August 11, 2006
41 responses to International Bloggers’ RAW and Natural Open Virtual Powerlifting Meet… anyone?
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Under the Bar is 20 years, 11 months and 11 days old with 462 posts, 329 photos, 108 video clips (363 M worth) and a bunch of comments.
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E-mail: kris@tsampa.org
August 12th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Definitely - see comment on previous post.
August 12th, 2006 at 5:25 am
I might do it, depends on what meets i have at the time. I would definately judge for you though.
August 12th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Scott and Stinn, excellent!!! Unless it was clear from above, I’m definitively in as a lifter as well. So we have representatives from Australia, Canada and Finland thus far.
August 12th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Name the day, and I’m in. Sounds like fun.
August 13th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
I’d be up for it as well. Just pick a day that we’re shooting for and I’ll see what I can come up with.
August 13th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
Right on folks! Måns also mentioned he’d be in, so we are currently five or six lifters and one or zero judges depending on in what capacity Stinn will be participating. Since nobody has suggested a suitable date, any objections against the weekend of February 9th-11th? The idea is that everyone can pick one of those dates (Friday through Sunday) according to what suits them best, but the selected date must be announced to the meet organizer (me) at least three weeks beforehand. Like a real meet, you can’t waiver, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Seems like we got the meet, but we could use at least one more judge and there’s definitively room for more lifters.
I suspect there will be at least a few more as the word spreads. I’ll put up somekind of meet page in September and we can then settle the nitty-gritties.
August 14th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
I’m in. Send me an email when you want to do it: [e-mail removed to protect against spam bots]
August 14th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Gords, very happy to hear that. I saved your e-mail and removed it from the comment to keep it from being harvested by spam bots. Will keep in touch.
August 15th, 2006 at 1:12 am
Count me in. Sounds like fun.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
This is going to be a blast. February sounds good. Gives us time to get prepared…I may move in that time span, but we’ll see how it all works out in the end.
August 15th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Chris D., from the looks of it, this is indeed turning into something else - I went ahead and registered virtualmeet.net to give this thing a proper playground (up sometime in September). Time is definitively a good thing; at least in my case, it will force me to start thinking in bigger circles and planning ahead to where I want to be come meet time. You guessed it, it is time for the dreaded diet… BTW, are you looking at a long-range move?
Jamie, really good to have you join the fun!! I am much pleased with the general spirit, good to see people of so many different levels from so many different places rub shoulders together. I for one am really getting motivated to push for new PRs… What else can one do?
August 16th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Well, since you asked, we could give the winner a complementary block of chalk..?
August 16th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Unless we get a sponsor, this one is for guts and glory. I don’t want anyone to be lured into this by the huge imaginary price money that will be awarded.
August 17th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Hi Kris!
I am a beginner (just started last April, can I join? If I am allowed to join then you now have a representative from Asia, the Philippines to be exact. I greatly enjoy Under the Bar especially the videos.
August 17th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Hi Erick! I would be most delighted if you are able to join in on the fun! There will be plenty of people who have never done a meet, real or virtual, so you will definitively not be alone in this adventure. For the majority of us, winning is not an option, but getting a lot of experience and perhaps breaking some personal records definitively is. Could you send me an e-mail with your e-mail address so that I can contact you if needed? I have contacts for all the others so far.
If Stinn is in, that makes for one Australian, three Americans, two Canadians, one Filipino and two Finns. Nine lifters so far, more welcome.
August 18th, 2006 at 6:23 am
I could definitely learn a lot from you guys. My email address is [removed to protect against spam bots].
August 18th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Thanks, saved your e-mail and removed it from your post. Best of luck with your training!
August 20th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Jon of Powerliftingwatch.com graciously mentioned this meet, going to be interesting to see what happens when the word spreads. One commenter guessed there might be like 300 lifters, but wait and see. If that happens there are ways to adjust for it, but not without a proportionate amount of judges.
August 21st, 2006 at 9:08 am
A quick thought : there are going to be large numbers of video clips (and associated files) produced for this. If you’re looking for mirror servers, I’ll happily offer mine.
August 21st, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Thanks for the offer, I’ll keep that in mind. From a technical standpoint, this will be a walk in the park for the server, but one benefit of possible mirroring would of course be spreading the files geographically to provide faster downloads. Where in the world is your server? Mine is in Texas of all places, I used to actually have it in Columbus, Ohio - really good connectivity from Westside Barbell Club… purely incidental though. I wouldn’t mind having a Europe based server, but the deals you can get on dedicated hosting in the States are just that much more favorable.
August 21st, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Speaking of clips:
Then again, we might not.
Kris, I think it might be wise to limit the maximum size of the file… To say, 3 MB..? That should also make the downloads a bit faster and easier.
Otherwise, some of us might enter with full-screen dvd-quality clips.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I’m in. Give me a date and I’ll tape some clips. I usually post my vids on putfile here, http://www.putfile.com/mjc1021, where would you post them?
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Welcome, Mike!
Since there seems to be no objections to the date, you can pick one of February 9th, 10th or 11th as your meet day. I will be putting up a website for the meet in September at virtualmeet.net, which is also where the edited meet video will be posted for public download after the meet. Once the site is up, everyone can formally register for the meet over there and preliminary select the date they will be lifting on.
Måns, been thinking about file size limits, but if there is one, it must be much higher than 3MB per clip. Ideally, it should be enough to just submit whatever raw footage your equipment spits out without having to worry about video compression. That said, DVD quality (MPEG-2) video clocks in at between 25-40MB per minute depending on encoding, so at an estimated 1 minute per lift this would amount to between 250MB and 400MB for one lifter’s nine clips. On paper, I can handle more than a hundred lifters submitting this kind of quality, but perhaps it would still be prudent to recommend that happy DVD camcorder owners run their stuff through some kind of easy-to-use compression utility. The resulting video will not be DVD-quality, so submitting this kind of quality is pretty pointless per se.
August 24th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Kris, I’m still UK-based, but should be moving shortly to something a little more local.
August 25th, 2006 at 8:28 am
Forgot to ask - Kris, who’s currently looking after your server, and are you happy with them?
August 25th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Currently with Layered Technologies. If you check them up online you will find people both vehemently for and against them. I’ve had my share of problems with them, including having to have my OS reinstalled thrice before they got the RAID-1 with custom partitioning scheme I asked for right and having my server accidentally rebooted, but their machines are good at a great price. In short: the quality and response time of their tech support varies a lot from great to really bad - fairly typical of budget hosting companies - but if you are comfortable with managing a dedicated server from the command line and can deal with all aspects of it yourself LayeredTech is a good place to be. The host in Columbus was XLHost, another budget outfit, but their support was really bad so left quickly, hope they’ve cleaned up their act since. XLHost had a really good network though.
August 25th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Hey Man,
Did you stop training? Start Posting !
:)
August 26th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
That’s the spirit right there!
August 27th, 2006 at 3:11 am
just noticed this…..god i sleep too much, i will be in regardless of training cycle (will have to figure out a “video-ing” avenue), sound’s like an awesome idea, and undertaking!!!, btw, like Mike said on his blog, you have got to have one of the best blogs on here…Here’s to getting stronger!!!
August 27th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Much honored to get you onboard Chris! It’s great to see that this thing attractes advanced lifters as well, Mike mentions going for some pretty nice numbers (650/455/700) without peaking. We’re now up to ten or eleven lifters depending on Stinn.
August 27th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Interesting indeed… This could well turn out to be quite a big thing right here…
I mean if this keeps up, there should be quite a few lifters on board come February.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
I’d be very interested in trying this. There are a couple of real meets in Nov 2006 and Feb 2007 that I’m interested in, but this sort of thing could be good prep.
I’ve been stagnant for a while and a challenge of this sort might be just the thing to kick me in the pants.
These days I’m good for around 160-115-210@90kg raw.
September 12th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
I like the sound of that Helgi, not shabby numbers. You sure deadlift like an Icelander.
I’ve begun piecing together the site for this project, once that is done we will see how many more feels an urge to get a good kick in the pantalones. Helgi, drop me an e-mail and I’ll let you know when the site is up.
While at it, anyone out there have any preference as to which relative strength formula we use? It has to support gender (male/female) and masters (40 years old+) in addition to bodyweight. This narrows it down to Schwartz/Malone, Reshel, Wilks and Glossbrenner out of which I suggest going with either of the last two. On paper, Glossbrenner would seem to correct some of the bias towards heavier lifters Wilks has while being the new kid on the block, but really, I am happy with either. I would really like to go with NASA since it has been developed with natural lifters in mind, but it has no gender coefficients. Anyone?
September 12th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
I would, but I can’t find your address anywhere.
Would kris AT tsampa DOT org work?
September 12th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Yup, that’s it. I should probably increase the visibility of my e-mail, it’s currently down at the bottom of every page.
September 12th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Ah thanks, I didn’t see it. People are getting very paranoid about publishing their addresses in machine readable form. How do you avoid this blog being spammed?
September 12th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
The simple answer is comment preview. I haven’t had a single robot submitted spam since. Some day the bots will catch up, but till then I feel this is the ideal solution, much nicer than having to punch in some verification code or having to moderate every single comment.
Regarding my e-mail, I really don’t like having it as an image. As you perhaps found out you can’t just do a quick page search for it. I also had an incident with a blind guy who wanted to contact me regarding my Tibetan software, but naturally his screen reader couldn’t get any ink out of the image. He finally found it in the readme file. I also imagine a lot of people trying to copy and paste it at first and then cursing when having to spell it out (what is this tsampa anyway#?@@!!!!!). Come to think of it, this is not the cowardly stance I want to take. Never mind the bots, my e-mail is now in plain text throughout the site. My spam filters are hungry, yummy yummy spam spam??
September 14th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Kris - Just getting back to a comment you had posted. yeah I am looking for a long term move. We are currently in Iowa, which isn’t near any relatives, so we want to get back west. Currently we’re looking at Idaho and the surrounding areas (family lives in Montana).
September 14th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
I should also mention that I can provide some hosting as well. In addition if you need some programming help let me know.
September 14th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Chris D., from one I to another, eh? Relatives seem to get more important the older you get. From time to time, we’ve tossed around the idea of relocating up north, but the increased distance to our closest relatives keeps haunting us as THE drawback. Rufus having his grandparents relatively speaking just around the corner is an immense richness (not to mention resource when tired parents need to go out for a movie…). This is speaking from the perspective of just moving a few hours away; I can definitively relate to how it must feel to be even further apart, your country being on the larger side and all. Best of luck with that! Have you already looked up good gyms in Idaho…?
Also, I much appreciate your offer. If this thing blows out of hand in terms of numbers of lifters I might take you and Scott up on your hosting offers to distribute a bit of the load, but so far I am working from the assumption that my current server setup will be able to take it in stride. I’m going to use a forum with carefully selected rights to take care of meet registration, announcements and such - thus far the site is quite lightweight from a programming standpoint. I’m also reusing a lot of code that I’ve developed in the past for stuff like templating, so I’m good right now. I’ll definitively keep your programming offer in mind if I come up with some crazy write-your-own-meet-backend kind of scheme…
September 15th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Yeah from one I to another. Well that is if I can find anything in Idaho.
As for gyms in Idaho I know there are a bunch…I know of a ton of strongmen that lift there so I’ll get in touch with them if it looks like the move is going to happen. I can always lift with my brother, but I think he’s more into the bodybuilding mode than lifting heavy stuff…despite the fact that he lifts more than me (ugh…).
Looking forward to this meet!