lifting weights

In my efforts to get fit, I’ve historically avoided lifting weights. I’ve always felt that i gain mass easily. So i feared that I would become one of those guys with no neck, giant muscles but no muscle definition. That’s the exact thing I don’t want. Because of that I’ve been focusing on cardio. After all, look at marathon runners. They have small, defined muscles and they still have a neck. I really want to delete my belly and love handles. By the way, I’ve never loved them. That’s the worst name ever! I recently read Urban Smiler’s article “So you want a flat tummy/6 pack”. When I saw the title I thought “yes please!”, then actually read the article. If I’m understanding her first point, definition comes not from adding muscle, but rather removing fat. Strengthening the muscle with make it bigger and more pronounced when the fat is removed. In her second point, I’m wondering what she means by “major muscle strength work”. Does it mean work all the muscle groups? or does it mean intense muscle building , which will render large muscles? In any case, I’m looking to build lean muscle and gain definition in my chest, stomach, back and shoulders. What’s the best way to do that? leave your ideas in the comments

100 Life Experiences

I was inspired to create this by Marina Martin, when I read her blog post “100 Life Experiences“. It’s only right to use the same title on my post. My list is targeted for things that appeal to my sense of adventure, and things are a challenge for me. At the initial time of publishing on July 22, 2009, I have 18 items completed.

Start your own blog.
Sleep under the stars.
Play in a band.
Watch a meteor shower.
Go to Disneyland.
Learn to ride a horse.
Sing a solo.
See the Alamo in person.
Visit South America.
Visit Australia.
Visit Hawaii.
Visit London.
Visit Paris.
Visit Japan.
Visit the birthplace of your ancestors.
Visit Russia.
Visit the Vatican.
Visit the White House.
Walk to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
Walk in Jerusalem.
Visit a Concentration Camp.
Visit the Lincoln Memorial.
See the Grand Canyon in person.
Stand in Times Square.
See the Changing of the Guards in London.
See the Mona Lisa in France.
See Niagara Falls in person.
Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
See the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
Ride in a gondola in Venice.
See Old Faithful geyser erupt.
See Michelangelo’s David.
Visit the Great Wall of China.
See the Sistine Chapel in person.
Go skinny dipping.
Run a 5K
Run a Marathon.
Ride the STP (Seattle to Portland)
Go rock climbing.
Go deep sea fishing.
Go scuba diving
Go snorkeling.
Bungee jump.
Swim in the Great Salt Lake.
Go whale watching.
Go hang gliding.
Go Parasailing
Take a martial arts class.
Teach yourself an art from scratch.
Sleep on a train.
Have a pillow fight.
Take a sick day when you’re not ill.
Build a snow fort.
See a total eclipse.
Watch a sunrise or sunset.
Hit a home run. [In little league baseball I hit several ]
Go on a cruise.
Teach yourself a new language.
Have enough money to be truly satisfied.
Sing karaoke. [I do this a lot]
Buy a stranger a meal at a restaurant.
Walk on a beach by moonlight.
Have your portrait painted / drawn.
Kiss in the rain.
Learn to shoot a gun well.
Go snow-shoeing
Go to a drive-in theater.
Have dinner in your car at a car hop
Be in a movie.
Start a business.
Ride a zip line.
Fly in a helicopter.
Save a favorite childhood toy.
Ride on a speeding motorcycle.
Publish a book.
Have your picture in the newspaper.
Kill and prepare an animal for eating.
Save someone’s life.
Meet someone famous.
Learn to shoot a bow and arrow.
Ride in a hot air ballon
Read an entire book in one day.
Write a song
Organize a major event. [I organized Barcamp Seattle 2 years running]
Ride a train across the USA
Road trip across the USA
Learn to swing dance
Perform 100 consecutive pushups
Cook Christmas Dinner
Kiss a Celebrity
Learn to drive stick shift (manual transmission) car
Build my own house
Learn CPR
Live in a foreign country for 6 months.
Write and release an music album
See the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)
Attend a large music festival
Get 6-pack abs
Buy a blue sunburst Gibson Les Paul guitar.
Learn to fly a helicopter

Trouble Getting Started

Getting started with the process of getting fit has been a little slow lately. I haven’t jumped in with both feet yet. Instead I’ve been touching my toe in the water. I think part of that is I’m realizing I’m gonna have to give things up that I know are bad for me. While I know this logically, I’ve been caving into my desires. We can all agree that this has to stop. I have a goal. My goal is to weigh 240 pounds by September 26, 2009. That’s 29 pounds to lose in 82 days from today. Is that possible? I wonder. I just did a search and found that WebMD says “If you need to lose 25 pounds, figure you are embarking on at least a three-month program“. My goal is a little more ambitious than that, but it’s not totally unattainable. I suppose that even if I don’t make that goal, I still win, right? So, Dear Reader, tell me – how do you stay motivated with your fitness? Do you set treat goals – only have ice cream once a week? or run a mile for every beer you drink? buy yourself something nice for reaching milestones? I wanna know.

Karaoke and the Tour

Karaoke for me is a funny thing. While karaoke itself hasn’t changed much, my idea of it has changed dramatically over the years. In years past, I held a highly unfavorable opinion of karaoke and the people who did it. Back in the day (during my college years) I saw it as something that the talent-less did for entertainment. Every time I heard somebody do karaoke, they were awful. Even worse, they weren’t even playing instruments. At least bar bands could play. Yeah, that’s pretty snobby, but I see that now. So what changed? A couple of things have changed. I’ve gained maturity over the years, and my love and appreciation of music has grown in leaps and bounds. Also, I learned how hard it can be to get on stage in front of a lot of people through my experiences with open mic nights. How did I do? when i was starting – lets’ just say they weren’t my finer moments. I was super nervous – I’d forget lyrics; my hands would shake from stage fright. With time I became better and more confident as a performer. Another thing that changed was I took singing lessons. Through this experience, I learned just how hard it is to be a good singer. It wasn’t really until I took singing lessons, that I saw karaoke as the ideal vehicle for work on my singing. It freed me from having to concentrate on the chords i was playing and providing the rhythm. Somwhat recently, I discovered that people I already knew in the Seattle tech scene liked to perform at karaoke. So I’ve started doing it and discovered that I really like it. One of the things about doing open mic nights in the past, I limited song selections to what I could sing and play. With karaoke, I’m free to work on my singing and related activities like composure, stature, pitch, breath control, and be in character. Now when I think about song choices, I think: do I like the song? is it within my range? do i think I could do it well? As I try more songs, I surprise myself on the number of songs I’m finding that I think I can do well. I’m also noticing that I’m not nervous anymore when I go on stage. hmmm, I wonder why that is? Nevermind for now. That is a different post. So what about the “tour”? The Seattle Karaoke Tour was devised by Jeff Croft and Alix Han. Eight nights in a row of karaoke, where each venue is different from the last, throughout Seattle. I’m looking forward to it. Last night was a great start. I’ve got a list of new songs that I haven’t tried yet. I’m hoping to make it to each night, to try them all. We’ll see what happens.

Getting Fit

It’s time! I’ve been carrying around extra weight for far too long. So now is the time to get rid of it. By spending the summer exercising and modifying nutritional habits, it should be possible to remove the majority of it by the end of September. Last year, I managed to lose 11 pounds in a month during Junk Food Free July. However, it wasn’t maintained, and after two months it had returned. – mostly through laziness. It didn’t help any that I reverted to some bad habits. Cooking at home most of the time should help too. I don’t want get too caught up in numbers but, I anticipate losing between 40 – 60 pounds. If all goes well, I’ll be looking like a new man by Christmas. Nice! I’ll update this blog every couple of weeks with my progress to let you all know how I’m doing. If you do something similar, let me know. Wish me luck!

Mobile Edition

This morning I’ve launched the mobile edition of AndrewWoods.net However, it doesn’t include this blog. That’s for a future time.

In keeping with the One Web idea, I’m using the same url but a different layout. I chose this method, because it complies with the DRY principle, it made it easier/faster to develop, and its more cost effective since i’m not using a separate hosting account for a mobile site. The difficulty to mobile web development is that you need to test a wide variety of devices. Acquiring such devices can get expensive depending on how many you’re developing for. Some developers, and even companies, make sites to cater to iPhone or Blackberry and call it a day. I’m using a Palm Treo 700p, and limiting my development to Palm Devices would be bad, given the small audience. More importantly though, I want everyone to be able to use my websites. So, I have a request. If you have mobile browser on your phone, could you send me some screenshots of what different pages on AndrewWoods.net look like, in the next day or so? Here’s an example of a screenshot from my hiragana project. I’d greatly appreciate it. If you’re a web developer that makes mobile sites, I’d love to hear any tips you might have.

Adventures in Bookmarking

Until recently, I had been using Ma.gnolia for my bookmarks. Then they experienced massive data corruption and data loss. this forced me to re-evaluate, and found Foxmarks via a recommendation on Twitter. I really like Foxmarks. Here a little background on what brought me to it. In the early days, I started out like everyone else, using the Firefox’s built in bookmarks. That was in the Firefox 1.x series. It did the job, but when I was on a different machine I had a different set of bookmarks that I had to manage. It’s easy enough when the set of bookmarks is small, but that gets out of control when your set of bookmarks gets significantly larger. If only there was a way to synchronize. I searched the Firefox Extensions and eventually found Bookmarks Synchronizer. This was a great step forward. I now could have one set of bookmarks. There were 2 limitation though. First, the authoritative copy was on the local machine, as that had the most recent edits. Secondly, I had to manually tell it to synch. so I if forgot for a while, it was possible to overwrite newer bookmarks with older bookmarks. I didn’t want to have to manage that. I needed something that had a centralized place where all the bookmarks were kept and then sent to each local machine. Enter del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service with an odd URL. Del.icio.us got around the synch issue by always writing to the server instead of the local machine. This was done using either a bookmarklet, or their toolbar. Then the local browser would download updates from the server. One point of authority, with multiple points of distribution. I was happy for a long time with this solution. It was very easy to add new bookmarks to my collection. I also made use of a feature called ‘bundles’ which allowed me to associate multiple tags together, and then I added these bundles to my toolbar. This was awesome as it allowed me to use the delicious bookmarks like the native Firefox bookmark toolbar. The downside of delicious was that they never had a good solution to editing bookmarks in bulk. If you wanted to delete 50 bookmarks, it took a long time. With each deletion taking 3-4 clicks, you’d perform approximatey 150-200 clicks. I had far more bookmarks to deal with, so I decided I’d start over – but where? When I went to Gnomedex in 2008, I discovered Ma.gnolia. One thing I really liked about magnolia was their use of OpenID – many sites, one set of authentication credentials. Awesome! Note: If you’re creating a new service, use OpenID out of the gate. Another thing I liked was the UI is much cleaner and better organized that del.icio.us. So I’ll happily computed for a number of months until last friday. That’s when Ma.gnolia experienced massive data loss. As of today (Feb 5, 2009) They’re working hard on restoring their users data, but it’s looking less likely as time goes on. So now what? A few days a friend of mine tweeted about Foxmarks, as Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal had done a write up on Foxmarks and recommended it. It too uses a firefox extension, but it makes use of Firefoxes built-in bookmark system which, with Firefox 3, uses tags. So I’ve come full circle, but I still get all the features I want. Firefox allows you to make use of folders to organize and tags your information, so you get the best of both worlds. The way tags are used is awesome. In the location bar, start typing a tag name. Any items that match that tag will be listed in the drop down list that appears – regardless of what folder it’s in! I have a folder called ‘Google Apps’. In this, I have bookmarks to docs.google.com, calendar.google.com, gmail.com, www.google.com. That folder sits in my Bookmarks Toolbar. I love how easy it is for me to access these.

2009 New Years Resolutions

I like the idea of New Year’s resolutions, as they provide us with an opportunity to be better. Not everyone does. They say things like “my resolution is to not make resolutions” or “they never work” . I suspect it’s because they have not had a positive experience in executing them, and therefore see it as an exercise in futility. Maybe they made too many, or they weren’t able to be completed in a year. But I digress … The question we should ask ourselves is “how can I be better ?”. There are other questions you could ask, like “what do i want?”, “What’s missing from my life?”, “How can I make this year suck less than last year?”, but in the end they’re essentially asking the same thing. Reflecting on this and other years past, I’ve realized that I don’t take enough chances. When confronted with a situation where I could be disappointed with the outcome, I distance myself from it and consequently prevent that possible outcome from presenting itself. Additionally, I need to get fit. I have a sizable amount of weight to shed. I have a picture in my head of what I should look like. I’m guessing that to get from here to there is about 50 pounds, but it’s probably more. The challenge I run into is that, the ultimate goal seems so far off, that it seems impossible. So I give up before I start. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way. But that was then. this is now. This is the moment to change. It’s in your power to change your life. the first step is decide that you want it. The next step is to do it. With all your drive, power, and determination, do everything you can to make it happen. No one else can do it for you. Others can help, and you should reach out to them, but ultimately, the power is in your hands. Good luck and godspeed! My Resolutions:

Be Bold
Get Fit

Quotes

“Courage is the first of the human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others” –Sir Winston Churchill
“Why not go out on a limb? isn’t that where the fruit is?” –Frank Scully
“Fortune and love favor the brave” –Ovid
“Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared” –Eddie Rickenbacker

Wish List

i want a way to keep track of the things I want. Being the geek that I am, I did a search for wishlist applications. Amazingly enough wishlistr.com came up. Taking a brief look at it, I decided it had potential. I thought about what I wanted in my desired app. Here’s what I came up with:

publicly viewable
use clean urls
login with OpenID to edit my list
easy to use
works with any product (not just products on a single site)

i asked my followers on Twitter for recommendations. The Amazon wish list was mentioned by several people. It works very well with anything on Amazon. Supposedly It works for non-amazon items with a little extra work. Deciding that i didn’t want to do any extra work, I signed up for wishlistr.com to try it out. It met all my criteria so I created some entries for my shiny new account. The lightweight entry of wishlistr was nice and simple. It felt familiar from the first entry i made, but couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I was visiting my friend Cassie Wallender’s website, and she has her own wish list, which is driven by delicious.com using a tag ‘wishlist’. Of course! It’s so simple! Wishlistr felt familiar because it’s similar to my magnolia.com bookmarks. I’m now using Magnolia with a tag of ‘wishlist’. Remember to bookmark my wishlist and keep it in mind for the holidays

Junk Food Free July – Week 4 Result

Well, July is now over. I wanted to give you all my weekly update, as well as my monthly summary. On the nutrition side of things, I’ve been getting more protein. This is mostly chicken that I’ve cooked, and some beef. Speaking of which, a burger on whole wheat toast is awesome! way better than just a white bun. I’ve also been drinking a ton of water at work. I haven’t done as well with the fruits and vegetable however. The exercise has also suffered a little. I didn’t meet my goal of 16km for the week, although i did run 4 miles on Saturday morning without much trouble. So I’m getting better at it. I’m wondering if 16km was too ambitious. I’m usually sore the day after a run, so it’s not so easy to run 2 days in a row. That can be problematic if I don’t plan the week ahead of time. The takeaway here is that i need to stay on top of it. So I need to be mindful of when I last ran. I’ve been taking the bus this past week, so I walk around more. I doubt it had any significant impact, but it feels good. By the way, if you live in Seattle I suggest that you try out the bus system – it’s pretty good. I am happy with my overall progress this month. I’m 10 pounds lighter than when I started. While I’d like to think “I’ll just do exactly the same thing for the next 3 months and I’m done” – something tells me it’s not going to be that easy. So, what have I learned? A few things actually. The biggest thing is don’t eat a lot at one sitting – space things out. By doing this, I don’t get super tired in the afternoon like i used to. Nowaday if I’m tired, its because I didn’t sleep well the night before and not because I’m in the midst of a food coma. Another thing is time matters. When you eat something, seems to matter. There were several nights where I hungry at 10pm or 11pm. Usually I’d just go to sleep. The metabolism is gonna slow down as soon as I go to sleep, so it’s best not to give it additional food to digest. It probably wont get to it anyway and just store it as fat. If the hunger pangs are just too much, drink some water. This will let you feel full, without the additional calories. This will just tide you over until you can eat something good in the morning. Also, progress comes from modifying your diet and exercise. Doing just one only maintains what you have. I had started with the idea of twittering my daily status. I did do it for a few days, but it quickly fell by the way side. I think I just needed something to keep me mindful of the goal. Now I’m thinking that writing this blog weekly was enough to accomplish that. Once I got into it, it was easier. I kept the commitment to myself. Just like the life lesson that we learn from Back to the Future – you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it Weight: 262 ( delta from last week is -3 )