My Fatness

I generally try to go the gym, but as with most people I think I'll get in to ruts of not going or not going often enough. Several weeks back though I decided to attempt to exercise 4-5 times a week. This was like nothing I ever tried before... and I was able to successfully do it for a good 6 weeks before I inevitably got sick and was forced to take some time off.

That period was actually the incentive for this post as I woke up one morning and thought I noticed a slight flattening of my jolly belly. As anyone who's experienced a similar situation can imagine I was ecstatic. Was it just me though or was it really true?

Cut to present day. After my 6 weeks on, 4 weeks off, I've been back to the gym for the past week plus at the same pace as before I got sick. The cherry on top of all this is that I got a mention to me how my stomach looked slightly flatter recently (not a typo, there is an 'l' in there) which I've taken as confirmation of truth.

In general though it's hard for me to evaluate changes. My weight has fluctuated (on average) a tick upward; squarely now in the 160-165 range where previously it was 158-163. Is this good? I don't think my eating habits have changed, although it's difficult to always keep track of such things. I like to think this is a net positive though.

Bottom line, I feel better about myself, like to think I look better and have the confidence if some crazed HGH'd chick attacked me I'd have a chance to take her down now.

If You Can't Beat Them...Bribe People!

Perhaps coming off the heels of their failed attempt to purchase Yahoo!, Microsoft has decided to pay users to use their search engine. This payment comes in the forms of rebates when you link-through from their live-search site. Apparently there are hundreds of retailers signed up for this service, including most of the "major" ones.

Not only does this smack of desperation to me, I don't really see how it could work. Sure there may be an initial increase in users using their search, but will that really pay off in the long run? What about once the rebates go away or become insignificant. Not to mention the fact that if some how the idea becomes successful, can't Google just copy it?

I'm going to take full advantage of the generosity of Microsoft since it's available though. I'll continue to use google as my main search engine and just link through to a product on live search (or maybe even paste in the url?) if I plan on buying something to get my rebate.

You need a windows live account to sign up and have to accumulate at least $5 in your account before you can get the cold hard cash. As well due to return scams, you'll have to wait a good 60 days before the transaction is posted to your account.
http://search.live.com/cashback

Like Looking In The Mirror

Netflix in it's attempt to move more to a hybrid social site introduced the concept of "faves" a little while back. This is essentially a watered down "friend". Where as a "friend" is probably someone you know in real life, and therefore netflix allows you to see basically all the information they can see about themselves, a "fave" is someone you probably don't know. Therefore you can only see limited information about them such as 5-star rated movies, and genres or actors they watch a lot of.

Each potential "fave" has a similarity percentage ("friends" have a percentage as well) based on some netflix algorithm which is a quick way to see (hey!) how similar your movie watching tastes are. So as I sometimes do I was on one of the netflix pages where you can see potential "faves" and saw a person with an 86% similarity percentage; which is very high. In fact this would be the highest of any "fave" similarity percentage I've seen yet. With all this "friends"and "faves" stuff netflix also introduced user names which if you don't choose one will be auto-generated for you from as far as I can tell your first and last initial, and then a string of digits. This specific "fave" (who by the way also had Kevin Spacey as the most watched actor...my favorite actor) had an auto-generated user name of "MZ 123456". (Yeah I changed the digits).
SPOOKY!!!

Type O Positive

I'm always impressed by so-called "creative types" (because I am not one of them). With the limitless power of the internet any artist can get their message out through various means such as shirts, music, comics and both of these.

Not only are the videos fantastic in itself, but they used scenes from several of my favorite movies. There are even more on YouTube as well if you decide to look!

Faux St. Patty's Day

On this technically non St. Patty's Day I present my list of music you should have listened to today while drinking your Guinness (non U2 division).

Dropkick Murphys - my favorite irish punk band
The Pogues - it seems every year they play St. Patty's Day in NYC and every year I forget
Flogging Molly - similar to Dropkick Murphy's
Black 47 - Only because I've seen them at Shea Stadium more than once without even knowing who they were! Not too bad.

Instant Gratification

I'm pretty sure I've emailed everyone possible about this but I find it really cool in that some of the big TV networks are offering their shows on demand through their websites. Just tonight I was able to go to the fox website and catch the latest Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (nice little show while I can't get my 24 fix) and then afterwards surf to the ABC website to get back in to Lost. Terminator was available in several resolutions (including HD) and Lost is (seemingly) only available in HD (which is totally fine with me).

I can't see why this won't continue going forward, I'm more likely to watch a show even with commercials (which ABC has, fox didn't) when I get to choose when I want to watch the show. The reason I find this great and I think it will be successful going forward is because I'm being given a choice. My only other options are recording the show somehow and then I'm certainly not sitting through commercials.

While I was writing this I thought "Well I should check the web sites of the other networks and see if anything is available on there". I go to NBC and whoa; I can now see season 2 of 30 Rock. Awesome! It gets better though as they have "vintage" shows available for instant viewing also... including the mother f'n A-Team!!!! Actually it's only the pilot episode for now, but it looks like they will be adding one a week.

CBS had some shows available too but since most shows on CBS suck, I couldn't find much of interest on there.

Now I have even more useless ways to suck away my time!

The Happy Recap

Well the year is just about over and as is often the case it seemed like such a long year.

My year started with two of the owners of my company leaving and (eventually) taking all but one client, most of the management team and taking or getting to leave all the highest level programmers. As I was made aware at our holiday party though, the one owner who was left had a bit of a harder time than I did. Literally about half the year I was unsure if I'd have a job to come to, but it turned out to be OK.

I went to 23 concerts this year including finally getting to see Rage Against the Machine. How awesome is that! Anyway probably at least half of those I went to by myself....and everything was fine. Now I'm not saying I wouldn't have enjoyed it more with friends, but the alternative probably would have been me sitting home on my computer. It seems so silly now that I would have in the past put something off just because I couldn't get someone else to do it with me even though I really wanted to do it. Yay, I've evolved.

Several people my family or I know passed away this year. More people in fact than I think I can recall in the last 10 years or so. I'm not sure if that really makes a difference though. Someone dies and it generally sucks; individually of what else is going on. One of these passings has unfortunately led to a large strife in my family that I can't see ever being mended. I'm not one to say something along the lines of "some good comes from everything", but it certainly have been driven home to me with this situation that money can overpower any and all ties including family which is pretty lame.

I went to my first wedding (and more importantly bachelor party) this year which was pretty freakin cool. With that I got to see a few people I hadn't seen in quite some years and that was neat.

All in all I think things have turned out pretty good. (Aside from the whole Mets spectacular failure that is.) Tomorrow will be just another day (and since I don't write notes anymore I don't have to worry about writing the date wrong on my paper).

Happy New Year!

Mets 4 Life

So my sister is a mets fan. Pretty big mets fan for a girl I'd say. I like to think I've done a fair part in molding her since we were little kids. As has been going on for the past week, every game the mets play are of dire importance to get in to the playoffs.

My sister who works as a waitress generally works Saturday and Sunday during the day. They have a bunch of TVs there though so she gets to catch most of the game on the weekends. Today though some dumb ass customer decides that he wants to watch car-racing (not even football!) and has them change off the Mets game. So she tells her job that she has to leave just so she can watch the rest of the game! Well I don't know if that's what she told them, but she left just to do that. I love it!!

Behold the Future!

Well maybe....Anyway I just bought one of these digital pens to mess around with. I'll use it to take notes at work for the time being and see how it performs. If it does pretty well I might give it to my mom since she basically writes notes all day and then transcribes them to Word when the day is over. Pretty cool stuff this is.

sermotion:excited

I try not to forget

I generally don't discuss my feelings towards September 11th with other people, not that they are all that different from others I'd think. Thankfully I wasn't personally affected by that day other than being a shocked new yorker and American. However, today probably in being that it was a Tuesday just like in 2001 has made me think about it more than in years past.

Feel free to continue reading if you want, but what follows is an account of my day and days afterwards. For lack of a better place I post this online so I will hopefully never forget.


I had an 11:20 class, but went in early because I didn't get homework done. I never found it easy to do at home. Therefore just by coincidence this day I hopped on the 8:35 bus. I remember hearing murmurs about something, but nothing that spoke to the magnitude of what happened. Maybe something about a plane, hitting a building? I was half asleep and no one seemed excited enough to warrant my attention.

I got to school about 9:15 near the union and walked inside to study in the lounge. I happened upon another kid in my class in the lounge and we looked over each others homework. Shortly thereafter Nick (I think) came in and told me what he had heard happened. It was still somewhat early so I think details were still sketchy. It's hard to believe but I don't think the phrase "terrorist attack" was even in my vocabulary at the time. We walked out of the union and ran in to a girl, Kirsten, that Nick and I worked at the sports authority with. Chatting outside the union about what happened a security guard came over to us. Someone had left a bag unattended near the steps to the union bridge. Honestly I don't know what came of this situation as we decided it was best to leave the area, but it seems strange such a thing would happen on that day. As I was walking over to class I called (or was called by) my house and started to hear the full details of what exactly happened. At that point I decided I had to go home.

I got home and like most people watched the news until I couldn't physically watch it anymore. It's unfathomable to me to think how many people's lives changed that day.

I'm sure the days that followed were a blur of emotions. Days passed and I went back to school. I think there was a vigil there for the USB alumni who had lost their lives that day, but I did not attend.

Only three things over that time period do I recall. None of particular importance either, but I'll probably forever associate with that day and the ones following. I had met a girl (Sherry) who was in the lecture hall in Javits that I had my class, but for the 9:50 period. I spoke to her a couple times and the Thursday before invited her to grab a bite to eat with me. Being the shy person I am I thought about actually asking her to hang out, but didn't. That day was the last time I saw her. I don't think anything drastic happened to her, but who knows about her family or her emotional state after the attack. It was the start of the semester and maybe even early enough to drop all your classes if one so wished. It's pretty lame, but I've thought about this situation whenever I question whether I should ask someone (a girl usually) something. I always at least try to now.

The second feeling I remember is that of not wanting to listen to a specific album I had bought recently. Physically being unable to listen to it even. The album was "Underground Network" by "Anti-Flag" and as you can imagine by the name, a bit of a politically minded one. I was so affected I couldn't even listen to music that I loved. What a sad time that was.

Finally the third item I recall was actually an event. I went to the first mets home game played after September 11th which was of course against the Braves. Myself, my mom, Andrew P. and his dad went. The place was sold out, security was tight. Although Andrew and I as we later noticed cut about 20k people in line and walked in to the stadium after only waiting about 10 minutes. Our parents waited around 45 minutes if I recall. In what was quite possibly the greatest HR I've ever witnessed in my lifetime; Mike Piazza hit a game-winning shot in the bottom of the 8th to put the Mets ahead 3-2 after the Braves themselves had just gone up 2-1 in the top of the 8th. It was quite the contrast to 10 days earlier and I like to think a few people in attendance that night were comforted in a way they didn't think could be done.