Going to the Huskies game!

A friend of mine has season tickets to the University of Washington Huskies and he has an extra ticket!  Woohoo!  It should be a pretty interesting game as we’re playing Fresno State.  I have a feeling that it’s not going to be great for our end.  Oh well!  Keep the hopes up, right?  I’m going to be tailgating with a great group of irreverent, cool guys called the Slumber Queen Crew.  These guys are some of the most rabid Husky fans I’ve ever seen!  Should be a blast!

Shangri-La has been going pretty well, but I’ve been slacking a little on taking my ELOO regularly.  I’ve been taking it in the morning, but when I come home at night I’ve been forgetting.  It’s sort of part of my routine now, but apparently not quite burned into my head yet.  I’ve been doing some walking, push ups, and sit ups but my weight has been hovering around the same.  Still down six pounds.  Though, I feel like I’ve been getting skinnier.  I’d like to think that it’s because I’m building muscle mass.  Yeah, that’s it!

I’m still a little wigged out by the fact that I’m actually DOING something about it instead of whining all the time.  I feel totally empowered.  ‘Tis wonderful.

Go HUSKIES!  GO SLUMBER QUEEN CREW!

Giving blood

Tonight, I was talked into giving blood. It was a first for me! I’m not sure what’s more gratifying…The lightheadedness or the fact that I’m potentially helping someone else. Only downer is that I’m now probably going to have give every 6 weeks because of my blood type. The universal donor. Type O Negative. Doh. Stupid genes!

It was also part of the whole facing fears thing. I hate needles. They make me crazy. I decided I was going to give it a shot (pardon the pun). I still don’t like needles. However, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting! Pretty soon, if all goes well, I’ll be fine with being poked and prodded at the blood bank.

It’s okay. I’m a little bitter that I’m not really supposed to drink beer right afterward though.

Oh well!

Shangri-la is going well. Thus far, I’ve lost 6 pounds while on the diet for almost two weeks. Pretty solid! I just have to keep reminding myself that this is an ongoing process. NOT something that will happen overnight. If I think about how much weight I really want to lose and what I want my weight to be, it gets pretty discouraging! Little by little.

The Xbox 360p.

Found this on Hack-a-day. Awesome mod!

The Xbox 360p.

On a side note, my apologies for being so amazingly negligent with posting. I’ve been pretty busy at work with rebuilding the builder. Finally, this morning, it’s working well.

More on the progress of the Shangri-la diet later this evening.

Darth Vader calls home.

This is absolutely hilarious! I found it while crusing around YouTube.

The official Papal beer

This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! Benedict Beer.

Totally awesome! Hope everyone’s Saturday is going well.

Shangri-La Day 4 and meeting new people.

Today was great.  I finally got my builder project nearly completed after several hours of frustrating bugs.  It built everything I asked it to!  Yay!

Shangri-la is going well.  I’ve been talking the oil only and I prefer it very strongly.  The insulin spike wasn’t worth it.  It made me irritable.  No one likes that.  Trust me.  I woke up and wasn’t hungry.  I went to work and wasn’t hungry.  I finally forced myself to eat some carrots, the last of the celery, and a protein bar (Double fudge brownie!).  It’s so strange to NOT be hungry all the time!  I still need to get a scale.  Tomorrow will be the day I run errands.

Today, while outside enjoying the beautiful day, I met a new person.  A very nice German intern guy that works at one of the other companies in our office complex.  He has quite possibly the best English that I’ve heard from someone from Europe.  It was amazing.  Grammar, vocabulary, everything.  After I introduced myself and started walking back into my office, I realized that a life change has been made in the last couple of years.  Call it maturity, call it what you will, but for me it is something rather intense.  For the longest time, I didn’t meet new people very easily.  I had a hard time “putting myself out there” if you will.  For some reason, I had this paranoia of what they thought of me, what they were saying, et cetera.  It was completely and utterly irrational.

Finally, I started fixing it.  I started singing karaoke.  Yep, karaoke.  Strange, you ask?  Karaoke is a type of activity that requires getting up in front of larger groups of people.  Sometimes ten, sometimes a hundred.  Either way, it doesn’t matter.  The point is, I was terrified to get up and sing in front of a herd.  Finally, on my 22nd birthday (while rather intoxicated) the karaoke DJ, Jeremy “Silent J” Ormsbee, signed me up for a song.  After some coaxing, I did it.

It was awful.

The thrill of trying something new and had never done before made me realize that I didn’t care about the (unfortunate) people in the audience!
My endpoint is this: I believe it is absolutely necessary for us to face our fears, whatever they may be.  Be it change resistance or meeting new people, singing karaoke or a fear of heights.  Often, this presents a challenge for us to become better people and more well-rounded individuals better suited for the real world.  Facing that challenge is a good thing.  It will make us stronger.  I promise!

I’m done waxing philosophical now.  What challenges or fears have you faced?  What was the outcome?

Shangri-La Day 3 and other geek stuff

Day three.

Last night, I had pizza for dinner. Does preprocessed food give you a stomach ache on this diet? It’s happened twice thus far. First, when I had a burger from a place in Seattle. The second is making a take-and-bake pizza and eating it. Each time I’ve just felt, well, for lack of a better term…gross. It wasn’t appetising at all.

Today though, I went to Trader Joe’s and got some good stuff to have for lunches at the office. This is twofold! I don’t spend money on eating out every day, AND I can eat more healthy things! Why didn’t I do this before? I had some carrots, some celery with peanut butter, and a Promax bar. I was stuffed. I can’t remember a time in my life when I had that little and been totally full. It was great! I got some of those chocolate-covered peanut butter-filled pretzels that I love so much. None were eaten. I didn’t want them at all. Amazing!

In other news, I’m currently downloading the Windows Vista RC1 image. I love my cable connection. 7 Megabits a second (yeah, you’re right Toby!). Glorious. I need a distraction from the company builder (the one that builds our software). I’ve been charged with revamping it to be able to support more options. Multiple Products and different source trees. Given the nature of the original builder, it wasn’t an easy task. Hopefully it’ll be done tomorrow.

Mt. St. Helens and Shangri-la Day Two

I was fully intending on heading out on my new adventure on Monday. However, Carrie and I were inspired Monday morning to take a trip to Mount St. Helens. Carrie had never been to see the mountain although she’s grown up in Washington! We had a wonderful day driving down I-5 and see the gorgeous scenery. Pictures will follow shortly!

Day Two of Shangri-La has been interesting. Yesterday, I took the olive oil and sugar water in the morning and evening. However, both times I either drank the sugar water too quickly or I seem to be somewhat sensitive to it. My blood sugar shot through the roof and then I crashed shortly thereafter. I tried drinking it MUCH more shortly this morning and it still was pretty intense. I decided to try only olive oil this evening and it’s been working great.

My appetite has shrunk quite a bit as well. It’s really sort of weird. Since I don’t have a scale (I’ll be getting one this week), I can’t actually weigh myself to know if it’s working!

More to follow later.

UPDATE:  Added a few pictures of the trip to Mt. St. Helens.   The link to my Flickr set is here.

Shangri-la

I just finished reading the book “The Shangri-la Diet” by Dr. Seth Roberts.

I have to admit that it is a fascinating way of thinking! I hate diets. I despise them. I think they’re often fruitless and ultimately lead to a yo-yo effect on your weight.

I’ve been looking for something that was more along the lines of a lifestyle change as opposed to a short term fix to my extra pounds. Hopefully, I’ve found that in this book.

The general idea of the method is each person has a weight “set point” which the body wants to maintain. Some foods can raise or lower the weight set point. By eating foods that have little to no flavor, the set point can be lowered.

It’s obviously more complex than that, but it is one of the things I’ve gleaned. So, this afternoon or evening I’ll be trying it out. For the next few weeks, I’ll be taking extra-light olive oil (ELOO) morning and night and gauging the effects on my appetite. If it works, right on! I’m a path to losing weight! If not, well, I’ll have to try something else.

I will also be attempting to keep track of the results (namely my appetite and how I’m feeling) here until the category “Shangri-La”.  I don’t own a scale at this immediate moment, so it’ll have to be that instead of the cold, hard weight numbers.

I’m thoroughly excited about this. Not necessarily for the ‘diet’ aspect of it, but of changes I can make in my own life when I decide I want to do something. It’s similar to starting this blog. I’ve wanted to start blogging for a really long time, but I just didn’t do it. Being spurred by killing my television I’ve started to gradually make things different. Life changes take time. I know this but now I do think I can do it. Finally.

Browzar isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I was surfing on Digg and came across this post. Scoble mentioned Browzar briefly yesterday.

I’m glad I didn’t download it! Heaven knows I don’t need to come in contact with MORE adware on a daily basis.

Personally, I use Firefox and the Stealther extension. It works splendidly!

And yes. I did have to add ALL those links in the two sentences, so don’t ask.

Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

UPDATE: Scoble pulled the link to Browzar. Good stuff!