I’ve been horrible about keeping up with this site lately.  Ouch. Anyway, tonight ended on a pretty high level of self-esteem for me.  I’ve been pretty reluctant and in a serious state of disbelief about the whole working-out regimen I’ve been following.  I’ve been working out very regularly since mid May of 2008.  I saw a lot of my family for the first time in months over Christmas and they told me I was looking “skinny” and “very good.”  Not things I’m used to hearing, so I would laugh them off.

I’ve been having to completely re-vamp my entire wardrobe.  I put it off as long as I could, probably because I didn’t really think I’d have much success with this.  But, I’ve lost 40 pounds since May 2008.  There’s no way that much of my current wardrobe would work much longer.  And that leads me to why I feel pretty good tonight.  I wore different clothes to my personal training session tonight because I was tired of the others and the way they fit.  Tonight, the first thing my trainer said to me was “Damn, you’re looking skinny and fit.  Are those new clothes?  Holy shit!  Good job!”  It was pretty flattering when my family told me that, but it just really took hold tonight hearing that from my trainer, Robert. 

It’s been a pretty tough journey.  I started this because both sides of my family have history of heart problems and I just wasn’t feeling fantastic on a daily basis.  My trainer’s been a big part of my success by teaching me how to eat properly and really pushing me beyond anything I thought I could physically do.  So, tonight for the first time it just really sunk in with what I’ve done.  And, I feel pretty damn good. :-) 

Vacation?  No, I didn’t really have a vacation.  I took a few days off in July, though.  Anyway, here’s a rundown of what I did during this summer.

May: Joined a gym for the first time in my life.  And got talked into having a personal trainer for 3 weeks a month.    Started going to the gym 5-6 days a week immediately after work and on weekend afternoons.

My sister graduated from university.  We had her a graduation dinner and celebrated Mother’s Day on the same weekend.  They were conveniently on the same weekend.  Got my mom an iPod for Mother’s Day.  We got my sister an iPod Touch for her graduation gift.

June: Discovered that going to the gym suddenly gave me more energy than intaking large amounts of stimulants.  It was during this time I decided I needed a new hobby.   I had been putting off buying a Playstation 3 for a while and finally decided it was time.  Bought Grand Theft Auto IV, Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid 4.

Had to get my dad an iPod for Father’s Day.  He was trying to steal my mom’s.  He takes to it like a duck to water; he loads more songs onto it than my mom has on hers and uses it in the yard while doing yard work.   Now, my entire family has an iPod of some sort.  And the squabbling stops.

Spent a Saturday down at Rock Eagle giving a presentation about the 4-H Technology Team and Science, Engineering and Technology club.  Led an online scavenger hunt that afternoon during one of the conference’s events.

Went to Helen with my mom and brother again.  My brother really likes Helen.  And we went to Stone Mountain to see the laser show with my sister.  None of them had ever been to Stone Mountain before and they wanted to check it out.

While playing the PS3, I decided my current television wasn’t good enough.  So, I bought a 19″ LCD HDTV for my bedroom so I could play for hours without monopolising the living room one.

I managed to complete Grand Theft Auto IV sometimes between June and July.

July: Continued playing video games during my newly found free time.   Took off a few days in late July for some personal time.  One day I spent in Atlanta at 4-H State Congress doing interviews for the portfolio portion of the state demonstration contest.  I got to read over many youngsters’ portfolios of project work.

For the rest of those days off, I stayed at home and promptly played through Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4.  I didn’t sleep very much.  But it was worth every minute I spent playing.  My eyes and thumbs hurt, but I didn’t care.

Got an XM radio in my car, courtesy of my mom.  She said it was part of my graduation present.  Just a few years late.  But, hey, it’s pretty sweet.  Better late than never.

August: Still working on finishing a myriad of games I’ve bought but haven’t had the chance to play.  I also bought a PSP to add to my ever growing gaming collection.

Visited Alan’s fancy dorm/apartment at Georgia State and hung out with Josh and Crystal last weekend in Roswell.

This weekend, we’re going to the Braves/SF Giants game in Atlanta.  My mom and brother have never been and they wanted to go.

Oh yeah, and that whole gym thing…I’ve managed to lose over 20 pounds since May.

I got a Playstation 3 a few weeks back.  I need some PSN friends.  My online ID is colonelpannik.  Feel free to send me a friend request.

/end shameless self promotion

Yesterday evening I decided to give BootCamp a try so that I could install the latest distribution of Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro.  I followed the instructions and partitioned off 10 GB of my hard drive for the installation.  I popped in the live CD I made and followed the on-screen prompts.  I restarted, and then something didn’t go right.

I held down the option key and waited for my 2 systems to appear.   I only saw one hard drive.  Uh oh.  So, I restarted and tried again with the Live CD.  This time, it let me install it again.  So, I restarted, held down option and saw 2 drives.  Except one was a CD and the other was a hard drive.  Crap.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but my partitions got funky last night.  I could only boot into Ubuntu if I had the CD in, and never without.  And when I booted back into OS 10.5, I saw two new mounts on my system; BOOTCAMP and DEV/4.

I tried, to no avail, to reclaim my partitions.  Eventually, I had to settle on reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling OS X to reclaim the partitions.  Now, I’ve only had the MacBook Pro for about 2 months so it wasn’t full of too much precious data, but I backed up all the stuff I needed.  During the re-install process I remembered that I had done a TimeMachine backup on the system.  So, I let the installer migrate my TimeMachine data over and all was well.  So…now I believe I’m going to invest in a bigger TimeMachine drive (mine’s currently only150 GB).

Oh well.  I guess I can try again later.  Although, maybe on a different computer.  :-/

Well, I got my PowerBook fixed a few weeks ago.  It arrived safely and contently to my house after being treated at the Apple Depot in Texas.

There wasn’t a real diagnosis on the problem, but the repairs they did were in line with everything I read online.  They replaced the entire top panel of the PowerBook.  This was the suggested repair by many a narcoleptic PB user online.

I cleaned it up nicely and let my 15-year-old brother have it.  He was getting a lot of mileage out of GarageBand, having fun playing with the korn shell in Terminal and his old computer’s hard drive died a few months back.  So, I figured he was a good a candidate as any.

He was pretty silly about the whole thing.  He didn’t notice that I was trying to give it to him; he thought it was my newer MacBook Pro.  And, after I gave it to him Erica and I discovered that he had sent out several text messages to his buddies that read “my new laptop is here.  it’s freakin sweet.”

Last night, I walked him through getting his songs from his iPod Touch onto the PowerBook.  Apparently, Senuti now supports iPod Touches. :-)  It hasn’t in past versions.  He was able to figure it all out with just a few guideful IMs from me.

He’s also gotten a sweet laptop bag that I may have to steal from him.  It has pockets for his mobile phone, iPod, and a padded pocket for the laptop.

I know it went to a good home, and I can make sure it doesn’t get abused.

The month of April was an eventful for month for myself as far as technology goes.  In 2006, I got my first flip phone.  I was never a big fan of them but I was given a chance to try out either the LG Chocolate or a Motorola RAZR.  I test drove both phones in the Verizon store and decided I’d go with the RAZR.  It’s been a great phone these past two years.  Although Verizon crippled a lot of the OBEX functionality on that model, I was able to create my own ringtones and keep my address book up to date.  In fact, this site became a small hotbed for “hacking ringtones on Verizon phones.”  :)

In the first half of the month, we upgraded our mobile phone family plan. I got a new phone, the LG XV8700.  It is one of the newer Verizon phones that doesn’t have the severely crippled Bluetooth functionality on it. I’m able to push photos, videos and sound to and from the phone with the Bluetooth on my Mac. Unfortunately, iSync doesn’t support LG phones so I cannot keep my address book up to date as easily as with the Moto RAZR. I feel, though, that the functionality I gained was much better than the functionality I lost.

We’ve got the new plan that supports unlimited mobile web browsing and GPS. I’ve had a lot of fun using the GPS functionality. I wish I had it before when I went out to LA last July. Oh well.

The biggest technology change for me, though, is I am in the process of retiring my PowerBook G4. I bought my PowerBook in June 2005. It’s been a very solid machine and I cannot say enough nice things about it. Unfortunately, it has started going into sleep mode at random lately. I’ve tried everything from resetting PRAM, NVRAM, cycling the battery, running it without the battery, reinstalling the OS and just about everything possible to make it stop. For some reason, my PowerBook thinks that it is continuously overheating. Googling around will expose this is happening to lots of people with that generation of machine.

It, of course, decided to become increasingly erratic when I needed it the most. I took it down to PeachMac, a local Apple reseller/repair shop, and they replaced the logicboard, heat sensors and re-applied the thermal paste. It worked for about 24 hours. And then it got worse.

Since I couldn’t wait on it to just be fixed (it has a month of AppleCare left on it), I bought a new MacBook Pro. I love this machine a lot! It’s almost exactly like my PowerBook G4, except faster and brighter. The LED backlit screen is amazingly bright and crisp. And the 2.4 dual core processors and 2GB of RAM make it blazingly fast. I was able to finish up some projects for last weekend in record time. Gone are the days of letting it render video for 45 minutes.

I dropped the PowerBook off at the Genius Bar at the Mall of Georgia Apple Store. It went narco twice while the Genius was looking at it. He’s keeping it and running tests on it for the next 24 hours and said he’ll give me a call tomorrow to let me know if it’s something they can repair in the store or will need to send off for repairs. I felt like I was dropping a pet off at the vet. I was unusually sad about it. I’m just hoping they can get it fixed before the AppleCare runs out. I’d like to give it to someone in my family since I have the new one now.

Just for the sake of it, this entry has been composed on my iPod touch. Unfortunately, I cannot see this as a viable alternative for blogging. Not because I am having problems typing. I have become pretty efficient at that. Mostly, because WordPress has a few problems playing well with Safari 3.

In fact like the “full” version of Safari, the only effective way to blog with WordPress & Safari 3 is to use the code view. Oh well, maybe the support for mobile devices will increase. This is giving me hand cramps…

In preparation for some fun stuff to do with the youth group I work with, I dug up some quick and dirty (and cheap) experiments to give a try this past weekend.  Specifically, getting a hard boiled egg into a bottle and the infamous Mentos + Diet Coke geyser.  Ever tried them? They’re fun to do when bored. And you get a chance to make a mess.

Conveniently, since this past weekend was Easter we had our choice of boiled eggs to use for the first experiment. We picked one and grabbed an empty Frappucino glass bottle to use. You want a bottle that will have an opening that’s big enough for the egg to go into but not big enough to just fall into when sitting it on top of the opening. Take two matches, light them and let them burn for a bit. Drop them into the bottle and then quickly put the egg on top of the bottle. The egg should be sucked into the bottle because of a difference of air pressure (the matches were burning and were sucking oxygen into the bottle). Neat party trick, right?

Well, you can use a few reverse tricks to get the egg back out. One site we saw suggested blowing into the bottle. We must have done that wrong because all I got was smoke and matches in my face. You can hold the bottle upside down under hot, running water and it’ll pop out. Buck wasn’t as patient as I was and stuck vinegar and baking soda in the bottle and turned it upside down and the egg popped out quickly.

Sunday afternoon, we decided to give the Mentos + Diet Soda experiment. That was a lot of fun. We used a piece of 3/4 inch pvc pipe as our “mint loader” and placed it over the bottle. Our pipe was a few feet long, and after dropping half a pack of Mentos in the bottle we had a geyser that went up over 8 feet high. And it kept us relatively clean as well.

So, I totally bought the iPod touch update the day Apple released it. Yes, it was $20 but I believe it adds much more than that to the value and functionality of the product. And, yes, I believe Apple should have included it out of the box for the early adopters.Now, it wasn’t as easy as 1-2-3 to get it installed on my iPod touch. You have to download iTunes 7.6. Then you have to update your iPod touch to the 1.1.3 firmware. After those two steps, you can now purchase and install the software. Apple says all you have to do is sync your iPod touch and disconnect it from iTunes.

Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely true.The icons didn’t appear after the first sync I did with iTunes, the new firmware and the purchased software. I had to uncheck the “manage music manually” option in my iPod’s preferences. Then, I had to click the “Restore” button. After the restore and reboot, the new icons were on my iPod touch. Then, I had to re-add all my music, photos, videos, and other data. Hooray.

I had one other hiccup with the software. Apple charged me twice for the update. However, if you follow their “report a problem” links in your iTunes purchase history/invoice they send you they will fix it promptly. I emailed them and politely told them I was charged twice. That was on a Saturday morning. I received a response on Monday morning telling me they were going to credit my bank account for the extra purchase and promptly apologised for the inconvenience. Thursday, I checked my account online and they had returned my extra $19.99. Some people have reported having problems with them getting the extra charges fixed, but I didn’t have a single problem.

All in all, it’s a solid update to a great product. I can now confidently take it around in lieu of my laptop if i just need quick internet access. Too bad the iPhones are only tied to AT&T in the US now…

I saw this during one of the bowl games over the holidays. I literally spit water all over myself and whatever was in front of me after watching this.

I wonder if this is even possible?