Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Happy holidays

Time away from work is fun! Yay!

This has been a pretty good Christmas for me. The biggest thing is I got my eyes fixed on the 23rd - believe it or not, it's quite thrilling for me to be able to wear a pair of cheap $12 sunglasses! Recovery seems to be good - had some blurring last night driving on the highway (pulled over and let my wife drive pretty quickly after I figured out that it wasn't going to clear up with blinking), but some eye drops and a few minutes of resting my eyes made that better.

Saw "Super Size Me" again at my folks' place - decided that I need to start exercising and paying attention to what I'm eating. Yes, this is a recurring theme for me, but it's better to keep trying than to just give up and become one with the couch.

And finally, my brother-in-law bought me Halo for the PC on Boxing Day, after I bought it for him for Christmas. I haven't been able to play it, though - my laptop doesn't have a powerful enough video card, and my desktop doesn't have a powerful enough processor. The only other machine that I have access to should run it fine, but it's my workstation at the office. Sigh... and I don't see much in the way of hardware upgrades coming in the near future. Sucks to be me sometimes, I guess.

Gotta run - my son just emptied out the cat food all over the bathroom floor. The joys of parenthood...

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

I'm not dead yet!

Why yes, my blog has been rather stagnant. Making bold claims like "I'm going to lose weight" or "I'm going to post to my blog every day" - what sort of moron says those things in public? Guess I know now. Thanks to jayson for getting on my case about this.

Monday, November 08, 2004

Heavy: Day 1

Stepped on a scale today. 299 lbs. Okay, so that's my starting point. I'm thinking of targeting 20 lbs by my birthday (April). That's not too ambitious - about 1 lb per week or so.

Today was TGIM at the office (Thank Goodness It's Monday - if it weren't for the fact that he seems dead serious about it, I'd say that my boss has a very sick sense of humour). TGIM means cinnamon buns. Cinnamon buns means temptation. Temptation leads to weakness. Weakness leads to eating. Eating leads to guilt. Guilt leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate... leads to suffering.

Ok, so that last bit went a little too far. But I did blow it - had one bun at morning coffee break (with my Diet Pepsi) and another at afternoon coffee break. I hate to admit this, but that is actually cutting back for me - it's often been two at each break. I also walked to and from work this afternoon, but didn't get on the exercise bike.

It's a start, I guess.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Heavy.

"There's that word again; 'heavy'. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?" - Doc Brown, Back to the Future

There's nothing wrong with the earth's gravitational pull as far as I know, but my gravitational pull is too strong. Yes, that's a geeky way of saying that I'm fat. I don't really like that word, but that's the ugly truth.

This has nothing to do with a poor self-image, not being brainwashed by the world's marketing departments that say I'm not one of the "beautiful people": the fact of the matter is that I could lose 100 lbs right now and still be overweight. I owe it to myself, and to my family, to improve my health by losing weight and exercising. Right now I don't have any major health issues aside from hypopnea, but life is funny in how things can go wrong without warning.

I want to be around for my kids' graduations, their weddings, their accomplishments. I want to meet my grandchildren. Heck, I'd like a chance to see my great-grandchildren. I want to live long enough to be truly considered a grumpy old man (instead of the grumpy 30-something man I am today). If I don't make some significant changes in the way I live, I'm just asking for trouble.

Time for some brutal honesty. I'm going to try to post daily on my blog, talk about what I do (or not) to make these changes. I'm going to admit my failures (watch for this, there's gonna be a lot of them). And hopefully, as time goes on, I'll be able to point to my progress and my successes.

Tomorrow, I begin. Oh no... Monday... cinnamon buns for coffee break at the office... be strong, be strong...

Thursday, October 28, 2004

If I only had the time and/or ambition...

I would...
  • sleep
  • learn to speak Norwegian
  • do the laundry more often
  • exercise more
  • eat healthier
  • clean the garage
  • play piano more often
  • play with my kids more often
  • sleep
  • organize my sock drawer
  • install Linux on my home machine
  • do something with all the obsolete and/or dead computer parts lying around (like my wife has been asking me to)
  • play the Pepsi iPod contest
  • sleep
  • watch the extended editions of "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" again before the extended edition of "The Return of the King" is released
  • finish ripping all my kids' DVDs to the laptop so we don't have to haul all the original DVDs with us wherever we go
  • change the oil on our minivan
  • sleep (yes, this is the fourth time I've mentioned sleep, very observant of you, now shut up)
  • create a full-fledged website with custom blogging, webmail, and photo album software
  • update my blog more regularly :-)

Friday, October 01, 2004

Lost in the electronic mists of time...

Once, back in 2001 or so, there was a neat website called "A Wind on Small Hands", created by someone simply referring to themselves as "J" - it was a multi-media work of fiction, with very neat artwork, downloadable MP3 music, and an interesting story - something about a small child and a lost angel, I think. Then, one day, it just disappeared, leaving me with an unnamed MP3 file containing a haunting theme song, and a fading memory of an unfinished story.

Today, that song popped up in my Winamp playlist (yes, it's stayed on there all this time), and I got to wondering whatever happened to the site. Google brought back one hit for "wind on small hands", an artist's page at Deviant Art with some of the wallpaper for the site (Trip52 appears to have been another alias for "J"). The Wayback Machine only has the front page of the site, probably because most of the content was in a pop-up window (and it may have been Flash-based as well).

Trip52's artwork has a dark, raw emotional edge to it, even though the art itself is extremely well polished. "Smack" appears to be about heroin addiction - the artist simply says "remembering...". The last thing that Trip52 posted to Deviant Art was "Americana Deceit" on September 17, 2001, with no comment from the artist.

I wonder what happened to Trip52/J - it's like they just dropped off the face of the earth. Maybe they changed to a new online identity - happens all the time, this "Cowboy_K" thing is a new identity for me, leaving behind my past aliases (sometime maybe I'll blather on about those) - but the darkness of the artwork makes me worry that perhaps they didn't live happily ever after...

Monday, September 27, 2004

Not that I'm bitter or anything,,,

In today's news, a Newfoundland woman won nearly $18 million in the 6/49. In related news, I matched the last digit of the "Extra", which means I won 2 dollars. The ticket cost 3 dollars.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Firefox: Welcome back, baby

It's Monday, but I'm happy - I've got my extensions in Firefox all back the way I like it. Url2Tab has been replaced with TabBrowser Preferences, Super DragAndGo is a new version not appearing in the official Mozilla or the unofficial texturizer.net update lists, and I had to hack the .XPI file for TabX, but it's all working now.

Back to work now - no more obsessively checking for extension updates.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Firefox: I love you, I hate you, I love you

A couple months ago, I switched to Firefox from Maxthon. I had been a Netscape user from 1.0 to 4.75, but after Netscape started stagnating and IE started to take the lead I switched. When pop-up ads started getting bad (thanks so much to our friends at X10.com), I found CrazyBrowser and MyIE2/Maxthon.

But then, the Mozilla project started making some major headway, IE started stagnating and requiring security updates every other day, and finally Firefox won me over back into Netscape's camp. With the right set of extensions, I soon found that I was missing none of the functionality of Maxthon, missing none of the security holes, and enjoying a whole lot of new features.

Two days ago, Firefox Preview Release (PR) came out. I confess, I'm a version junkie, always wanting to be running the latest thing, so I shouldn't be too surprised that things went wrong when I upgraded. The base features in PR were better than in the 0.9x series, but my favorite extensions broke. Super DragAndGo, URL2Tab, BugMeNot, TabX - all refused to work in PR. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about Maxthon again...

I know that I just need to be patient. It'll probably be only a week or so till most of my favorites are updated, and who knows - I might even get desperate enough to try my hand at XUL. But I'm still frustrated... yes, I can downgrade back to 0.93, but I like the new PR features too much.

Firefox, why do you hurt me baby? I love you...

So it begins...

Lord help me, I've got my own blog now. What to do now - rant about my job? Complain about how depressed I feel? Whine about Microsoft's crappy software? Wax philisophical? Ask lots of rhetorical questions?

Oh. I guess that solves that one then. Hopefully I'll put some content on here in the not-too-distant future that others will find entertaining, enlightening, interesting, or simply find as an excuse to mock me mercilessly.

Not that I'm bitter or anything...