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.

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.

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.

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?

2007 was an interesting and exciting year for me.  Not only did I not accomplish anything I set out to do (I always hated resolutions), but I had fun not doing them.  It was also a year of firsts for me. 

I camped out with Paul and Eva in January to get a Nintendo Wii in the cold and rainy weather.  And it was worth every minute of it.  I still play the Wii now as much as I did last January.

  
In July, I walked in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.   I was out in Los Angeles for a business/work trip.  It started off very bumpy, and I was alone.  But it turned out to be one of the highlights of my year.  I got to meet lots of amazing people in our LA offices and made lots of new friends.  I got to hang out with some old friends there too.  I got to go to Hollywood and Malibu. 

I changed jobs at my company.   That gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of awesome stuff and work with some amazing people.  It also sent me back out to California.  And this time, I wasn’t alone.  We were able to find fun in-between the hours we weren’t working.  We went to dinner in Beverly Hills one night and ate at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant.  We got a tour of Bel-Air, Westwood, and West Hollywood.   And for those of you who watch American Idol, I saw the folks that went out to Hollywood at LAX.  No, Robbie.  I won’t tell you who they are.

I got to watch someone grow up a lot and mature in ways I never thought was possible.   And that person is turning out to be able to maintain “cool” moments more frequently. 

I took my sister to her first ever Braves game.  And she enjoyed it.  Even though it was rainy and hot.I discovered Helen for the first time. And took my mom, brother and sister there this summer for tubing and sightseeing.  My brother fell in love with it, and my mom got a big bump on the back of her head from a river rock.  And how could I forget, we saw an Elvis impersonator there throwing beads to pedestrians.

Here’s hoping 2008 will have some pleasant surprises. 

I got carded buying cough syrup this afternoon.  Let’s add this to the list of things I’ve been carded for in the past 6 months:

• cough syrup
• watching rated “R” movies at the theatre
• buying rated “R” dvds
• cigarettes for my dad
• lottery tickets
• alcohol 
• model rocket engines

Wow. I don’t think I’ve put anything useful or insightful here since I got back from Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

It’s been a very exciting and fast-paced 3 weeks. Week one was spent in Los Angeles for job training. I even got to see rain in LA! I managed to miss ALL of the Malibu smoke. Score. I learned a hell of a lot and my head was still spinning after I landed.

Week two was spent continuing to run after hitting the ground. Lots and lots and lots of reading UNIX documentation, sniping any sort of work I could get at work since the job change, and documenting every single thing I did just to keep it stored somewhere. I’m absolutely loving every moment of it though. Still as exciting as it was when it was announced I was moving to the new department.

Week three was spent doing some commuting to Norcross and back. Training up the new, new guy who just started. Still learning at an incredibly fast rate.

Week four has just passed. Wow. Still learning and feeling good about it. I even managed to troubleshoot and SOLVE two problems I was working on from the week before. I’ve come to learn that some of the work I’m now doing doesn’t have immediate gratification. Sometimes you have to coax it and mold it with finesse to get it to work. And I’m still learning lots and lots. I’m still loving every minute of it. It’s challenging and fun.

I have to say, though, I’m going to enjoy the next few days. I’m going home tomorrow. I have a birthday on Sunday. I won’t be back into the office until Thursday. At least I get to spend some time with my family. I wasn’t able to see many of them around Thanksgiving because of my trip to LA.

This trip out was much more relaxing and lower stress than the last trip.  Made my flight to LA just fine.  Everything went the way I wanted it to last time.

The real fun began, though, after I got home.  Hah.  Both of my toilets didn’t “flush” anymore.  The apparatus known as “the flapper” was broken in both of them.  So, I got to learn how to fix toilets.

My PowerBook’s adapter also decided to kick it in the big electronics store in the sky. I had to order a new one from Apple last night.  They’re not cheap; $79.  I believe the MagSafe ones are more expensive – but they’re not for PowerBooks. Oh well.  That’ll be in tomorrow.  In the meanwhile, I’m using my old XP box.

I’m heading back out to LA on Monday morning for a week.  I was out there about 4 months ago visiting one of our company’s offices in Westlake Village.  This time, I’m going back for training.  I’ve officially moved departments; from Web Dev to Technical Support.

I’ll specifically be working in the integrations portion of TS; concentrating on new internet banking installations and their components.  I’ll be doing a lot of UNIX admin type duties and scripting.  I’m pretty excited about it.  It’s going to be different than what I had been doing. Change can definitely be good.