travis' brain dump

So, I figured I’d at least get one post in every month in 2012. That being said… it’s January 31st. I think for a while there I was shunning technology a lot. Crawling into my little hole and trying to ignore electronics for a while seemed like a fitting thing to do with all the workload I was under for so long. It’s been really nice to have the last couple of months be somewhat “normal”, if there is such a thing. I rolled into 2012 with some cool tech toys… upgraded my failing HTC G2 with a nice Samsung Galaxy S2, scored myself a Transformer Prime and I’ve been on a rampage of updating things the last few days on the backend of my servers. Feels good to be back in the saddle again. I may even pick up some lightweight development projects for android along the way if I can keep this up.

So, 2012… a new year and lots of things to do. Fitness, major revamp of that project in order this year. I haven’t gained any weight back but I’ve been in this maintenance mode for all too long. It’s quite pathetic and I need to bust out of the plateau and just finish the job. I only have about 10-15 lbs to go out of my journey, why just settle now? 215 is right around the corner and is taunting me. Still, where I’m at is quite the departure from the 270 I started at. *shudder* Aside from the obvious non-resolution, I’ve decided this year to spend some time getting some things in order in my life… the typical gambit of things… doing more family stuff, finances, future goal setting/planning, etc… etc… I figure I’ll get it all figured out just in time for the 12/21/12 apocalypse… *laughs* whatever. Top on my list of things to do, be a little more focus on who I should be… This blog is probably going to turn into the most bi-polar representation of my psychological state that anyone has ever seen trying to meet that goal. Should be fun from an observers point of view though so stay tuned!

With that… I need to go to bed.

So walking to the bus today I saw a homeless man standing ther with a sign that read, “anything is a blessing” and it made me stop and think…

If someone who has nothing deems anything a blessing, how should someone who, by comparison, has everything view what they have?

Everything is in fact a blessing. No matter how much we feel we lack or what we feel has been taken from us, we should always appreciate those things which we do have. Hard to think like that sometimes through all of our human imperfections, but it’s a solid lesson that can definitely change one’s outlook on life in the bigger picture.

Man, I must be getting old. Lol

Soo… I ran my third Bolder Boulder today and successfully shaved off another 11 minutes from last year and came in at 1:03:32! So in total from the first time I ran the race I’ve shaved off 17 minutes and 25 seconds. Next year I think I’ll break that one hour barrier and see just how far under I can go. I probably would have come really close to that one hour mark but I drank too much water before the race and  had to stop at bout the 6k mark and hit a roadside port-o-pottie, lol.

Here’s the results from today… not too impressive overall but I’m well pleased!

Running Activity 6.51 mi | RunKeeper.

overall place: 18472/49208
division: M32
division place: 323 out of 497
gender place: 11221 out of 22348

mile 1: 00:09:44.80

mile 2: 00:09:47.22

mile 3: 00:10:39.53

mile 4: 00:10:18.56

mile 5: 00:10:08.29

mile 6: 00:10:54.11

net time: 01:03:31.48

pace: 10:13 (based on net time)

Next stop… Tough Mudder Colorado… Just 25 days and counting!

So, another year down… another to go.

2010 had some pretty interesting challenges, lessons learned, blah blah the usual nonsense. What does 2011 hold? Who knows at this point. NYE went pretty well… it was a calm one. Just spent it hanging out with Andy and Amanda and the kiddos gorging on food continuously for the entire evening… gotta get in that last night of crazy eating before those weight loss new years resolutions kick in eh? I’ve actually done really well this holiday season, partly due to the fact I’ve been sick most of it. This cold has been such a pain in the rear end but it seems to finally be getting out of my system.

So much I could throw on the list of new years resolutions and goals but at the very least, this year, I’ve got to do the final kill on these few extra pounds lingering… I’m goaling for the first three months of 2011 to get that done… this past summer really screwed me up with that crazy work schedule. I was within my goal weight by 10lbs and ended up gaining 10 back due to working so much. On my list of goals is to run another 2 10k’s this year and get a better time than last year by at least 10 minutes. I think I can do better than that, but we’ll see. I figure if I can drop 20lbs by April and kick training into high gear from the end of March through the end of May, I should be able to tear up the Bolder Boulder this next year.  Eventually I want to work myself up to a half marathon, but I’m not going that crazy this year. That’s just way to ambitious for me with my schedule, lol.

I’ve got the usual various other goals to work on too… you know those personal goals for finances, the ever looming Camaro project that is slowly but surely moving forward, etc… I just want to make some major dents this year. On the plan as well, remove that horrible old swing set from the back yard and build the kiddos a mega-plex to play in for the summer. Should be a fun project but I’m definitely done with that archaic setup we’ve got going on. It should be a pretty interesting year. But for now, I’ve still got 3 solid months left of snowboarding season and that’s got priority.

So in other news… on the tech side of things… I’ve integrated my blogsite with Facebook. Now it’s easier to login to the site using facebook credentials. Anyone with an existing account can login the same way and link their blogsite account to their FB account from their user profile screen. Also new accounts registering can do so using their FB credentials. This is all part of the eventual removal of the traditional registration/login system that has been allowing about 50 spammers a month to sign up using automated methods. Really irritating. More to come on this as I play with more features, etc.

Anyway… enough boring nonsense.