First post, 2013, more or less

Well, I set a goal to blog more often in 2013, and so far I’m off to a sucky start.  Writer’s block, I guess, or more specifically: at best only a vague idea of what I wanted to write about, leading to paralysis by analysis.

So I’ll run off for a while, get the First Blog Entry Of The Year out of the way, and maybe that’ll uncork me.

2013 has been an interesting year, so far.  I set some other goals (not blog related :)) and have actually kept to many of them.

I set a goal to weigh 175 by about end of April, and I’m on track to be there closer to end of March.  I started at ~192.

I set a goal to achieve and maintain “inbox zero”.  I had to “declare bankruptcy” on two fronts, at home and at work, but since then I’ve done it.  To expand: I moved everything in my inboxes at home and at work to some other folder, and I “unstarred” all my Google mail.  (I read several months’ worth of the latest starred emails, and most of them were moot, and the ones that weren’t I transferred to my shiny new Toodledo account.)  So having achieved “inbox zero” by force, I’ve been able to keep it up: my work and home inboxes are both still clean, three weeks in.

I set a goal to get and stay more organized.  So I dusted off my Toodledo account, deleted all the old crap in it, and have been dutifully adding stuff, and checking stuff off, since 1/1.  A couple things sparked this: the new year, a general desire for a less hectic life and better sleep (I hate bolting awake at night thinking OMG what about X!?), and reading thesecretweapon.org really lit a fire under me, too.  TheSecretWeapon actually deals with Evernote, not Toodledo, but I decided to stick with TD.

On the minus side, I got the flu a week ago and it’s been a rough road back.  Still somewhat sniffly and congested.  Ick.

Here are some things I’d like to write about in the coming months.  I’m pretty sure I’ve written an entry like this before, so time will tell how well I stick to my guns.  🙂

  • the trials and tribulations of being a BHS Chapter President.  My pie-in-the sky idea is that my little “so you wanna be the president” section would become a popular reference for BHS Chapter Presidents throughout the Society.  First, of course, I have to write a bit, and then we’ll see if any of my ideas don’t suck.  🙂
  • I enjoyed and was impressed by Deacon Duncan‘s series critiquing a popular Christian Apologetics book, and think it’d be cool to do the same.  (See also the Created To Be His Help Meet series over at Love, Joy, Feminism.)  Something that’s interested me for years is morality and the basis thereof.  Or lack of a basis, as the case may be.  Long ago, before I was quite so atheistic in my own mind, I read a book about situational ethics relativism called Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Midair.  [Edit: title & link to book.]  I re-read some of it more recently, and what seemed to make a lot of sense the first time around, just didn’t any more.  So I thought it might be fun and interesting to write a chapter-by-chapter critique of that book.
  • Go, the computer language, continues to fascinate.  I learned about it more or less by chance, about last August, when a friend on FB got me interested.  (Thanks, Jonathan!)  I have a couple of small-to-medium projects in mind that I’d like to write about: 1) duplicate my most common use of Perl in Go, to wit, write a module, template, or framework that reads a text file, cuts it up into fields, and does stuff with the fields.  2) write a Go interface to Toodledo, Evernote, or both.  3) Write a Toodledo front end, that more accurately realizes my ideas about my perfect todo list.

Well, the plane’s about to land.  Gonna save now.  See you next time!

Test post

Testing, testing, is this thing on?

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Old Bridge Rd,Townsend,United States

Note, 3/1/14: BlogPress on the iPad didn’t get the URL for that image right.  It’s missing a “/”.  I could fix it by hand, but I’m not going to; they got it wrong, it’s staying wrong.  Test failed.

running cygwin’s “ping” as administrator

I installed Cygwin’s “ping” package and couldn’t run it in a regular mintty due to permissions problems.  I got “ping: socket: Operation not permitted” errors.  But it worked fine if I ran it in a mintty that I’d started with “Run as administrator”.

I searched around a bit and couldn’t find the right answer to my question of “how to run /bin/ping as administrator in a regular terminal window”, and couldn’t get it to work on my own either, but I thought I’d post my work-around, to wit:
alias ping=/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/PING

On being folksy

At the top of a blog I read, it says “Howdy, Larry Clapp!”  The problem is, I know a guy named “Howdy”, so part of my brain insists on interpreting this folksy salutation as nonsensically as “John, Jane Smith!”

“On LoseIt” … well, not really

So my last couple Fitness Status posts have said “Nth week on LoseIt”.  But I can’t really say that.  I’ve only logged food on 7 days since 6/4, and for 3 of the previous 5 weeks before that, I “took the weekend off”.  So depending on how you count it, I was only really “on” LoseIt for about 10 weeks (3/26 – 6/1).

And even then, I was at or below “budget” only 2 of those ten weeks; for the other 8 I was an average of 2176 cal over budget per week, or 310 per day.  So my record for actually stopping when I was “supposed to” definitely sucks.
Pretty amazing I’ve lost any weight at all, really.
Here’s hoping it was mostly fat and not muscle!

Weight / fitness status, 7/9/12

End of week 15 on LoseIt.  Up 5 lbs since last entry (two weeks ago, 6/25); net loss so far, 3.2 lbs.
My starting weight 3/26 was 189.6
My current weight is 186.4
My goal weight is 175
My plan is to lose 1 lb per week
My calorie budget is 1,733
My goal date is September 28, 2012, almost 12 weeks away.  😛
My original date was July 8, 2012 (yesterday, at the time of writing, alas)
I was in Portland, OR last week for the BHS’s International convention.  I was 183 before I left, so apparently I gained over 3 lbs in a week.  Hopefully some of that is water weight which I’ll shed in the next few days as I return to a less carby diet.  Fasting today till dinner in an attempt to get that started.  🙂
I’ve been on an upward trend since my most recent low of 178.8, 6/15.  Since then I’ve been to MD for a week and OR for a week.  *sigh*

Of course I can’t blame it all on poor eating while traveling.  Rather a lot of ice cream lately, and then pizza and ice cream last night after we got home.  Boooo.  And of course in my 6/25 entry I said “I ate fairly well [in MD], and even IF’d twice.”  Haven’t worked out much lately, either.

Pivotal / influential books

These books were all important in my life.
  • Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
  • Illusions
  • Finite and Infinite Games
  • Valentina
  • Godel, Escher, Bach
  • Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
  • Metamagical Themas
  • The Screwtape Letters
  • To Be Or Not: An E-Prime Anthology
More recently:
  • Good Calories, Bad Calories
  • Body By Science
  • The God Delusion
I should probably write a little about why, but time prohibits, alas.

Staying up late

Yesterday I wrote some more about my personal axioms, and mentioned a scene in the book Starship Troopers.  I couldn’t find the text online, so I ponied up my $10 and bought the Kindle version, and ended up staying up well past midnight, reading more than half the novel

It’s good sometimes to return to the classics.  I should probably reread Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, too.  (Yeah, you might not consider it a classic, but it was pivotal to my youth.)