How many times have you heard that from someone who’s blog has gone dormant? Writing is a difficult, albeit useful and sometimes cathartic practice to maintain. It’s a habit that like any exercise has lasting benefits, but it’s a hard habit to develop. But the turn of a new year often creates the opportunity to reflect on years gone by and plan for the year ahead; a time to begin to develop new muscle memories.

Several months ago I begun a trek on the path to weight loss. Not jumping on the latest diet fad, I decided to make small but maintainable changes to my daily habits that would result in a drop in the bulk I’ve accumulated over the past 25 years. Several things led to this, one of which was something my doctor had told me.

What if I asked you to carry around a fifty pound bag of rocks for a week. You’d respond by saying “man, you’re crazy.” But that’s exactly what you’ve been doing for years.

For some reason, that made a profound amount of sense, even though it’s a “duh” kind of statement. The truth of it is, I’ve been carrying around 2 bags of rocks. For years.

Six months later, I’m down almost 60 pounds, my blood pressure is lower, and my cholesterol is almost normal. The funny thing is it really hasn’t been that hard. Two things have contributed to this. The first is coming to an understanding about what foods are good and what foods are bad and why. Not the radical “all X is bad, don’t eat X ever” (whatever X may be). It really comes down to simple math. Things you eat have a caloric value, and your body burns calories at a certain rate, depending on activity. If the first number is less than the second, you lose weight. A pound is roughly equivalent to 3500 calories. If you eat 500 calories less than you burn a day, you’ll lose a pound in a week. It’s a simple equation, and it’s simple to do on a regular basis. Simple, that is, if you have the second tool which is the ability to track your burn and intake.

I know most people are averse to “calorie counting.” I would be, too, if it wasn’t as easy as it is these days to do the counting. You see, it’s not about reducing your intake quantity-wise, it’s about the intake of the “right” things… simple, easy substitutions allow you to eat plenty and be “satisfied,” yet don’t contribute as much to the calorie intake side of the scale. Couple this with a simple increase in activity and you begin to lose weight.

So, how did I do this? Well it started when I came across a device and website called the Fitbit. Basically, the Fitbit is an advanced pedometer, counting steps and activity level, and automatically, wirelessly syncing this data to their tracking application on their website.

The interesting thing about this is initially the Fitbit was an extremely hard item to come by. I can only imagine, as a fairly new startup, they were having production issues keeping up with demand. I ordered my Fitbit on July 19, 2010, and didn’t receive it until the end of November. But that’s the interesting thing… the use of the tracking tools on their website work without a Fitbit, and cost nothing to use. I used an existing cheap pedometer that I already had, and started using the website to track food, activity (steps), my blood pressure readings, etc. Using this alone, I lost over 40 pounds before I even received my Fitbit.

I should point out here that I’m not particularly advocating Fitbit, although I think it’s a great site and an awesome device (now that I’ve received mine). I even got a Fitbit for my wife, and she’s onboard now as well, although she hasn’t started tracking her food, yet. There are many tools out there, find one (or more) and use them.

The key is understanding that certain foods that I was used to having were just not healthy from a calorie standpoint. That double whopper from Burger King for lunch? 990 calories. Add fries? 500 calories more. A burrito from Freebirds? 1,450 calories. By using the tools on the Fitbit site, I set my weight goal, daily calorie intake goals, and tracked the numbers. It literally takes seconds to enter the data, the hardest part is getting in the habit. But, as research has shown, if you do something consistently for 30 days straight, you’ll turn it into a habit.

So that’s what I did. Weigh each morning before my shower. Take a walk before work. Record my lunch and dinner right after eating. Record my daily steps and take my blood pressure reading right before bed. And the weight started coming off.

With the Fitbit, I no longer have to remember to enter my steps and activity for the day. The device automatically syncs wirelessly whenever I’m near my computer. Very cool. Next, I’ve located a scale from a company called Withings that syncs your weight readings over wi-fi to their website. Fitbit is beta testing an integration with Withings so your weight readings flow directly into your Fitbit profile. Withings is about to release a new blood pressure monitor that hooks up to your iPhone to monitor blood pressure and factor that into the tools, as well. Very cool.

Of course, the main thing is watching the types of food I eat. I haven’t cut out fast food altogether, but I’ve drastically cut back. And there are plenty of “good” options from the normal fast food places you eat. More salads, fruit, protein… less fat, fried food, salt. The point is I get plenty to eat by simply picking the right things and paying a little more attention to the labels. Easy.

I shoot for 1250 calories a day, and a burn of 3000 calories a day. Right now I’m averaging about 1500 calories a day in and 3100 out. The math on that averages to about 3 pounds a week, and the graphs prove that out. I won’t lie, December was hard (more fun food available and the weather not so cooperative for exercise). I have been basically flat from Thanksgiving thru New Years, but I’m back on the downward path now that we’re into January.

I’m at 270.0 pounds today. According to the site, I move from “obese” to “over” weight at 247. I’m shooting for 206, which is when I move into the “normal” range for my height. So, 64 to go.

I didn’t mean to turn this into a weight loss post. The goal is to start writing about things that are going on, allowing me to better sort the details and thoughts out in my own head. Writing about things does that. The next habit I want to make is to do this on a more regular basis.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve since gone to Akismet spam checking, and it’s working pretty well… no false positives yet, and no false negatives either… but the amount of attempts is bewildering. It’s already filtered over 250 spam comments.

Don’t even get me started on email spam. I get, easily, 250 spams a day through my various email accounts. Fortunately, Apple Mail does a pretty decent job of catching those as well. However, I still get 10 or so false negatives a day and the occasional false positive. This means I have to continuously sift thru the sludge to make sure I didn’t miss an important email, which has happened. I used to have a pretty good server-based spam catcher, but it started randomly crashing my SMTP server, so I had to abandon it.

The thing that makes me slap my forehead is the fact that spammers wouldn’t continue their flood of garbage if they didn’t receive some sort of return. That means that some (albeit small) percentage of people out there are actually dumb enough to fall for their pitch and follow the link. It’s pretty simple, folks: if they have to resort to such low-life ways of getting their message out, their message is not worth hearing, and is most likely a scam of some sort.

I know sending emails is a relatively cheap way to get the word out, but even so, I’ve got to think that if the click-thru rate on this spam went to zero, the spam would dry up.

I think what is needed is some sort of authenticated email system. The ability to send anonymous email over SMTP is entirely too easy. If people had to attach their true, authenticated identity to each email they sent, things would be much more above board. Shine the light and the cockroaches tend to scatter. I can’t think of hardly any scenarios where true anonymous email is necessary, can you? In the rare case where it might be, there is probably a different channel available for that communication.

I’m also working on a new design for the look of this site, I’m getting a little bored with the blue boxes, although I’m not sure what I’m going to change things to.

Mom has started blogging! You can see her new site at http://www.devoll.net/mamade.

I’ve upgraded to the latest build of WordPress, and am liking what I see. The upgrade process is almost as painless and easy as the installation process. I’m very impressed with the WordPress people.

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and signed up for a .Mac account. I’m using it primarily to sync address books/calendars/etc. between my desktop and Mac Book Pro, since I’m doing more and more with my notebook each day (that’s a topic for another post). Having .Mac is turning out to be a pretty neat thing… I’ve started using iWeb in conjunction with iPhoto to post pictures. The basic templates that come with iWeb are nice, and the slideshows created on .Mac are pretty cool. I’m just starting to learn Aperture, and am anxious to see how powerful it’s web publishing tool is.

I’m also trying a new comment spam prevention method. Let me know if there are any problems posting comments.

Things have been busy, but I’ve managed to rework the site entirely into WordPress. The layout is very similar to the old one, but CSS-based, not table-based.

I’ll be picking up the story of our Disney trip with day 6, and writing additional entries to catch things up to the present.

If you’ve been keeping up with this site via the old RSS feeds, please re-subscribe via the link in the upper right-hand corner.

Also, I’ve started enabling comments on the posts, so comment away. WordPress uses an authentication scheme, so your post may have to be initially approved. I’ve also included a Captcha plugin to prevent comment spam, so you’ll have to decipher the letters in the little images. Annoying, to be sure, but it seems to be one of the best ways to prevent automated spambots from flooding the comments on blogs.

Let’s see, how to summarize…

• Work: busy
• Family: busy (lots of basketball, and Madison and Michael are another year older)
• Church: busy
• Health: well, sick, well, sick, well
• iPod Shuffle: cool
• Michael’s new Mac Mini: very cool
• Oscars: very boring
• March: looks to be busy

Cynthia and I took a short trip to Vegas, stayed at the Luxor, saw Blue Man Group, had a blast, but had to come back.

Work is busy. So much so, that I haven’t even had the time to put together a decent website for the new business. Got to get that done. Several projects (happily paying ones) have been keeping my attention.

And yet, the world marches on. Plenty of dumb things happening in the political landscape: Fahrenheit 911 is getting plenty of press, but people seem to be wising up to all the fallacies and deceits of this mockumentary. John Kerry picks a “safe” VP running mate that won’t help him at all. A story leaks today that Homeland Security is investigating the possibility of postponing the election in the event of a terrorist act; something that won’t happen (the postponing, that is). It would be just about the stupidest thing ever to do, giving in to the terrorist threat. Ah, to have more time to comment.

Apple previews Tiger, steps all over a successful developer, introduces marvelous new displays (including a 30″ monster), and sells the 100 millionth song on the iTMS. If they’d only hurry up and release Motion…

O, and it’s hot. But that’s not news, that’s normal for Texas in July.

It’s not like I’ve been busy or anything. You know, starting a new company and all. Oh, I forgot, hadn’t blogged about that yet. OK, I’ll get to that.

Anyway, suffice it to say that the last month has been quite a whirlwind and now that the dust is beginning to settle just a bit, I guess I’ll get back on the stick of posting. Betcha you’ve never heard that one before.

Right now, though, I’m at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, and while I haven’t even been able to step foot on the floor yet, Apple has already unleashed a slew of updates and new products:

• Updates across the line for PowerBooks and iBooks. The PowerBooks now top out at 1.5Ghz with a 4xDVD-R drive, and iBooks go to 1.2Ghz starting at just $1,099.
• eMacs have been seriously upgraded to 1.25Ghz, with a superdrive option for only $999.
• Final Cut Pro HD, which is really FCP 4.5. Lots of new features, including much improved workflow with other apps like LiveType, and lots of new support for HD over firewire.
• Updates to LiveType, CinemaTools, etc.
• DVD Studio Pro 3.0 with much improved workflow and integration, and the return of the flowchart view from 1.5.
• Shake 3.5, which is still too expensive for my blood, but I’m not sure I have a use for such a high-end compositing package, yet.
• Motion. New product that looks to compete with AfterEffects. Must look into this one today.
• xSan – xServe RAID on steroids. 64 simultaneous users, each with up to 400Mbps throughput to a common data store, perfect for video postproduction environments.

And that’s just what they announced in the last 24 hours. This is gonna be a fun week.

I’m in San Antonio, recording voiceover and video for a training series we’re doing for the US Courts. Long hours in the sound booth, woo.

There’s a lot going on, both at work and at home. And in the world. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to comment on some of it soon.

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we’ve released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We’ve included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable. We’ve also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time. Of course, there are no perfect defenses, and if you’re truly concerned about the comments on your weblog, the best defense is prevention by closing old comment threads.

One more check mark on the to-do list.

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I was in San Antonio on Friday, visiting an existing client and a prospective new client. The trip went well, but rain caused my flight back to be delayed.

The weekend was quite busy, with Church things and Birthday parties to go to and all. Then the news came Sunday morning that coalition forces had located and captured the rat himself, Saddam Hussein. Great day!

Monday was back to the hectic schedule, with a day or more worth of work to get done before lunch. Afterwards, I ran FOH sound for the Salesmanship Club’s annual roast/initiation dinner. The crew I was with put on a full multimedia show, including two-camera live shoot, pre-recorded and edited video segments, etc. All this while the audience was pelting the guys on stage with dinner rolls. Just like a fraternity party. I’m just glad I was back in the sound booth and not running a camera up front.

I’ve got two projects to get finished up this week, and two more are kicking off. Not sure when I’m going to get my Christmas shopping done. Woot!