I have mentioned a few times about how different my health is from what it used to be and I have started working on it, but I can’t go full on because I am not in the gym. On the first I started keeping records and worked on eating healthier and it looks like my mass has not gone down, which I am thankful for. I am using the DoD bodyfat calculation to determine these numbers, which is close, but not exact. While it is not as exact as the BodPod or underwater methods it is what I have been using for years so it gives me a great comparison to what I have been in the past. Right now I am sitting at 165-170lbs lean mass, and that is because it is based on measurements and sometimes you can measure different. I have no doubt that when I get back in the gym I can gain another 10 in muscle, if I do that and drop to 200lbs I will be 10% bodyfat and 180lbs lean mass. I was big before, but people could tell I had bulked, right now I think people just think I’m fat because I have a lot more of it.

Yesterday I got a quick run down of just how out of shape I am. I spent a couple hours moving things to storage and cleaning out the shed. I also went to bed at 6pm and woke up at 9:30am this morning. To give you an idea of what I used to do. I would get up at 5am eat a banana and drink a bottle of water, leave at 5:15 and drive 35min to the gym. I would usually begin working out around 6:00 and finish at 7:10. Shower and then leave around 7:30 after taking my supplements. Arrive at work at 20 of 8, eat my breakfast then I would work from 8 to 5 outside in the hot sun on equipment or doing some stuff by hand, but prior to that 1 or 2 days a week I shoveled horse crap from stalls. Think of working out in the gym * 4 then multiply that by 8 hours, it is literally the hardest work I have ever done and I have done a lot of stuff in life. You are basically removing 1ft+ deep shavings + crap from a 8×8 stall, not your standard family farm daily cleaning. Anyway after that I would go home eat and get 8 hours of sleep before starting it all over again. When you compare that to what I do now, you might understand how I could become out of shape. Not really the job for the type of person that can program in a number of languages, but I loved the job. I hated the smell of horse shit and being dirty as hell everyday, but I worked with friends, I was in shape and when I got home I knew I had done something that day. I didn’t come home with a lot of money in my pocket, but that was ok because I know that I earned every single penny I did bring home and I had the sore muscles to prove it.

I remember in California when I was working with mortgages they would say, you work hard don’t cut your fees just so a loan will go through. I thought to myself, well thats California for ya. I have actually worked hard and made a lot less. You call someone, get their information, email it to some brokers, work up deals, pitch it, and do more paperwork. It’s a joke, you make 2k+ per loan and have a lot of stress when you don’t have clients, but it isn’t hard work, just time consuming at times.

I switched my DNS for another domain over to Google Apps last night. This domain, tworaised.com, is going to be my project domain where I will actually store the code for all my public projects. It will have trac and svn environments for people to interact with and probably a blog plugin integrated into trac, but we will see I would almost like to have one blog to cover all projects. I have considered not using the domain because of the name. Tech people will get the 2^ part because everything is 2^x, but I’m sure others will think two raised as in two middle ,,|,, fingers ,,|,, but what can ya do.

I will be detailing my experiences with Solaris in my next post, along with my experience with the user community surrounding it.

I was laying on the bed with my dog sorta playing around and had his leg and pretended like I was chewing on it. He is usually playful, but this time he bit my head and when I got up I drew back out of reaction and he snarled at me and growled. I will admit in the past I have hit him, not the best solution, but it was only a few times and I don’t do it anymore. Anyway was he just playing you think or was he being mean? He is a sweet dog, but sometimes I don’t know what if he is playing or not.

Some people have said when a dog bites you it must be put down or it will do it again, but I can’t do that and won’t do that. He has never done that to anyone else so I am thinking it might have been he thought I was trying to hurt him or he was just playing. He is trained somewhat, but not what he should be so any advice on training a dog 2 years old or any advice on this subject at all is appreciated.

I found this article on slashdot about Dell won’t sell Ubuntu based systems to businesses. If you read my blog you know the troubles I have had with Dell and I see that article as another big reason to just totally write them off. I don’t understand the reason why they won’t sell them to businesses, what about it being designed for personal use makes it unfit for business use? I mean really, does it have a sesame street background for the kids? While I don’t like Ubuntu one of the benefits is its use of packages, so the things people want and do not want can be installed and removed with a package manager. I setup systems for businesses and I don’t consider their systems more business than personal. I setup email, the network, standard applications. I guess the only difference is Quickbooks and a couple applications. Whatever, its Dell… I still havn’t gotten my damn money back for that monitor. If I don’t have it by Monday I am filing a BBB complaint. It has been over 2 months since I ordered the monitor and getting close to a month since they received it.

I first switched to Wordpress on 7/6/2006, almost 1 year ago. In November of 2006 I was getting about 1,123 unique users a month and 12,296 page views. Right now June 1st - June 19th I am at 6,166 and 29,894 page views. Might not be as high as a lot of sites, but going from an average of about 40 unique users a day to an average of 335 makes me happy. I don’t advertise or push my blog to anyone other than through XML-RPC to the normal sites and thats about it. I think when I start adding screencasts it will improve even more.

I just finished up an interview with a company in San Francisco looking for a PHP developer. At points I thought I said the wrong thing, but at the same time I feel the interviewer did not indicate that I did. You can sense those things and there were things he said that makes me feel there is real interest, but I could be misreading it. Even if I don’t get the job or even a second interview all you can do is try and every interview prepares you for the next. I had four people in one interview one time, and it was the most difficult interview ever, some apparently have experienced this before, but others were shocked when I told them.

I mentioned the other day about my move to Google Apps for all my email and calendar needs. I am really loving it, I don’t have to worry about not having previously sent email when I am on the road or having to login to a ton of accounts to access it. IMAP is nice, but this is a little better in my opinion. With IMAP if you delete something locally it will eventually get removed remotely, with Google Apps you can download like POP3 but it remains on the server.

I have started to work with Ruby on Rails and I have come up with a terrific project, I am unsure if it will be done in RoR or not, but I thought about it when I was brainstorming ideas for RoR applications.

During my time at beCamp I got to meet Waldo. Waldo has some great ideas about handling people on the internet and I wanted to share. He mentioned one alternative he has used to combat trolls on forums and people who are commenting on blogs. This method involved placing in some code that would have the posts that individual wrote to only show up for them and nobody else. Eventually they will stop posting when nobody responds, letting them leave on their own instead of banning them and having them come back. He also wrote a post about being anonymous on the internet and how it is pretty hard to do. I like his approach to handling people who cause problems, not many people seem to be willing to keep people away from the firing squad, but Waldo did.

I have learned that conferences really are career builders. I met a guy named Roger at beCamp and he has been helping me to make myself more marketable from the first night. I am in a very rural area so I don’t see a lot of things that happen in the “real world”, and he is filling some of the things I miss out on by not having conferences available all the time or LUGs to go to.

The randomness is complete….for now