Boo!

So on the diet front ... I lost another pound this week. The last couple of weeks have been a little disappointing, slow progress, but I keep trying to tell myself "slow and steady wins the race". And it's better to keep losing slowly than to keep piling it on, right? Check fatguysjourney.com for all the latest updates. :)

We had lots of fun Saturday evening. We met up with some friends Donna works with and had dinner Saturday night, then went to a "haunted house". I have not been to one of those for literally years, but it was pretty fun. The line was really, really long and our feet were hurting by the end of it, but it was really done up well. I can't say that I was actually scared, but it was really funny watching all the ladies scream, half the time even when they could see the person coming. It was a good time.

Today was fairly uneventful. We watched the Martinsville NASCAR race and I geeked around on the computer and that was about it. It was a pretty low-energy kinda Sunday and I kept putting off my workout and ended up not doing it, which I'm not proud of. But I'll get back to it tomorrow morning!

That's about it for now I guess. Time to brace myself for Monday morning.

Diet and Exercise Stuff

Just a quick note to let everybody know that I've moved my diet and exercise stuff (i.e. the bike map, the "Don't Break the Chain", etc.) stuff to its own site - http://fatguysjourney.com. Just kinda wanted to seperate that stuff out and it was making the main blog page just a little busy. If you forget the URL, I'll have a link to it in the sidebar on this page.

Oh, the new page features a new element - I added a line chart to track my weight loss.

Riding Over 400 Miles Seems To Help Weight Loss

So I'm in a pretty good mood today, for several reasons.

First, I reached my first goal on my bike ride. Yesterday, actually. And that was 400+ miles. It was nice visiting with my parents and my brother (in my head anyway). Now I'm off to visit my wife's parents in the town she grew up in, Berne, IN. This trip will be a little shorter, and then I'm going to pick a distance farther away, probably somewhere I've never actually been. I'm thinking maybe I'll go see the Statue of Liberty.

So the second reason I'm happy, which is closely related, is that I dropped another six pounds this week. Biggest loss to date! I guess all those miles on the bike and eating better are really paying off. It was a nice way to start the weekend.

The third reason I'm happy, is that this weekend is the NASCAR race is in Talladega. It will be really interesting to see how the new cars work out there. I love the superspeedway races. Here's hoping Jr. and his cousin can pull off a win before Eury moves on to Hendricks.

The fourth reason I'm happy is that I found out a couple of days ago that Jonathan Coulton is coming to Atlanta in November. It's kind of funny... I bought one of his CD's for one of my nephews, I think for Christmas one year, but I never listened to it or really knew who he was at the time. Then, probably a year or two later, I heard one of his songs, Code Monkey, which sort of became my anthem. I started checking out some of his other work and ended up buying his "box set" from his website. I really love his music and it will be really cool to see him live, especially since the performance will be in kind of an intimate setting.

The fifth reason I'm happy is that I have running water (at least last time I checked). I just finished working out, and I really need a shower!

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"Bike Trip" Enhancements

Been playing around with the google maps API and made a few improvements to the little map at the bottom of the blog.

1. It now tells you how far along I am on the current leg of the journey (for example, right now, on the 1st leg, from Roswell to Mt. Carmel, I'm 97.08% along, with 12.5 miles to go, which means I'll be "arriving" in Mt. Carmel tomorrow!


2. The icons look a little nicer now. Instead of the standard google maps icons there are pushpins, and the bicycle icon looks nicer now. (If you aren't seeing the green bicycle icon, you probably need to hit refresh in the browser -- its probably still caching the old images). The green pushpin is my original starting point. Yellow pushpins indicate various stops along the way. The red pushpin is the "endpoint" of the trip, at least at this point in time. I plan to pick a new endpoint as I get close to whatever the current one is.


3. You can now click on the pushpins to get more information about the destination. I'll be updating them as I go along with information like what date I started for them, and when I arrived


4. There are two small links below the map, one is labeled "What is This?", which will take you to the first blog entry I wrote describing the idea behind the map. The second one is "Larger View", which will open up a much larger version of the map in a window


5. I registered a new domain, fatguysjourney.com, which will take you directly to the large map version. I have some ideas of doing more with that domain, but for now that's it.

I have some more ideas for enhancements, some on the backend to make the code easier to maintain, but one that I think will be cool is a play button, which will take you through an animated version of the map, iterating through each day of the "journey", showing the location on the map for that day for a few seconds. I think it will be kinda cool.

This is a really fun project. Its helping encourage me to get on that bike each morning, and its quite educational as well. I'm also learning a lot more Javascript, and all about the Google maps API!

Donna and I Decided To Get Some Mexican Food

... and, well, we got kinda carried away. Just watch the video. :)


Edit: I got some reports of trouble viewing the embedded version. If it doesn't work for you, try this direct link.