So I have been out of commission again for a few days with a pretty intense cold turned sinus infection.  This on the tail of that Stomach Flu I had a few weeks back has been a frustration but now that I am feeling better, here are a few things I experienced while m.i.a. that I thought  worth sharing:

JACKPIE SKETCH SHOW - Even though I was sick, I couldn’t miss my last opportunity to see the new sketch show “Two Presidents” at Relapse Theatre. I bundled myself up, leanded on Mary and made my way to the theatre with cough drops and kleenex. I was really impressed. The addition of music and images during the scene changes covered really well and the variety in the sketches skyrocketed thanks to our new sketch classes and workshops. Overall I’d say each new sketch show has been at least twice as good as the one that proceeded it as far as production value, creativity of presentation and variety of content go. Well done folks!

JACKPIE STAND UP COMEDY - On Saturday night I headed back to the theatre again (glutton for sinus punishment) so I could see the newest incarnation of Jackpie… STANDUP COMEDY!  Brad Binkley is the creative mind behind the Standup Program and with just one 8 week class he took a group that had no prior standup experience and got them onstage doing 5-10 minute sets each! Whe I saw the show I seriously had trouble believing that they had only been working for 8 classes. All of them were solid and a few of them looked as if they could head right over to an open mic at a local club and get started on their careers. Truly impressive work all the way around.

10,000 STEPS - Sunday was the official start of my work’s compeition for most steps taken in 2 weeks. I only accomplished about 5k on Sunday because I was sick but yesterday I cleared 10k!  That is huge considering that my day job is extremely sedintary. I am still behind a coworker for 1st place but that is mainly because she went out dancing Saturday night just before midnight and danced for 4 hours in the wee early hours on Sunday morning.  Knowing that I am in a friendly competition is certainly helping me to push myself to be more active.  Must defeat competition. Must… take… more… steps…

As I was trying to find something that would get me exercising more during my day and while I am at the theatre at night,  I discovered “Virgin Healthmiles” via my day job’s corporate website.   The idea behind the program is pretty simple… I take 7,000 or more steps each day which are recorded into a free pedometer they provided me and they credit me with “health miles” that I can use to lower or even pay for my copay for my doctor visits. Quite ingenious.  Get people to stay healthier so you don’t have to pay huge amounts in insurance claims when their lethargy and obesity cause other more expensive health problems to arise. I jumped on this right away and ordered my free pedometer. I have been using it for a few weeks now and love it!

Then I hit a wall… What would drive me to take MORE than the minimum needed to pay for my doctor copay? I know that I SHOULD take more steps but it is the program itself that is keeping my fitness in focus. In steps the “challenges” portion of the Virgin Healthmiles website.  When my co-workers got hold of their own pedometers, they started right in on challenging each other to contests. Yesterday I was challenged by some of my teammates and I gladly accepted. Seven of us are now competing for the most steps taken in two weeks. The person who comes in last place buys lunch for the person who comes in first place.  Thanks to the pedometer’s ability to upload to the website, we are all able to see where we stand in the contest and make adjustments accordingly.  The competition gives just enough of a nudge for my progress in daily steps to be in the forefront of my mind.  I look forward to seeing what affect this has on the rest of my health in the coming months!

Mary could only laugh when I told her I joined foursquare.com and was using this new social networking service. She didn’t care for facebook at first but she eventually joined… she didn’t understand Twitter but now she is all about it… But Foursquare? I am paraphrasing here but I believe her reply was something like ”Won’t be long and you’ll be the Mayor of a Gas Station!”

What is foursquare? (according to foursquare.com)

foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.

So here is a list of the reasons that I have joined Foursquare.com and maybe they might open your eyes as well and tempt you to give it a try:

1. I am not normally one who ventures outside my box very often. I eat at the same places because I know and trust them. I would like that to be different but it is tough to bring the right sorts of things into my line of sight so that I choose the new thing over the known thing. Part of Foursquare.com is a social game that “rewards” me for trying new things and better yet, brings up ideas of new things around my current gps location. It does for me what Yelp and Urbanspoon failed to do which was get me thinking and moving towards the “new.”
2. My company (Jackpie at Relapse Theatre) is looking for new ways to reward its frequent visitors. We will be adding in rewards for those who visit us a certain number of times and also something along the lines of a free pair of tickets per week for whoever holds the title of “mayor” for Jackpie Theatre.
3. I am interested in where my friends are after they leave the theatre at night.  If I decide I am up for hanging out a few minutes I don’t have to start making calls to see who is out… I can check foursquare.com and see that a couple are at Manuel’s Tavern, a few are at Octane and I can make my decisions accordingly. Ordinarily I would probably just decide it is easier to start my commute back home.
4. Foursquare.com is fun. You get a badge for accomplishing certain tasks and points for each additional new thing you do each day. I use things that are fun. I don’t use things that are not fun. This one is fun. Fun.

So give it a try. Who knows… You might find yourself doing something new tonight!  If you sign up… find me at http://foursquare.com/user/karwisch

I have been trying to streamline my online reading using Google Reader. It has really worked. I pulled in a few news feeds, a few personal interests, some theatre and improv and Presto! a one stop shop for me to absorb in my few free minutes each day.

Below are a few really interesting items from my reader this past month:

• Serious Eats - Best Baked Buffalo Chicken Wings 
• Io9 - Is There a Politically Correct Term for Robot? 
• All Blogs Lead to Rome - Undercover Boss?
• Lifehacker - Naps Can Improve All Day Learning?
• Io9 - TV Tropes: Themes in Film? 
• Io9 - Amazing Art using Junk?

Enjoy!

About six months back, Mary and I decided to make a major change in our lives. We were noticing that the small amount of time that we had with each other was being soaked up by dozens of television shows we had managed to get hooked on. Worse, when Mary was by herself and I was at the theatre, she would spend most of her spare time watching DVR’d shows. We decided to rip TV out of our lives and no longer let them revolve around the television.

The hardest part was convincing ourselves that we didn’t need all of those shows in our lives. By luck, or perhaps divine intervention, four or five of the shows that we were really devoted to started to drop in quality all at the same time.  We were able to say “That was awful. Why did we just watch that?” and then mentally cross it off the list of shows to watch.  The next step was an addicts worst nightmare… we had to call and turn off the cable. Yikes! Visions of shows we would miss began to race through our minds… we doubted our decision. Could we really do this? Could we off our television?

We moved our entertainment system over to the other side of the room and circled our seating arrangement so that our focus was on each other and the fire place. We softened the lighting and added a few lamps, fine tuned our Pandora stations on the computer/stereo and picked a ton of books from paperbackswap.com. 

Now, six months later, we can’t imagine it any other way. The amount of time we spend actually talking to each other has grown tremendously and it is no longer bound in by commercial breaks (or worse, not possible because of Netflix TV or DVR fast forward capabilities.)

Last night I was able to follow up on student leads while Mary worked on recipes for the upcoming week. We had an open dialogue about food, music, books, cats, movies, the theatre, exercise and more. It was really a great night and I felt like I truly lived it with Mary instead of co-existed it while watching a trillion hours of television.

Don’t worry… we still watch LOST on Tuesday nights. Once a week we turn the couch around, revive the television and pull out the rabbit ear antennae to see the final season of our favorite show.

Hightlights of the Week:

• On Monday I graduated a new group of Improvisers from the Jackpie Training program. I then held an audition and cast a team out of the class members right there on the spot.  Not only did all of them get cast but I got a surprise that Denny Zartman isn’t leaving town as early as I thought and he was able to audition and get cast on this team! Excellent! There are 10 of them on this new Crecent Team and they are at least temporarily called “The City.”
• Tuesday night was LOST with Mary. We watched as much of the Hurt Locker as we could before it started but unfortunately life got in the way and we weren’t able to finish it. Probably for the best because for some reason the violence was really getting to me that night… there was a preview for a movie beforehand that showed some teenagers playing a prank on a boy and pretending a girl had died in his care. He ends up killing her by “accident” when he follows their instructions to find a sharp object to use in dismembering the body.  I got really shook up for some reason and it took a couple of minutes for me to be ok again. I jumped right into my brain as if I had really witnessed something that awful. Anyway, we’ll probably catch the end of Hurt Locker over the weekend so I can comment more on it then. LOST was awesome. I can’t believe this is the last season! *sigh*
• On Wednesday I met with the heads of state at Relapse about adding Corporate workshops and shows. Too much to really hit in just one hour but we got the basics in and it looks like it will work well if they hit the ground running as hard as they say they will. I went out after class with the new Level One class. I like to do this at the end of Level One because I think it helps them to bond together and I think that it gives them a human/outside the theatre view of me as a real life guy. Really fun. We hit 6 feet under since it is so close to the Theatre. I can’t wait until we are set up for the bar at Relapse and can just go to that area of the theatre for this type of hangout session.
• Thursday night I was really tired and burned out so we did a movie… Saw District B13. I loved the Parkour and hated watching Mary get upset at how people were treated in the movie.  No matter how far fetched the movie is, Mary experiences very real empathy and gets highly upset at Law Officials doing evil and the manufacturing of drugs that will go on to ruin people’s lives. She has such an amazing heart and I feel for her when she feels for others.
• Friday (Tonight) Going to see the Jackpie Sketch show tonight at Relapse Theatre. I am really excited about this because I let the guys do this one completely on their own. I didn’t even read the scripts for this one. Of course this could come back to bite me and I could see some things tonight that I might have put the kabash on right away if I had read the script, but I feel that is a pretty fair risk to take to see what product I get when I am not involved in the process. Show is called “Two Presidents and a whole lotta sketch…”

That is all. Can’t wait for the weekend!!!

Because I stay so busy at my day job and running the theatre at night, I don’t have a whole lot of time for outside activities. That doesn’t mean that my brain doesn’t try to push me toward activities, time for them or no.

Here are a few things that my brain seems to think would be fun and pop up in my mind’s eye throughout my day:

1. Parkour -  The the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment. Parkour requires… consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects. Parkour movements typically include… running, jumping, vaulting, climbing, balancing, and quadrupedal movement. Movements from other physical disciplines are often incorporated, but acrobatics or tricking alone do not constitute parkour. Parkour training focuses on… safety, longevity, personal responsibility, and self-improvement. It discourages reckless behavior, showing off, and dangerous stunts. Parkour practitioners value… community, humility, positive collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and the importance of play in human life, while demonstrating respect for all people, places, and spaces.  http://www.americanparkour.com/whatisparkour
2. Backgammon - one of the oldest board games for two players in which the playing pieces are moved according to the roll of dice. Players win by removing all of their pieces from the board. There are many variants of backgammon, most of which share common traits. Backgammon is a member of the tables family, one of the oldest classes of board games in the world. Although luck plays an important role, there is a large scope for strategy. With each roll of the dice players must choose from numerous options for moving their checkers and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. Players may raise the stakes during the game. There is an established repertoire of common tactics and occurrences. Like chess, backgammon has been studied with great interest by computer scientists. Owing to this research, backgammon software has been developed capable of beating world-class human players. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon
3. Amazon Kindle - a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for rendering and displaying e-books and other digital media.[1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle
4. Music Theory - the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures found in composers’ techniques, across or within genres, styles, or historical periods. In a grand sense, music theory distills and analyzes the fundamental parameters or elements of music – rhythm, harmony (harmonic function), melody, structure, form, texture, etc. Broadly, music theory may include any statement, belief, or conception of or about music [1]. People who study these properties are known as music theorists. Some have applied acoustics, human physiology, and psychology to the explanation of how and why music is perceived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory

Very soon I hope to make a change or two in the setup of my life that should make some or all of these a reality or at least give me the time to try them out.

Over the last week (Tuesday to Tuesday) I lost somewhere between 7 and 10 pounds and it was all thanks to the new fad diet called “The Stomach Flu.”

It started at about 2am on the 16th with everything that I had eaten making a mad dash out of my body through every way it could conceive of doing so. This made me unhappy. It also made my wife unhappy because she had just gotten over the same ordeal and was finally getting some good sleep again.

After a routine of visiting the privy every hour on the hour for another system jailbreak of mythic foodstuffs I finally calmed down at about 10am and got some sleep.

I woke with a weird combo of fever and chills (or maybe that is just how fevers work) and parked myself on the couch, covered myself in blankets, accepted the cold wet rag Mary placed on my forehead and put on the pilot episode of LOST through Netflix. I kept thinking “This couldn’t happen at a worse time.” I am in the middle of a complete overhaul of my business at the theatre and losing time and steam by being sick was the last thing I wanted to do. Begrudingly, I gave in to it and rested because I have learned my lesson on trying to work while ill and how much worse that makes EVERYTHING.

Now back in the land of the living, working my day job and mourning the loss of an entire week I can at least say that I am a few pounds trimmer… so… Allons-y!

It’s the last season of LOST and I have added some LOST Theories from Dark UFO to my Google Reader. Some of them are facinating, some are ridiculous but they are all really fun…

Check out LOST Theories for more.

In 1991 I purchased my very first digital organizer. It cost me $19.99 and stored up to 100 phone numbers!

In 1994 I purchased my first pager and before it fell into the my college dorm urinal, had a very brief run as the coolest thing I had ever owned.

In 1998 my best friend and I went in together on an hand held email device that sent and received email if you held it up to a land line phone.

In 2000 I got both a nokia cell phone and a palm pilot and continued to upgrade… each model more advanced than the one before.

In 2005 I got my hands on a used smartphone, and the world changed beneath my very feet.  First the Palm Treo and then later the Blackberry Curve were my weapons of choice…

Then in January 2009 I gave up my Blackberry curve and picked up the iPhone 3g. Because I am an artist and very much a gadget geek I was head over heels excited about it. For the first 3 months I was practically an iPhone salesman, walking around showing everyone what it could do and how sleek it looked.  “Look at these amazing apps!”  However, around the 6 month mark I realized something… I was spending an aweful amount of time and effort trying to tweak my iPhone so that it could do the things that I was accustomed to on my Blackberry. Over time, more and more tweaks were needed and then some things I just flat out couldn’t make happen like I wanted on an iPhone.

Finally, about 3 months ago I started to get frustrated at how inefficient I was getting and how scattered all of my theatre work seemed. Even though I knew I would get flack from all of my friends at the theatre, I decided to go back to the Blackberry.

I am writing this entry mostly because I have to keep answering the question “What happened to your iPhone?” I have put together a top ten list of why I went back to my beloved BB this month. Keep in mind these are my own personal preferences so for some of you reading, it may seem petty or unfounded but it truly was affecting my day to day life…

10. The speed of launching the Camera
Let’s start out small. I love taking pictures and I have missed tons of quick photo opportunities with the iPhone camera. It takes exactly the same amount of time for the camera to initialize as it does for that puppy to stop making that face or the man in his underwear on 14th street to walk around the corner out of sight.  The Blackberry has a side button dedicated to the camera and a split second after you press it, there is the camera! Blackberry Bold has pretty good resolution and has caught at least 3 shots just this month that I would have missed on the iPhone.

9. The Keyboard
This won’t be a surprise to anyone because it was a critic’s concern even before  the iPhone actually debuted. The virtual keyboard on the iPhone just doesn’t float my boat. I went through cycles of feeling somewhat comfortable and being fairly quick typing on it only to suddenly go back to fumbling around and being frustrated again. On the Blackberry I got fast and continued to get faster. I know where the keys are by feel and can conduct the physical keyboard much better than I can the virtual. Real keys make me happy. Also, they are always there which means they can serve multiple functions. I like keys that are always there.

8. The Balance
Now this may just be me and how my hands fit a smartphone, but the iPhone just isn’t comfortable for me to hold. If you hold it like the commercial with one hand holding the sides and the other hand conducting the screens with style and pizazz, then it isn’t all that bad. However, I work a lot with one hand which means my pinkey curls under the bottom and I work the screen with my thumb. The iPhone feels heavier and narrower for some reason and always seems like it is pushing on my pinkey trying to escape to the floor. The Blackberry feels just right in my hand and feels very balanced. Also, there is a slot in the bottom of an iPhone where it docks with a cradle that has two ridges that get really uncomfortable to hold after working for more than an hour.

7. The Accelerometer
Everybody loves the accelerometer besides me. That is because it is cool. I’ll admit that… it is really really cool. However, if you are a single hand user like me, the constant movement between landscape and portrait within certain applications (not to mention if you if you are in an app where you are forced to read in portrait but are allowed to type in landscape) keeps me having to think about what I am doing and usually pretty annoyed while I’m doing it. What I want is for the phone to stay still and look good from just one position. Blackberry Bold does that. I can lay back in bed and hold it up over my face and it doesn’t start shifting back and forth between accelerometer views of landscape or portrait.

6. The Message Indicator
I like the Blackberry’s message indicator. I like seeing visual reminder that I have forgotten that it beeped 2 minutes ago while I was doing something else and that I still have have a new  message waiting. The iphone will sit dormant and either beep or buzz when the message comes in but once you have heard that, it will just sit dark until you check it again or another message comes in. Often my reminder to check my messages is when another message comes in and sometimes that can be a while after the first.

5. The AutoCorrect (hint vs change)
On the iPhone, if you type something that it thinks is another word, it will go ahead and change it for you. When you work in a business with tons of weird names and acronyms you find yourself trying to trick the iPhone into learning what you want it to say ahead of time so that it doesn’t change it on you in the middle of a paragraph. On the Blackberry it will just put a subtle thin line below the word and then if you miss that it has the feature to spell check for you like a regular computer. I can’t tell you how many times on the iPhone that I sent out messages that had random words thrown in because iPhone decided it knew better. I would rather be given a hint that I might have misspelled something rather than having it “fixed” for me.

4. The Physical Call, back and Menu buttons
I like buttons. Buttons are good. I like to have my finger on a button ready to hit it. I like being able to give buttons other hot key functions and speed dialing tasks. The iPhone only has one real button. Blackberry has a menu button that does more or less the same thing no matter what I am in. I like that. And I especially like being able to just start typing a number from the keypad to dial someone or press the green call button which gets me on a call with just a couple clicks.

3. Touch Vs Trackball
I tried really hard to like the touch screen, but as I said earlier, when I am trying to work with just one hand (while writing, eating, drinking or holding a child or a stapler) there are times that you have to get your thumb to jump up to the top right of the screen to click, then down right, then middle left etc… sometimes this is easy and they give you big virtual buttons. However sometimes you end up missing and doing something else entirely. With the Blackberry you work with the trackball, click wheel or with their new touchpad. Your thumb stays pretty much in one place and your phone stays stable in your hand the entire time.

2. Multi Tasking (run in background)
I am a multi-tasker. I get that Apple doesn’t want you to run more than one program at a time because it is a battery and memory killer, but I should be able to decide that for myself. I need to kill my battery sometimes in order to get things done. That is what spare batteries, chargers and pods are for. I want to be able to leave something and have it continue to do what it was doing while I jump over and snag something else. iPhone quite simply refuses to do that with anything other than the phone, sms and ipod.

1. The Message List
On the iPhone if you want to go and see if you have a message (voicemail, email, sms, mms, instant message etc…) you hit the home button to wake it, swipe to unlock it and then see what you’ve got to check. If you have a voicemail, it is a tap to get into the phone app, a tap to get to the voicemail and then a tap to get to the single voicemail you want to listen to… not too bad right? But then when you want to go and see your emails or text messages or even your instant messages you have to go back to the home screen and work your way into each of the programs individually for each type. If you are someone who gets contacted as frequently as I do, you just can’t keep up with it all. What would often happen is someone would call me, start to leave a message, hang up, decide to write me an email, send it and then follow up with a text message. On an iphone these are spread out into 3 categories. On a blackberry they all go into the message list and you can see a concise view. Oh! they called first and then texted and emailed. Well no reason to listen to that voicemail then because they emailed me that this is a written version. Blackberry’s message list rocks.

So there we are. I love Blackberry and working with one has felt like such a relief. It is a homecoming of sorts. I am pretty sure now that even if Blackberry doesn’t do anything to improve their phones from here on out that they just work better for me. No offence iPhone… you sure were pretty.