Tag: ITouch

Project: Thinner by Design

This has been an very odd day.  I actually woke up without any plans for blog entries and as it turns out, I now have two.  Unfortunately it is a situation of the Yang and the Um in the sense that a joyous blog topic was countered with a bummer of an entry.  After an internal debate as to which topic to lead with, the decision was made to go with the order in which they occurred in the day.  This means we’ll be starting with the happy event.  So most of this year was spent rehabbing my messed up hamstring.  With the exception of a few important races, there wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to hit the pavement for any extended time.  In fact, after the Bix7 in July I don’t think there was one run over 3 or 4 miles until October.  Definitely nothing up to race pace which means it was difficult to keep the weight in check.  By the middle of October I’d managed to gain 6 pounds putting me at 166 (one pound over marriage weight and 19 under my martial arts weight).  This was pretty depressing and the scale was nagging at me every single morning.  Something had to be done.  At the same time a friend of mine (Pakage) had made a personal (and probably doctor approved) decision to reduce his weight and had employed an iTouch app called My Fitness Pal to help him do that.  I was totally impressed when he showed me this app because it had an extensive DB of foods both from restaurants and grocery stores.  Through a simple interface you were able to track your calorie intake, exercise along with a breakdown of key indicators like sodium, fats, vitamins etc.  Oh, and the most important thing is …. it was FREE.  All this brings us to October 20th when I made the personal commitment to getting myself back in running shape again.  There was something coming up the week of Thanksgiving so decided that was going to be the target date to eliminate the unwanted 6 pounds.  The software asked me a few questions regarding my lifestyle and goals and set a target calorie consumption of 1710 per day.  From October 21st to present I documented every meal, every snack, all drinks and detailed my workouts as much as possible.  First thing every morning I stepped on the dreaded bathroom scale and updated the app with the result.  Curious as to the results?  Let’s cut to the chase and show you the weight graph.

I wish there was a way to change the scale on the myfitnesspal website, but you should be able to tell that the goal was MET!  Today’s weight was indeed 160 and even a few days short of the self imposed duration.  In celebration I hit McDonald’s on the way into town and ordered sausage and egg bagel and a medium hot chocolate.  That was one of the best tasting breakfast sandwiches ever.  For now, I’ll transition to maintain mode and with the hammie finally coming around, the runs are already in the 4-5 miles range which means the daily calorie count will need to increase a little.  There are some more details after the jump, but a lot of the graphs and such are more for me to analyze how things went.  Honestly, this was not the easiest thing for me to do.  We eat out a lot which makes healthy choices a little more difficult and there were some sacrifices which led to some frustrating moments.  Swapping out my tasty muffins for oatmeal every morning was hard enough, but giving up some of my favorite desserts and reducing the portions on some of my favorite meals was a true test of the willpower.  At this point, the hammie feels a lot better, my cardio is getting back to par (think there may have been only 2 or 3 days that I didn’t get a core workout in or a run) and can pretty much work out in the lot for hours and hours without tiring.

Some analytics after the jump

Continue reading Project: Thinner by Design

Let Off Some Steam, Bennett

I happen to harboring some angst this weekend and decided to get this one out of the way while I am still feeling edgy.  So I’ve been dealing with the BMW issue (see last post), yesterday an estimator for a concrete company failed to show up as promised for some work I am looking to get done and then I have the topic of today’s post.  To set the background, keep in mind I have a satellite based Internet service due to a decision to live out in the country.  Trust me, I’d make that decision again in a heartbeat.  The downside of this is a) I can no longer game with my friends across the net, b) the best performance I can get is 1.5M on nice sunny days and lastly c) my usage cap is 300M every 24 hrs with unlimited between the hours of 1 and 5AM.  This is Hughes Net in case you were wondering, which far exceeds what we were getting with Wild Blue.  With all this, I can still enjoy local gaming and tend to gravitate to the war or fantasy based games.  These are all played in solo mode of course which means the cost of any multiplayer game far exceeds my usage.

At some point I acquired Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (either Xmas or Bday gift, can’t remember).  Finding some extra time one night in my schedule, I decided to install it and play a little to relax and let of some stress.  I Made it through the packaging and dropped the disk into the drive.  Next thing I see is it needs to install Steam.  For those not familiar with this product, it is an Internet service that provides patches, friend status and in some cases copyright control.  You could have heard my groan half way into town.  This was a pain when I had cable service and now my connectivity was severely limited.  A quick check of the back packaging did reveal a small warning (at the bottom of the package) that it required Internet access TO ACTIVATE the product.  Well, activation can’t be that bad can it?  Wrong!  So first I have to install Steam which immediately goes out and DOWNLOADS the latest version of the product which takes over 35 minutes to complete with no indication of how big it is in order to keep tabs on my download limit.

I lucked out and remembered an old account when I was still on a better network.  The program eventually loads and the actual game program loads from the local disk – for emphasis, loaded from the manufacturer’s disk which was legally purchased by someone’s hard earned money.  With eager anticipation, the solo campaign icon was hit and the game…. wait.. the Steam window comes up and logs into my account.  Fine, it is probably just a quick validation and on to the ga…. wait… apparently in order to configure Steam to play offline, I have to make sure the latest version of the game is installed.  Anger has now replaced all anticipation to play.  It is 10PM and now the game needs to download patches.  Just how long might this take on the satellite connection?

That’s right folks, 1 hour and 5 minutes and again, absolutely no indication of the amount of data it is downloading so I do not even know if I can get it all in under the cap.  How cute, a little toggle to automatically start the game as soon as it is ready.  I hope the bats enjoy the game because I’ve given up waiting on it.  The dogs decided they needed to go out later that night.  Since it was after 1AM, I dropped by the computer and kicked off the download.

The next night I decide to see if the game was worth the wait.  Immediately, those plans were ripped to shreds.

The iTouch alerts and mail checks were all successful so the problem is likely on Steam’s side.  Let’s summarize, the game was legally purchased, I have no plans to play the game on the Internet, assumed the game was thoroughly tested before packing it in the first place and have zero use for Steam beyond the copy protection capabilities it is providing to the game.  With all that, I still have not been able to play the game for two days.  Needless to say, my wish list and actual purchases will no longer contain any product that requires Steam to run.  If this is the future of copy protection, then I’m calling it quits.  This is doubly insulting based on the fact this particular game was selling out all over the place when it came out.  In case you are wondering, I did finish the game.  As a review, if you like console games you should feel right at home… if you are instead installing it on a PC then recall how you felt once Unreal Tournament 3 came out and ruined the experience.

In my best Arnold imitation, “Let off some Steam, Bennett”  and go and uninstall that crap.

Another Successful System Upgrade!

Good news everyone, the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 is now officially complete.  As mentioned previously, I was a little hesitant to embark on this endeavor since it is my main workhorse machine and really the heart of my day to day activities.  Adding to the complexity, my new provider caps me at 300MB per 24 hrs with the exception of 1-5AM.  It did not start out exactly smooth, but some blame is on the space between the chair and the keyboard.  The upgrade was from Windows XP Professional 32Bit to Windows 7 Professional 64Bit.  There is some question where the 7 Professional was really needed, but that purchases was pre-release and thus too many months in the past to worry about.  Unfortunately, when I slipped the 64Bit upgrade disk in an error popped up saying the install disk was not compatible with my OS.  This definitely resulted in quite a surprise.  Of course I tried it again using the exact same process expecting for some reason a different result.. yeah, I know insanity.  It then occurred to me to try and boot off of it.  A couple of attempts at that before realizing my BIOS wasn’t set up to boot off the CD Drive.  This was corrected and sure enough the upgrade boot was successful.  From that point on, the install was pretty smooth – besides working around the download of the updates in the uncapped morning hours.  It took about 5 hours for me to get all but one of my applications re-installed.  A significant portion of that was getting my mail client (Thunderbird) to resync with my backup.  I was a little worried about getting my Firebird back to my preferred state, but it turns out there is an export file it routinely creates which allows you to quickly bring back all your bookmarks.  So far, every single app is functioning without issue and there is definitely something to be said about having a pristine install.  I am still getting use to the Windows 7 UI, but other than a few oddities and slight annoyances it should be fine.

I would like to make two comments that stood out.  First off, I am a heavy user of Casper as my recovery system.  Thanks to a Thermaltake bare drive external unit (BlacX) I can slap in a bare SATA drive, ghost the system on it and slap it on the shelf.  I rotate through 3 drives allowing me multiple backups to roll back to.  Trust me, stop wasting your time with resolving viruses and go the simple route of taking  2 minutes to replace the OS drive.  Now, I utilize Raptor drives for the base OS and my gaming needs.  I think there was a 150G in there to begin with.  Since I wanted to be able to roll back to XP if issues were encountered, I picked up a 300G Raptor to ghost and replace the original drive.  Got the new drive out of the box, removed all the packaging and slapped it in the enclosure.  Ugh, the drive would not seat into the slot.  After closer inspection of the drive, they had taken a small drive about 2.5 inches by oh 4 inches and slapped a heat sync around it which brought it up to standard desktop dimensions.  This would be fine, but the drive’s connectors were at a different offset.  As a result, I had to open the case and add it as secondary drive.  Even this had troubles since the spacing was different than the case SATA cables causing me to replace it with a cable that came with the drive.  After all this, Casper successfully completed the copy and the primary drives were swapped.  Note to WD, stick with the standards and keep your user base happy.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on the last application that I finally got running after about 2.5 hours of fighting with it.  First a little setup.  Recently a certain example has become the poster child  for arguments to switch away from Microsoft and go with Apple.  Any guesses what that particular example might be?  Hint, it has to do with a standard activity that commonly happens with all computer installations…. it has to do with a certain hardware component…. got it?  Yes, the process of adding a printer.  No less than three times last month I was subjected to case scenarios on how such and such a family member struggled time and time again trying to get a printer installed on their Microsoft computer but when [such and such person] gave [them an Apple or showed them theirs], they were able to tell it to just find the printer and PRESTO, the printer was spewing out test pages in seconds.    As a result, everyone in the world should switch to Apple because all their support problems would disappear and we will all be in Pandora.  Once my OS was successfully upgraded, I brought up the add printer dialog and started my st0pwatch.  26 seconds later my network printer was successfully found, installed and a test page was coming out of the printer.  I don’t know about you, but my life can spare 26 seconds.  Now let’s talk about the final app.  The last application that needed to be installed was Apple’s ITunes.  I have an ITouch and until I jailbreak it next week I’m stuck with utilizing this ridiculous excuse for software.  So I go through the install to find out that I have registered all 5 of my available 5 computers for my username and I’ll have to remove them all to add anymore in the future – translated, I have made 4 upgrades/installs of my computer and one on my laptop.  Oh, and I can only do this removal once a year.  Once I get everything installed, I have to wait for it to download all my purchased apps.  Once that is done, I tried to point it to a copy of my previous sync directory.  After what seemed like an eternity, the import completes, but all my playlists are missing.  Thinking this was not an issue, I deleted everything and went to simply sync the contents of my ITouch to the new desktop install.  Guess what – that ain’t happening ’cause you can only sync the other way (desktop to ITouch).  So I rebuilt all my playlists by hand and re-added all the music song by song.  Finished with that, I hit the sync button and and and and … it simply came back that the sync was done, but nothing showed up on the ITouch.  20 minutes later I found a checkbox on the music tab telling it to sync the files.  How silly of me to actually think that people who install ITunes and connect up an ITouch would want to sync their music by default.  It is finally all working now and needless to say I have a counter argument for anytime anyone brings up a similar contrived excuse to move to an inferior platform.  The irony is I have an iTouch, but that appears to be something they got right but of course the supporting software frustrates me more than any Microsoft product ever has.

Anyway, everything is done now so no more excuses for not blogging!  I just might have to break out some recent Acadia pictures in celebration.