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.

so… after fifteen hours of driving, three days and two nights in provo,utah, one snowboarding trip to park city, one visit with an old friend, a few hours of chaos with kiddos and an android g2 phone later… christmas is over.

This by far was the most expensive trip (in part mostly due to shelling out 5 bones for a new phone) but overall was a good one. It was good to see some of Amanda’s family and get out of town for a few days but I’m still on the fence on whether the several trips through some epic powder was worth 600 bucks or not. Nothing says awesome like doing a cartwheel tumble down a hill so violently that you eject your cell phone from two seperate pockets that were previously secured well with velcro… lol

Anyway, regardless… the kiddos, Amanda and even myself had a pretty good trip. I am however glad to be home… now if I can just kick this stupid cold I will be happy.

Only one thing left to survive… New Year’s.

Merry Christmas to all… (albeit a day late)

-=posted via my t-mobile G2=-

SO, where to begin?

After going on a serious technology sabbatical, at least from a personal stance, I am back. I think.

After working so much during the summer, I tried to get back into my usual personal technology quests (blogging, mobile modding, gaming, home server/network stuff, etc) but just found that by trying to dive back into my personal time with technology, I came to hate it even more… so I just quit for a couple months. It was actually a pretty nice “break” for me. I still couldn’t avoid it since technology is my career, but not engaging in activities involving it after hours helped to smooth over my jaded feelings towards all things tech.

And… after a few days of “hitting it hard” again, I actually feel pretty good about technology once more. I’ve upgraded the blog site software running on this server, updated the VMWare installations for the hosts, updated the VSA software, rooted my Cliq, loaded a vanilla android installation on it, reloaded all the apps I wanted and pruned out 66 bogus user entries… Oh, with that, if some of you notice that the email coming to your inbox for notifications has switched out mysteriously to another mail account, my apologies. I was playing with a little tool that links up Facebook accounts to WordPress blog accounts and accidentally pulled down the email address you have posted in your Facebook profile. If you want to change it, just log in and update it with another email account.

I’m also pretty stoked about the beginning of my favorite time of year… SNOWBOARDING SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!! *happy sigh* This is my time to relax, my time to destroy myself on the mountain and feel like I really do something recreational besides a routine daily workout. Can ya tell I’m excited? This season should prove interesting since two more members of the family are now geared up and ready for the fun. Arwen got a gear reload this year so she’s all set and Amanda got geared up right at the end of last season so she’s all good to go as well. Hopefully plenty of funny stories and good pics ahead!

With that… updates on the family. Family is doing great… Travis Jr is two now, I can’t believe how big he is. I seem to remember him coming home from the hospital just a few weeks ago, where has the time gone!? Hopefully I’ll get around to updating some recent pictures in the gallery today or perhaps tomorrow. Today will be consumed with cleaning, grocery shopping and a lot of XBOX Kinect. That seems to be our new fun thing to do around here… I think it has something to do with the fact even the kiddos can play it. No controller gaming, a 7 year old girl’s absolute dream, especially when she gets to play with virtual tiger cubs for hours. *rolls eyes* lol. I’m still torn on what my favorite game is. I would have to say independently playing I’m partial to Kinetc Adventures and Dance Central. Group playing I would have to go with Kinect Sports and Dance Central. Those are just really fun “party” games to enjoy with a group of people. Kinectimals is a pretty cool idea, kinda fun for the kiddos and Biggest Loser Workout is a workout, so I can’t count that as a ‘Game’ per se. Between our collection and my buddy Randy, I think we’ve got all the games and reviews covered.  We’ll probably pick up another game or two over the next couple of weeks as these start to lose their “new car smell”.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Nothing really dramatic going on and life is slowly returning to “normal”, whatever that is. Busy day ahead so I’m going to end this for now…

July to September… there’s a gap. *shrug* only two months I guess… It’s been a busy couple months…

I think between work trying to kill me and trying to get caught up with stuff around the house it’s a wonder I’ve got time to post even now.

Finished the bulk of the migration at work… only a few servers to move over/virtualize and the creation of a new Citrix environment and we’re pretty much done. Just wish people would recognize what was done and quit complaining about the little things that we’re still having quirks with. It’s not like we didn’t complete 6 months of work in 2 and a half or anything. You’re bound to have some issues to work through, right?

So, I sold the Corolla. Done with it. I needed to focus on just one car to work on and I just want to work on the Camaro. It’s been sitting too long and it needs some love. I’m going to try to be good and not get another car until I can put the Camaro back on it’s wheels, at least that’s my goal. We have the Highlander so it’s not like we don’t have another car or anything but we’ll see how it goes.

I was at least able to take a week or so off work, although I don’t think it was long enough. I spent most of it getting caught up on projects around the house that needed my attention during that two months I was getting destroyed at work. Installed the stair rail by the door finally, cleared out the bulk of the junk we had under the house (almost 2/3′s), cleared out the garage of all junk not needed, cleared all the limbs/stick piles out of the yard, etc. I was surprised at how much crap there was and how little of a dent it put in a 30-yard dumpster. At least we got a couple neighbors in on it and it only cost us each 100. That’s a good deal to me. We also ended up replacing the washer and dryer in the house as well which is pretty much awesome. Judging by the performance thus far, I’m pretty optimistic about how much water and power these new units are going to save.

I’ve been on a total energy savings kick the last few weeks. Bought a new virtual server to host all of my stuff in the house so now I’m down to just 4 1U units, the switch, firewall and router in the rack in the garage. 3 SAN storage units and 1 VMWare host to run all 9 systems including the media center. So far it’s pulling only about 600 watts/hr to run EVERYTHING but that’s still better than the 900+ watts/hr it was a month or so ago. That alone should drop the power bill quite a bit a month. I also went through and replaced all the flood lamps in the house with CFL Flood Lamps which are using a ton less electricity and again with the replacement of the washer and dryer things should definitely look better. I’m hoping for at least a $50 drop by the time I get this all figured out. We’ll see in a month or so once I’ve run a full 30 days.

It’s kinda nice though… between cutting down on all the servers, rummaging junk, etc… I also found a ton of stuff to put up on craigslist and ebay so some of the money i’ve been dumping to get all this stuff is coming back to me at least. yay for balance!

Now that I feel all caught up with that stuff I just need to figure out some way of getting caught up with my personal life… June through August kinda killed any summer time with the family. I feel like Arwen’s summer vacation time was a blink of an eye to me. I can’t believe she’s started 2nd grade already. Where does the time go!? I swear yesterday Travis was a newborn and she was in Kindergarten. Today she’s in 2nd grade and Travis used the toilet for the first time. Definitely going too fast.

Well, anyway, enough with the blogging for today. Hopefully I can get more time to vent out things on here and do more “me things” in the near future now that things are slowly returning to “normal”. We’ll see.

fun?

So I finally get a day to sit down and take a look at emails, computer stuff, etc around my house and I realized it’s been over a month since my last post… time for the July update.

Nothing really new to post unfortunately. I think that’s mostly due to the fact I’ve been working myself half to death the last month. I can’t say it’s been horrible, but there have been days. I think mostly the worst days have been when I’ve spent the whole day working on progressing the new domain structure forward then something critical breaks towards the end of the day which keeps me working. Those days went from an acceptable 10-11 hour day to 16+ in an instant. All in all though it’s been kinda fun I guess. It’s not all the time that you get to recreate an entire environment from the ground up. The best part will be once we’re all moved over and sitting in the new environment. Seriously, the existing one is a wreck. It’s a lot better than it was when I started a few years ago but still – it’s hard for two different IT teams from basically two different companies to share one domain forest without some serious problems presenting themselves. Oh well… not an issue so much anymore.

Sadly, that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing the last month. At least I’ve been forcing myself to get out of work at a decent time this last week so I’ve been able to spend some time with my family again. I hope I can keep the trend up but since I worked so much in June it’s hard not to feel guilty like you’re not doing enough work when you’re used to pouring in a ton of hours and cut the throttle back to normal. It’s like some sort of withdrawal, how lame is that?

Well, with that said there is much to be done around the house today…

ahhh the latest and greatest… ok, maybe not the greatest… lol

Nothing too crazy to report. I finally got off my rear and posted up more pictures and such. I think the only thing I’m lacking at this point is the finished photos from doing this last round of remodel action. I’ll get to it. Just need to take them. I think we were so thrilled to be back into all our rooms and have the house back after that week long nightmare I haven’t cared much to take the time to take more photos.

I finally ran the Bolder Boulder again. For being 9 years later and about 20 lbs heavier I think I can be pleased with my time. In 2001 I ran a 1:20:57. Not too bad, but not the best time for someone who was 22 year old and weighed 210 lbs. LOL This year I’m pleased to say I came in at 1:14:50 pulling a total time drop of 6 minutes and 7 seconds. If only we didn’t get stuck in the walk/jog heat I might have pulled an even better time. We ended up adding just over a half a mile in extra steps dodging folks which made it a little difficult to keep a good pace. However, that being said, next year it’s ON! I’ll be going in for the qualification run or hopefully run another race before hand to log as a qualifying time and get into a jogger heat or something. My goal is to bust the hour mark next 10k I run. I was sad that Amanda couldn’t run with me this year but she was having some problems with her leg while training which kept her out. I ended up running with my neighbor Cristal who did an awesome job as well.

Aside from that, the last three weeks have been uber crap for me working out. I really need to get some workout time in before I end up plumping up again. I looked at some pics of me from 2 yrs ago when I started working to drop the weight and the me at 270 compared to the me at 232 is nothing if not motivating to never let myself get back there. I’ll get back to it but it’s been hard with work lately. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that I’ll be having much time the next month or two. Work is going to kill me, I’m convinced. We’re incredibly busy right now trying to bust out a pretty large project in a pretty tight schedule. It’s an improbable schedule which of course we’ll knock out. We’ll see how positive my next monthly update post is now won’t we?

All in all everything else is going well. Finally getting the Camaro restored. It only sat for about 5 years with no work on it… At the rate I’m going I think I *MIGHT* be able to drive it in a couple years. The only thing slowing me down now is money and I’m about 10k from finishing it, lol.

Anyway… that about does it. If something else comes to mind i’ll certainly drop another update (if i can find the time, lol)

That’s me. I am the professional blog slacker.

Well, to be honest I think I have a decent excuse or ten… It’s been pretty hectic. I think where I last posted was a good sign things were ramping up to drive me completely nuts. To be honest, I don’t recall everything that has occurred over the last couple months but it’s been somewhere in the lines of tons of career work and lots of home related work (remodel, kiddos, car stuff, workout, etc) so needless to say blogging has been the last thing on my list.

So to bring my little online community up to speed for things they may or may not already know. I successfully made it into the 220′s (albeit high 220′s) on the weight loss and I’m hovering around 19% on the body fat count. I can’t complain really, that’s pretty good considering I was out around 270 when I started this whole thing two years ago. So, almost 42 lbs down and more than 6″ off my waist is nothing to be disappointed over. We’ll see how this next round goes. I’m doing quite a bit more cardio as Amanda and I are training up to run the Bolder Boulder at the end of this month. Projections say I should see around 215 again. That would be nice… lol

In other news, we finished cleaning up the three bedrooms and the hallway to the upstairs in the house with a little remodel. Nothing like pulling out all the insulation in the exterior walls and replacing it with 2 levels higher of an R factor to make things a little cooler/warmer in the bedrooms. It pretty much wraps up most of the work in the house in the odd areas. All that’s left is the kitchen/livingroom combo remodel and the two bathrooms and this house is done. I kinda wonder what we’ll do after that… Hopefully start building the house in the mountains if all goes well. Some pictures will be posted up shortly if they’re not already there when this is read.

I also passed another birthday… 31, wooo… I dunno. I remember thinking as a kid that I would be lucky to see 21 and here I am with 10 more years on top of that, two kids, a wife, a career, debt and everything else that goes in between. Wow.

Tons of stuff in between but hey, I’m still alive and all is well so that’s pretty much where we’re at. Hopefully I can get at least one or two posts a month as things go forward eh? *rolls eyes* riiiight.