quite the lama, indeed…

I don’t remember where exactly I found this, but good stuff nonetheless – straight from the Dalai Lama himself…

Instructions for Life:
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three R’s: Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

so tired…

Tonight I set a new record for myself – 641 calories in 55 minutes on the eliptical … I feel very good, but very tired! 😛

Weekend To-Dos:

  • (money) – balance mid-month budget and pay bills
  • (writing)– get “the backlog” down to 20 columns by Saturday night; start working on upcoming paid articles
  • (exercise)– workout Friday night and Saturday morning … Sunday is optional because I actually kept to schedule this week!
  • (misc) – wash, vacuum, clean-out car because it’s getting to that point again
  • (fun) – not quite sure yet, but I think I need to get out and do something Sunday if I can manage to get everything else done … any suggestions?

caveat emptor, indeed…

P.S. Why I need to remember not to buy DVDs from people on eBay:

http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=3035490
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=3035510

Sure, the disc is “in perfect condition, only watched once,” and yet the case gets smashed via shipping and I’m stuck because I didn’t pay for the insurance. Of course, we won’t even mention the fact that had the manufacturer used real cases instead of those cheaper, crap cardboard ones, I’d have been able to just replace the case.

Six bucks as opposed to twelve from BestBuy.com, but at least Best Buy knows how to ship their products… 🙁

exercising my life away…

Current Position on the Beaten Path:
8/6 – 215 pounds!!!
6/19 – 219
6/15 – 222
5/21 – 225
5/14 – 228
begin – 235

The good news – I’m almost halfway there!
The bad news – This is technically where I started trying to lose weight almost a year and a half ago!

The truth – I do honestly feel a difference, though, even if it does feel like now the fatty areas are more prominent than ever…which is weird, seeing as now I’m a good 20 pounds less of the stuff than before! Who knows … maybe it was more compacted and thus less jiggly or something … I don’t know.

We’re getting there, though! I do miss some foods that I used to indulge in – desserts especially. I can’t even remember the last time I went out to eat downtown, which is probably a good thing on more than one front because I need every dime to throw at paying off Bank of America now. It’s just different, but I guess some change is ok…

Goodbye, love handles! 😉

wha?!

Can somebody please tell me why on God’s green Earth they’re making a sequel to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo???

lemonade

If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

— Jacques Cousteau

It seems that life is throwing a lot of challenges at me this summer and while I might not deserve them, they’re mine to deal with and deal with them I shall. It may take me some time here and there to collect my thoughts, but I’m not going to give up the race. Its times like this when I need to heed my own words – it can’t rain forever … everything’s going to be alright.

“You should never let the sun set on tomorrow before the sun rises today…”

Thank you for your time – I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog…

lemons

Ever have one of those days when you wish you hadn’t even gotten out of bed in the morning?

Why can’t I stop having them?

it’s always something, I tell ya…

Well, after four weeks and three system restores dating back to nearly June, my Windows Update lag issue seems to be fixed. At least I’m running bittorrent right now and am still somehow able to type, so that’s got to count for something…

It looks like now wi-fi is going to be on the fritz for a while – I was finally able to start using my own connection again this week after bumping down the encryption to just plain, old WEP, but now it’s back to this goofy thing where sometimes it can’t get a valid IP address from my router and obtains a private one instead…sans Internet access, of course. I honestly wish that I’d never bought that router and just stayed with Internet Connection Sharing because I’m constantly unplugging the thing to power-cycle and kick-start DHCP…and all of the message boards seem to agree that its internal server SUCKS, so I know that it’s not just me.

Any chance someone out there has some experience with Linksys products and getting them to work with one another successfully? It should be a pretty simple setup – just a broadband router and a 802.11g access point, with my cable modem plugged directly into the router. DHCP lease time is set to the max … the access point is the least stable, but sometimes my desktop or VoIP line will lose their IPs, too, and I don’t like the idea of having to pick up the phone every so often just to verify that it’s still actually working properly. The only other thing that I can think of is just turning DHCP off altogether and manually configuring IPs, but it seems like a pain and I’d like things to be simpler than that if I have guests over that want to jump on the network with their laptops.

I’m open to suggestions – help a fellow geek out! 😛