Not only did I pick up a few days supply of kombucha, but I also picked up a few delicious and delightful argo teas. Now please don’t get argo tea confused with that Academy Award winning best picture Argo (the one with Ben Affleck starring in it), this is some good tea!!

While the movie was predictable and lacked suspense (come on now, you know it did, it was based on a true story, duh, they escaped!), the argo tea is NOT predictable. The argo tea brand is full of vibrant flavor choices.

They go great with one of my signature kidney bean and artichoke salads as shown here. I didn’t just take a picture of argo tea along with my kombucha in my shopping cart this morning, I actually drink this!

Maybe next time I go to Whole Foods Market, I’ll actually have food in my shopping basket!  More interesting is the fact that it was like ~27 degrees and I was running errands on my scooter (2012 Honda Silverwing). Just like yesterday, only the sun and warmer temperatures have started to melt most of the snow. Good riddance! :-)

My new scoot is a 2012 Honda Silverwing maxi scooter. It’s 600cc, and just shy of ~600 lbs. It’s a smooth cruising machine. Does 0-60 in about ~4 second.

While you may think that riding a scoot when the weather is in the mid-30′s, to lower 40′s, a crazy thing to even try, the streets are clear (for the most part). They are dry (pretty much). And it’s all about doing what you like to do.

As you get older, you don’t have many opportunities left in life to do what you want to do. Every day you say to yourself “I’ll do that when….. and when this is…. and I have that….. in place….” I’ll tell you when you’ll do that.

Never. That’s right, you’ll never find the right time to do what you like when you want. Do what you like today.

This (obviously) applies to more than just riding scooters. If it’s something you like to do, or would rather be doing, then go do it. If your current gig, startup or otherwise, no longer makes you want to get out of bed, do something else.

As far as me goes. Riding my scoot today for a quick spin was great. There is not a blizzard going on. The roads are fine, and as long as you dress properly in layers, there was no reason why I shouldn’t have taken my scooter out for a ride.

Even if that ride lead me to places where the sidewalks are not cleared off. The streets at least are smooth riding.

This picture was a stop I had to make during my quick ride, ie: not my place! My sidewalks look super clean and some might say sparkly (not really, but thought the sparkly part was just fun to add).

drinking daily. It’s not cheap, but it’s great for you. Just wondering how many of you are drinking some later today? Or even now as you read this blog post?

One thing I never realized was how you could actually drink/eat chia seeds. Chia seeds along with the superfood spirulina are suppose to be fantastic for you. Both are rarely talked about in mainstream media which is obnoxiously controlled by the pharmaceutical  lobbyists.

The lobbyists would rather have you believe that their voodoo magic chemical madness will fix you. The truth is, medical science hasn’t even found the cure for the common cold!!! Yet, they continue to prey on you with cold drugs, which is all fake, because if they cured the common cold it would kill their profit margin. They are nothing more than a mask for your common cold issue, which they haven’t cured. And won’t. I don’t have numbers but I bet the over the counter cold drug biz is a big billion dollar a year hustle.

This next question/statement may be sensitive to those that have lost someone to this money making disease (my mom passed in 1997 from it, so I’m with ya) called cancer.

Think they really are going to cure cancer? See the above statements. Common cold, not cured. Big OTC drug and doctor visit money maker.

Cancer, HUGE money maker. Basically, you are only fooling yourself if you think that the voodoo they pass off as medical science is going to fix any disease that is lining the pockets of big pharma? Negative. Not going to happen. Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.

Where would companies like Express Scripts be if it wasn’t for big pharma? They certainly wouldn’t have a gigantic prescription filling campus without the profits that pile up. If it wasn’t for the big money involved in making drugs to give out to people, ESI wouldn’t exist as a company.

That is what I love about blogging. When I started writing this post, it obviously was not going to be a big bashing on the pharmaceutical industry, but ended up that way. I’m actually glad it did.

eating today. Yes, this is another blog post that is brought to you by the WordPress mobile app for Android.

Some of you swear that some coffee or a Redbull is all you need. I thought that for many years. The real winners in life that truly get up and function each day are the ones that realized years ago that caffeine is only an adrenalin boost and no substitute for some food!!

While many of you reading this can barely function without that first cup of joe, there are other people who are already about to plan their lunch. They probably also had a productive morning.

Those people got up, answered the bell today. How about you? Did you get your slacking ass out of your bed, eat some breakfast and get up to answer the bell?

Just so you know I’m being real, I did eat

that bowl of oatmeal, flax, and fruit while writing this post.

Just about finished with breakfast. I’ll leave ya with this thought for now:

Eat well, exercise, and kick some ass today!!!!

Today I actually just opened up my laptop for the first time in over a day and half. I have been able to do everything from this phone. I only opened it up today as I needed to reset my password so I could use this mobile version of WP to start blogging from wherever.

No idea why I resisted this long to do this. I usually come up with post ideas away from the computer. In fact there are probably more great posts that I never wrote because by the time I thought to open up my laptop and start typing, the inspiration to “write a blog post”, that may hand been witty or insightful was long gone.

Looks like inserting pictures is pretty easy. The picture in this post is what I had for lunch today, which I posted to my instagram account earlier.

I’ll leave that as my final thought from my first mobile post. I guess zemanta and tagging isn’t available until you login via a computer, but other than that, this is pretty easy to do. Makes for at least writing some drafts if not full on posts you do right from your smartphone.

I like!

I’ve been on a weight loss journey of sorts for over a year now. In October of 2011 I was around ~225 lbs. Last January of 2012, I was 212 lbs. Today March the 15th 2013, I’m ~180 lbs. The photo to the right was taken back in February out at Pacifica beach.

While that may seem like no rapid loss, I’m also quite pleased with where I am today. I just joined a new gym, and as always, they offer a free trainer session. I decided to take them up on it. I’ve always been of the mentality that “I know what I’m doing in a gym, and how to work out“, and I know how to lift. I know how to do the standard lifting workout. What I didn’t know was other ideas, and that was why I gave this free training session a try.

In my interview session I told the trainer I wasn’t done yet, and wanted to be ~150-160 lbs like some of those MMA fighters you see. I’m 5’7″ tall, so I figure that would be a good weight for me as a goal weight. Plus those dudes are ripped to the max, and yet are only that weight range.

After telling my trainer that information, he set up my free workout test that was more of what MMA fighters do, which was very little to do with lifting, which is what I tend to do a lot at the gym. The best part was that I was doing everything the trainer wanted and then some. In other words, I’m in much better shape then I figured I would be. Oh, I was sweating like I usually do (which if you know me personally, that isn’t anything new, since I sweat a lot just standing still some times!), but I was able to do things that will help my future workouts.

There are times you get stuck in a rut in your routine. My routine has been a fast 30 minutes of elliptical cardio, then 30 minutes or so of lifting. I will usually work and isolate different body parts. But as many of you know, once your body becomes use to certain things, it adapts and you hit a wall where nothing seems to help you lose weight or gain mass.

I hit that wall a few months ago where I didn’t seem to be losing weight anymore. I was still hitting the gym like 4-5 nights a week, same routine, but then I figured my nutrition was off. Last month or about 6 or 7 weeks ago (not one to track exactly when I did something, obviously!) I started doing a vegan diet. That is working well as I shredded about ~12 lbs over the last ~6 weeks or so. That seems to be working great, but I also think that I might be lacking some protein, or at least I need to start working on making complete protein so I don’t lose the benefits of not eating stuff that is bad for your nutritional intake.

Now I have seen people that do the juice thing. The bad thing with that is that I also see them putting on sugar weight, as I call it, due to them drinking too much juice. Same thing for the people that drink too much whey or creatine. I know most bodybuilders will say I’m full of it, but I seem to notice those people have this pudge or retain too much water. I’ve avoided a lot of that, as I did the supplement thing before, and they just seem to loaded with sugar.

Tonight’s workout though has given me new ideas on exercises I should be doing in the gym to break up my routine more and still receive the most gain out of my time in there. One thing I do try to do is spend only around ~1 hr in the gym per session. There are those that work out like ~2 or 3 hours at a time, but seriously, I am way beyond any type of professional athlete years, and those type of workouts are beyond what I have time for.

For now, I’m quite happy that I’ve gotten myself in better shape then I was back in October of 2011, and I’m glad that I feel motivated to hit the gym. It’s not a drag for me to work out. I am liking the results I see, and hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to take off my shirt in public and not worry about the big flab hanging about. That in itself is one of the hardest things to rid on anyone. It can be done though.

First for real post I’ve done here in a long, long time. Hopefully my 6 or so loyal readers enjoyed reading it.

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Just Between You And Me – April Wine

I’ll continue to upgrade this old phone as I have a moment to do that, and basically plan to use it as my Spotify tunes device when I do my cardio. Screenshot of the Samsung Captivate i897 about screen are below.

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After 1 day, 17 hours, 3 minutes and 13 seconds (according to the graphic below), it was time again to charge my Samsung Galaxy Note II.  This smartphone lives up to everything a smartphone should be. Don’t let the size of it dissuade you from purchasing one. The battery life alone should be a great indicator of how much care the Samsung group put into releasing a quality product.

Once again, I ended up having to stream my way to the end of my battery life late last night. I still was running on nearly ~30% after over ~36 hours of normal use. I did the stream on 4G LTE to speed up the pace in trying to kill the power, and that still took a long time. I ended up watching some old Ah-nald (Arnold Schwarzenegger) flick called The 6th Day. I think I was into a good part of the movie before it was hitting that ~1% you see below.

Personally speaking, I’m quite satisfied with Samsung Galaxy Note II. Don’t let the legions in the peanut gallery who are just there to snicker and leave you with snide remarks or babbling commentary  of “Ooo.. it’s too big!” – “I don’t know if I could take a call on something that big, it would be a like a tablet up to my head!” – etc. etc. etc. stop you from getting what I have already termed, “BIG is actually BETTER!”

Remember the other week when all the sheep were jumping on the iPhone5 release? Remember how they are basically the same  jealous friends who thought the iPhone 5 was the bomb? Well, the iPhone5 fits comfortably inside the screen of this phone. While the iPhone5 looked big a ~few weeks ago, this phone shows what big really is. Not to mention the 1.6 Ghz overclocked quad core processor and 2 GB of ram, it’s pretty much a buttery smooth experience.

Once again – get this phone! People that haven’t walked around with it for nearly a ~week now, are about the only group telling everyone to not get this phone. Why would you not want to get this phone? Ah, yeah – that’s right you probably are in that congregation of people who like small, tiny, microscopic screens, with slide out keyboards in 2012.

I for one like always looking forward. I like progress, and I definitely like seeing screenshots like the one below. If you want a screenshot like this and want a true powerhouse of a smartphone, you’ll be heading up to the phone carrier that you are with and saying, “Give me that Samsung Galaxy Note II, and give it to me now!”

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The main issue was Microsoft Exchange and the sync/push. Once you turn that off and just use it manually, all is good. For some reason it’s not getting along with Jelly Bean 4.1.1 – at least on this phone. It is getting stuck in some loop where it keeps the Exchange Services active for hours on end.

I figure though, “Do I really need my work email syncing up while I’m at work? Already sitting in front of my email?” It’s redundant. Not having push running is not a big deal, and I can manually and quickly check it when I’m away.

For now, I’m loving seeing the below:

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For some reason, my battery was barely making it ~8 hours. After figuring out the culprit (It was my corporate work email that still uses Microsoft Exchange) I did some googl’ing and found out the “fix” for now. I turned off Push syncing, the battery life drastically improved. Improved to the point where I was trying to kill the battery at ~12:30am’ish this morning!

Did find a pretty cool streaming app called Crackle. The 5.5″ Super AMOLED HD display does make watching videos on it is actually a fun experience. There was one point where I was running Crackle, Netflix, HBO GO and maybe some other app, and bouncing between streams. On WiFi, on 4G LTE, just trying to kill the battery. I streamed like so many episodes on Crackle last night and early this morning, I actually started to like the shows I was watching.

I even was watching videos and trying to figure out more about the S Pen at the same time. All good. The battery held up like a champ, the streams were good on WiFi and 4G LTE, crystal clear on the huge screen. Definitely a nice experience.

Anyways, if you are in the market for a solid new phone, don’t let the detractors tell you otherwise – Samsung Galaxy Note II is very solid!

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Now I’ve had my Note II since only Friday 11/9/12 when I was told by the AT&T store people the launch date was then, even though Sprint had it a week earlier, and I think T-Mobile had it even before that.

I called to make sure the phone was in stock. They had 4 of them, and so at lunch time, I asked a co-worker to do me a solid and take me to the store. Of course it was lunch time and the AT&T store was packed. I do like that you have to take a number and that it’s visually on a big screen behind the main counter.

About 10 minutes into the wait, I did the usual, “yeah, I’m on an upgrade, yeah, I have an account, no, I don’t want that craptastic new deal, just get me my dang phone please!” I was told they had a white phone, but they didn’t.

The gun metal metallic gray is a good color though, white I guess was something I just wanted to show up the iPhone types.

Now how does it work? Well all I can say is that my first morning of use, I was able to text, check email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. all without my glasses on. Yes, it’s big, and big is good!

The S Pen has been controversial on the first Note, and from reviews I’ve seen you can actually do a lot with it. I haven’t really explored the full capabilities of it, but below are some screenshots of a pic, and then what you can do with it by just clipping it. Not an artist, so I don’t know how much S Pen time I’ll actually use.

So in the below picture here are some S Pen screenshots that I took and kind of an example of clipping a picture. Not very good, but there are a ton of review videos on YouTube – just search for Samsung Galaxy Note II and you’ll see lot’s of good stuff.

I don’t think I’ve found a negative review yet, as everyone seems to be in love with this phone and for very good reason. I kind of think of it like when I got my first iPhone (and that was the 3G version too), and it changed the way I thought about phones. This phone gives me that same feeling. It’s a game changer phone.

Original Panoramic Picture of a mural at The Alibi (a cool dive bar):

Opening Up or Pulling the S Pen out which launches this screen:

Now once you open that up, you can take for example the above picture and cut around it and make a file to share with people if you like. Or so that is what they tell you in all the tutorial and review videos!

Cropping a Picture:

The only issue I’ve found so far is the battery. I think I found the culprit and as usual – it’s a product I hate using and that is Microsoft Exchange!!! It seems to not shut down (stays active all the time!) and burns up my battery something fierce. I may have found a fix on this, but won’t know until later today. That fix seems to be setting your period to sync mail to ~3 days and not automatic or anything like that.

Here is my current home screen, same as my screen on the Samsung Captivate which I talked about in my last post. I still have that, and now it will become a fun little phone that I can keep upgrading as new ROM’s come out for it. Now I have that phone that isn’t dependent on “working”, so the pressure to make it work is not so prevalent anymore.

There is a great video out on YouTube on how to customize the UI.  I started too yesterday, but just went back to the basic home screen for now. It’s not that hard to do, but it is time consuming, so maybe another day off or weekend I’ll do that.

Samsung Galaxy Note II – if you are on an upgrade, and were thinking of iPhone 5 or some other smartphone, take a look at this phone. You will not be disappointed at all the features and will have that, “Wow, BIG is GOOD moment!”

:

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Today I thought I might have had it finally figured out, but alas, it was not to be. The phone got to the point where it just went into SOD mode over and over again and burning the battery, I finally decided to give Semaphone JB 2.4.0c a try. Wish me luck!

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Nothing unusual to report so far. For those of you who are wondering – it is Jelly Bean 4.1.2 – and so far it seems to be pretty snappy with the Devil3 1.6.1 kernel.

Make sure you follow this guide when you start to mess around with overclocking or other tweaks. You might want to start by trying to fix what they term as Sleep of Death (SOD). That is the first thing I’m trying to fix by playing around with the voltage a bit. Hopefully it will stop the SOD!

If you have any questions, just leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer. Do all your basics – such as saving off your SMS, calls log, backup recovery, etc.  It didn’t take too long and was a rather smooth upgrade. While doing this, I ate dinner, watched a VP debate (yes, I know – why?!?), as well as streamed NFL Thursday Night Football.

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Now… what I didn’t like was that I was stuck on Android 2.1 Eclair because for some reason the OTA updates never worked for me!

This has been a slow process, as I had to read up on how to do most of this stuff. Now I have a friend of mine that does this like no other, but the only way you learn anything is to do it yourself.

I rooted my phone back in like March, but the got stuck on what to do next. You have to be super careful as if you mess things up, and if you are like me, you only have one phone. While this phone is old, it’s reliable and I hate that the manufacturers of hardware just purposely let the software make the hardware appear to be under performing.

It’s almost as bad as one of the posts I wrote recently about the way the shaving industry has everyone bamboozled into believing plastic blades with springs and 5 of them, are better than single blade that is steel with a heavy handle.

The other week, I was back in St. Louis where the person I know that does this like most people breathe said “Let me see your phone.” He said, “They have jelly bean out for your phone, it should be easy, just 3 button recover mode boot, and you are set, download the ROM, etc.. ” and of course, he wasn’t in any shape to do the upgrade for me. He was deep into like ~9 beers and was getting ready to start a poker game. :)

No worries. I did however have my interest peaked again to finish updating my phone. So, back to researching how to do this, and figured I’d go with something stable, and I went with the stable release CyanogenMod 9.1 (the one for the Samsung Captivate). Long story short, because it did get quite long as I ended up having to find a PC to flash a kernel, I did end up on 9.1 and I was happy. I learned a ton, like flashing a kernel should be done with Odin v1.3′ish and not the new version of Odin which I believe is 4.5′ish. Just use the old version of Odin with a PC – trust me!

The reason of course is that I am on a Mac and for the Mac, it’s called Heimdall. Heimdall didn’t work for me. It left me with a soft bricked phone. That in itself was a scary ~24 hours. I thought I was going to have to just go the store and buy a new phone. Which was the point I was trying to avoid. Not that the Galaxy S III isn’t a nice phone, it is totally a nice phone, I just do not feel like spending $200 on a phone right now, enslave myself for another ~2 years to AT&T and have a perfectly good piece of hardware (my current Captivate) sit in my phone graveyard. Dumb if you ask me.

Anyways, plenty of good articles out there. Here are the links to what you’ll need to get here. Download these on your phone to your SDCard. This is the official blog post on the CyanogenMod blog. This is the Samsung Captivate related forum. Here is a good article on how to.  :

CyanogenMod 10 M1 – this is the first monthly release, like a semi-stable monthly release they intend to start doing before the final stable or any RCS they do.

Google Apps for Jelly Bean – You’ll need this unless you just don’t want Google or the store, or anything worthwhile. Come on now, we all have to have our masters, Google ain’t so bad. :)

Now you can from here do the 3 key thing as long as you have CWM recovery installed. If you don’t have that running yet, you’ll need to get to that stage first. In between installing the CM 10 M1 ROM and the Google Apps ROM (and I actually did it after and it still worked) you should try to install the Devil3 Kernel for Jelly Bean.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to stop after doing the CM 10 M1 ROM and the Google Apps Rom, you totally can just stop. But if you want some performance, you’ll want to install the Devil3 kernel, this makes things much more snappy. With this kernel you can overclock with Devil Kernel Manager.

** WORD OF CAUTION ** don’t get greedy and try to do something stupid and get more than 1.2 ghz out of it! Follow these instructions I found here, it’s even called “Idiot-Proof” – so don’t be like me and ignore that advice. Don’t go over the butter settings this person noted. Idiot-Proof All-in-one Guide to Making your Samsung Captivate Awesome (like mine)

Again – don’t get GREEDY!!! I did, and it cost me like an extra ~1 hr or more to figure out how to get out of the mess I created for myself! You might think that you can bump it just a tad bit more, but you can’t. Trust me. I found out that that tad bit will end you back where you don’t want to be. Restoring, starting over, barely breathing as you wait for the new CyanogenMod 10 start screen to appear.

This is where I ended up. I think it’s pretty cool. For now, as long as the overclocking doesn’t kill my phone, I’m set until the next CyanogenMod Monthly (maybe called M2?) comes out. I could do the nightly releases, but who has time to do this every night? Lucky for me, it was an off night from my wunning.

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UTM Builder <– Give it a try

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Watch another day pass me bye

I’ve been listening to a lot of Black Stone Cherry lately. Such a shame that I only discovered them in the past few weeks. This band has been around for like over ~10 years now, and I’m only now finding out about them. You might be wondering, “What took you so long dude… ”

Basically the above first few lines of the song state what I did for those 10 years. While probably not something you would ever guess of me if you know me personally, I was seriously down or as they say these days, depressed. I watched the world go by, smoked another cigarette and reminisced. Followed up by a healthy dose of alcohol, repeat daily for 10 years.

Lucky to be alive, and glad to have now changed it up a bit. In my last post here, last week Saturday, I talked about facing demons. I did include a nice picture of what I saw as went on that morning wun. I took another picture this morning, so before I write another line, let’s share that one. Pretty much the same location, but took a wider angle of it.

Just like the seasons, I’m gonna change

One thing I never did over ~10 years ago was do that very line. I didn’t change a thing. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, and I kept it all inside. They had blogging back then, but I really didn’t write about things I should have put down and documented.

I waited until all these years later to make the changes in my life that were going to be a more positive outcome. I’m eating better, and it’s not hard people, just don’t eat fast food 5x a week or more. Don’t eat a ton of fried food, and eat more non-processed food. And then the most important thing, get in some cardio and you’ll start to feel much better.

Well as I come back from my wun’s, I feel better but sometimes they are a serious M’F~! Since I’ve set up a wun schedule, of Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, and now throw in Saturday, by Thursday, I feel really gassed. No doubt about it I have a long way to go before I have the endurance to do a complete wrun. I’m glad that it’s tapping into that afterburner effect that seems to be the key to burning fat.

Today I’m here, but tomorrow I’m gone

That seems to be the key to my entire life thus far. Maybe it’s the way I grew up as a kid, moving a bunch before I was even in HS. In fact it more than likely affected me greatly on how I’m good with just moving on. I do what it takes to have that next adventure in life.

Adventure in life is what life is all about. Sitting still and doing the following….

I’ve smoked another cigarette
Reminisced on the girls I’ve met
Watched another day pass me bye  -Black Stone Cherry “Rollin’ On”

…. Will only lead you to where I ended up. Probably about ~60lbs overweight and having to work hard at it to get it back to where I need to be.

In order to keep living that adventure called life for another ~20 years or more, I couldn’t keep living the life I was living. To keep Rollin’ On, I need to get on it.

Like the clouds, I’m rollin’ on
Hey Merle Haggard, I know what you mean
When you say sing me back home - Black Stone Cherry – Rollin’ On

For those of you who aren’t familiar with my travels here, that’s because I haven’t shared much since this post here about ~10 months ago. Most of what I posted on this blog has been boring stuff, little side projects or hobbies I’ve worked on, etc. Nothing really deep or insightful here. Well I did talk about my Saturday trip to Santa Cruz on this blog post.

Everyone has Skeletons in their Closet

Whether you want to admit it, or keep them hidden away, you have them. How you decide to let them out is totally up to you. Over the years of just about getting there, only to hit a wall or being afraid of my own success, and walking away, you end up here. Where I am now. Reality. You figure that you only have a few more shots at this thing called life.

To be quite honest, for me it’s never been hard. It’s like the next magical opportunity kept coming my way. Every time the door shut, the window opened and there I go again. It’s been a constant cycle of highs and lows and blahs. Never one to have reached the golden ring, and always keeping it in sight, just never getting there. I’m the classic example of potential never fully reached. I’m the guy the school teachers told you about. The person you didn’t want to be when you grew up.

The anger builds and you feel that it’s everyone else. As you get older you realize it’s only you that is holding you back. You also realize that while you may be talented and can do just about anything, you also have a higher power in charge. For me that higher power is God. For other people out there it could be something else, but you always know that no matter how talented you are and how egotistical you might be, there is always that bus waiting around the corner that you didn’t see because you were texting while crossing the street.

Realization, Reflection, Change

When you step through that door, or rather go over that line of sanity, you pull back and you figure out that things can’t continue in the same direction. You just end up just repeating the same cycle, over and over. That cycle which I briefly described above is the sick cycle of almost but not quite. It is a cycle that was my demon that needed to to be realized.

One of the more easy things (should be!) to control that has plagued me for years now has been my weight. Of course the main cause of that is that I basically sit on my butt all day to do my job. The latter I can’t control, that is how I make the money to pay the bills, etc. Some things you can’t control. Trust me, you don’t want me swinging a brush to paint a room or hammering nails or fixing cars. I can do all of that and have done all of that, but that isn’t my forte.

The one thing I have avoided is any type of physical activity. The most physical thing I was doing was still the same. Walking places, but usually ended up walking to the bar at the end of the day. And my lifting usually consisted of a pint of beer.

I will admit that it was worse before I came to Silicon Valley. One change I thought would help was, “Don’t keep beer in your fridge!” – ok, that sort of worked, but just cost me more money because when I wanted an adult beverage, I had to walk around the corner to the bar!

That was me – ~9 months ago and even as recently as January when I realized I needed to change. It was either that or I’d sit on my butt and stay home (yes telling myself I was being good by not going to the bar). I would instead proceed to sit and drink a bottle of wine and watch Netflix.

Stepping Through to the Other Side

First things first. Let’s share the picture I took this morning about 1.5 hrs ago now.

This was the view I had as I headed out on my first Saturday morning wun. You are probably saying to yourself, “well there is a misspelled word!” Nope. I call it wunning because it’s more of walking still, with some running – therefore in my mind it qualifies as a wunning or wun.

I’ve been wunning pretty religiously now like ~4x a week. Monday – Thursday. Again trying to control my demons, only going to the bar on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Yeah. That is really working. I’ve turned the corner a bit, but still taking 4 steps forward and 3 steps back every week.

I’ve had a lot of pretty good early morning chats with my coworker Ryan, who I consider a pretty decent friend these days. While he says I’ve helped him change, I think I owe my new changed life to him in turn. I hope that I can always be there for him.  He has helped me without even realizing it.

Long Way to Go

While I have quite a long way to go, I am proud to share with you that since I’ve arrived in Silicon Valley at the end of October 2011, I’ve dropped 20 lbs total. Still not where I want to be, and have a long to travel to be back to where I should be weight and health wise, but changing my habits is the first step.

Like I stated above, this exercising and change of habits is the first step for sure. Even minor changes, like last night I went to the grocery store on a Friday night before heading to the bar! Oh and when I got to the bar, I switched up from drinking beer to a vodka drink. Later I had a light dinner at the new Turkish place up the street and a glass of wine.

This morning I basically had nothing on tap that had to be done, so that is where I figured it was good to put my feet and body to good use and go for a wun. Now I’m nowhere near doing a 5k, but my friend Ryan thinks I should sign up for one. My current route is just about ~3.5 miles, so I guess I’m close. Just need to turn up the volume on the running part first.

This is my current route, from the corner where that above picture was taken – so basically minus from the point of where I actually live. If you are local, give it a shot at driving it. It’s basically a route that is entirely up hill. I made it hard on purpose as I need to build up my stamina and helps me get stronger.

View Larger Map

Like my friend Ryan has preached to me for weeks now – “Drinking Beer Is Easy!” I was thinking about getting a shirt made that said that on the front, and on the back it says “But I’m not easy… I’m hardcore!” Ok, maybe not.

Anyways, it has taken me longer to write this post than it took to do my wun. Time to hit the shower and get on with the rest of my Saturday.

I haven’t done much else with it. With anything I have ever done or put out there for people to use – it should just flat out “work”. It’s not “pretty”, black on white, but hey – when you are just doing one thing, it should just work! No need to be fancy pancy about design, aesthetics, and being all pussy footed graphically inspired. That’s not my game or intentions with any of this stuff. I like things that work, period.

Since the domain needed re-purchased, I went ahead and did that, and also added the Site Checking System and that fun thing I created called Tango ‘n Ca$h to the site. Also, it seems there is a small crowd of people using Decode t.co – so I figured they might be interested in those tools. Well at least Site Checking System.

Even wrote a blog post over there (I mean the site is built on WP, might as well blog a bit, right?).

As we saw just recently near the end of July – if Twitter goes down, so does t.co. Not the best system, even though it might have proven just that fact – they need to beef up fail over, emergency processes, etc. I will say that they did fix things like champs, and had a worldwide system back up and running in a few hours, but during that time, there were no t.co urls working. So a few other services short urls popped through, like ht.ly, ow.ly, etc… Which of course was a great time for a malware merchant of death to wreck havoc.

Luckily they didn’t, and situations are all back to normal. You may want to keep this site around though – just in case!

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