolest room in your house. Chill out in there. (A good excuse to move the furniture around if I ever saw one!)
6. We’re not like the Americans. We never cottoned on to air conditioning in our homes. To replicate some of the effect, put a fan in the window. Have it facing outwards during the day to blow hot air outside, and turn it around at night to blow cool evening air through the room.

I probably need to track down some advice out there for people who feel sick when they eat during this kind of weather… I’m getting tired of living on lettuce- and watermelon-type foods.

Stay sun-safe, folks!

Technorati Tags: lifehacks, site, wordpress