I recently got the Google redirect virus on my laptop. No anti-virus / anti-spyware program I found solved the problem. Neither did manually deleting entries with Hijackthis. Eventually I found a really easy solution that worked to fix the redirect virus. I simply went here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318378

This reinstalls all the Internet Explorer defaults and since then I’ve had no redirects in Google. There are so many unhelpful threads on how to fix this virus out there with no clear solution. Hopefully this works for many people who find my website. If this has helped you please feel free to leave a comment!

So the last few months have been a fairly interesting test as to whether it’s possible to gain strength while cutting. In the middle of May I weighed 191 pounds after getting back from a trip to Santa Monica. I decided it was time to start cutting for the summer, turns out I started this way too late since it’s now the end of August and I still have a little bit of fat to lose! In a little over 3 months I’ve gone from 191-177. I was very afraid that I would lose a lot of the strength gains I’ve made, but i’ve manged to actually gain some strength on my lifts:

Squat: 225×5 —– 240×5 = +15 pounds
Bench: 175×5 —– 175×5 = +0 pounds
Overhead Press: 122.5×5 —– 120×5 = -2.5 pounds
Deadlift: 275×5 —– 335×5 = +60 pounds
Powerclean: 145×3 —– 155×3 = +10 pounds

The only lift that’s gone down is the overhead press, and only by 2.5 pounds. Bench press has completely stalled out but that’s totally fine with me since I’ve gone from being able to bench my body weight only once to being able to bench it almost 5 times. The deadlift progress has been very steady, I just put 5 pounds more on the bar every workout and it goes up. I’m pretty sure my body is built perfectly for deadlifting though, I have really long arms and the leg/torso ratio is perfect too. This may be one of the reasons why my progress has continued despite the weight loss.

One thing I will say is that I haven’t been super aggressive about cutting. I eat whenever I’m hungry but I’m eating super clean and making every calorie count. For someone with poor food chioces or who wants to drop weight really fast I think losing strength is inevitable when cutting. Basically my diet consists of fruits, vegetables, meat, beans, nuts and whole grains.

I’m not really cutting or bulking at the moment. I think it doesn’t even matter which one I do at this point. I want to put on a lot more muscle and probably need to lose 10 pounds more to get really shredded. I’ve decided to just eat as healthy as possible and not pay attention to the total calories. Whether I lose fat or gain muscle it’s part of my long term goals anyways. If I reach a point where I have no more fat to lose I’ll make sure I put my body in a surplus situation, but at this point that’s not the case.

Back in early April I traded some Pokerstars money for Paypal money with a guy who I met through a friend online. I honestly didn’t even want to do it at the time, my bankroll was kinda low online, but the guy was basically begging me to do it. Anyways, I ended up sending up $386 over the course of a few weeks and he always sent me Paypal money before I’d send it to him on Stars. Everything seemed fine until June when I got chargeback notices from Paypal. Apparently this guy called up his credit card company and disputed the charges.

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he made a mistake. I was pretty nice and patient with the guy throughout the process, even though I knew he probably did it deliberately. Also, I thought I had a real chance to win the chargeback disputes, since I had facebook messages from the guy admitting to me that he recognized the charges, and I used that as evidence.

Well about a week ago I got the final verdict. His bank decided I didn’t have enough evidence to prove my case. Obviously I was furious, I honestly didn’t even know why I thought I’d win a chargeback dispute. It is well known in the credit card industry that the seller NEVER wins a dispute, since it is decided by the customer’s bank. This is total bullshit, of course they are gonna favor their customer.

Anyways I sent this guy 1 last message giving him a chance to send me the money he owes me. Of course that never happened. Since this guy is a college student, I decided it was a good idea to give his parents a call, maybe they’d talk some sense into their son. Well not only were they unhelpful, they were downright hostile. I was very agreeable the whole phone call too, never said anything bad about their son or anything. His mother actually said to me “What kind of person sends money to someone to gamble with”.. I was absolutely stunned. Her son just scammed me out of $386 (and $180 in chargeback fees), and she thinks I’M doing something wrong when her son begged me to send him money on Pokerstars. Talk about being in denial about the situation. Anyways they told me they would talk to their son about it, and it seemed that it was actually their credit card he used to send me this money.

So I called them back tonight and talked to his father who basically told me that I wasn’t getting any money from them and to stop calling them. He then hung up on me. I understand that they want to support their child over a complete stranger, but I’m not sure what kind of people teach their kids that it’s ok to steal from someone. He also said that they never got the money back from their credit card company, which is a complete lie. I called Paypal twice to verify that they had won the chargeback.

I looked into filiing a lawsuit, but just the filing fee is $125 (and I’m only owed $563). If I decide to go that route, I’m gonna go for the throat and sue their bank for credit card fraud along with them. I sent them pretty clear evidence, and they just decided in the favor of their customer. That’s just not fair, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. If I do this lawsuit, it’s gonna be a pretty big thing, I’ll likely sue the bank for punitive damages that will probably amount to something in the 6 figures. I want headlines and all that kind of jazz, so as to get this issue out in the open. It’ll be a big project and I’ve been quite busy lately so I’m not sure I’ll have the time for that.

In the meantime, I’ve registered a website in the guy’s name and plan on posting the story of how he screwed me out of the money, along with all the evidence. I’ll use some SEO techniques to get this site to the top of the search engines when someone googles his name, that way other people won’t be scammed by him. Also, employers and such should know what kind of person they’re dealing with before hiring him. I’m also looking into getting a list of email addresses at his school, which shouldn’t be too hard given my skills. Then I’ll email anyone I can find who works there with the story.

Internet justice FTW.

So as a chess player I’ve been following these matches since they started last week. I have to say that I’m really disappointed and almost every match so far has come down to a blitz crapshoot. Grischuk is known to be a good blitz player, and his strategy so far has been to draw every classical game and hope to win in the random blitz games. So far his strategy has been very successful, as he’s been able to beat both Aronian and Kramnik, who were probably the 2 biggest favorites coming into the matches. Still, the way he’s playing these matches is almost disrespectful and shows how stupid the format really is.

I mean the whole goal of these candidate matches is to find the strongest player in the world other than the current world champion, Vishy Anand. I don’t think anyone would say that Grischuk or Gelfand is the strongest player in the world other than Anand. Honestly, both are 2nd tier GMs who have absolutely no shot at beating Anand in a match. Already the World Championship is a joke and we don’t even know who is gonna be in it.  We’d be better off just selecting the highest rated player in the world other than Anand and let them play for the world championship.

The way these candidate matches have gone makes Magnus Carlsen look like a genius. He was able to foresee how retarded these matches would be and refused to be a part of it. I don’t understand why FIDE couldn’t just make these matches 12 games long instead of 4. I’m sure all the players would be for it, except maybe the ones who suck, since they want to add as much variance/randomness to the result as possible. But who cares about them, we don’t want them to win anyways.

Anyways the whole thing is a huge disappointement, especially compared to the last World Championship match where we had Topalov and Anand fighting it out. I doubt I’ll be following the remainder of this World Championship cycle very closely. I hope somebody taps me on the shoulder in a couple years when the next cycle comes around so I can start following chess again.

I was benching at the gym tonight and on the last rep of my 2nd work set I pulled a muscle in my neck. Right now it reminds me of when you sleep the wrong way and wake up and have trouble moving your neck a certain way. Also my right shoulder was pretty achy after benching. I was supposed to do dips and power cleans today but I just called the rest of the workout off. Whenever I encounter any kind of small injury I like to pay attention to my body and make sure not to injure it more.

I think the small injuries are actually correlated to me not eating much the last week, as I’m attempting to lose some fat. Unfortunately, restricting calories reduces the body’s ability to repair muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc.  So you end up being more injury prone. At this point I either need to lower the volume  or up the calories back to a surpus. I haven’t decided what the best course of action is, I always seem to find reasons to avoid cutting, so I kind of feel a bit guilty eating like a pig again just because I tweaked my neck a little bit.