Two months into Crossfit

Hey

Today I wanted to share with you my experience training Crossfit.

I did weightlifting for a long time, but it started to become a pain in the ass to go to the gym, it was so
boring I wanted to go home as soon as I crossed the door.
So I decided to take a break for a month, after that month I came back, and guess what? I just got as
bored as before, so I decided to quit.

I knew I had to do something for my body, but I didn't know what, and it was then when I found out
about Crossfit.
Being the information consuming machine I am, I started reading all I could find about it, and
discovered that there is people who absolutely love it and people who absolutely hate it.

People who hate it says its because Crossfiters forget about form just to get more repetitions, that
they push their bodies to unhealthy extremes and that because of that injury risk is bigger.

Choosing the right Box (Gym), knowing your body and training thoughtfully you can avoid all those
problems and enjoy the results of training in "Constantly varied, functional movements, performed at
high intensity in order to increase work capacity over broad time and modal domains".

Most Boxes offer a free one week trial, so I took it.
My first day I was gladly surprised by how welcoming and cohesive the group was, I found the "Box
rules" most of them were funny, but I remember one saying "If your partner faints or vomit, don't 
worry, he is just resting", and then there was a big sign saying "Leave your ego at the door".

After stretching, the professor explained the WOD (Workout Of the Day) that are the exercises we
are going to do that day, the WOD changes everyday and you never know it until you get into the
box, and usually last between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on the specific WOD and your fitness
level.

Usually in a WOD you do an exercise and when the involved muscles are so tired you need to rest
you move to a different exercise, that way the muscles can recover but you cardiorespiratory system
doesn't.

Check this short video to see what a WOD is about:



In my first week of training I was feeling dizzy in the middle of the WODs, other times it felt like I
was training with a plastic bag in my head, even as I breathed through my mouth and nose it seemed
that the incoming air couldn't provide all oxygen my body needed.

Two months later it's the same LOL, well kinda...

The big difference is that I noticed my cardio improved a lot, also my strength, as I started doing the
exercises with more weight and started training 4 days a week instead of just 2 and my beer fueled
belly started to disappear even as I gained 4 lbs, probably muscle mass.

But the idea of Crossfit is to take your body to YOUR limit every WOD, so even as you get better
and stronger if you push yourself you'll find you run out of breath and go to failure in the lasts reps.

Also, besides training your body you'll train your mind, it's hard to continue when it screams you to
stop, your muscles hurt, your lungs beg for oxygen and your heart beats like a machine gun going
cyclic, only being focused in accomplishing your goals will allow you to finish.

Crossfit isn't for everyone, you need an special  personality type to survive it, but the results you can
appreciate in your body and mind are well worth the price.

Patriot Dawn: Free Kindle Download – Sat/Sun Nov 23/24

http://amzn.com/B00AYPQTVK

‘Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises’ will be available for FREE download on Kindle this weekend
November 23/24.

In this novel you can see applied the concepts you can learn in ‘Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post
Collapse Survival.


Also don't forget to check Max Velocity awesome blog at: http://maxvelocitytactical.com/blog/

Book synopsis:

The United States has descended into Civil War. The storm was rising for some time, a Resistance in 
the hearts of American Patriots to the strangulation of liberty by creeping authoritarianism. The 
scene was set. It just took a little push. A terrorist attack on the United States leads to war with Iran, 
followed by collapse, as the economy goes over the cliff. The final blow is a widespread opportunistic 
Chinese cyber attack, taking down the North American Power Grid. From the ashes, the Regime 
emerges. Liberty is dead. What remains of the United States of America is polarized. The Resistance 
Rises. Jack Berenger is a former Army Ranger Captain, living in northern Virginia with his family. 
Following the collapse, they fall foul of Regime violence and evacuate to the farm of an old Army 
friend. Jack is recruited into the resistance, to train the fledgling forces in the Shenandoah Valley. 

The fight begins. 
Live hard, Die Free. Resist.

Introduction to Bitcoin

Hey guys

Lately everyone talks about Bitcoins but not many really understand what a Bitcoin is, and I don't
mean the inner workings that are way too complicated dealing with mathematics and cryptography,
but their simple usage or understanding about the implications of such system.

At bitcointalk.org there is an excellent intro to what Bitcoin is that I wanted to share with you

Introduction to Bitcoin

Forget most things you've heard.  

People discover Bitcoin in a variety of ways, but usually pick up some sort of misconception like 
"Bitcoin gives free money to people with computers" or "in order to use Bitcoin I have to use a 
program that wastes electricity for nothing" along the way.  Here is a good summary to help you 
understand Bitcoin in general, by focusing on what Bitcoin is and what problem it solves.  
These two things are not typically well explained on most websites, and it is difficult to appreciate 
just how effective a technology Bitcoin is until they are understood.

What Bitcoin is:  

An agreement amongst a community of people to use 21 million secure  mathematical 
tokens--"bitcoins"--as money, like traditional African and Asian societies used the
money cowry.  

Unlike the money cowry:

• there will never be more bitcoins
• they are impossible to counterfeit
• they can be divided into as small of pieces as you want
• and they can be transferred instantly across great distances via a digital connection such as the internet.

This is accomplished by the use of powerful cryptography many times stronger than that used by 
banks.  Instead of simply being "sent" coins have to be cryptographically signed over from one entity 
to another, essentially putting a lock and key on each token so that bitcoins can be securely backed up 
in multiple places, and so that copying doesn't increase the amount you own.

Because bitcoins are given their value by the community, they don't need to be accepted by anyone
else or backed by any authority to succeed.  They are like a local currency except much, much more
effective and local to the whole world.  As an example of how effective the community is at "backing" 
the bitcoin: on April 4th 2011 30,000 bitcoins were abruptly sold on the largest Bitcoin exchange, 
consuming nearly all "buy" offers on the order book and dropping the price by nearly 1/3.  But within 
a couple of days, the price on the exchange had fully rebounded and bitcoins were again trading at 
good volumes, with large "buy" offers slowly replacing the ones consumed by the trades.  The ability 
of such a small economy (there were only 5 million out of the total 21 million bitcoins circulating 
then, or about 3.75 million USD worth at then-current exchange rates) to absorb such a large sell-off 
without crashing shows that bitcoins were already working beautifully.


What problem Bitcoin solves:  

Mathematically, the specific implementation of the bitcoin protocol solves the problem of "how to do 
all of the above without trusting anyone".  If that sounds amazing, it should!  Normally a local 
currency has to trust all kinds of people for it to be able to work.  So does a national currency.  And 
in both cases, that trust is often abused.  But with Bitcoin, there's no one person who can abuse the 
system.  Nobody can print more money, nobody can re-use the coins simply by making a copy, and 
nobody can use anyone else's coins without having direct access to their keys. 
 People who break its mathematical "rules" simply end up creating a whole different system 
incompatible with the first.  As long as these rules are followed by someone, the only way Bitcoin can 
fail is for everyone to stop using it.


This marvelous quality of not having to trust anyone is achieved in two ways.  First, through the use 
of cutting-edge cryptography.  Cryptography ensures that only the owner of the bitcoins has the 
 authority to spend them.  The cryptography used in Bitcoin is so strong that all the world's online 
banking would be compromised before Bitcoin would be, and it can even be upgraded if that were to 
start to happen.  It's like if each banknote in your pocket had a 100-digit combination lock on it that 
couldn't be removed without destroying the bill itself.  Bitcoin is that secure.

But the second way of securing the system, called the blockchain, is where the real magic happens. 
 The blockchain is a single, authoritative record of confirmed transactions which is stored on the 
peer to peer Bitcoin network.  Even with top-notch digital encryption, if there was no central registry 
to show that certain bitcoins had already been "paid" to someone else, you could sign over the same 
coins to multiple people in what's called a double-spend attack, like writing cheques for more money 
than you have in your account.  Normally this is prevented by a central authority, the bank, who 
keeps track of all the cheques you write and makes sure they don't exceed the amount of money you 
have.  Even so, most people won't accept a cheque from you unless they really trust you, and the bank 
has to spend a lot of money physically protecting those central records, whether they are kept in a 
physical or digital form.  Not to mention, sometimes a bank employee can abuse their position of 
trust.  And, in traditional banking, the bank itself doesn't have to follow the rules you do--it can lend 
out more money than it actually has.

The blockchain fixes all these problems by creating a single master registry of the already-
cryptographically-secured bitcoin transfers, verifying them and locking them down in a highly 
competitive market called mining.  In return for this critical role, the Bitcoin community rewards 
miners with a set amount of bitcoins per block, taken from the original limited quantity on a 
pre-agreed schedule.  As that original amount gradually runs out, this reward will be replaced by fees 
paid to prioritise one transaction over another--again in a highly competitive market to ensure the 
lowest possible cost.  The transactions are verified and locked in by the computational work of 
 mining in a very special way so that no one else can change the official record of transactions 
without doing more computational work than the cumulative work of all miners across the whole 
network.

In conclusion:  

All this mathematical technology may be a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice is that 
Bitcoin works just like cash.  Bitcoin transactions are intentionally irreversible--unlike credit cards 
or PayPal where chargebacks can invalidate a payment that has already been made.  And there are 
no middlemen.  Transactions are completed directly between the sender and the receiver via the peer 
to peer network.

Because of Bitcoin's intricate design, the network remains secure no matter where or how you 
process Bitcoin transactions.  Which is incredible--no one else has ever tried to create a system that 
worked this way!  All previous monetary systems have relied on trusting somebody, whether it was 
the king, town hall, the federal reserve, or banks.  Bitcoin doesn't.  It's guaranteed instead by the laws
of  mathematics, and that's why it has everyone from technologists to economists very excited.  I'm 
sure you have lots more questions, so scan the index below to see if they've been asked before, then 
dive in!  The so-called "canonical" threads linked from this index are considered newbie-friendly 
zones;  outside of them you're welcome to try your own luck.

And if you want to immerse yourself into the mysteries of Bitcoin and his creator 'Satoshi Nakamoto'
you can read this awesome research blog called Bitslog.

Also you can check the original paper at: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

For the tl;dr; kind of guys, you can watch the following video, but you'll get just a bare idea of what it is all about.

Security: A resistance manual by Sam Culper Review

Hey guys

If you read Mosby's blog probably you already know Sam Culper from http://guerrillamerica.com/
a blog dealing with Intelligence Collection and Analysis oriented to prepper, resistance, III% kind
of folks.

Sam for sure knows what he is talking about and you can appreciate that both in his blog as in
"Security: A Resistance Manual" the e-book he wrote and I'm reviewing in this post.

"Security: A Resistance Manual" is an excellent primer on the techniques and procedures that will
allow a resistance to operate and communicate securely under the constant watch of Big Brother.

Topics covered in the book include communications security (COMSEC), information security
(INFOSEC), personnel security (PERSEC) and operations security (OPSEC).

Good thing is that the e-book goes straight to the point  and in every chapter you'll find tips or
actions you can take easily to improve your group security, also the book is explained in layman
terms, so you don't need to be a tech savvy guy to understand what Sam is talking about.

But don't get me wrong, even people with knowledge in COMSEC/INFOSEC will find gold nuggets
in this e-book, and new stuff to research and experiment.

Sam also provides a list of useful links to continue learning about the different subjects covered, and
even better, he provides his awesome blog whose content complements perfectly this e-book.

Solid stuff Sam, thanks a lot for the awesome e-book, the only con I found is that is short and leaves
you wanting more, but well, we have the blog to satisfy that :D

You can buy your copy at: http://iiimagazine.com/?product=iii-security-manual-pre-order

And visit Sam's blog at: http://guerrillamerica.com/

EDIT: Sam contacted me and told me that he is working on an extended version of the e-book that
will be twice as long, and also all the people who already bought the first version will get the
extended version for FREE.