14 Days of Self Control

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I haven’t written about this in a while, but I really need to because it’s been too long.

I’m not at all happy about my body right now. In fact, the last couple of weeks it’s been kind of depressing. I feel super lethargic all of the time, walking not that far makes me winded and tired … even moreso when I’ve got a toddler in tow, and I haven’t really been sleeping well and wake up most of the time with aches and just generally feeling terrible.

And it admittedly scares me a little because if I look back over the years, I can see myself progressively getting worse and worse, past points that I never pictured myself getting. Like when I first moved down here in 2003, I weighed about 215 and wanted to lose 20 pounds … even something like 225 seemed so far away that it really wasn’t that bad, and yet eventually over the years I passed 225, and 235, and 250, and so on…

It’s kind of embarrassing – I don’t even want to say how bad it’s gotten.

Ok, fuck it – today I weighed in at 270 pounds.

Which is scary both for the number itself, not to mention that 300 pounds doesn’t seem all that far away, even though previously I would’ve thought about it like some sort of ridiculous weight that really fat people weigh, but not me…

…just like I once felt about 250 pounds, too. 😛

So I’m writing here both a little bit to vent and also to work through the plan I’ve been devising in my head to get myself on a better track. Even though I know that I need to exercise eventually, too, I’m not gaining weight due to a lack of exercise, but to all of the horrible food that I’ve been eating, and so even though I’m generally not a fan of diets, per se, in favor of lifestyle changes longterm, since I haven’t actually been able to do that myself, we’re going to try things a little different this time!

For the next two weeks, instead of trying little changes over time, I want to try holding myself to a very strict diet in hopes of shocking myself into realizing that this is something that I can actually do if I put my mind to it because frankly, otherwise I just haven’t been taking the little changes seriously and eating a healthy breakfast followed by a box of Tastykakes for lunch kind of defeats the purpose altogether!

Anyways, here’s the challenge:

  • The Nos…
    • No carbs (or at least no doughy carbs … fruit and whatever is fine)
    • No junk food … cookies, cakes, chips, candy, ice cream – basically, everything that I love
    • No fast food
    • No sugar cereal
    • No eating after midnight
  • The Yeses…
    • Lots of protein – chicken, shrimp, turkey, fish, maybe even steak
    • Lots of fruit & vegetables
    • Experimenting with new kinds of salads
    • Gorging myself on tea

It’s going to be especially tough because it’s pumpkin season and I’m currently surrounded by donuts and cakes and other junk to review, but that’s all going to have to take a backseat for now … maybe I can review the healthier stuff or something, I don’t know.

I do know that I’m committing myself to hitting the grocery store more often because we have a habit of buying lots of diet food and then pitching it all in the trash after it spoils two weeks later, so maybe if I go with a single meal or two in mind (and spend less), it’ll be a bit easier.

We’ll see how this goes … of course I’m motivated today, but that’s how diets always go. Talk to me six hours from now when all I’ve had to eat was lettuce, tea, and a protein shake and see if I’m still on the wagon then!

Focus. Focus. Focus.

On Being Anti-Abortion vs. Anti-Planned Parenthood…

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If so many Republicans are against abortion, why don’t they just push to make abortion illegal instead of trying to defund Planned Parenthood???

It seems like the more beneficial scenario across the board because that way Planned Parenthood could continue providing all of the other women’s health services that they offer and there would be no worry about state and federal funding going to support abortion because the process itself would be illegal … whereas if Planned Parenthood is defunded and can’t provide any of its services, other providers will still be able to offer abortions.

Mind you, I’m personally pro-choice and honestly have no problem with abortions being limited to the first trimester unless the mother’s life is in danger as our laws state today. It just begs the question to me of what those trying to defund Planned Parenthood are really after – do they truly not want abortion to exist because they believe it to be immoral or do they have some sort of vendetta specifically against Planned Parenthood and they simply refuse to see the forest for the trees?

I hate customer service.

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Sometimes I feel like dealing with customer service departments makes me out to just be another grumbling asshole when in reality I just want an answer that makes sense.

Not the copy & paste response that isn’t even relevant to my problem.

Not one that is just blatantly guessing on your part.

I just want a legitimate answer that justifies the problem that I’m experiencing, and bonus points if you can actually help me to solve my problem, too!

I think part of my issue comes from having a developer’s mindset because when I see an issue with a company’s website that I have to interact with, I don’t simply want an apology for the inconvenience … I want to know what’s wrong so that other people don’t have the same problem in the future, too!

In a way, systems are easy because they’re consistent, or at least they should be. If designed properly, a website should look the same to me as it does to you … the 1,000th text message that you send should be delivered just as the first 999 were … when banking transactions don’t all post to your account in a consistent manner, that should be a red flag for anyone concerned about how the online banking system is working.

In my scenario, I scheduled five transfers from my checking account on Friday – when I woke up and looked in my account, four of the transactions were pending, but one was missing.

This seemed odd to me because when I do regular, unscheduled transfers, every transaction always shows as pending immediately regardless of where the transfer is going to.

…and mind you, these are all transfers within the same bank…

All in all, I talked with six representatives across different customer service departments – some had different explanations than others, some clearly didn’t want to be talking to me at all, and even the final supervisor that I spoke with couldn’t really say why it was happening but at least offered an alternative to what I was having an issue with.

I mean, I get that most customer service reps don’t understand their company’s systems well enough to identify where a process is failing. Hell, I’ve had issues where I’ve had to talk to multiple developers to get to the one who could speak accurately to their own application for building new ones! But regardless of your knowledge of a given system, I think it’s a fair suggestion that anyone should be able to recognize one of these things is not like the others to help identify when the system might be behaving incorrectly so that those with more know-how can investigate those types of scenarios in more detail.

And don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked in a call center myself so I totally get that a lot of people just don’t care because as soon as my call disconnects, they’ll have another pissed off customer in their ear to deal with next … but that shouldn’t be the gold standard because you can’t improve customer service through apathetic customer service representatives. Good customer service starts with identifying that a customer is upset and then dissecting their issue into something you can work with, whether it’s through education or process improvement or even a bug fix.

It doesn’t neither of us any good for you to just say, “I don’t know what else to say – that’s just how it works…” unless you’re looking to keep your complaint level high.

It reminds me of another situation that I had earlier this year – I was driving home one day and noticed that one of the signs leading onto the interstate was wrong.

Huh?!

I even drove back that way a second time to double-check myself before saying anything. They were doing a lot of construction around a new interchange, and the arrow definitely indicated that one lane was split for both north and south … even though it really only went south.

So after mulling over who to even report that kind of thing to, I found a contact on the Florida DOT website for our area and explained the situation … to which I got a fairly curt reply stating that I was incorrect because the guy’s field engineers said that it was fine.

The next day I drove down and took pictures.

A few more days passed before he finally replied again that the road had just been reconfigured and now matched the sign overhead, so everything was ok. I drove through one more time, and he was correct.

But how hard would it have been to just say that they were in the middle of changing things over and the sign had gotten updated before the lines were repainted on the road???

I know that customer service is often depicted as a shit job that nobody likes because it’s nothing but people complaining at you all day long, but what if you were to take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other end of the line?

Be the guy who got on the interstate going the wrong way because the sign was wrong.

Be the guy who wondered all weekend if his mortgage payment got pulled from somebody else’s account by mistake.

And then don’t just gloss over this issues with an “Oops!” – actually take the next step towards solving them so that they don’t have to happen all over again.

It’s the difference between “Give us a break – the sign’s fixed now!” and “Sorry about that – we’ll make sure our contractors know to cover up those parts of the signs that aren’t correct until the new lanes are opened to prevent that in the future…”

Or “Yeah, I can see why you would expect all of your online transfers to appear the same. This is how our system behaves today, but let me open a ticket with our development team so they can look into changing that.”

The more you act like you actually want to fix my issue from happening again, the less I’ll sound like just another grumbling asshole when I’m explaining it to you.

…mainly because hopefully it won’t be the sixth time I’ve had to explain the same issue over and over again to apathetic ears that are just counting down the time until their next break… 😛

Dream Journal : More Fragments

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I was Superman.

An evil super villain had just stolen a nuclear-powered shark and was hauling it away … for mischievous purposes … on top of a borrowed cruise ship full of passengers.

At some point during pursuit, he pulled the entire ship underwater, which miraculously didn’t flood the ship but simply threatened to do so and trapped everyone inside. With that, I dove underwater to get the ship back, however in the back of my mind I had pictured Lois Lane dying and having to go back in time to save her, so in hindsight I probably could’ve just done that from the beginning to save us all some time!

Anyways, it took a while for me to remember whether Superman (me) could breathe underwater, but after deciding that I could, I fought some random magic guy before eventually catching up to the ship. I somehow managed to get inside without bringing any water with me, and then got everyone to help me move all of the heavy stuff to one side or the other to help balance the ship.

Presumably this was to help with something that I was about to do to save them, but maybe it was just to keep them all busy so they wouldn’t panic as much.

* * * * * * * * * *

We had just rented a new house and I was carrying things in from the curb when it started raining outside.

The h0use was kind of set into the side of a hill, so it had all sorts of neat landscaping around it that unfortunately made it really hard to just walk a straight line from one place to another.

When I finally made it back to the car, I had the kind realization that I would pull it into the garage for my wife … no idea why I hadn’t done that in the first place to make hauling things inside easier … but after driving around the block and then coming inside again, I couldn’t figure out how to get to the actual garage even though I knew there was one!

Inside my Dad offered to help me come look, and together we opened a door that seemed garage-worthy, only to be greeted by a garage that was very much not empty because it happened to be filled with something like a dozen dogs. Some of them were really nasty, too, and even though I managed to close the door in their faces, they still came running around from another hallway and we all went outside to figure out where in the hell all of these dogs were coming from…

Outside was a couple with even more dogs on leashes citing that they had permission from the landlord to use the property for their dog business. I explained that we had just rented the home and there was nothing in the lease about a dog business sharing the property, so we fought until the police finally came.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was trying to go out to the movies and my wife was asking who I was going to go with … like on a date.

Apparently my first choice was some redhead, followed by another girl, and then I had the thought of going with my actual wife instead.

She seemed happy with my decision.

I want to go on an adventure.

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I think I’m getting a little stir-crazy around here because after spending a good hour this evening browsing random Google Maps of one of the cities I almost ended up in before moving to Florida, I did the math and realized that it’s been almost two years since I’ve left Central Florida for anything … and even then the event in question was an unexpected trip up to snowy Michigan in January 2014 for my Grandpa’s funeral.

Before that was only six months earlier when we went up during the summer of 2013 to celebrate his 90th birthday.

And don’t get me wrong, we’ve most certainly had a busy couple of years!!!

Between IVF and having the baby, and then the last year of learning how to be parents from scratch, and I’m sure lots of other stuff in between. We’ve also had lots … I guess just about everyone … come down to visit either for the holidays last year or to meet Christopher between last year and his first birthday. And part of that’s my fault because Sara was more eager to travel the baby around right after he was born when I didn’t want to…

But regardless, I guess it’s a little weird to think that we really haven’t traveled outside of 90 miles from home in the last couple of years because in our younger years we were a lot more adventurous! We’d gone on a couple of cruises, and our ginormous, month-long road trip, and yet now even if we can wrangle up a sitter it still seems prohibitively expensive trying to sneak away for the weekend after we factor in boarding the dog, coordinating time off, money, etc, etc…

I mean, Disney World is great and all, but I think I’m kind of itching to see something different for a change.

falls

It takes an awesome wife to let you run cat6 overhead through her kitchen…

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Just did an experiment because Plex videos have been buffering more than usual, especially some new home videos that I added tonight from our phones, so I ran a cable from the TV in our living room directly to our router to see if it really is the wifi bogging down.

Verdict … yes and no.

Random stuttering seems to have improved and I was able to play a couple of key movies that have given me troubles in the past without a sputter in sight. That said, apparently there’s a known issue with Plex sending .MOV files to Samsung TVs on the home movie side, so I’ll have to do some more digging there…

I also learned – because I had to move my router into the spare room next door where the server is for the cables to all reach – that apparently the coax jack in that room isn’t live after all! Wonderful. Thankfully I had a piece of coax long enough to run around the corner from my office, but that’s one more thing I’m going to have to look into when I’m poking around the attic, which is now going to have to happen sooner rather than later on account of the ethernet cable now running overhead in the kitchen!

I think I need to get one of those dorky headlamps to wear before I plan my adventure upstairs… 😕

Home Tech Talk, Part 2

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So picking up where I left off last night, I think these are going to be my next points of focus around the house…

Run Cat6 to the Living Room and Bedrooms
Not really looking forward to this because it means I have to go up into the attic and I’m always afraid of falling through the ceiling, but I’m figuring that wiring up these two rooms so that Plex doesn’t have to run over the wifi is right now probably the easiest thing I can do for the occasionally freezing that we see during playback.

Run Cat6 Out to the Garage for FiOS
Right now we have 75 Mbps symmetrical service, which is awesome, but to upgrade to anything faster we actually have to move away from using coax and run ethernet direct from where the fiber comes into the house to our router. Verizon claims that they’ll do this themselves during the upgrade, but who knows what the quality will be, and if I have to be up in the attic for wiring the other rooms anyways, it makes sense to just do this one at the same time.

Improving Backups on My Local Server
Part of this will be easy and part will be a pain. The easy part … right now I have a local install of CrashPlan pushing something from the server into the cloud, but I honestly don’t even remember what … it could just be test files from when I first got it setup, for all I know! So I just need to review and update the backup plan so that it includes more of the things that it should – Plex’s database and local settings, and some other random stuff sitting there that I want to preserve. It’s probably still not appropriate to push 20 TB of media files into the cloud, but I’m cool with sending 100 GB of music files for now.

The less easy part is facilitating backups from my web server that hosts all of my sites from an actual data center. They technically do regular backups within their own network at no charge to me, but just to be on the safe side I wouldn’t mind pulling down another copy of everything to keep archived here just in case. It’s only like 15 GB for everything anyways, so it’s not a ton of files, and I think that WHM even has an option to FTP another copy of the backup set to another location when it’s running. I just need to take an afternoon to figure it all out and get the thing working…

Organizing and Sharing Photos
Now with bringing my wife’s iPhone/iPad photos into the mix, we’re sitting on a collection of something like 40,000 photos over the last 15 years and as unmotivated as I am to print them out and fill photo books, it’s still fun to flip through them online so I think I want to finally figure out a manageable way to put them online for regular browsing. Not sure if it’s going to be Flickr, or a self-hosted WordPress install, or something else … I guess that Plex has options for Photos & Home Videos, too, so this one’s still wide open, but it’s something I’d like to do before we get up to 50,000!!!

Automated Christmas!
And the last one is something that I eluded to yesterday, and tonight I found another cool option, but their beginner set still costs upwards of $500 so it’s going to be a while before I can splurge here and it still might not happen this year. Still, I love the idea of a truly customizable Christmas light display where not only can I make the lights dance to music, but can even choose the color of each bulb as well, so no more fighting for the right combinations of colors at Lowe’s and Walmart and wherever else my lighting takes me…

…although at &^(%% per string, they’d better turn any color you want them to! 😯

Envisioning My Automated Home…

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So I spent some time reviewing my home server/network setup as it stands so far and it got me thinking about what might be the next steps on down the road.

I’m fairly happy with my media server, and aside from squeezing in maybe one more hard drive to satiate demand, it’s pretty much as far as I can take it until I can drop a couple of grand into expanding to new rack-mount hardware and a separate, high-end NAS for storage.

Backups are good, too, as all of my most important files (writing, pictures, tax and finance stuff) are triple backed up between a local backup and two independent cloud destinations, and just tonight I’m finally looping my wife’s devices into the schema so that the bajillion photos of Christopher that she takes will be safe and secure, too! 😉

So what’s next???

At first I started thinking about trying to automate our Christmas light display outside, though I’m not sure what kind of costs are reasonable on that front. I’ve seen a few setups where people just setup controls to flip the individual strands on and off, though I’m not sure how safe that is for your standard, residential Christmas lights that one buys at Home Depot.

I also briefly researched the idea of going the landscape lighting route because it’s probably more durable for the task, and I found this custom LED system that looks really freaking sweet, but the fixtures alone are about $100 a piece … I’m kind of afraid to ask how much the controller that runs everything is!

Maybe some day… 

Then there’s your more traditional automated home offerings – security system, cameras, thermostat, etc… – and although I really have no idea what I want at this point, maybe it would be something fun to tinker with until I both figure that out and hit the lottery to be able to fund it all!

I figure I’ve got a couple of years to get there, anyways, because I honestly see this house that we’re in right now as more of a test house, at least from this regard. Our goal in the next five years is to be able to built our dream house where we’ll ideally spend the rest of our days, so that’s where we’ll want to splurge on all of these kinds of bells and whistles, but just like our home server has been resurrected and grown so far this year, it’s still fun to experiment and play around with what I can get my hands on in the meantime until we build up to that point of dropping thousands of dollars on network-connected fixtures and wiring the entire house to best fit our modern, connected lifestyles! 😀

In the meantime, I can still see a more immediate need to at least hardwire connectivity to the rooms where Plex gets used, and I’m thinking we might splurge and upgrade the FiOS to that 150 Mbps package they offer before long … because I just learned that apparently they’ve got a promo giving the $200 router we need to upgrade to away for free with the upgrades right now!

We’ll see – maybe come Christmastime I’ll start tinkering with a single network camera or controlling the star on the Christmas tree via computer … gotta start somewhere.

I can’t even…

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I’ve watched a lot of disturbing stuff on the Internet, particularly involving two girls and one cup, but right now there’s one video floating around that I just can’t bring myself to watch.

I just read some tweets from staff members of the news channel in Virginia that saw a reporter and her cameraman murdered in cold blood on live TV yesterday morning – it sounds by now that it was by a disgruntled former employee – and not only was the reporter dating someone in the newsroom, but the cameraman was engaged to someone in the control room who watched the entire thing happen live.

I can’t even imagine watching someone unrelated’s death live on TV, so to see someone like that unfold for the person who you’re planning on marrying???

He was 27. She had just turned 24.

The guy even wore a camera and filmed his attack, posting it immediately online afterwards.

Shock is the only word I can use to describe what happened, and yet frankly it happens so often in America that asking the questions doesn’t even seem relevant anymore. Hearing about somebody getting gunned down out of nowhere in the streets isn’t just something that happens in other, less-civilized countries anymore. Here in the Land of the Free, it happens in our schools and on our streets in cities big and small … there’s been almost 250 mass shootings in the United States in 2015 alone … or more than one a day.

The only reason this one even managed to ride the news cycle all day is because it literally happened on the news.

They were just reporting the local news … just like those first-graders were just trying to learn…

Hello, Birthday #35.

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I’ve been expecting you…

Not really, though. I think people anticipate the big ones – 21, 30, 40, other numbers even higher than 40 – but 35 is kind of an oddball age. You’re not old old just yet, but you’re not exactly young anymore, either.

I mean, fuck – I’ve been out of high school for almost two decades now!

If anything, 35 is certainly proof that I ain’t getting any younger here…

And I think I’m ok with that, for the most part, anyways.

I don’t really want to be 18 anymore – girls wouldn’t talk to me and I still lived in my Mom’s basement.

25 was a little better – some girls were willing to talk to me and I played video games every moment of free time that I had.

30? Meh … by then I was already married and found myself bludgeoned by the fact that reproduction was going to be significantly more expensive for my family than it was for most.

31 – 34 … I honestly don’t even remember those birthdays anymore!

And that brings us to the big 35 – right in the middle between 30 and 40, and I suppose if I had to put it into words that’s about where I feel I am. There’s always something more just off on the horizon – more kids, more career opportunities, more changes. Admittedly it kind of makes it hard to live in the moment when you’re constantly focusing on the future like that – I guess that’s one thing in particular that I’m trying to keep in mind at this particular focal point of my life.

I also think that I’m starting to acquire just the smallest amount of that so-called wisdom that you sometimes hear old timers talking about. For me, it’s been in trying to filter out the things that I actually care about in life from the rest of the noise, and there’s a lot of noise, I’m certainly finding! Occasionally I’ll come across something that not five years ago I was immensely passionate about, and yet nowadays I find myself just shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Whatever…”

Right now more than ever, I recognize that time is my most valuable asset, and I think that wisdom is simply in trying not to waste it on stupid things that just don’t really matter in the big picture anymore.

I have a sneaky feeling that the next five years are going to pass by a lot more quickly than I would like, which I guess is a little ironic considering all of that forward-thinking stuff that I mentioned earlier … by the time that I turn 40, Christopher will be starting school and hopefully we’ll have two more in his footsteps, we’ll be getting ready to move into a new house, Cleo will be just as loud and obnoxious as ever…

Thankfully some things never change! 😉

As a little inspirational message to my future self whenever I circle back to this blog post again, here’s a video that I’ve watched many, many times before but the words ring true each and every time that I hear them. This clip dates back to 1984 from the eulogy that Muppet performer Richard Hunt gave at Jim Henson’s memorial service…

“Jim did not cling to the past, he did not worry about the future – that would work itself out…

And he did not live for the moment.

Instead, he lived in the moment … because that’s all we really have.”

So as I turn the big, old number 35, here’s to living in the moment. Above anything else, let’s have some fun… 😀