I’ve mostly avoided looking at this for years. I assumed the neglect would make me feel bad. But I enjoyed paging through a few of the things I’ve written. And since social media seems to be a disaster lately but I still want an outlet for this sort of self-indulgent stuff I think I’ll try using this again.

Heck maybe I’ll even fire up an RSS reader too. I used to really enjoy the Internet.

Wonder if Alli & Ash will help me by updating the logo and making some other drawings.

Alli doodled the drawing to the left in about 30 seconds to try out my new pencil and iPad. She didn’t give me permission to post it but hopefully she won’t mind.

See what I did there with the bold.

We do things, we make decisions and choices without even considering the options.  Our subconscious not only can provide us with important facts, like all the words to the closing song of Gilligan’s Island, it also will bring up complex thoughts like the results of thinking or provide a course of action.  Don’t believe me?  Think of the last time you drove a car somewhere and had one of those realizations like, “Holy crap I’m driving a car and not paying attention to where I am or where I’m going!  How did I make it this far?”

Learning anything requires repetition, so does unlearning.  But before you start training yourself what you want to do, like Zippity the Zebra in Man vs. Beast you have to “realize it’s a race.”  The key there is to set yourself a standing order to notice when you do some physical thing . Go on, put that subconscious to work for you noticing you taking the phone out, or eating that 28th cookie.

Now you are at that crossroads, where you make the choice.  The thing you’ve done at up until this point over the last 87 times this choice came up, the thing you decided you wanted to change for some reason, will seem very compelling.  It may even seem crazy that you ever wanted to or could change.  Here is where you will need to have thought out the good reasons for why you will change, to overrule the habit and emotional response that is tied into taking that habitual action.  What you want to do here is put yourself in the right frame of mind to realize, that, yes there are actually other things you might want to do besides restock the floors in Tiny Tower.

The way I recently learned and am trying to do that is to have a nice little slogan, “WWID?”  This means, “What Would I Do? Where I, is me heroically taking into account my full hierarchy of values.”  This is a pretty general mindset, depending on the particular habit I’m trying to change I may just focus in on that one for a few weeks and have a different slogan to recall in my time of need.

So in summary, I plan to take certain things I don’t want to do anymore and notice when I’m doing them so I can wake myself up enough to know, “it’s time to make a choice,” and then put myself in a heroic frame of mind to make that choice.

I had initially planned an update every 9 days since it just happened that I was 108 days out from my goal when I started and being a geek I couldn’t help but see the evenly divided intervals.  But, alas, I have missed not only 99 days but also 90.  We now stand 86 days from my goal and this is my first update.

So from an eating perspective it’s been easy, I’ve been able to avoid all but a very small taste of sweets and all but a very small amount of grains.

I think it was easy because before starting I made an effort to pay attention to how crappy I felt.  How I was tired and always lacking something trying to find it in sugary snacks or in caffeine laden beverages.

And—I think this was stronger motivation—I also made an effort to actually imagine two alternate futures.  One where I now took responsibility for my health and one where I continued to drift eating and acting based on whim or emotion.

The first was me in 20 years, strong and healthy working with my daughters on some sort of outdoor project, maybe helping them build a new garden or shed in one of their homes, but here I was a man of 55 (the same age as my father when he died) doing hard physical work with my shirt off and not inappropriately.  Feeling temporarily winded from a recent extreme exertion and resting for a moment, taking a deep breath and feeling the exhilaration of being alive and reshaping existence to my will and paying with my effort.  And I was just at that moment before I plunge back in and continue at a hard task that will still take another hour or so after which I will enjoy a restful afternoon with good food and surrounded by loved ones.

The second I don’t like to think about, but I do anyway.  It was me in 20 years.  I can’t really picture myself like I can in the first vision, but I am able “…to guess by hints, to see everything through the greater intensity of implication."¹ And in this case I am looking out.  I see myself in the sterile hospital environment.  I am uncomfortable, I’ve just woken up and have been laying this way for a long time, a few hours, a few weeks? I am just so tired and sore I can barely muster the energy to move.  I finally notice that here again I am surrounded by loved ones.  But this time the looks on their faces are masks of tragedy.  In this imagining I really pictured my daughters as young adults, they were beautiful if they weren’t so sad.  I wanted to tell Allison that nothing could be so tragic as to put such a look on her face, and she tried to smile for me when she saw me awake, but the pity there was worse.  And Ashley never one to attempt to hide her emotions wouldn’t even smile and was barely able to look at me.  I reached out for them with a tremendous effort and saw the tubes snaking around my arms.  And my arms were thin, flabby and pale.  Then I saw Michelle and it the suffering she was obviously trying to hide from me was more than I could bear.

I didn’t bother to fill in details about what particular disease had put me in such a terrible condition.  But to concretize the threats to my future of living a lifestyle where I ignore what I’ve learned about nutrition has helped my motivation tremendously.

I’ve diverged a bit from my original intent of this article into that motivation that has made the choice on what to eat easy.  Now to sum up my update.  My two primary measures of the effectiveness of my health sprint are my weight and how I feel energy wise and general comfort level.

Over the past 18 days I’ve felt great.  I made a great effort to get plenty of sleep, and I can’t remember being better rested.  My energy level has been excellent.  I seem to wake up ready to take on the day and keep a more or less constant energy level until the end of the day when I start to get tired and ready for bed.  My creativity level has been high, and my stress level has been low.  I take surprises and emergencies at work well and have been less defensive when criticized or when I perceived criticism.  Also I’ve been very productive at work and in my personal projects making great strides toward my goals.  Finally I feel stronger.  I’ve been doing pushups occasionally at work and they’ve certainly gotten easier to do.

As far as the scale, well that is the millstone, and the challenge or opportunity.  I’ve only dropped about 2 pounds per the chart software I use.  In the past when I’ve done this I’ve dropped weight more rapidly.

Based on this I am going to tweak my approach in an attempt to speed things up a bit. My plan is:

1. Cut out dairy (I got a milk frother for my birthday and have been enjoying tea lattes so for now that will pause)
2. Go to the gym more often, I am going to target 1 trip every 3 days.

Other than that it’s no sugar, no grains as I stated at the outset.  I anticipate feeling great, stronger and being lighter.  I’ll plan another update in a few days.

Maybe on 81 days to go.

1. Borrowing a short quote from my favorite book of all time The Fountainhead. ↩

That probably needs an explanation. Pomodoro is a time-boxing technique that guides you to do 25 minutes of highly focused activity followed by a short 5 minute break. In the PDF the author suggests it should be a real break from any thinking about work. I found the transition from a hard thinking task to a state of mental relaxation to be very difficult to pull off, my mind–already warmed up to the topic–would wander back to the problem I was working on. So I decided to do a set of push-ups to help me relax.

So far I’ve gotten better at pushups, squats, and sit-ups. Oh, and I’m enjoying my productivity based primarily on the structure to my day. It helps me concretize the idea that I can only do so many things in a day and helps me at the hard task of prioritizing my time. It also helps me measure how long I take at certain tasks. Since I chronically underestimate I welcome the opportunity to improve my judgement.

I was clued into this fact by the various Paleo resources I’ve studied over the past few years particularly Robb Wolf’s, The Paleo Solution.  So I started paying attention to how I functioned on various levels of sleep.  I learned that I was able to think, act and feel much better when I was well rested.  I remember thinking, “Does anyone else know about this? It is actually possible to walk around with nearly super-human ability simply by consistently getting a full night of sleep!”

Now in my defense, I not only attended college but also have two young children and have worked primarily at technology start-ups throughout my career.  So sleep was scarce in my life and somehow I just had to find a way to get things done.

But it’s not super-human, it’s regular-human to sleep when tired, wake up well rested and feel alert and energetic during your days.  A good sign of trouble is you need chemicals to wake up and function at all and at bedtime you can’t figure out how to fall asleep.

So I failed to mention in my initial post on my plan to win at the game of life that one other thing that is going to help me meet my health goals is to get plenty of glorious sleep. You too should get plenty of sleep tonight, you deserve it!

1. Eat no sugar, eat no grains, which means a diet primarily made up of meat and vegetables.
2. Play hard.

That’s really all I have in mind.

I have two other parts of it, but they aren’t primary they are just ways to keep the motivation level high when faced with a stressful day and some tasty sugary grass cake.

I plan to weigh in every day, as it’s something that worked well for me when I starved myself on the Hacker’s Diet.  It’s motivational it ties my high level get healthy goal to a concrete I see every day.  The other part is I plan to write about my progress here.  At a minimum I will write every 9 - 10 days.  So there will be at least 12 posts up here about this.  Probably more at first because I have other stuff to talk about regarding changing habits.  And I’m planning to write more by writing 150 - 400 words at a pop.

Lot’s more to explain including the book Changing for Good, what I mean by play hard, and why do I think grains and sugar will mess me up.

Also along that front I’m thinking I should blog consistently about the things I do and learn while working on the game so it forces me to really solidify my understanding.

I’d also like to really get my health to a better place.  On Saturday Allison’s karate school, East West Karate, had a class for parents of new students to learn a few basics so we can experience some of what they are doing first hand.  It really made me miss my training.  Now I haven’t been to the gym or done any serious workout in months so I’ve been sore now for two days.  But on top of that I’ve gotten the best nights of sleep that I’ve had in recent memory due to actually using my body a bit.

So I’m considering joining their adult classes.  As I’ve already earned a black belt, they would allow me to wear it to their school and help me have an accelerated version of their curriculum.  But I have mixed feelings about that.  I did work hard and earn it, but I am severely out of practice and wouldn’t want to embarrass myself or the school who awarded me my black belt by showing up there next week.  Also I’d want to do it only if I really am sure I’m committed to it.  So I’m thinking I’ll set myself a target of June to get myself into better shape through a concentrated training program at the gym, and probably 2 or 3 days a week run myself through some exercises trying to recall and practice some of the martial arts skill that I had earned through hard work and let slip away.

Also I have plans to attend a Thinking Directions pilot class in New York City on Saturday from noon — 3, and I’m also very excited about that.  I’ll have to see if I know anyone in New York that wants to grab dinner before I catch the NJT back to Trenton.

BIG THINGS COMING YOUR WAY!  WATCH OUT!

It’s in encouraging the push for independence, and growth.

My wife sent me a snapshot of Allison before running her to her first day of pre-school. And I felt quite a strong bit of emotion. I am still not sure if it is reluctance, fear, sadness, joy or all of them pushed together.

Happy first day, Allison!

I figured the way this would happen would be I would make a big pile of money by a few years after college, pay everything off and have enough left over to live off of the spoils of having money, *interest*. Spend about 15 hours a week tracking my investments and the rest of the time enjoying my various hammocks.

How to achieve such a lofty goal. Well what do engineers actually do when they graduate. Many go to industry, they go work for giant engineering farms, where they ripen their young engineers by surrounding them with the color grey and bathing them in fluorescent light. Some pay well, some pay poorly, they all have pretty good benefits. The downside of course is engineers here are resources like the copier or the conference room. They get cataloged, tagged and are called on to do things that are understood to be their bailiwick. There are growth paths here, that involve fighting bureaucracy and red tape and really after 10 - 20 years you could be pulling down a nice paycheck. The problem I noticed when working at $BIG_COMPANY was you don’t really need to excel and many of the big rewards are fairly arbitrary. You could be there 30 years and barely have your job change. Do the same or similar things every day. Sounds like I am describing prison. Anyway I initially chose this route, but as you can see from my description above it just wasn’t for me.

Well what else is there? Graduate school? Two more years, for what another piece of paper, that gets me a nominal raise at $BIG_COMPANY, or the chance to switch to another big company. Will I learn more? yes and no. I will learn more about specific topics, not necessarily things that work in Industry, but certainly things that work in the academic world. I sort of also chose this, when I was at the big company, I started grad school at night. It was… not compelling, hell I was **bored**. I had just finished about 5 years of this, and I was looking at 10 more classes, which quickest possible way to get to the end of that would be 2 and a half most likely 3 years. And it was hard to see how that would get me closer to my goal of the Hammock.

Other options? Start a business. Be my own boss, do what I want. And most important, do something really, really cool! Now this is something that sounds interesting. But how the hell do you do that? Well there are tons of steps involved. Some hard, some boring, some tedious and some deliciously fun. To start a business you need to have an idea, something really clever, something no one has thought of before. Also I am in college and I have a senior design project coming up, where Engineering school does it’s damnedest to simulate the real world. You need to come up with an idea, propose it to someone for approval, do some or all of the work to get at least a prototype working and present it. There are opportunities for funding and opportunities to start a business with that idea after school. Of course there was some stupid rumor or fact that the school has the opportunity to get some percentage of any business arising out of a Sr Design project, which would be fine if they were *letting* me use their resources to help accomplish it. But I was paying dearly for that privilege. But that’s a bit off topic here.

When I was working on ideas for my senior design project, I sought the advice of the professor who wore the most expensive suits and talked the most about entrepreneurship in his classes. It didn’t hurt that he was the incoming IEEE president either, his advice had to be worth the price of admission. While I was focused on coming up with some ground breaking new *thing*. He kept saying that your proposal doesn’t have to be so, unattainable. He kept picking up his pen and saying, something simple, and enhancement to an existing product, for example somehow making this pen better. I left the meeting figuring he had been in the academic life too long and had lost his mind. Why the hell would I improve the ball point pen, when I could do something exciting, like, um, well something more exciting than that, surely. So I continued my search for the **idea**. Finally with deadlines approaching, picked something, but wasn’t terribly jazzed about it.

Over the past 3 years I have slowly come to learn, that the big idea is a myth, if only Ramit could have told me that about 5 years ago, I’d surely have my hammock by now. Of course I would have thought him as a guy who just lost his desire, or was really never going to be the one to come up with the great idea anyway. But really, now, I am finally in what I feel is the right frame of mind to start gaining that freedom. I have learned much in my career, and like every other time in my career, I think I know it all. But I do know more now. And since after a brief stint with a big company I have spent most of my time working at small startups, and learning.

So I think I’ll save my big ideas for any Science Fiction that I eventually get around to writing. And continue to take action on my current general goal

* half.com listings * amazon listings

Generally pretty slim pickings. But maybe there is something that tickles your fancy. Let me know.

I think the main reason I got interested in programming and playing with computers at all was games. I would never have given a second look at my Dad’s TRS-80 if he hadn’t shown me how to load up some game, he acquired from who knows where, with the data cassette drive and start playing.

> You are in a dark cave, there is a hallway to the west, another to the east and a smell > of rotting flesh from the south, you have a pocket knife, and there is a torch on the > floor…. What do you want to do?

I learned BASIC on that thing just so I could try and mimic what the authors of that wonderful game had done, and my love of programming came from video game roots.

Man, I was hooked, from then on I would have trouble with my body weight, because I would prefer to sit in front of the TRS-80, Atari, IBM PC AT, Beltron, Commodore 64, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, N64, PlayStation 2 than do other stuff. I mean sure I played sports, and did all kinds of other stuff, but sometimes it was a battle to pull myself from playing *River City Ransom* one more time, “This time I’ll win without buying the cowboy boots!”

Anyway, since then I have gotten degree’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, have taken numerous programming courses, have done programming professionally, and have always thought of doing game programming, but never had the guts to follow through. Always doing what other people thought was a more viable means of making money. But hell, I have a day job. I get paid that way, if I am going to do side work, that may eventually become a way to get paid, I need to do something I have passion for.

And video games are that passion. So yeah, add me to the list of all the geeky wanna-be’s who tried this. Because I am trying. My goal is to have something playable by the end of September, and hopefully sooner. And yeah I am going to the dark side to do this, because if I do want to eventually make some money on this, I need to maximize that chance. I am going to try and do this in C# with DirectX on windows.

*GASP*! I thought you hated windows?! I thought you were mister Linux. Well I got news for you, to quote a lovable scoundrel, “Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution. … I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for the money.”

So I start today, actually I started about 3 days ago, but I publically start today. So watch this space, for the next revolution in gaming. :)

Anyway I am trying to do something similar but my goals are a lot less aggressive, $2500 by May 1, 2006, from nothing I will miss, so I can go to Mexico for my brother-in-law’s wedding.

I haven’t been able to get much yet, I listed a bunch of stuff on half.com and amazon.com, but haven’t gotten any hits yet, and I have some plans to sell some stuff on ebay to get the process going. I am going to take an initial $20 which is my cash back bonus from my Discover card and apply that to the fund.

This also reminds me of some story from 1st grade about some eels that were given a pearl by their teacher for a summer project. Some of the more industrious eel’s invested theirs and created underwater lemonade stands or casino’s or some other glamorous cartoony venture. One eel buried his in the sand somewhere, and then dug it up for the next year, and not only was he the only jerk who didn’t make a ton of dough, he probably failed the project too. I think it was based on some biblical parable, but I can’t remember what one.

Here’s hoping some hidden marketable talent emerges from no-where so I don’ t have to be the dumb eel.

**Update**: I found the parable. Mathew 25:14-30

See, isn’t this better than a real gift?

Of course I don’t know the knife is in there. And it turns out they don’t either, even though I noticed the TSA worker looking quizically at my USB drive, and checking out my ipod. It wasn’t until I was talking to Michelle a few minutes ago that I noticed the knife while I was looking for my cell phone charger.

Dammit. I have at least 3 more airplanes to get on. And to pass TSA security at least twice more. A knife has to light up like a christmas tree on the XRay machine, otherwise why the hell is the xray machine there. I could check my bag. What a PITA, especially since my original 2 flights and 1 of my subsequent flights were cancelled today. Where would my laptop end up?

So I decide to try the “At your service” line at the Marriot I am staying in. Well they hook it up, a fedex envelope is filled out and set to be shipped back toward my home, for hopefully not too much money. Now I can avoid becoming a mainstay on the terrorist watch list, or avoid further disgust and embarssment as my tax dollars at work to protect the airways continue to miss finding a knife in my bag.

I guess with it being a Friday I will have to read the the joke RFC too. Side note: If you try really really hard to tell a joke and it really is only mildly amusing, does it still count as a joke?

Also I downloaded ipodder last night and grabbed a few podcasts to listen to on the travel to and from work. Mildly interesting, I guess at least as good as some of the commercial radio around here. The only problem is the people tend to not have a very strict agenda and digress into really boring topics or inside jokes, it’s like college radio where all they talk about is how cool it is to be able to communicate over this wonderous medium that is radio. “And here we are voices coming to you through the air, isn’t radio great! I wish everone would do this.”

Although I think an hour long podcast of just the little 5 - 10 second self-promotional rock and roll intros with ominous voiceovers that each caster inevitably makes for themselves would be fun to hear. It would be like just hearing that little segment of the Rob Zombie song Howard uses to launch his show every day, over and over. (Yeah I know, I am the only one driving around at 6 that hears this. But it sounds cool.) Seriously I think most of the people doing podcasting probably wanted to do it, just because they always liked this really cool part of some song wanted to have it as their intro music, much like the WWE wrestlers have, or that episode of the family guy when Peter wished for theme music to follow him around all the time.

“Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus ….”

I wonder if it matters what kind of pen/ink I use, I want to make sure it doesn’t fade too much over the years.

Hopefully it will be arriving in time for me to spend a long weekend playing with it. Excitement abounds.

Anyway, It was not a one time fluke either, reports out of Montgomery County are just in saying the feat was repeated this morning, with authority. There are a bunch of short but very large AVIs of her trying to roll over, on the increasingly growing gallery, the snapshot here is from one of her initial attempts.

The only downside is that I have a new phone number, because I didn’t want to be without service forever while the phone companies sorted out the paper work to get me my old number back from limbo. So if you need to call me, get my new phone number; somehow.

Maybe I should send CavTel my cell phone bill and associated brain tumor also.

Well, I hope you come soon, baby. I’ll save you some orange juice.

• 59 to INBOX
• 373 to the caughtspam folder
• 10 misses
• 0 false alarms

That means I got 7.8 times as much spam as I got messages in my inbox. I am sure there are much greater horror stories out there, but damn, I really am not going to buy a rolex or prescription drugs based on an email that looks like a ransom note, because of all the interspersed mispellings and numbers to try and make it through my filters.

In grading student papers over the weekend, I’ve learned the following:

• It’s not fair to remove a president from office before he finishes a war he’s started.
• The war on Iraq was unjust, the president doesn’t seem qualified, and the facts presented in “Fahrenheit 9/11” are disturbing, but it’s unpatriotic to question the president and wrong to vote against him.
• Gandhi was a “coward and a suck-up” and “soft”
• During the 1960s, “some slavery” was beginning to be abolished.
• Americans never get to hear Bush’s side of the story
• Direct quotes: “you are a liar” (to me), and “Michael Moore can eat *&@!”
• Gandhi is more like a “Care Bear” than Malcolm X
• It’s “fucking awesome” that Bush was a cocaine addict and alcoholic

Those are the building blocks of some fine arguments.

Apparently sunday is Alumni day for the Eagles, so they have this great picture of Chuck Bednarik, after practically destroying Frank Gifford’s insides, on their site.

But if you don’t want to participate in that, at least register to vote in the general election and do it.

PS: don’t ever rent a UHaul using the internet, it is nothing but trouble, they haven’t figured out how to coordinate the reservations and they always end up screwing it up in some manner, hell, they won’t even tell you where or when you will be getting the truck until the day before. You are much better served paging through the phone book and calling your local UHaul locations. They know their own inventory and schedule and will hold the truck for you. They will even attempt to service special requests. The experience may be different for Ryder or Budget, but I had that experience renting a truck three years ago, and my brother and brother-in-law both had similar troubles this year.

Forever isn’t long enough.

Happy Birthday, Madison.

Through the 1920s, booing remained our little secret. There were no outside reporters of the Michael Wilbon ilk to label us America’s nastiest fans. But that all ended when the A’s hosted the St. Louis Cardinals for Game 2 of the World Series on October 2, 1930.

Among the 32,000 fans on hand that sunny afternoon was President Herbert Hoover, looking for a few hours of escape from the gloomy economic news of the time. In those days—despite the Depression and Prohibition—heckling a president was unheard of. But as Hoover’s limousine drove onto the field near third base, the murmurs began. And when Hoover stepped onto the field and tipped his top-hat, the crowd, let loose.

From everywhere in the park the boos came, said Horvitz. I never heard such booing in my life. Then they started yelling, We want beer. It reverberated over the whole park.

Just started reading the book. So far, so good.

The PenCam pictures are in there now as well.

Thanks, Michelle, I love you.

Took a bunch of pics on the way home, to get used to playing with the pencam again.

Check em’ out