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.

How original. I do like the walls, though. Wanna bet on how long untill someone posts a picture of them blue-screening?

Geez.

Let’s take a look at a few parts of the activities of the past 30 days. Signing of the largest spending bill in the history of the world. Holy cow. How can that not throw up all kinds of red flags? And where is this money going? How will it “stimulate” the economy? Truth of the matter is it won’t. Any “stimulus” it might provide will be in the form of jobs on the government payroll. And when was the last time you ever knew the government to reduce it’s payroll? That’s right, never. So not only are we spending a ton of money now, we’re increasing the size of government more than we ever have, which will mean more government spending tomorrow.

Has anyone noticed that every time the president opens his mouth to preach more doom and gloom, and blame the previous administration for all the ills in the world, that the market takes another few steps downward? All stocks are suffering, but banks are hardest hit right now. So the next step is the government “invests” in these banks to shore them up, at a greatly reduced per-share cost. Nice. The government gets a deal, and we end up with the entire banking system having the fed as the largest single shareholder. If the government controls the banking industry and the printing of currency, how can that be good? Tell me, if (and that’s a big if) the banks recover after this, and their shares go back up, does the government have to pay capital gains taxes on their increases? Something tells me “no”. They’ll just keep the stock and continue to control the banks.

What about the mortgage “crisis”? Well, since you asked, we have some legislation and spending for that, too. Let’s do this: if people can’t pay their mortgages, the government will step in and force the banks to rewrite the loans while paying for the shortfalls of the consumer. Hmmm, what does that encourage? In the areas where people “suddenly” find themselves upside down in their mortgage, because the value of their home has dropped so much they now owe more that it’s worth, what are they going to do? Stop paying the mortgage, of course, especially if they’re only eligible for government assistance if they’re delinquent. This will only cause matters to get worse, much worse. On top of that, it’s starting to become clear that the vast majority of foreclosures are occurring in 5 states (California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan). By a whopping margin. The home values there were significantly inflated compared to the rest of the country. Banks wrote notes to people who couldn’t have afforded them in the first place, they default, and the banks foreclose. This causes the values to drop, which causes a correction. The market takes care of itself. But since the fed is going to step in and encourage default, this will only accelerate the decline. Honest people who would otherwise find a way to make it by in lean times will say “forget it” and go into default so they can participate in the handouts. So now the government owns the mortgages too.

Healthcare is next, and gun control is after that. Just wait. And the president announces last week that he wants to cut the deficit in half while all this spending is going on. How in the world does that compute? We’re just being softened up for the tax increases that come along. And history shows that every time taxes are raised, the economy reacts negatively.

It concerns me that the big O is spreading the fear and doubt in an effort to depress everything so that he can rush as much government increase legislation through as possible. Pretty soon the majority of the country (in one way or another) will be working for the government, and then suddenly everyone is going to wake up and realize that we’ve been Socialized. That will be a scary day indeed. The road to recovery from that will be painful indeed.

Take off the party hat and think for a second.

Things either spiral down or they spiral up. And it’s all comes down to confidence and attitude. If you are confident and have a positive attitude, things tend to go your way. If you have a negative attitude and are scared to death of the next shoe to drop, you start hoarding what little you have, holing up in your home, spending as little as possible, and things go the other way. Some call that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, in that line of logic, think about it this way. If the President of the United States preaches nothing but doom and gloom, and says we’re going to use the power of the government to spend our way out of this (by increasing the size of government), and we’re going to help everyone out by giving them what amounts to $13 a week, what are you going to do with your $13? Probably put it under a mattress. It won’t go back into the economy. People will see that they’ll get a handout if they shirk personal responsibility. We’ll all go downward together.

But if the President said something like, “you know, our economy is still the largest in the world. We lead, we don’t follow. In fact, when we grow our economy, everyone benefits. More jobs are created. The tax base grows. Everyone wins. So, instead of spending us into oblivion, we’re going to do something radical. We’re going to do away with income tax for 2009. Take that money and get yourself back on track. Whatever that means to you.” Think about the impact that that would have on our economy right now. Sure, some people would use that shot in the arm to get themselves in a better financial position, perhaps getting out of debt. Many would go out and spend more. For about the same price as all of this spending the economy would receive a much more direct “stimulus”. And the stimulus would be at the hands of the people, not the government. Then the market could take care of itself.

If they really wanted to get radical, during the tax hiatus they could overhaul the tax system itself. Eliminate the stupid concept of taxing a persons earnings and move to a consumption based tax system. Forget this flat tax nonsense (although that would be better than what we have now). Tax me on what I consume and spend, not what I earn. That would have a much more positive natural effect on peoples spending and saving habits. Why should I aspire to earn more if that means the government is just going to take more?

I’ve about had all I can take of this class warfare rhetoric. “Tax the rich, they can afford it!” What a load of crap. It’s been said, but I’m going to say it again. I never got a job from a poor person. Ever. Here’s the deal: there will always been someone with more than you, and there will always be someone with less than you. You have to encourage people to move up in life. If I have money to spend, chances are I’ll spend it. Either by starting a company (creating jobs), or investing (creating jobs). Chances are not great that I’ll just stuff it in my mattress.

The government was put in place for only two reasons: to protect the people from foreign enemies (military) and to enforce the common laws of the land (judicial). It was not put in place to guarantee healthcare or build roads or help the poor or invest in the stock market or any one of the thousands of other things we’ve allowed it to do. The government has no place to tell me how I spend my money. It has no right to take my hard earned dollars and give them to someone who has a different set of socioeconomic circumstances. If you try to level the field by taking from me to give to someone else, you will only bring us both down. But if you get out of the way and let me decide who and what to invest in or give to, we all rise. That’s the fundamental difference between a market driven republic and a socialist/communist society.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for helping out your fellow man. If you vote left because you think your party is more compassionate towards those less fortunate, that’s great. But think about this: if you want to give to the poor and help out at the soup kitchen and volunteer at the hospital, that’s awesome. But do you want the government to mandate what you do in that regard? Should it be up to the political elite to decide where your earnings go? Or should you decide that?

With the current and proposed increases in government spending and scope, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s all connected. How in the world can you have the “live and let live, what you do is your business and doesn’t affect me” attitude on the one hand, but then have the “I’ll tell you who gets your money” attitude on the other? You can’t have it both ways. It just doesn’t work. There are fundamental truths to the world.

I’m not happy with where the Republicans allowed us to go in the past few years, but is this the kind of “change” we were looking for? Socialism? It concerns me to no end that we now have a generation of voters and citizens who don’t even know the meaning. All they hear is headlines and rhetoric. And they can’t look past next week’s paycheck to see where we’re headed. We have a real opportunity to right the ship. But at this rate, we’re going to abandon it. So, if you lean left you can gloat all you want about your newly elected candidate. But I urge you to ask the question “is this really what I signed up for?”

In software, systems often reach a point where it’s easier to trash it all and rebuild than it is trying to support the current code stream going forward. You move forward with the learning and knowledge of the prior system, but start anew. A bunch of people from Europe did that about 250 years ago. Are we there again?

Remember, once a government increases its power, it very seldom gives it back. And we’re rushing towards the point of no return. Every example of Socialism and Communism has ended in revolution.

Think about it.

Modify your my.cnf file and set the innodb_buffer_pool_size variable to a value north of 2GB. Sounds like a good idea, right? The more memory you allocate to the InnoDB Buffer Pool, the faster InnoDB table access will be. Cool. Change that setting and save that bad boy. Jump over and do a mysql restart.

MySQL shuts down normally.

MySQL starts to come back up, but seems to take a while. Hmmm…. After a minute or so, it completes startup and says [ok].

Except none of your data is there. At least, no tables that use InnoDB are there.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

No warnings, no error message, no tables. And your blood pressure is at about 215/180.

After quickly issuing a mysql stop, editing the my.cnf to restore the original settings, and doing a mysql start, you’ll see the tables back and all is well.

It should take about 20 minutes to calm back down.

It’s not like I’m speaking from experience or anything…

update: Just so this doesn’t hang out there… the problem was I attempted to allocate more than 2GB of RAM to a single item, which causes problems on most 32-bit versions of Linux… Had I been on the 64-bit version of RedHat, I probably would’ve been fine. Since I wasn’t, the InnoDB storage engine didn’t start up, and therefore all tables using InnoDB didn’t show up. No data loss whatsoever; I just found it “interesting” that the startup of MySQL didn’t warn me that InnoDB had choked and died. phew.

Just sayin’.

1,206,830

One Million, Two Hundred Six Thousand, Eight Hundred and Thirty.

That’s the number of spam emails that did NOT make it thru to my domain. In one month. 31 days. That’s an average of 38,930 a day, or 1,622 an hour. There was one day where spamstopshere.com blocked 82,202 spam emails. In one day.

Unbelievable.

Just for comparison, 2,938, or 0.24% of all email traffic for the month of January, were “good” emails, and did make it thru. It also stopped 12 emails that contained viruses. Doesn’t worry me too much, but my dad runs Windows XP and 2000 on his machines, so he could’ve been affected.

It absolutely bewilders me how bad the spam problem has become, and that we’ve been able to do nothing more than intelligent filtering to stem the tide. Remember from my earlier post on the subject, there were points where I was receiving so much inbound junk mail that it was literally crashing my server. Not any more. My mail logs have grown less over the course of the past 35 some-odd days than they used to hourly. It’s been great.

At least in the snail-mail business, I don’t pay for the amount of inbound mail, the sender pays so there’s a “natural” valve. But because of the proliferation of shoddy operating systems that allow their host computers to become infected with malware email sending bots, the purveyors of this garbage have a virtually unlimited ability to push these bits thru the internet.

So, as I received the email that my trial period was ending, I gladly entered my credit card number into their system to sign me up as a paying customer. It bothers me that I have to pay to block something like this. However, I don’t begrudge a service like spamstopshere.com at all and will gladly pay them for the valuable service they provide.

The only reason the spammers keep at it is there’s money to be made. We need to choke off their air. Don’t ever purchase anything from someone who sent you an email you didn’t first ask them to send. And make sure your O/S is clean and your machine is not inadvertently pushing this spam at the behest of the spammers.

Rant off. I’m happy with spamstopshere.com. If you don’t have a spam solution, give them a try.

Here’s the scenario. I almost exclusively use my iPod in my car when on the road. One of the nicest features (on a long list, mind you) of my Q7 is the iPod interface. Plug the iPod into the dock connector under the arm rest and whammo, everything (except video) on the iPod is available thru the interface of the computer screen in the dashboard. Nice. Works great. Except for one thing.

Except for when the family is in the car with me, when they tend to drive the playlist, I listen almost exclusively to podcasts. I subscribe to 30 or so, which it plenty of content to keep up with on a weekly basis. I do this instead of radio. Much fewer commercials, content I’m interested in, and the ability to pause and pick up later when I get a phone call or reach my destination. Perfect.

The problem is in order to roll thru my content and get new content, I have to remove the iPod from the car, bring it in and physically plug it in to sync with the computer. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but #1 it’s a little bit of a hassle to open up the special compartment below the arm rest and plug or unplug the iPod and #2 sometimes I forget (either leaving the iPod at home when I leave, or forgetting to get it out of the car when I come in. Then I have to wait 3 or 4 minutes for it to sync when I’m ready to get on the road. All minor annoyances, I agree, but still, it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve had wireless 802.11 (B then G and now N) at the house for 10 years now. Best thing since sliced bread. And the latest round of iPods (the Touch, based on the iPhone form factor) has 802.11 built in. My iPhone can see my wireless network from the driveway and garage. But here’s the rub: the iPod can’t sync with the host computer over the wireless network, even though it can see it. Why?

In the article I referred to above that I wrote just over 5 years ago now, I talked about a number of other pieces of functionality that would be nice. Of course, I was headed down the “Radio TiVo” path then, which is still a good idea and I still don’t see why it’s not built into modern car radios, but that was before podcasting. Now all the pieces are in place for such a combination.

I’d gladly buy an extra iPod Touch (just to leave in the car permanently) if I could do a few simple things with it that you currently CAN’T:

• Sync wirelessly with the host computer. I don’t care about multiple computers or other things that you’re currently limited to with the hard-cable syncing. That’s fine. I just want to be able to sync with my desktop in my office over the wireless network.
• Sync automatically on some sort of event. Either when the host computer notices an update to items synced with that device (like a new podcast download) or when the computer becomes “visible” because I just drove into the garage. It’s important for this to be automatic so that I don’t have to have some interface from within the car to start a sync and so that when I get ready to go, my device is as well.
• Smarter updating of many devices with current playhead location. It’d be nice if the meta-data information about current playhead location in a track would live a little more in the cloud. Especially if I have a MobileMe account.

With the app store and the programability of the new iPod Touch/iPhone platform, there could be some cool apps to help manage this functionality, but the core “sync over the air” functionality is going to have to be provided by Apple.

Come on, Apple, who do I have to bribe to get this done?

That pretty much means I’ll be avoiding all media on Tuesday. And Wednesday.

Except Lost. I’ll be watching that (but fast forwarding thru the commercials, thank you Tivo!)

None of it was shot practically except the shot of the room and the car at the end (meaning it was all CG). Nice job!

The main three announcements from the keynote yesterday were iLife ’09, iWork ’09, and the new unibody MacBookPro 17″. Here’s my quick take on each.

iLife ’09.
Very impressive upgrade. I am very anxious to try out the Faces and Places functionality of the new iPhoto ’09. Face detection and recognition technology has come a long way in the past few years… I hope the functionality in iPhoto performs half as well as it did in the keynote. Very impressive. Additionally, I’m looking forward to Flickr integration, and the bi-directional syncing with facebook looks very interesting.

iMovie also looks to have some nice new features. Although I don’t personally use iMovie at all (I cut in Final Cut Studio), my son does and it looks like a very nice upgrade. I’m looking at solid-state-based camcorders, and right now it’s a lot easier to deal with AVCHD in iMovie than it is in FCP. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Core Duo-based Mac to use iMovie, so my middle son’s iMac G5 is out. Hmmm.

Not sure completely what to make of the Garage Band upgrade, Lessons, but it could be cool. We’ll see about that one. No upgrade to speak of to iDVD, not too surprising.

Lastly, Apple made some nice upgrades to iWeb, most notably the ability to upload directly (via FTP) to servers other than .Mac and the ability to work with multiple sites. Nice. Hopefully the upload function is smart enough to only upload the changed content.

iWork ’09
I’m not a huge iWork user, but I do occasionally use Pages and Numbers, and use Keynote quite a bit. The main interesting point on the first two (for me) is the ability to share documents in the cloud via the new iWork website. Keynote, on the other hand, has a number of new features that make it even more snazzy and distances it even further from Power Point.

MacBook Pro 17
OK, I have to admit, I’m starting to drool a bit more today than I did yesterday over the new unibody MacBook Pro 17. My current MBP 17 is a little over 2 years old, and while it remains the best portable Mac I have ever owned, as I run down the specs on the new box I find myself jumping over to e-bay to see what the resell value would be towards a new one.

Things I noticed: faster CPU, 8GB max RAM, larger HDD, higher resolution screen, smaller, lighter, longer battery, new display connector. If anyone out there has about $4k burning a hole in their pocket, I’ll take one with a 24″ LED Cinema display, m’kay? thankyouverymuch.

The only other real thing of note is the removal of DRM (finally) from almost all of the iTunes catalog, with a feature to have iTunes analyze your purchases and give you a bottom line price to upgrade your library to 256kbps non-DRM. Mine was $68. Not bad. Remains to be seen if this will extend to movies any time soon. And, it appears there are certain strings attached to the upgrade.

Noticeably Missing
No upgrade to AppleTV. No preview of iPhone 3.0. No preview of Snow Leopard, nor even a mention that it’s still coming. And although highly anticipated, no Mac Mini upgrade.

I’d have to concur with the general consensus and and say the announcements are lackluster. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to play around with the new iPhoto, iMovie and Keynote apps, and I do want a MBP 17 (just let me know if you need the shipping address). But I expected at least a little lip service to some other items.

And macrumors.com getting hacked, while a crime, was funny.