personal blog
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Progress and Next Steps – March 10, 2013
It’s been quite some time since I’ve published an update on my fitness project. This has been for few factors beyond my own pessimism. In short, I haven’t been making the types of progress I expected, and it’s been really bringing me down. I’m not doing terrible, but I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, stuck doing the motions while only making slight, if any, gains or strength increases. Although I have added some mass, my bodyfat has crept up as well, thereby losing the definition I was so proud of.
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My Fitness Transformation Story
Prologue You may not know me, but I’d bet we have a lot in common. Take fitness for example. Growing up I was fairly active for a nerdy kid, never out of shape. Then college I lost myself, and I’ve tried to get in shape many times. I’ve also failed many times. There are a variety of reasons for this: lack of knowledge, support, or motivation for sure, but primarily simple contentment (let’s be real, I was lazy). Nonetheless, off and on I’d try to do better. Perhaps my most pronounced fitness effort was during and after college, squarely after…
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Realistic Expectations
I recently told a friend what my fitness goals were, what I wanted to achieve with all the time and energy I’ve been putting into this project of mine. Their reply really struck me, they said I should “remember to accept realistic expectations of what [I am] capable of”. Maybe it wasn’t meant to, but that sounded to me like “you bit off more than you can chew” or “you should just accept that where you are now is as good as you can be and be proud of it.” I don’t think he meant it to be discouraging, and…
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Mr. Consistent
Have you ever ventured onto Wikipedia to lookup one encyclopedia entry, and end up reading a dozen others as you navigate among (un)related links? Sometimes it’s satisfying to quench idle curiosity by thumbing through interesting topics. The discoverability and broweability of inline links greatly appeals to me, of which you can see evidence in my various posts. One such blog I frequent as part of my information diet, Lifehacker, uses such a writing style. And today as I hyperlinked my way through How Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret Fixed My Procrastination Problem and a separate related post explaining the method, I was enticed by the ‘don’t break…
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Moore Storms
Back in December of ‘06, I was asked to come up with artwork for a team, the Moore Storms. Although I never took it further, I re-discovered a rough draft I came up with while digging through some archives. If you aren’t familiar with the meteorological symbols, here they are in order, following the tornado: snow storm, hurricane, thunderstorm, cold front, and dust storm.
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The Future We Live Within
My thoughts after noticing the incredible pace and significance of recent papers in the scientific community… On several occasions, I have yielded to my inner nerd and shared with friends how much I’d desire to have been born a few centuries later, to grow up in a world not unlike Roddenberry’s fictional universe. As any dedicated Trekkie will gladly discuss at length, many of the principles and concepts in the series were inspired either directly or indirectly by actual scientific research and mathematical postulates. As for gadgets, today you can point to a number of now-commonplace examples of what was…
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How far we’ve come
Of the things we take for granted, instantaneous global communication is perhaps the most far-reaching. But it’s such a recent advancement. A mere 50 years ago, the only way to communicate overseas was by a letter and a boat. Where it took weeks to have correspondence before, the first trans-Atlantic cable allowed us to have – get this – 30 simultaneous voice calls going on at once. Thirty! It truly is amazing how far we’ve come in that 50 years. And you might think that our advances continue to accelerate. That is true, but consider these thoughts: We couldn’t make…
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How We Used to Vote
I saw this on Slashdot earlier. Very interesting! “Think hanging chads, illegal purges of the voter rolls, and insecure voting machines are bad? The New Yorker looks back at how we used to vote back in the good old days: ‘A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party’s Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings…