Skip to content

General

Stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category

My 90-day health improvement plan

A few days ago, I Tweeted a message about how I've lost weight, dropped my blood pressure, and reduced my resting pulse rate over the last few months:

Sep 8 vs Dec 8: Blood pressure, 140/95 -> 115/75; resting pulse, 73 -> 48; Weight, 218 -> 185. Amazing what's possible in three months.

I had a few people ask (on Twitter) me how I made these changes. My response required more than 140 characters, so I thought I'd expand on it in a blog posting here.

Warning, this is a long blog entry, mainly because I've not written this down anywhere before, and I wanted to get it all in text. The executive summary version is simply that cutting sodium, watching calories, and running every single day possible are the three main factors behind the changes in my weight and blood pressure.

Read on for the highly-detailed version of the above...

[continue reading…]



Photos from our summer tour

After posting about my favorite roads from our summer tour around the west, a few people asked to see some pictures. Here's an album showing some of the interesting sites and landscapes:

Summer Tour 2010

It really was an amazing journey—4,000 miles in about 18 driving days, plus another 700 miles during a one-week stay in Colorado to visit friends and relatives. More about the trip, in particular spending that much time in a car with two young children, in a future post.



These are a few of my favorite roads…

Last summer, we took our two girls on a 30-day, 4,000-mile trek around the western United States (here's the full route). The trip was made possible by my wife's employer, where everyone is given a multi-week sabattical after 10 years of service.

Our kids are relatively young for such a journey--just four and seven at the time of the trip. To make it bearable for them (and us!), we drove relatively short distances each day, and spent a mostly-driving-free week in Colorado in the middle of the trip. (More on the lessons we learned traveling for 30 days straight with two young kids in a future blog post...)

What was great about the trip, for the adults in the car at least, was that relatively little time was spent on interstate highways--only 1,200 of the 4,000 miles, and of those 1,200 miles, 900 of them were on the first three days and the last day of the trip. So most of the time, we were on state highways or even smaller backroads. These are the roads where you can really see the country, and get away from the crowds--many times we had the road completely to ourselves.

Given how much we enjoyed these roads, I thought I'd take a few minutes and share some of my favorites from the journey. (Click the small map image for the full Google Maps view (in a new window) of each road.)
[continue reading…]



A non-review of Avatar

It's not very often that I see a movie that moves me enough to write something about it. Sure, a couple years back, I put together a list of some of my favorite comedies, but those were capsule summaries written about movies that were, in general, quite a few years old.

Yesterday, however, I saw Avatar, and was, for the first time since the 1977 release of Star Wars (I refuse to call it 'Episode IV'), absolutely amazed by a film. As such, I felt moved to write a little bit about Avatar.

This is not a review, and it (hopefully) doesn't contain any spoilers. Instead, I've focused on my reactions to Avatar, some comparisons to that original Star Wars movie, and what I think it means for movie making going forward.

First off, after sleeping on it, I definitely stand by the three-word (five, counting the parenthetical) review that I tweeted yesterday:

Go see it (in 3D)

Go see it because it's entertaining. Go see it because it represents the state-of-the-art in movie visual effects. Go see it if you're a fan of cinema in general, and want to see where filmmaking may be headed in the future. But really, just go see it—Avatar is well worth the cost of admission, regardless of the reasons.

Does that mean it's a perfect movie? No, in fact far from it—the story, in particular, is too predictable and has been seen many times before. Then again, Star Wars wasn't necessarily a completely original story, either. Another recent favorite of mine, Star Trek, was itself very similar to Star Wars (this funny video demonstrates just how similar). In short, I don't necessarily mind a predictable story if it's presented well and the rest of the movie works with the story.
[continue reading…]



Now for something completely different…

Veering off the usual technology/toys focus of my blog, I have a nutrition question. My wife and I are having a friendly debate over the relative healthiness of a couple of different breads. One of these breads is a traditional "whole wheat" loaf, and the other is one of the newer "whole grain white" loafs. I'm hoping some nutrition wizard out there can help settle the debate as to which is better for us to be eating. After the jump, you'll find the nutrition labels from each loaf. I'm curious as to whether or not one is clearly better than the other...
[continue reading…]



There’s a bit of duffer in all of us

Thank you, Michael Letzig, for demonstrating just how difficult golf can be. Yesterday, during the Buick Open PGA tour event, Michael hit a shot that I've replicated many times (too many times!) myself--a good old-fashioned full-on hook shank. This shaky YouTube video shows just how bad the shot was.

That clip, however, is quite dark and it's hard to spot the ball. So I snipped a bit of it out, and processed it with ScreenFlow and QuickTime Pro. The end result is this version, which makes it much easier to track the ball and see exactly where it wound up. Urgh.

The bad news for Michael is that, despite that shot (he saved par on the hole), he played well enough to...get paired with Tiger Woods in the final pairing for today's final round. Urgh.



Trip report: Destin, Florida

Last week, we took the kids to a family reunion in Destin, Florida. For those who've never been (as I hadn't prior to last week), here are some observations from my experiences.

  • Highway 98, the main arterial road that runs up and down the peninsula, is seemingly always crowded. This is especially true on Saturday and Sunday. We sent some folks on a grocery run to a Sam's Club when we arrived on Saturday. It was 16 miles away, and it took them nearly an hour to get there. The rental office was five miles from the bridge where we crossed to the peninsula, and it took nearly 20 minutes to cover that distance.
  • The sand (at least on Crystal Beach, which is where we stayed) is simply astonishing. Pure white and very soft, with nary a hard shell to poke you in the foot.
  • The water temp near the surface was 80F+, and very pleasant. Waves are generally small, but large enough for the kids to enjoy some boogie boarding. We went scuba diving one day (though Destin isn't the greatest of dive destinations), doing two relatively short dives (as they were somewhat deep). One decent picture at right.
    The water temp was about 73F to 77F at 60 to 85 feet; we wore 3mm wet suits, which kept us warm enough for the two dives.

[continue reading…]



In search of iPhone golf GPS and/or scoring apps

Macworld logoI'm in the midst of a huge round-up of iPhone golf-specific GPS (range finder) and/or scorecard apps for Macworld. As of now, I've identified 32 of them, but I'm wondering if I've missed any. If you have a second, please check out this list and let me know (via a comment here or via Twitter) if you're aware of any other apps.

Read on for the list (note that some of these may be mis-categorized as I haven't tested all of them yet)...
[continue reading…]



What are the chances?

This is a story about chance, and how, well, chancy it can be.

Today I flew across the country to visit my dad for a few days. The first leg of the flight left at 6:00am, which meant a very early start to my day (even by my standards). Out the door at just after 4:00am, after parking and shuttling to the terminal, it was a bit after 5:00am. Check-in went fine, so then it was off to the security lines. At the Portland airport, they run two security lines--one for first class and one for those of us in the cattle car.

Both lines were quite long this morning, but moving at a good pace. As I neared the front of the commoner line, I looked to my right and noticed a familiar face standing almost right next to me, in the first class line. It was Bill (names have been changed, as I didn't get permission to share this story), whom I worked with at my last job (prior to joining Macworld full time).

I hadn't seen Bill in person for probably three years (I left the company in 2005). However, Bill and I had been trading voicemails for a few weeks, trying to get together for lunch and to set up a round of golf at some point. But we kept missing each for one reason or another.

So it was very odd to stumble into Bill at the airport, especially at 5:15am on a Tuesday morning. He was traveling with his family, heading off for a week-long vacation. What was even more chancy about this encounter is that, for at least a couple days, Bill and I will both be in the same city on the east coast! How very odd.
[continue reading…]



Five easy steps to a heart attack

Here's how it's done...

  1. Have your cat awaken you at 4:30am, pawing your face to let you know he's hungry.
  2. Head downstairs in a stupor, leaving the annoyingly-bright lights off.
  3. Open cat food and start scooping it into the cat's bowl, letting the cat know just how you feel about the 4:30am wake-up pawing.
  4. See the light from, and hear the click of, the downstairs bathroom light coming on.
  5. Have heart attack.

OK, so clearly I didn't actually have a full-on heart attack. Instead, my pulse merely doubled and I had an amazing adrenaline surge.

As soon as I started breathing again (quietly), I reasoned that any intruder with even a quarter of a brain wouldn't actually bother to turn on the bathroom light, nor would they have ignored my easily-audible talking to the cat.

So what was the cause of the spurious pulse-quickening light? It turns out that our six-year-old daughter apparently heard me, and had gotten up to use the bathroom. Why she chose to come downstairs--very quietly, I might add--I have no idea, as there's a bathroom just down the hall from her room.

Needless to say, after bundling our daughter off to bed again, I found it basically impossible to go back to sleep, given the adrenaline coursing through my veins.