Is it Really Almost October?!?!?

To quote the Steve Miller Band, "time keeps on slippin' ... into the future." Not only that, it seems to continue accelerating.

Anyhoo, just a quick "weekend update" of sorts.

First, I lost a couple more pounds this week. So I've lost six total so far. I am also closing in to my first goal on my "virtual bike ride" (scroll to the bottom of my homepage), riding from my current city of residence to my home town of Mt. Carmel. In fact, based on my average pace, I should reach it by Friday. So I've already decided on my next destination, which is a shorter trip, from Mt. Carmel, to Berne, IN. I haven't picked the next location just yet. It's going to be fun watching this build up over time, seeing routes criss-crossing the US. At some point in the near future, I'm planning on adding an animation so you can play back the history, watch as the days go by at watch the little bicycle move on the map. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

So we went to see a movie this week, The Brave One. This was one I had to kind of talk Donna into going to see. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be that great. It had its moments, but it was way too long, and for the most part just not all that engaging. It was cool to see Sayid from Lost (well, OK, Sayid is a fictional character, the actor is Naveen Andrews). I don't think I've seen him in anything else, and I really like him on Lost.

Today's NASCAR race was a lot more entertaining. Couple of observations. First, I love Dale Jr., and I'm not a big fan of Kyle Busch, but Jr. really screwed up when he took out Kyle, and I don't blame Kyle one bit for being ticked off. On the other hand, I saw Jr. interviewed during the rain delay, and as I've observed before, he man'd up and totally owned up to it. Then there was the wreck-fest finish, which was shortened because they ran out of daylight. It was really weird, first they said they were shortening it to 225 laps. Then 210 laps. Then, after the last caution, when a nice three car green/white/checker shootout between Biffle, Boywer and Johnson was brewing, the abrubtly decided not to restart and freeze the field, giving Biffle the victory. Now I was happy to see Biffle win, because I like him and he's been in a real slump, but Bowyer was catching him and it would have been fun to watch.

Well, that's all for now. Time to gear up and get ready for Muuuunday.

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Weekend Update

First ... yay me! My exercise and dietary changes are paying off, I lost four pounds this week. I have a long way to go but progress is progress. Also, if you scroll down to the bottom of the blog, you'll see I'm quite a bit farther along on my virtual bike ride ... I'm past Nashville now!

Another relaxing and fairly uneventful weekend. Spent too much time on the computer, as usual. On Saturday we went to see the movie Mr. Woodcock. I thought it looked pretty funny from the preview and the premise had a lot of potential. It centered around an evil-incarnate gym teacher who makes children's lives miserable. (I of course, related to the suffering children). One of his former students returns to his hometown years later to receive an award honoring his success, only to find out this evil former teacher is not only being honored as "Educator of the Year", but is also engaged to his Mom! Hilarity ensues! Well, in theory. There were a few amusing moments but overall it fell pretty flat. Oh, well.

Oh, one thing I wanted to share, and those of you who are my Facebook friends may have already been pestered by me about this, is this website Scrabulous. I'm not really using the Scrabulous site directly, but rather, the Facebook application. It's fun. It's basically Scrabble, but you can either play it "real time" or as you have time. So, in other words, instead of having to devote a specific chunk of time to play through a whole game, you can start a game with one of your friends and each of you can take your turns as you have time. So a game may go on for days. And you can have multiple games going on at once. So far I have only finished one game, which I won (yay!). I've got two other games going on at the moment, which I'm not doing so well in. Even so, it's still fun!

So how 'bout that NASCAR race today? Dale Jr. ended up a respectable third, which was great to see. Record number of caution flags. Nice guy Kyle Petty gettin' all up in Denny Hamlin's face and Denny jumpin' out of his car ready to throw down. Michael Waltrip had a pretty strong finish, and the points race is all shaken up, with the top four separated by less than five points. Even with all that action, I managed to get in a nice nap during part of the race. :)

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200 gigs of 7200 RPM goodness

When I bought my MacBook Pro, I didn't really think much about upgrading the hard drive. If anything, I assumed that it would be similar to upgrading the drive in my old Dell 9300, which was a pretty straightforward procedure.

Apparently it is pretty straightforward on the Macbook, but when you pay the premium for the "Pro", one unwelcome "bonus" you get is that it is really a pain in the butt to upgrade the drive. In fact, while Apple actually has a PDF document with instructions on upgrading the drive in a Macbook, the drive is not considered "user upgradable" on the MacBook Pro. There are a bunch of screws and delicate ribbon cables you have to deal with. Even for someone who has done their share of computer upgrades over the year (not to mention building a few computers from the ground up) the process can be a little intimidating at first glance.

After a long period of indecision, carefully shuffling files back and forth to external drives, and reviewing various install guides on the net, I finally decided to go for it. I settled on a 200G Hitachi drive. There was a 250G drive available, and I thought maybe I should get the largest drive I could (because I don't really want to do this again!), but I decided I would go with the 200G which would also allow me to move up from a 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive. I ended up using this step-by-step guide to find my way along.

Aside from some nervous moments when one of the teeny, tiny screws from the side of the machine managed to jump off my desk and hide, the upgrade went pretty smoothly. I have a lot more free space. And man, I was not prepared for how much faster the system runs with the faster drive. It makes a huge difference, at least subjectively. I confess that I haven't actually run any benchmarks, but I'm convinced its quite a bit faster, especially at boot time!

Happy, happy, joy, joy!
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Weekend Update

It was a pretty uneventful weekend. Basically just spent time around the house. Played on the computer some, watched some movies, and of course NASCAR. Only nine races left in the season. I'm of course bummed that Junior didn't make the chase, but there are still several drivers I wouldn't mind seeing win the championship.

Which reminds me ... I had the weirdest dream the other night ... I was a Nextel Cup driver, and the race to the chase was over, and I was apparently in the top 12. I also was teammates with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson ... and we were celebrating and high-fiving. And then the last thing I remember is that I was telling Jeff and Jimmie how cool it was going to be next year with Junior on the team. I'm not sure it means, (other than maybe I'm spending too much time thinking about NASCAR) but it was kind of a cool dream because I was so happy.

Speaking of being happy ... I was really happy to see Clint Bowyer win today. He seems like a pretty nice guy, and seems to be well respected by the other drivers. Bowyer also seems to be the underdog ... or at least, he sure seemed that way until today ... going from 12th in the points to 4th. And finally, it doesn't hurt that his primary sponsor is my favorite adult beverage, Jack Daniels.

In other completely unrelated "news", I'm up to 187 miles on my "bike trip". I worked out for an hour on Saturday but I was really sore afterwards, so I scaled it back to my regular 45 minutes today. Oh, and you might have noticed, I added another one of those "don't break the chain" things to the sidebar. The red one that was there before is still tracking the days I exercise. The blue one is the new one. I'm realizing that exercising is not enough and that I really need to keep careful track of what I'm eating, and keep my caloric intake within a reasonable range. To help reinforce that, the blue "chain" will track the days that I stay "on plan".

Yeah, this "chain" stuff and the whole map thing may seem dorky to some, especially if these aren't issues you've ever struggled with, but I can use all the encouragement I can get. These are issues I've struggled with my whole life. I've won some major battles with this in the past, but those have always been followed by even bigger setbacks. This time I want to win the war, and I'm willing to use whatever weapons I can find.

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My Biking Progress and Fun With Google Maps

See below (near the bottom of the page) for what I was alluding to earlier when I was talking about a cool idea for charting my exercise progress.

I thought it would be kind of cool to pick some place to "ride" to. In reality, I'm riding indoors on an exercise bike, but I thought it would be a cool visual "anchor" to plan some long route on a map, and as I rack up the miles on the exercise bike, plot that mileage progress on the map.

I figured I could probably do this with the google maps API ... and turns out I could. There is a LOT to the API, and I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Fortunately, I was able to use this cool example as a starting point. I removed a lot of code and tweaked what was left to get something close to what I wanted. It's still not quite there yet, and its definitely hacked together, but I really wanted to go ahead and put up what I had.

So basically the idea is, for this first "trip", I'm riding my bike from where I live now to the town I grew up in, Mt. Carmel, IL. I elected not to use any street addresses - just the names of the cities, so the actual start and end points are just whatever Google uses as the default. You can pan around and zoom just as if you were on the Google maps site.

Once I get "home", I'll pick another destination. Maybe I'll go "visit" my old stomping grounds in Ft. Wayne, or perhaps take a trip to Atlantic City. Who knows? I think this will be a fun way to chart my progress anyway.

Oh, one other thing I added. I found this site today called dontbreakthechain.com. This is a very simple but cool little web app. Basically, once you set up your account, you have a calendar, and for each day that you accomplish whatever goal you've set for yourself (in my case, exercising) you just click on that day. It changes the color for that day and you gradually build a "chain". Again, it basically serves as a visual anchor and positive reinforcement of the progress you've made. Pretty cool. And they are nice enough to make a little widget version available, so if you look in my sidebar, you can see how I've done for the previous four weeks. Now, I really just started a couple of weeks ago, so don't get on me for the blank spots prior to that. :)

See? I told you I was going to post more often!

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Updates

Yes, I've been very slack on my blogging. I'm going to try to do better. Yes, I have written that before. More than once. That said, here's a few random updates.


First, I'm back to exercising regularly again, which I really, really need to be doing. At the moment I'm doing 45 minutes a day on my exercise bike. I've been doing my workouts just about every day for a couple of weeks now, only missed two days so far. Also, I have a kind of cool idea for how to chart my progress, which I plan on adding to my blog soon, but I'm not going to tell you what it is yet. So there!

Our dogs have really been killing us with the vet bills this year. The latest problem is with Scout. Poor little pooch. I was playing with him the other day and noticed a really large mass in his chest area. It really scared the crap out of me because it was huge and I'd never noticed it before. We took him to the vet, and he is fine, it's not cancerous or anything. Well, he's not entirely fine, because the vet suspected he might have hypothyroidism. They checked for it and sure enough, he has it, so now he has to take Soloxine twice a day.

Oh, and I got a new toy recently ... an Xbox 360. I love it. I know Microsoft is evil and all, but this thing is sweet. So far I've mostly played Forza Motorsports 2. I don't have a steering wheel yet, which is my excuse for getting schooled the couple of times I decided to try Xbox Live. I also got Battlefield: Modern Combat but haven't played it too much. I've played quite a few FPS's on PC's, and maybe that's a bad thing, because I'm having a hard time adapting from using a trackball to using the Xbox controller. Hopefully I'll get the hang of it eventually. BTW, I'm shriekingmonkey on Xbox Live.



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