health & fitness 1 Comment

More Exercise Observations

Today, I opted against going to dinner in BG with some old co-workers, because I was looking forward to my jog and a healthy dinner instead.

Have I been abducted by aliens? Replaced with a Beta, a la The Last Starfighter?

I think I crave the dopamine or something. I feel soooo much better when I work out, even if I’m no more productive during the rest of the evening. 🙂 What would normally make me all depressed (‘I’m so unproductive; woe is me’) instead makes me look for something to do (like blogging).

I’m also better able to stave off hunger pangs late in the evening (like now). Or, rather, just flat-out ignore them.

I write this as kind of an historical record (yes, Diana finally exercised on a regular basis), but also as a future motivator. I know I’m going to want to slack sometime soon, and hopefully getting these words down on… well, not on paper, I suppose, but in writing of some form — hopefully that will help re-motivate me when I need it.

weight loss

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #21

After a month-long hiatus of slackitude, I’m back with a vengeance. After gaining back most of my recent weight loss, I managed to lose two pounds this week, bringing me back to 210lbs and 34.5% bodyfat (or thereabouts).

The big deal this week was exercise. I returned to doing my PUSH workouts, and I added jogging into my repertoire. Granted, it was a walk-jog, but it did the job of getting my heart rate up and getting the blood flowing. Even better, Aaron and I went on a walk-jog together on Saturday! If we can make this a weekend habit, it’ll be much easier for us to keep it rolling, I think.

So, the week’s exercise was: Monday, PUSH. Tuesday, jogging. Wednesday, PUSH. Thursday and Friday, rest; and Saturday, jogging. I hadn’t intended to put those rest days in there, but my legs were killing me, and Aaron convinced me that I should let my legs heal instead of going for a jog on Thursday. 🙂 And, as usual, the slackitude rolled over into Friday, when I’d had every intention of doing my PUSH workout. Ah, well. I’ll shoot for more consistency next week.

Food was pretty much the same as usual this week, although I continued to get caught up in my work and ended up foregoing the morning snack, for the most part. Dinner was more protein than usual, though, as I’ve been cooking up chicken breasts for most of the week. I haven’t been tracking my actual calories or carbs or protein lately, which is something I should be doing again. I think I’ll charge up the Palm and start using my Diet Organizer program again.

So, overall, this week was the long-awaited introduction of cardio to my lifestyle. I know I didn’t do nearly as much as I should, but I at least learned that a little cardio won’t kill me. In fact, it feels pretty good.

news 6 Comments

Un-American

Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is dead.

I’m not sure how to react to my reaction. Yes, I understand that he killed innocent people. And I do realize that he was an important ringleader in terrorist activities in Iraq.

But I just can’t make myself happy about someone’s death, no matter how many people they themselves have killed.

I felt the same way when Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by the military. I just can’t be jubilant about another human being’s death. Maybe this makes me un-American. Maybe this makes me a goddamn hippie, or a left-wing nutjob, or something worse. I just can’t make myself say about anyone, “I’m glad they’re dead.”

Of course, none of my friends or family were victims of Al-Zarqawi. Were I in that situation, I’ll grant that my reaction may have been different. I honestly can’t say for sure.

Even if I hadn’t had an initial reaction of not-happiness, I would have been made even more not-happy — no, make that “disgusted” — when the media began showing images of Al-Zarqawi’s bloated corpse. Honestly, that was unnecessary. The one main identification image was bad enough, with his eyes closed and his face all slack in death. But then I saw another, worse image, even more disturbing, showing his swollen lips and protruding tongue… that just took the cake for me.

There’s a line of decency to be observed here. I’ve seen too many REAL CORPSES on the news lately, without any advance warning of graphic content. I doubt that the media would be so casual about showing the corpses of American soldiers on national television.

I could go into a full-blown rant, but I think it’s probably best if I just end here and go to bed.

drumcorps 5 Comments

Making Things Difficult

So, I finally decided it’s time to get off my ass and work on the LSM page again. Figured I’d start with installing phpBB, the standard generic PHP-based forum. Simple to configure, free… can’t go wrong. Right?

Well, I came across a problem. LSM’s hosting only allows one SQL database. That spot is currently being used by my home-grown content management system, which is kind of important. So… now I get to figure out how to write a forum FROM SCRATCH. Or at least steal appropriate someone’s code.

I’d just gotten myself all excited over figuring out how I might make an alumni database work. Now this… this is a little more daunting. I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but I also don’t doubt that it’ll be buggy as hell. I just hate to disappoint. Shout-out to all web geeks: any help here? Where can I find my holy grail of forum code?

I guess the bright side is that my users a.) will be able to access the forum with their site login, and b.) will *have* to sign up if they want access to the member forums!

Update, 6/9/06: Thanks to Sheryl’s and Dan’s patient explanations, I now have a brand-spankin’ new forum installed on the LSM site! Now all I have to do is write a post about how to sign up, how to play nice, etc; add a forum link to the main site; and email the board of directors so they can be my guinea pigs to test the thing. 🙂