Margaret and Helen – my new favorite senior citizen bloggers!

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This post is amazing.

The Race for Respect
http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/the-race-for-respect/

“Show me a Republican who makes less than a million a year and I’ll show you a moron who watches Fox News.”

It’s honestly hard to tell if it’s ghost-written just because it almost seems a little too point-on and punchy to be written by a single person, but it’s amusing either way, and if you read it in an old, retired person’s voice as they’re driving their golf cart down the sidewalk, well then Martha, that just makes it even better… 😉

Thin Post : Stress Eating vs. Productivity

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Funny how despite this week having not the greatest weigh-in for me, I’m still having a lot of trouble getting things back on track. Maybe my writing on Tuesday sounded a little more motivated than I actually was, but frankly, I think stress eating just had a lot to do with this…

Stress eating has always been a problem for me, especially when I’m facing down some sort of creative struggle because somehow in my mind I convince myself that the snacking helps me to stay on task and actually make whatever deadline I’m working on. It’s almost as if I get into this mindset where all I can think about is getting my column done or finishing a particular project, and at that moment it feels completely justified to shun whatever other strides I’ve made in weight loss that week just for the sake of pushing something else forward.

It would kind of make sense to me that it had something to do with being overloaded and only being able to handle so much at one time, sort of like a mini-breakdown … like my brain just can’t worry about losing weight and being creative on a tight schedule at the same time, so it makes me choose and thus I convince myself that eating a package of Pop-Tarts when they’re clearly outside of my calorie limit for the day will somehow help to carry me over that creative finish line. 😳

The sad thing is, sometimes after giving in I’ll emerge a few hours later thankfully victorious, but I’m not gonna lie and say that there have certainly also been times where I threw my diet out the window for an evening and by the end of it all I had to show were some empty candy wrappers and the same three half-finished paragraphs as when I first started!

I’m not really sure what the answer is at this point, except maybe a little hope that more diligence with diet & exercise AND not allowing myself to fall behind enough to get creatively panicked like that might together help to prevent me from having to face the food vs. art conundrum head-on to begin with.

I’ve said it before – sometimes I wish that I could just ignore everything else and simply focus on nothing but weight loss until I was done once and for all, but aside from the people who go on The Biggest Loser and all of those other TV shows, that’s simply not reality for the rest of us. We have to learn to balance life and all of its stresses with this seemingly impossible goal of becoming thin and healthy, and it’s really hard, but nobody ever said that life would be easy.

Have I mentioned recently that Bill Nye is awesome?

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Ever look up from the computer and realize that you’ve been watching awesome videos of Bill Nye trying to explain scientific principle to the common layperson for the last two hours?!

Actually, in hindsight I think it was still time pretty well spent! 🙂 Here are a couple of my favorites, including one particularly amusing anecdote where he made an appearance on Larry King Live to refute a group of old servicemen who are absolutely convinced that they saw a flying saucer back in 1964…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GowSyF0G-o

You’ve got to hand it to the man for having the patience of a saint for going on these ultra-conservative shows that all think science is just this huge myth that laughs in the face of capitalism and religion, but really, these are the exact people whose minds he wants to change. 

Brilliant guy.

$317,000 and growing for just one webcomic?!?!?!

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I’ve been meaning to write this post since I saw Dave Kellett’s tweet last night, and each time I go to start typing their take keeps getting bigger and bigger! It wouldn’t surprise me at all if I have to go back and update the title from $317k to $320k by the time I’m actually ready to push the Publish button…

What’s interesting about this is that I’ve technically heard of Order of the Stick before and I’m sure I’ve read random strips when my D&D buddies pass links around, but I guess I just never knew it was that big of a strip until I saw this Kickstarter campaign raising funds to do reprints of some of his older books.

It’s kinda sad that it took just a shockingly impressive fundraiser like that to prove to me that I should give it a look, but after perusing through his catalog of print compilations, I really think I want to pick up a couple of them once they’re available again because they really look like a lot of time went into them. Sure, some are a little pricey at $30 a piece, but then again, those ones are also full color and almost 300 pages long!

As a brief aside, I can’t tell you how inspiring to me it is as a fellow independent creator to randomly come across stories like this of new people who I’ve never even heard of being wildly successful at creating their art for a living…

Thin Post : A Short Step Backwards

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So today was my 4th weigh in for the new year and for the first time thus far, I gained weight instead of losing it.

0.6 pounds, to be exact…

Honestly, it didn’t really surprise me too much, albeit it’s certainly nonetheless disappointing, but looking back over the last week I pretty much just let my appetite get the best of me because although I actually exercised 7 out of 7 days in one capacity or another (5 days of cardio, 2 of push-ups only), there were still a few days when I splurged more than I really should’ve that I guess put me back over the edge.

I’m trying not to beat myself up too much over it, even though obviously I was hoping to get a bit further than 4 pounds into my efforts before plateauing off! But it’s probably a good lesson to learn early on – I thought things were going great and I had some wiggle room to splurge here and there, and so this weigh-in was a loud and clear reminder that, “No, I don’t!!!”

At least for the near future (read: 6 months minimum), I really need to be religious about not only getting my exercise in, but also keeping better track of my calories to ensure that all of my hard sweating work doesn’t go to waste. And not that I can’t have the occasional splurge, but not for nothing … I polished off the better part of that pizza in a single night just because I didn’t feel like making something healthier. There’s really no reason other than convenience and ambition why I couldn’t have made my own healthy pizza that had more veggies and half the calories – I just didn’t have the discipline to hold myself to it because I thought that I was better off this time around than I actually am.

But I know better now, and so next week is going to be different. Snacks are going to be more rationed out, I’m going to go back to forcing myself to eat more apples and less nuts, which are easy to binge on, and for those big nights out when we’re going out to eat, I need to not only eat lighter meals earlier in the day, but also show a little more self restraint once I’ve actually got the fork in my hand, too…

*ahem*

My Less-Than-Stellar iPhone Replacement Story…

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Good god, I never imagined that getting this fixed would end up being so difficult… 👿

Tonight I had a really bad experience getting my iPhone replaced. It wasn’t one person that did something really poorly, but instead several entities who all made tiny mistakes individually that compounded into a giant ball of frustration that for a brief moment left me wondering if I really did need this beloved iPhone of mine after all!

Let’s start at the beginning…

The Appointment, Part 1 (Apple’s fault)
I actually had originally scheduled my appointment for 7:20pm Saturday night, but rescheduled to 7:20pm on Monday so that we could go to Disney. Or at least I thought I had rescheduled, but come Monday morning, I double-checked and apparently it didn’t take, so I ended up with a slot 30 minutes earlier because my preferred spot was now mysteriously gone…

The Appointment, Part 2 (Apple’s fault)
Though I’m honestly not even sure why I had an appointment because I literally sat there for 40 minutes before somebody was actually able to help me. It kind of reminded me of that old Curb Your Enthusiasm episode – what’s the point of having appointments if you’re still taking walk-ups ahead of me?!

The Replacement (nobody’s fault?)
Ok, so this part actually went fine – they gave me a new iPhone with almost no questions asked, and after nearly an hour, it looked like I was finally on my way!

The Activation (Verizon’s fault)
…except that I couldn’t actually activate the thing in the store because Verizon wanted some stupid “Billing Password” that I had no idea what it was. When I got home, neither did Sara, so she ended up having to call and have them activate it over the phone.

The Restore Process (iTunes != iCloud, Apple’s fault)
But we weren’t done yet! After all of that, I couldn’t help but notice that a good number of my apps, along with all of my music, were just plain missing. It took more digging, but I finally figured out that I had backed my phone up to iCloud instead of iTunes, and so I had inadvertently restored from the wrong backup. Worse yet, the only place you can choose between the two is when you’re setting up the device for the first time, meaning the guy at the store had just buzzed right past the option that I needed and I had to wipe the whole thing and start all over again to choose the option correctly that time…

Thankfully, when I got to the activation process again, I just guessed at Verizon’s mystery password by using the last 4 of my wife’s social and it miraculously worked, so at that point I just had to give it time to re-download all of my apps from iTunes again, this time based on the list that iCloud had, not iTunes.

A couple of hours later, and one incredibly long walk afterwards to calm my nerves, it looks like everything has been restored and I’m back to business as usual again. Just goes to show you not to let yourself get too excited about a company’s “amazing customer service” because it really can change just that quickly.

In retrospect, it’s also interesting to note all of the precautions they took in the store to emphasize that they had no responsibility for my actual data – I had to sign something stating that I was authorizing them to wipe my old phone, and the guy even had me push the confirm button! So it’s a little discomforting to find, even only temporarily, that my backup didn’t actually contain what I thought that it did – I certainly don’t have lists of my apps or contacts anywhere, so if those actually had been lost, it would’ve been a major inconvenience to say the least.

If anything, it seems like a fairly quick fix would be a setting on your Apple ID to indicate whether your backups were local or in their cloud, just so there’s no confusion. I actually thought that when I migrated to iCloud, I wasn’t allowed to do local backups anymore, so if during the restore it had just asked me to sign in and then explained whether it could get my data from the cloud or if I needed to connect to iTunes to continue, that would’ve made a lot more sense.

Apple’s usually pretty good about the overall user experience, but they really dropped the ball on this one, especially considering that I’m a geek and I still got confused. Most probably would’ve went back to the store the next day and yelled for them to “fix it,” whereas I pretty much just yelled at the dog and was a grump the rest of the night while I tried to work through it myself… 😳

Just glad that it’s over now, and I’ve got a working home button on my phone to show for it.

This is so cool – teenagers send Lego man nearly into space!

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Here I spent my senior year of high school beating on guitars and pretending that I had a chance of becoming a rock star, while these two kids from Toronto spent their weekends trying to figure out how to put a Lego man into space!

Well, 85,000 feet is still a long way…

I don’t care if it’s been done before – this is a really cool science project for a couple of kids to undertake … not only considering the lift and drop physics, but also factoring in weather, protecting their cameras from shock and the elements, foreign politics for realizing that they’d best not launch it when it might land over the US border for fear of getting hassled by the Dept. of Homeland Security! My favorite kind of science was always the hands-on stuff, and this just really appealed to me as something that would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun to brainstorm. :mrgreen:

Here’s kind of a fun interview with the two friends about their process and backstory:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120808–toronto-teens-send-lego-man-on-a-balloon-odyssey-24-kilometres-high

And they’ve also got some amazing pictures up on Facebook from the balloon itself:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.288451477876098.87467.288247574563155&type=3

Weekend Update

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Midnight Hour at the Magic Kingdom
Although we weren’t really planning on it, Saturday night ended up turning into an impromptu jaunt over to Disney and it was a fun reminder of just how long it’s been since we’ve been over there! Although we were at Epcot last month for Candlelight Processional and Downtown Disney a few weeks ago, I think it’s actually been months since we set foot inside the Magic Kingdom, so it ended up just being a fun couple of hours running around doing the classics and enjoying the atmosphere and whatnot. The park stayed open until midnight that night – one of the reasons we picked it – and it definitely got me back into the mood of trying to get over there more frequently than my weekend writing schedule sometimes allows… 😉

Clutter and Cables EVERYWHERE!
Sunday’s big project is one that I’ve been putting off for a couple of weeks now – that of completely gutting and reorganizing the spaghetti mess of cables behind the entertainment center in our living room. It actually came to light because our cable box started acting funny – turned out that the DVI port burned out, but instead of taking it back to the cable office and swapping it out (and losing all of our saved shows and schedules in the process), luckily the component outputs still worked so I ended up just switching over to those and calling it a day.

I was a little bummed at the end when I realized that setting up the rear surround sound speakers just wasn’t going to be a possibility at this house – I hadn’t hooked them up yet because I had originally been wanting to get smaller speakers to just mount to the walls and utilize the landlord’s built-in wiring that was already jacked into the back wall of the room … but after about an hour’s worth of testing random wires behind the TV, I eventually came to find that none of those wires actually led to the pre-wired speaker jacks! And due to the way that the room is laid out (and a hyperactive, ever-chewing puppy), there’s just no good place to run actual wires to situate the speakers anywhere else, so it looks like while we’re in this rental, the surround sound is going to be a no-go… 🙁

But my next house – the one that we actually BUY – is going to have an awesome setup, you just wait and see!

Death and Taxes…Also, Refunds
On a slightly more positive note, I just finished doing our income taxes a few minutes ago and we’re actually getting back a considerable refund this year, which is pretty odd for us because we’ve traditionally had to pay the last couple of years. It’s basically all going to help pay off my car, but still – refund > having to write the IRS a check!

Please Fix My iPhone…
And lastly, I was supposed to go to the Apple store on Saturday to have them look at my phone’s sporadically non-responsive home button because the warranty expires on it in a week, but at the last minute Sara threw out the idea of going to Disney instead, so I ended up rescheduling my appointment for tomorrow night. Hoping that they don’t give me any hassle and it’s as easy to “just swap it out” as the other rep said when I mentioned it last weekend… 😕