March Walkies

04.01.2014

Last month I was amazed when my little Nike walking app I've been using since mid-December rolled over 100 miles total. I was shocked and proud that Gina and I had walked 100 miles in roughly 3 months. For someone who had trouble walking across a parking lot a year ago without stopping (once or twice ) to catch my breath, the idea of walking 100 miles over any amount of time was more than I could fathom. Granted, losing 120 pounds will help anyone feel better.

March was my month to walk. I tried to go walking 5 days per week as opposed to the 3 days I was walking before. Thanks to Gina, my pace had picked up when walking so we were going faster, and technically farther since we would roughly try to walk the same amount of time.

With March over, my little Nike walking app showed that we had walked 61.33 miles in March. That's walking for exercise, not toodling around like when I was wearing a pedometer to keep track of my activity (those things just get in the way of my keyboarding). 61.33 miles of exercise. In a month.

When people ask how I'm feeling or how my surgery went, I'm just going to talk about how much I've been walking versus how little I used to move around.

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Star Trek Enterprise Part Deux

03.29.2014

While hip deep in actual work for the past month+, I've been re-watching Start Trek Enterprise in my down time. With 43 minute episodes that I've seen before, there's less chance of accidentally getting sucked into a watching marathon.

I watched parts of the first season when it first aired in 2001. Once the series was released on DVD in 2005 I finally watched the whole series. Since then, I don't think I've watched a complete episode. It was with a little trepidation that I started over with episode 1 as I didn't have the fondest memories of the series. Much to my surprise, I've been enjoying this 10 year old sci-fi series a lot more than I think I did in 2005.

Firstly, outside of the pilot episode it seems I don't remember any of the episodes. While this may mean the specific plot points were forgettable, it also means for the past month it's felt like I've seen all new episodes. Next, I don't remember as many CGI special effects in the show. Or space battles. Pew pew pew!

Yesterday I finished up season 3, which (as I remember) wrapped up the big story arc of the show even though the season finale ended on a cliffhanger. We'll season what happens over season 4 as I have free time this coming week.

Once I finish Enterprise (for the second time, ever) I've got my normal backlog of DVDs that have been released over the past month. There's also a couple of TV shows in that mix for me:

• Game of Thrones, Season 3 - This is one I've been looking forward to and know it will lead to a weekend marathon where I watch the whole season. This batch of shows is the reason I started watching Enterprise again, as I knew I didn't have a weekend I could waste in front of the TV.
• Arrow, Season 1 - I got this on sale for $15 at Target. I'm led to believe this is the Green Arrow version of Smallville. I liked Smallville. I had planned on waiting until Arrow had produced more seasons before trying it out (nothing worse than getting enthralled in a show and then having it suddenly cancelled/unavailable), but for $15....
• Boardwalk Empire (Seasons 1-3) - Another sale pickup that I've just been delaying getting into.

I've got plenty to do in my free time. I just need the free time again.

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Crickets Chirping

03.28.2014

...work deadline that I've been working toward for the past month is "officially" this coming Tuesday...

... mostly finished except for little bugs that keep popping up...

... also have to figure out a way to make a database query between 14 database table that does what I want it to do. So there goes Saturday.....

Permalink programming/interweb

Walkies Update

03.16.2014

There hasn't been a diet update in a month - mainly because my weight has leveled off - but at least I've been keeping active. Gina and I still go on our evening walks around the school in Athens. My goal as of a couple of weeks ago was to try to reach a 20'/mile pace as I was normally walking 21-23'/mile. Gina took this to heart and sped up my stride.

Our average for the past week was 18'43". I was happy when we got close to 19'/mile. For 3 days we would average 1 second better than the previous day. Suddenly on Thursday we averaged 18'30". On Friday 18'00". That's just crazy!

Saturday Gina was busy so I took a longer route at a slower pace. Not as slow as I was used to, as I still averaged less than 19'/min (but just barely).

It's weird. I now like going out for a walk. I needed to clear my head after weeks of intense (for me) programming, so when I went for my walk I didn't take anything to listen to. I just walked and listened to the crunch of the gravel beneath my shoes. When I was done with my 4.5 mile walk, I didn't want to crawl into bed or scuttle around like an old man, I just continued with my day.

I'm starting to think that extra 120 pounds I was carrying around with my sedentary lifestyle wasn't good for me.

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Worked Out

03.15.2014

It took a week longer than I intended, but this afternoon I finally got to the point on my little work project that I can quit worrying about it, or at least not worry about big chunks of functionality not being there.

Granted, there are some small things that probably don't work quite like they should. I had been making lists of things as I found them and then fixing them later. My list of those fixes is all marked off now.

Friday was a bigger waste of time than I had hoped. I was planning on getting everything wrapped up yesterday, but I had to re-factor my code to preserve checkboxes and drop down lists when paging through a table (which doesn't resubmit the page back to the webserver). Once I got into the code I had no idea how it worked in the first place - one of those times of carefully balancing tweaks to get it working once. Now, I know what's going on and have some nicely commented code.

This coming week will have some proper testing of my code along with writing an email/cron script. I could write the script now, but I need test data for it. I think Monday will be a good day to make test data. Saturday is not a good day for test data.

Now for the first time in 3 weeks (maybe 4) I have some free time I don't feel guilty about. What to do?

#1 thing to do - DON'T WRITE ANY CODE. For at least a day. 'Till tonight, for sure.

Permalink programming/interweb