This short video of Woody watching Buzz liftoff on the Space Shuttle Discovery was ridiculously adorable!
LEGOS IN SPACE!!!
In continuing the LEGO space discussion from a couple of weeks ago, how insanely cool is it that NASA is sending minifigs to Jupiter to help teach kids about science?!
Full Article Here: http://www.brothers-brick.com/2011/08/03/lego-minifigs-going-to-jupiter-on-nasas-juno-spacecraft-news/
Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything more on the design specifics, but I did think it was kind of interesting that the three figures were custom made out of aluminum for the journey – probably not for weight because I’d think that the metal would actually weigh more than plastic, but more so my guess would be some sort of heat issue, considering that the 1,740 million mile trip to Jupiter over five years would clock the probe’s speed in at just under 40,000 mph!!!
Kind of reminds me of Disney’s coordination with NASA a couple of years ago to send a Buzz Lightyear figurine to the International Space Station, where he conducted a series of “missions” that were available online to teach kids about space. I would’ve been all over this kind of stuff if it was going on when I was a kid, so I’ll be real curious to see what sorts of games and videos LEGO and NASA put together to help promote it.
punishment vs. rehabilitation
So I found this slideshow of a rather unusual prison over in Norway that seemed kind of interesting…
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/25/the_super_lux_super_max?page=0,0
Ok, so I guess the pictures just looked swanky, but the comment thread to follow – now that was an intriguing slice of cultural clashing that although I wouldn’t have really expected, I suppose sadly doesn’t really surprise me in the long run. The discussion is about the concepts of prisons themselves and underlying, what they’re actually intended to be used for. It started off with a handful of American comments about how our criminals would tear a place like this apart in two seconds … I suppose so as to boast that our thugs and murderers are much more vile and dangerous than anything that Norway could ever churn out!
Not exactly a bragging point, as far as I can imagine, but still…
In turn, Norwegians (I assume?) fired back that it’s really a problem with America’s prison systems in general and that if you look at the numbers, Norway actually has a ridiculously lower incarceration rate per capita – a mere 66 prisoners per 100,000 people, as opposed to 738 per 100,000 here in the US! Damn statistics and your factual insight…
I mean, it’s a common argument here that our judicial system is out of whack merely how we deal with simple drug use, but the bigger picture that I think is really telling is that while here prison is basically intended to be one’s punishment for their crimes, overseas in Norway they look at prison to be more of a rehabilitation system that aims to work out whatever problems these people are having so that eventually they can leave and be productive members of society again.
It’s very clear by reading some of the comments that a lot of Americans really look to our prison system as a type of revenge against people who do bad things in our society … but is it really in the public’s best interest to lock these people away and isolate them entirely for a period of time prior to welcoming them back? When you consider how many people in prisons today are repeat offenders (over 50%, according to one study I read), coupled with overpopulation and financial issues, maybe the lock ’em up and throw away the key angle isn’t really working for us.
Granted, I can’t even begin to imagine what it must feel like to be the victim of someone’s incredible spree of violence or hate towards his fellow man, but maybe this is where we stand up as a society to help these troubled men and women who up until now have just been clogs in the system the way prisons work in America today. While you may not be able to help everyone, I don’t see how trying to move prisons away from the criminal breeding grounds and towards a place for improvement could possibly hurt given where we stand today.
It’s a drastically different approach than what we’re used to today, but eventually you’ve got to take a step back and make drastic changes when it’s become painfully clear that our current system just isn’t working. Are we there yet???
(P.S. While I understand that the piece was originally published as a buzzworthy item depicting a luxurious life for the recent terrorist incident in Norway, however it’s been clearly noted multiple times that the dude doesn’t have a chance of getting sent here anyways. That’s not the angle I wanted to talk about here anyways – more so a generalization of how the two countries differ in their prison systems … but I just wanted to clarify that real quickly here before someone gets sidetracked on the terrorism angle that doesn’t really even apply here…)
Thin Post : Toils of the Weekend Warrior
So for my last post in this little impromptu diet writing marathon that somehow manifested itself this week, I thought we’d look to the weekend and consider some of the pros and cons that I personally experience in my quest to lose weight…
For starters, I think that the biggest pro that comes to mind for me is that typically I’m able to skip a meal when I’m just going to be at home all day … namely due to sleeping in and getting up late … but regardless, one less meal is one less meal! Counting calories is easy when I’ve only got two meals (plus snacks) to spread them out across, and even if I splurge on one of them, as I’m expecting to do this weekend, in fact, it’s still easy enough to make my other meal real light to help compensate.
Now that said, all of that is true as long as I have the right kinds of food around the house! If we’re plentiful in the low-cal and fruits and vegetables arenas, then we’re golden, but if the kinds of food that I’m supposed to be eating are lacking, well, let’s just say that accidents happen and occasionally I’ve been known to go through an entire box of granola bars or more than one ice cream bars simply because they were there and I was hungry in a moment of weakness!
I guess you could say that there are both pros and cons to a weekend spent at home. Luckily, I’d like to think that overall I’ve had more of the first scenario than the second scenario to contend with lately and my weekends have actually been fairly instrumental in helping me make progress, but at the same time it’s just important not to get too complacent because there’s a dark side to my beloved weekends all the same…
Thin Post : Walking the Dog
Since my last post about using furry, little Cleo as a fitness enabler, I actually think that we’ve made a lot of progress with the walks that we’ve been going on. We don’t necessarily go every night – surprisingly never on account of weather, but more so due to a lack of time, however so far she really seems to enjoy getting out and wandering the neighborhood for an hour or so at a time with me a couple of days a week.
We go in the evening – usually around 11pm when it’s at least a little cooler, albeit the bugs have been pulling double-duty to make up for it in the misery department lately! We’re actually up to almost 3 miles now – we started at 2, and one of the neat things about our community is that all of the subdivisions are connected together in convenient .5 mile loops, if you will, so adding one subdivision got us up to 2.5, going down another gets us to 3 miles, and so on to where it looks like we can do 4.5 miles without even having to cross the major road that runs through our community.
Back in our last community, I was up to walking 5 miles in about 90 minutes – I would literally walk from one end to the other and back, listening to podcasts, talking to myself about the things I’m trying to accomplish with my writing, and generally just clearing my head. By the time I would get back, I’d just be dripping with sweat, so I knew that it was productive time at least from an exercise perspective, so I’m kind of glad that Cleo is able to help me get back into that habit again … even if her involvement is basically limited to sniffing and eating bugs and occasionally crapping in my neighbors’ yards… 🙂
Thin Post : Stretching
Simply put – I think I need to do more of it.
I used to love the WiiFit for this because the yoga exercises actually taught me how to stretch when before I would just do a couple of random whatevers before settling into my workout routine. With yoga I had a good 10-15 minutes of nothing but stretching, and I feel like it really helped both to make me feel more limber and also not nearly as sore after working out … trouble is, I don’t really do much WiiFit anymore.
I probably should – at least the yoga part, anyways. On one hand, it does seem a little silly to fire up the Wii and get out the balance board for a quick 10-minute, pre-workout stretching routine – maybe I need to just figure out a couple of quick things that I can do or even just imitate some of the ones that I used to do in WiiFit. Either way, I’ve been trying to make a more regular thing of walking the dog, which I’ll talk more about tomorrow, so as much as I’m not really doing a ton of exercising right now, I guess anything to help minimize the amount of achiness the following morning is worth taking into consideration.
Being overweight is bad enough by itself, but just feeling old in general sucks, too!
LEGO Sidewalk Art
These are pretty cool – I love the way they captured the view of where each installation would be located so that the pieces blended right in with the city around them! Very cool.
Thin Post : Focusing on Food
I think one of the big things that I’ve realized about trying to lose weight is really just how important your diet can be to your success.
Think about it – you won’t gain weight for not exercising, but you sure can by failing to watch what you eat! Do the math and most people should be able to lose weight over time simply by regulating their diet and never touching a treadmill, but just try to keep eating crap and think that you’ll just need to do a few extra sit-ups to keep your losses in the black and, well, let’s just say that I tried out this very logic quite extensively over the last seven years and I only really started losing weight this year when I finally gave in and changed my diet…
It’s just so tough to visualize how many calories are actually in the foods that we eat. I mean, I had pizza for dinner tonight because the wife had ordered it and really had to fight taking a third slice because on the plate it didn’t really seem like that big of a deal, even though calorically it was probably the difference between the meal being 600 vs. 900 calories (it was the stuffed crust kind that should really only be a splurge, which it was…). And the problem therein lies that this was only for a single meal, yet the difference is probably more calories than I would burn in a single 1-hour walk around the neighborhood where I sweat like crazy and end up sore for the next two days!
At the end of the day, strictly from a numbers perspective it’s far more impacting for me in the long run to manage my calories properly because slowly over time those numbers really add up. Depending on whose Basal Metabolic Rate calculator you use, I can burn anywhere from 250-400 calories a day simply by sticking to a 2,000 calorie diet … that same 1,750-2,800 calories would take upwards of 12 hours of walking to burn during my aforementioned walks, and sure, maybe the numbers would be better if I did a higher-impacting exercise like the elliptical or kickboxing or something, it still seems more logical to keep my calories under control to avoid creating a deficit that I then have to work against before even getting to the actual fat that I want to burn.
Thin Post : Riding the Wave of Progress
Yesterday I weighed in at almost 2.5 pounds less than my last post.
And you know what, it feels good to succeed! With over a quarter of my goal to lose 8 lbs by my birthday already in the bag, less than 6 pounds in three weeks doesn’t sound nearly as daunting as 8 pounds in 4 weeks … after 2 months of floating steady did merely a week ago. It’s funny how after seeing my success yesterday, I think I’ve gone out of my way to eat even healthier in the last couple of days – hell, I ate nothing but vegetables for dinner tonight … what’s up with that?!
Frankly, I think it’s really important to fully embrace moments like this for all that they’re worth because anyone who’s attempted dieting time and time again knows that sadly, there are often times way more lows than highs, or even mediocre in betweens when you find yourself stuck in plateau-land. If weight loss was easy, everybody would be thin, and with 1 in 3 adult Americans battling obesity these days, we know that’s just not the case, so if you happen to come across something that helps to give you a little extra mental motivation, why not take it for all that it’s worth?
I think I can attribute last week’s success to fairly easy factors – I walked the dog 2+ miles a couple of times and I tried to get my diet back in the realm of 2,000 calories with more natural stuff and less questionable junk. This week I hope to do more of the same – I’ve really been going through corn on the cob lately, in the spirit of the summer, I suppose, and I want to up my exercise to three nights of walks with Cleo … hopefully a little longer, too. Ultimately I’m really trying to get going without pushing myself too hard into something that I later might not be able to maintain, so we’ll see in about 24 days if it works…
about creating books
Here you’d think I’d be relieved to finally be done with my last book, and yet this week I already started working on the next one!
I’m sure part of it is simply because this one got dragged out so long – I literally started putting that book together last fall, but got side-tracked, then we moved, then I got side-tracked some more. It didn’t help that I’ve been working through issues with my printer for the last month – it was actually all ready to go around the end of June, but every order I received had print errors that just kept dragging on and on! But we’re not here to talk about that right now…
Instead I kind of just wanted to ramble about the process in general because like most creative things that I do, I really enjoy the end result even if there are points throughout the process that seem arduous or sometimes even mundane. Books in particular are kind of a big deal because I’m really fortunate in a number of ways to even have the opportunity to be publishing them – a lot of stars have to align, from having written the actual content first of all to having the technical knowledge about how to put the things together, being able to squibble up enough design know-how to come up with a cover that looks halfway decent, and then having a print-on-demand option that will still allow me to make more than pennies a book for my efforts.
I’m definitely greatful because it becomes painfully clear at all of the various points throughout this process just how delicately my ability to publish my own books hangs in the balance – it became quite clear with my printer issues because as much as I may have wanted to get angry and pitch a fit, they’re really my only option other than to not print books for profit right now, and thus it was required as a business decision to play nice and give them the benefit of the doubt.
…or even several benefits of said doubt…
But it could’ve been anything else – what if I wasn’t able to come up with a cover design that didn’t look amateurish like 99% of other self-published books? Luckily for this one, being based on our comic strip I had some old graphics to fall back on to bring the design together, but it’s still a fear for the next book because even though I mostly have the 50-60 columns for my next humor book picked out as of a few days ago, I still haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to do for the cover yet. I think the last one turned out ok, but there’s always that little bit of fear over whether your next project will be deemed better or worse.
So anyways, I’ve got a sneaky feeling that I’ll feel this exact same way after I finish the next one, too, which should really be in the next couple of months. And you could argue that two books in one year sounds like a lot, but actually next year I want to do three, so we’re really only getting started! That’s another part of it – my long-term business plan has me ramping up even more work as the years pass, so it’s not like this creative anxiety is going away or anything.
Plus, next year’s books will feature two that are based on content that hasn’t already been created yet, so in addition to the stresses of making the physical book, I’ll also have to worry about actually writing the stuff that goes inside, which oddly enough hasn’t been as much of an issue to date because books 1-3 have all been (and #3 will be) covering content that I wrote years ago. I’m sure that’ll invite along a whole new set of challenges for what it’s worth, but if there’s another thing that I’m finally starting to pick up on, it’s that you can’t get worked up about what might happen tomorrow because you’ve still got work to do today, and that work for me today is my next humor book.
Hi ho, hi ho – it’s off to make books I go…