Trying to keep fit in Silicon Valley
The place is not the problem, the lifestyle is. Many of my friends suffer from various kinds of RSI (repetitive strain injuries), including the notorious Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I've found from experience that such problems are avoided if the disgustingly sedentary lifestyle is supplemented by physical activity (but then everybody knew that).
Some of my fitness-motivated friends and I try to make it to the gym on all weekdays, and it kind-of works (we do end up slacking sometimes).
Update: The above was valid until August 2001. Since then, my life has been caught up in a few more important things. I do hope to get back on track soon. At the moment, I don't think I look like this anymore :-(
Working Out
Gold's Gym is ubiquitous. It is pretty good. It might interest you to know that they are (were) giving away $500,000 (that's half a million dollars!) to the person who achieves the most revolutionary change in their body within 12 weeks. Details are here.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's books on bodybuilding are some of the most useful I've come across.
- Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder
- Arnold's Bodybuilding for Men
- Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding
Some other useful links include "About Bodybuilding", which is an Information Resource Community for Bodybuilders.
Also worth checking is the Hard-gainer Bodybuilding & Weightlifting FAQ. Here is a link to Fitness Pros Bodybuilding
Ping-Pong
One good thing about my current work-place is table tennis. It's not just that there is a table and ample space, but the fact that a frighteningly large fraction of the employee population is skilled at the game. We even had a tournament sometime back!
Here's the Table Tennis FAQ.
The Sex Life of the Inside of a Ping-Pong Ball!
Cache ping-pong: a hardware phenomenon in an SMP system, where two tasks on different CPUs are both accessing the same physical memory in a cache line. This means as each task runs, when it changes the memory, it must invalidate the other CPU's relevant cache line (to ensure cache coherency). Then, when the task on the other CPU runs, it must reload the cache line (as it is set invalid), before changing it. Repeat ad nauseam. A bad thing. BTW, we don't play this version too often.
Tennis
There are many courts in the Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto area, and the weather is usually nice for tennis.
Skydiving
A bunch of us skydived last summer. It was cool ... exhilarating stuff ... maybe somewhat of a damp squib as well (since it wasn't heart stopping or anything when it really happened - the apprehension was far too over-hyped!).
Climbing
Some of my friends love to climb. I love "Climbing Up The Walls". This is a picture of me climbing at Chris's behest. Cool stuff, although most of the fun is taken away because you are strapped.
Hiking
Go climb Half-Dome. Then lose sense of direction on your way down. It's fun. Builds character. Builds a lot of it as well.
Walking In San Francisco
Nothing beats a good old fashioned stroll in a city with a character.