Monday, February 11, 2008, 01:42 PM
Hey all, for those that don't know my birthday is coming up in March, in early March in fact.
Also for those of you that don't know, the Paragon is in the running for SOTM for March. I'd consider it a nice birthday present from the FSF membership if y'all would vote for Paragon and make her the SOTM for March.
...yes I know, I'm being all beggy pleady with it, but hey why not.
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( 3 / 10 )Saturday, January 12, 2008, 09:46 PM
So a couple weeks ago I was playing Rock Band with my brother-in-law and sister, and the whammy bar on the Rock Band guitar broke... I actually took the guitar apart and discovered that the spring used for the whammy bar snapped at one end. So I made a mild attempt at fixing it. I've had the game for a few months so I was hoping that perhaps it would solve the issue.. by just connecting a different link.
Well, a few days ago I was playing the game, and the whammy bar broke again, evil cursed thing that it be. So last night I got myself setup to get a replacement from EA...
Now today I was playing the game, putting a lot of good time into it. My brother-in-law and I were play the Endless Setlist (58 songs in a single setlist.. w00t) anyway, we were at about ...41.. when the strum bar stopped working for down strokes... which is my primary stroke, Thankfully the up-stroke still worked fine, but that still left me with a harder time playing through 17 songs...heh.
Stupid guitar, I'm not too pissed, mostly because I've already setup for the replacement... but I'd rather not have had to deal with that issue.
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( 3 / 10 )Monday, January 7, 2008, 06:22 PM
So I've been continuing on with the attempts of living healthier. My mother was kindly enough to purchase some water bottles at Target, and that should be beneficial, not required of course, but beneficial as I can always just put water in the bottle and always have it with me.
My sister was kindly enough to get me a 10 day free membership at a semi-local gym, I have yet to use it, but I intend to do so soon, and perhaps joining the gym as well, should finances permit.
I've been doing relatively well with the building of the vitamin habit, and have continued to take it daily.
I'll admit over the holidays I did break the no alcohol that I've been attempting to attain, but it was a way I thought of trying to break the stress by letting go a little, it didn't really help much. But drinking never does.
Although Saturday night, despite the fact that I was tired and just wanted to rest, I knew I needed to unwind. So my brother-in-law and I headed out to Dave and Busters and hung out there for several hours, mostly playing the Derby Owners Club, but also doing some of the various ticket earning games. It really helped a lot. Today at work I did not feel overworked or overstressed or near breaking as I have been over the holidays, despite the fact that we are behind.
I was also able to be relatively productive compared to late, and that was a good thing.
I'm also planning on attempting to get up earlier, I have so far had poor luck in waking up as early as I want, but even still I am aiming my sights even earlier, if anything I'll still wake up earlier than I am if not at the time I hope. At least at first. I usually hate having time in the morning, because I never know what to do with myself, so I got in the habit of giving myself just barely enough time to get stuff done, and that eventually turned into giving myself no time to do anything before work..or whatever. Something I hope to change. We'll see how that works out.
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( 2.8 / 18 )Saturday, December 22, 2007, 02:03 PM
So it's been a little over two months since my last post, and I'm sure that all of you are wondering what's been up with the Ku-Monster.
Work...that's about the long and the short of it, I've been working.
Now that's not the focus of my post here, but just thought I'd mention that.
For those that don't know, for the majority of my life I've been an overweight to low-level obese guy that has had poor hygiene and consisted of a diet of primarily junk food and dr pepper.
Granted, there was a short time when I was, in fact, thin... but that's because I was sick all the time.
Far too late, it may seem, but still early enough, I've decided that I want to ensure that my life is better.
Like most people, I wanted to lose weight, appear attractive to the ladies, and things of that general nature. I tried several times to start losing weight, but rarely got anywhere. I know, I'm starting to sound like a diet pill commercial... But guess what, that's not where I'm going.
I eventually figured out the two major flaws with my plan.
1. I was looking to lose weight, and that was my primary focus.
2. I jumped right in.
Now they may not seem all too bad, and there were other flaws I had at times (like going in under someone elses push or motives or ideas instead of my own.) Earlier this year, perhaps late March or early April, I can't quite recall when, I came up with a different tactic, a different plan, a different goal.
The goal, at least the primary goal, is not to lose weight, though I hope that it does happen. The primary goal is merely to live a better life all together. Healthier, Wealthier, and Happier.
Happy is the easy part, interestingly. I read somewhere, and I agree with it, Happiness is not the goal, it's the journey. You don't try to reach a level where you are happy, you either chose to be happy or not. While I may be stressed and near overloaded at work, and not have an excessive amount going on outside of it, I'm not allowing that to disuade me or bring me down, even when I falter in my attempts to become healthier, I don't allow that to bring me down.. it's a part of the journey, and so is happiness.
So, the goal has changed, and that really helps. It saves me from looking into temporary diets, I am looking to change my diet... the way I eat, alltogether. I also look for ways to save money (healthy option of grocery shopping instead of eating out is a great one). As well as a variety of other things to help me out in life in general.
Now the second flaw, just jumping in...
One thing that almost everyone knows but it seems everyone ignores, is that you can't take on too much at once, or else you'll overload and eventually fail. That was my problem when I tried to lose weight. I'd jump right into exercise and diet all at once, and take them to extremes right off the bat.. go from burgers and soda straight to juices and salads, and from sitting around on my quite rotund buttocks to hitting the gym for several hours three times a week.
To countermand that this time around, I've been making small steps.. trying to make new habits, not neccissarily get rid of bad ones, but get new ones.. sometimes that includes getting rid of bad ones.
The first step I made back in march/april was starting to drink water.
I was never a big water drinker, and I knew it was far healthier than what I had been doing. Even here I weaned myself, I didn't just jump straight from soda only to water only. I took small steps. I went into flavored waters, juice drinks, and some unhealthy guys too, but that's okay. In the end I got into just water, and for the most part that's what I stick to. Of course since I'm not on a diet I can "cheat" as it were and not ruin anything, so if I really want to I can have soda, truth be told... that doesn't happen much. I've found that when you do or have something every day, you start to prefer it even if you didn't before.
More recently I've started getting back into some things I dropped out of recently.
Grocery Shopping...
My list usually consists of canned goods (vegetables, meats, and soups mostly)
Wheat Bread
Peanut Butter
Orange Marmalade.
Sometimes I try other things as well, but the above tends to be my standard.
I'm also trying to get the habit of taking vitamins every day. That's the trick of it... setting a routine, a schedule, making it a habit. I've got the water only thing down...
In case you're wondering for water, I don't go the least expensive route, but here's what I do.
At home, I use a Brita Pitcher to filter my tap water...
outside of home I will sometimes allow myself to get bottled water, especially if I am going out to eat.. or I'll take water from home.
Of course, I'm trying to get into the habit of vitamins every morning, as well as taking lunch to work.
My lunch, as of late, usually consists of two peanut butter and orange marmalade sandwiches on wheat.
I am also trying to get into the habit of having breakfast, and a better breakfast than just bagels... at this poitn my breakfast usually consists of Reese's Puffs cereal.
My dinner usually consists of the canned goods I have around.
As of yet this still isn't the most efficient way of eating, but hopefully it'll help me started onto the right path.
Once I'm secure in getting the start of the vitamin, food habits... I'm going to finally make the step into creating the exercise habit. Starting that off with 20 minute exercises everyday, most likely walking for 20 minutes at first, perhaps on a treadmill at a gym or perhaps around the neighborhood. That will of course eventually grow to at most an hour (the longest effective length of exercise as I understand it) daily, and by that point I'll have probably also included some strength training as well.
I hope, and plan, to start posting up here weekly with how I'm doing with my life changes, and I look forward to sharing my goals and successes with everyone in the FSF... at leas those that check out the blog here.
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( 2.9 / 16 )Wednesday, October 10, 2007, 08:41 PM
Mostly, PC repair is just stress and frustration. A lot of decent challenges which is nice. Sometimes, there's something that just makes it all worth while, some device not working right, or someone forgetting to install something important. Sometimes you can get something working a bit too good, and causing interesting results.
Well, one customer took in his Liquid Cooled machine, a plumber by trade, and you can tell... so much useless tubing, he could have honestly cut it down a lot, but he didn't. Not to mention the copper elbow joint he added in. Still, that's not all that bad, his computer had not one, but two cooling systems, for reasons beyond me, one is usually enough.
One was your standard run of the mill modular liquid cooling system, and it was the mess of tubes thanks to our plumbing pal.
The other was a closed system set up just for the CPU, and it cools water in a unique way, using these weird plates instead of the standard radiator. It also has a module that is supposed to regulate these. Now I didn't know about the module until after I left work, and I'm not the tech working on the machine, and I'm not in tomorrow so sadly I may not know if this is the case, but I'm assuming he did not put this module in, and thusly the plates are working at maximum.
They main part of the cooling system was at a nice frosty 42 Degrees fahrenheit, which is a bit below the dew point, and very close to the freezing point.
One of the times that I wished I kept my regular camera with me all the time, but thankfully I had the camera in my phone, and here's what those temperatures will do to a liquid cooling system.
Sadly I wasn't able to get decent pictures of the rest of the system due to the plumbing in the way. But I think that's enough, especially considering this is on the top of the system, the only thing lucky enough to be out of the way is the power supply, which sat above this.
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