One and Done?

I Hit BMI 29.48 this morning which means I met my two week goal in one day. I guess that not actually eating for a day can do that. All I think it did was made it that much harder to reach the next goal. I set an new goal of BMI 29.25 for two weeks from today.

Jim – not quite withering away yet

Restart

Up on time today. I have a feeling I'm going to be tired today, but hopefully that will wear off in a couple days. I got in 30 good min of aerobic exercise. Pre exercise BMI was 29.71 which is better that I thought it would be. I'm pretty sure I got an advantage because of the time of day difference, but at least she didn't call me obese. Set my goal to be under 29.5 in the next two weeks.

Jim - hasn't hit that "more focused in the morning" phase yet.

Inspired

Inspiration can come from some pretty strange places. In this case it came from a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. The strange part of course was that it had nothing to do with software development.

Last Christmas Santa brought our family a Wii balance board. If you haven’t seen one, it is a pretty cool new input device. It is a flat board that sits on the floor, you stand on it and distribute your weight across four pads. Along with being able to weigh things, it allows you to use the balance of your body to play video games. The Balance board comes with a game called "Wii Fit" that is supposed to help you exercise.

I took it all casually at first, knowing that I needed more exercise, and willing to play games. The galvanizing moment came after an initial "weigh-in" when a sweet feminine computerized voice said to me…. "Ooooh that’s obese".

The next day I took the balance board back out of the trashcan and started in earnest to mend my ways. I didn’t really change my diet, beyond eating reasonably, and cutting out sweets and sodas. However over the next 6 weeks the moderate 30-40 min of workout was enabling consistent weight loss. More importantly I was feeling more fit and gaining noticeably more endurance and strength each day.

Then it happened:
A couple bad days at work…. My wife got sick….I cut the exercise out for lack of time.
The cycle was broken and all my old habits started creeping right back in. I was starting to put back on all the weight I had lost.

So how does the Microsoft Developer Evangelist fit in? A week ago today I was at a user group developer meeting. The topic was ASP.NET technologies. It was interesting, although I think it was the same slide deck that I saw the same guy present last fall at a roadshow.

What really caught my attention, was the side story that came up in the casual conversation. Here was someone that was that was going through the same issues that I was, and using the same methods to achieve his goals. It was actually a little spooky, right down to the core reason for taking care of myself. I don’t want to be dead before my kids grow up.

While I’m pretty sure that it is explicitly written somewhere in the Bible that it’s bad form to brag about what you are giving up for Lent, I will say this much, in the hope that it inspires someone else. Typically during lent, I have been cutting out caffeinated sodas. It can be a pretty painful withdraw if you are addicted. However, they aren’t really that good for you and you feel a lot better once the drug is out of your system. Unfortunately, I had already pretty much given soda up at the beginning of the year, and started drinking more plain water, and that habit stuck. Therefore, for lent I am going to pick back up my exercise routine among other things, and borrowing an idea from my new "evangelist" friend, starting tomorrow, and continuing at least until Easter, the alarm is going off at 5am. a.k.a …. 0 dark 30

Jim – was never scared of the dark

Put that tweet down on the TwitterDeck Captain!

It only takes a few minutes with the default twitter interface to realize that this beast can become completely and irrationally unmanageable pretty quick. I looked at several twitter clients and TweetDeck seems pretty good.

TweetDeck is an AIR based application. (That sounds impressive, but really it just means that there is another product, I have to go figure out a meaning for…)

The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

I am not Spock! I am Spock.

Yes, I am Rachmeg. I think I created the online Avatar about 13 years ago when my second daughter was born. I don’t know why I thought putting two girls names together sounded like a tough medieval fighter, but at the time it worked. ( Rachmeg rhymes with Watch meg) Unfortunately as anyone knows, once you create an online persona, you can’t just go and change your name if you still want people to know who you are. From there, the name followed me across message boards and through online communities (some related to online gaming and others completely not.) I don’t expect that I will ever have the time to lead hundreds of people on dragon raids again, but I still feel the need to reach out to an online community. Hopefully, I can just change that focus to a different set of like-minded people. I now intend to use my blog space to start listing code examples and such that I may link to from outside, (as well as random personal commentary) Because of that, I’m going to switch to my more modern Avatar’s name. (Unless of course, I feel inspired to do otherwise) If anyone from the old days or from the “Nest” drops by – rest assured, I’m still around.

Jim – Because the trick is, realizing that there is no spoon.

Do You Twitter?

Do you twitter? I just started. Until I get a better site setup, I’ll resurrect this old site that I used to use when a tweet was a Tweety Rant. Nights and early mornings were spent planning raids for Dark Age of Camelot rather than pondering jQuery and WCF or MVC. Since there is only about 1 person from the old days that might even look here, I hope they won’t mind too much if .Net code starts showing up. All the links are old or broken, but Ill get them fixed shortly, and add my new links in tomorrow.

Rach – Wondering how early 0 dark 30 really is…