Sam on Maui

Today for lunch I figured I would grab a salad from Jack in the Box. Their Southwest Chicken salad is actually pretty good and it had been a while since I had one. Got it, came back to the office and proceeded to eat. While munching away, however, it began to dawn on me why I didn't get the things more often. Salads are time-consuming to eat. Maybe it says something about modern culture, but the darn things simply are not fast to eat! I think I could've eaten a sandwich in half the time it took me to eat my salad. Maybe a third of the time. But its simply not a very "efficient" way to go if you're pressed to eat within a short amount of time. Be it fresh or fast food, there are a wide variety of foods that can simply downed faster than a meal-sized salad, that are just as satisfying, and can be had for the same price. One could go with something plus a side salad, but I don't see the point. Side salads are nice, don't get me wrong, but honestly as small a...

One trick with dieting is that weight can be a fickle metric. Clothing, hydration, meals in the stomach, use of the bathroom, muscle mass lost or gained, temperature affecting the scale and more can swing things in either direction. As such, my brother has encouraged me to track my progress is more than one way. In the front of my little journal they actually encourage you to track things two other ways than simple numbers off the scale – body measurements and clothing sizes. This evening a little time was spent with a measuring tape and pen so I could get at least the body measurements handled. So, as of today? Right upper arm – 14” Waist- 40.5” Hips – 45” Right thigh – 26” In one month I’ll measure again and hopefully find the numbers to be to my liking!

Well, I'm not quite at a monthly check-in here, but progress is being made :p Week 1 - 220.6lbs Week 2 - 221.6lbs (+1 lb) Week 3 - 216 lbs (-5.6 lbs) Week 4 - 216.6 lbs (+.6 lbs) Week 5 - 214.8 lbs (-5.8 lbs) Week 6 - 215.6 lbs (+.8 lbs) --missed a week Week 7 - 216.8 lbs (+1.2 lbs) Week 8 - 215.8 lbs (-1 lb) Week 9 - 216 lbs (+.2 lbs) ---missed a week Week 10 - 216.6 lbs (-.4 lbs) Week 11 - 214.2 lbs (-1.4lbs) Week 12 - 217 lbs (+2.8lbs) Week 13 - 214.2 lbs (-2.8lbs) Week 14 - 210.4 lbs (-3.8 lbs) My 5% weight loss goal with Weight Watchers is 11lbs (209.6 lbs), so I'm aaaalmost there. After that my 10% goal is 22 lbs or 198.6 lbs. Right now I'm not sure what my ultimate weight goal should be. Certainly, getting under 200 lbs (first time in 5 years) would be good and what the doctor ordered as a minimum, so that'd be good. According to the CDC's BMI calculator thingie (and I know - BMI doesn't take into account bone structure or muscle-mass) a healthy weight ra...

Wow! Been a while! @_@ Week 1 - 220.6lbs Week 2 - 221.6lbs (+1 lb) Week 3 - 216 lbs (-5.6 lbs) Week 4 - 216.6 lbs (+.6 lbs) Week 5 - 214.8 lbs (-5.8 lbs) Week 6 - 215.6 lbs (+.8 lbs) --missed a week Week 7 - 216.8 lbs (+1.2 lbs) Week 8 - 215.8 lbs (-1 lb) Week 9 - 216 lbs (+.2 lbs) ---missed a week Week 10 - 216.6 lbs (-.4 lbs) Week 11 - 214.2 lbs (-1.4lbs) So far I'm 6.4 lbs less than when I started, and losing about .5 lbs a week. Seems good and healthy. Even when I mess up I'm doing better, eating-wise, than before. Trying to get more exercise in as I remember, but its not habitual yet. I've got 4.6 lbs left until I reach my 5% weight loss goal, then its eyes forward to my 10% goal of 22 lbs lost. I'm pleased with my results thus far, and just need to keep on at it. I've got two more sessions to go before I need to start paying for it again (got 13-weeks from at a discount from my HMO), and I'm considering doing it. What is nice, if not great, is that a...

Last week I picked up a copy of Forbidden Island from my local Borders. I had first heard of it while looking for cooperative games to play with my friends on our Sunday get-together. Its for two to four players and suggested for ages 10 and up. The goal of the game is collect all the treasures on Forbidden Island and escape before the island sinks into the ocean.

Tonight was my Weight Watcher’s meeting/weigh-in. Normally, my ritual is this; I go home, get my stuff and change into a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. This week, due to the 88th annual Maui County Fair, I had to go straight to the weigh in. As such, I was wearing my work clothes. Okay, fine, no big deal. I get to the meeting, empty my pockets, take off my shoes, and get weighed, coming in at +0.2lbs compared to last week. NOOOO! When I get home I immediately change, grab the pants plus my normal weigh-in shorts, and hit the kitchen. We’ve got a nice little digital scale that will even zero-out for stepped measuring. I weigh the shorts, zero the scale, then weigh the pants to get the difference. I then take numbers, find a website that converts ounces to pounds, take that number, add it to my weight last week then compare to my week this week. Happy happy, I actually weigh 0.175lbs less this week than last week. But man… I think I’m a little crazier than I thought!

We’re finally in the fourth quarter of 2010. The year has certainly flown by, but I’m not certain if its from fun or the years passing faster as I get older. In a bit less than three months I’ll be at the one year mark for a personal contract, a plan, I made. Intended as a blue-print for the year I sat down and went through four areas I wanted to see improvement. So, in order… Get my finances in the best shape of their life. Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University was a big help here, and my credit cards are paid off. That being said I’ve not progressed far beyond that point – by nature I am not what Dave would call gazelle intense . Quite the opposite. So, at the moment I have not pursued a second job as originally planned, and paying off my car at triple speed has taken a back seat to other things. When I get my emergency fund back to full (recently had to pay for some car work) I will get back on to track with the more aggressive payoff plan. If nothing else I think I can say I’...

Sunday afternoons I normally find my self at Paul and Mandy's house. They're a wonderful couple with a wonderful family - gracious and hospitable. The time is often spent playing games of various types - word, card, personality, trivia, etc. We've played Moods, Wizard, Pit, Title Recall, Shout it Out and more, enjoying ourselves the whole time. Its not uncommon for the house to have eight or more people there, visiting, and enjoying each other's company. Much to their credit, as well as the folks who come, its often laid back and everyone is a good sport about winning, losing, and generally just playing. But one thing I was wondering, however, is "are there many cooperative games?" As is, the games we play are typically competitive in nature. The rules set up a system for that competition that everyone has to abide by and goes from there. There is really only one winner, be it an individual or a particular team. Now, that is good, and enjoyable, but "in t...

The debate between new and used is usually fairly cut and dry when you talk to people - buy new and pay more or buy used and pay less. Its accepted that used will have a certain amount of wear on it and not come with all the perks a new item would normally have, but overall that's the price you pay for not paying full price. Over the years I've gotten to know and be acquaintances, if not friends with, a fair number of content creators. Artists, writers, musicians who make their living (or supplement it) through books, games, and music sales. I'm a fan of a fair number of companies that do business with selling software and services, some of which have seen ups and downs. On top of all that I've got a liking for some of my local stores and businesses. Because of all this, its put a different twist on how I'm seeing the new versus used debate, and has me leaning more towards buying new. Not because I'm rich, mind you! To be honest, for a while I felt like it was k...

Right now I've got a Palm Centro. Its an older smart phone, and was considered to be entry level at that. But its nice! I like the little guy quite a bit and make okay use out of what it offers. Contacts? Yep. Calendar? Often. Basic word processing for notes and stuff? Good to have. Camera? Used rather frequently. Keyboard for texting? Used a lot. In short - it gets a lot of use for things other than being a phone. All without a data plan, no less! Realizing my actual wants and usage of my smartphone (indeed, my actual "I'm not in front of a computer" habits) are fairly modest, I've come to realize that any of the smartphones out there should be quite fine for my needs. However, and this might be due to my XY chromosomes, I've been eying the newer smart phones lately. Apple/iPhone Believe or not this is the phone I'm considering the least. Part of it is maybe some contrary-ism on my part. Perhaps an irrational attraction to "other" options. But ...

Got it at my friendly local Borders - $150 for the unit, and it came with a $20 gift card for Borders.com. The unit itself comes with 100 public domain books - started "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" last night. The hardware seems nice enough. Light, comfortable. I don't think its going to be award winning or anything, but I'm reasonably pleased with it. Its a bit slow compared to what I'm used to (LCDs and multi-cored gigahertz processors), but I got used to it. The control pad on the bottom goes to the previous page (left), next page (right), up a font size (up), down a font size (down) and brings up the menu (center click). Works nicely, although I do want to press down to go to the next page sometimes. I've discovered that you can make it crash/hang-up if you hold the power button too long. Clicking it puts it to sleep, so (somehow) I've been trained to press and hold to turn off. That hasn't worked so well for me! Having to find a paper ...

Tonight at 6 p.m. I'll be heading to my Weight Watcher's meeting for my second weigh-in. I started at 220.6lbs, first weigh in was 221.6lbs (+1lb), and tonight? We'll see. Its been educational thus far, though. The Point tracking via the little food diary has made me a bit more conscious of what I'm eating, that's for sure. Discovering a bit more about how my hunger works has been pretty helpful, and is helping me plan accordingly. So, today, what am I having for lunch? Jack in the Box. No, really. A Sourdough Chicken Club, hold the mayo, plus a small fries and diet Coke. A gruesome 17 points, or half my point allowance for the day. Yes, this is the same guy who was fretting over a Snickers bar having 7 points, which is more than a lunch from Subway. But I'll tell you what - I've still got a LOT of points left for the rest of the day, especially if I eat sensibly the rest of the day. For a snack today I've got a personal size bag of low-fat popcorn (than...

One of the things that I've found interesting about Weight Watchers is my point allowance is what they say I should be eating. Ideally, after I add up all I've eaten and subtract it from my daily allowance I'll end the day with a nice zero. Slow and steady weight loss at maybe 1lb per week is what its shooting for, along with getting me to change my habits and diet. Good and admirable, certainly. Well, I've run into going over before. There are provisions for that, and honestly, the worst thing that happens is I dust myself off and get back on the program. Slowed progress is still progress. Last night, however, is the first time I've gone under my allowance, and I did so by about 1/7th of my total. Not a big deal, right? Nope. At least not the way I did. If I had eaten a lot of filling, zero to low point foods that'd be one thing. But I didn't. Where I missed things was dinner. I had a very small (less than 3 oz) portion of steak, half a tomato, kim chi and ...

Right now I'm seriously hunting a for a new smart phone (darn my geek lust). At the moment I'm ignoring the iPhone - I know it'll do everything I want, so I think I'd be better off looking at the competition, you know? More likely to find that "perfect" fit for me. I've been looking at Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7's, but feel like I haven't given Blackberry a fair shake just yet. Just doing my research :) Been looking more at the smaller phones - want something that's a reasonable size (no Droid X for me) with a good camera. I've realized that having 1 billion apps isn't important - my wants and usages are actually fairly limited. Nothing major. If my Centro has taught me anything is that I'm fine without multitasking, although it would be nice. I'm seriously NOT power-using my cell phone - that's what I have computer for! I pretty much want: a phone (heh) to be able to check my email (two accounts - Yahoo and Li...

There are a fair number of truisms and clichés about getting back up after being knocked down and learning from one’s mistakes. I won’t bore you with them, but that is what has happened. After doing things my way - at my own pace, and generally not having much success at it – I started up with Weight Watchers. Last week was my first weigh in, and I took home a bit of information for it. Now, anyone who has tried to break, change or start habits can tell you its hard, never mind doing two or even three of them at once. As such, I came back this week and actually gained a pound. Yay me! Thanks to the little food journal I got, I could see where I was having trouble plus figure out why. Seems a bit obvious, I suppose, but I wasn’t doing it before!  After thinking about it, I remembered (or more to the point, made it a point to remember) that afternoons are trouble for me when it comes to food. That’s when I want to eat, to snack, to put my face in a trough of something tasty just t...

For those of you who don't live here: on Maui things are set up so all the different parts of Maui County can vote for who represents all the different parts of Maui County. There's a bit more of a fuss going on about it, especially since what can  happened is a person running can lose in the district they're running for, but still get elected to office. A good story on it can be found here at the Maui Weekly. There was a commentary there that's a good, quick read read. A quick excerpt from it: The current system overwhelmingly favors incumbents over challengers. It requires that the candidates run throughout the county on three separate islands to gain a connection with the voters in far flung corners of the county. The incumbents, by virtue of their office, already have those connections. The difficulties facing Lāna‘i or Moloka‘i challengers running countywide are extreme—their chances of winning are just about nil. So those incumbents are rarely challenged. Invu...

Come the middle of August I’m going to have almost a whole week off from work. Trick is I don’t know what I necessarily want to do. I could stay home. I’ve got a bunch of projects that I’ve been wanting to finish up. Staying home is cheap, too. Well, unless I end up having to go to Lowes or someplace like that. I could do a quick trip to ‘Oahu or the Big Island. That’ll get expensive quick, and I’ve got no idea what I’d do there anyhow. Well, visit friends, but since friends work for a living that might not be quite so convenient. I could cancel the vacation and not worry about it, but then I’ll have my bosses breathing down my neck to use my vacation time before the end of the year. Decisions, decsions..

This is something I’ve been going back and forth with for a while now. Tonight I went to Borders to play Cashflow with my brother and some of our friends. While over there I picked a copy of Bill Phillips’ Transformation (was curious about it since he wrote Body for Life ), and looked for the new Shonen Jump . It occurred to me later on that there might be electronic versions of those – maybe at Amazon, maybe Borders.com or some other outlet. Would they cost the same? Maybe less? I’ve been doing this with my music increasingly over the years and I like it. Because of this, I know that there’s a couple big perks for me: No clutter. I’ve been thinning out my stuff and not having to worry about storing physical copies of things would be great. Having everything on my computer and making my computer my library is appealing, especially for magazines and other periodicals. Portability. With an eReader, be it on a cell phone, tablet/pad or computer I could take them anywhere I want pret...

I spent the afternoon with my friends Paul and Mandy today. Paul has a bunch of starter decks for the old Star Trek Collectable Card Game and one of them was out. I was curious, took a look, and since we had time he tried to teach me how to play. In the two games we played (myself, him and this guy Ben?) we saw a The Next Generation deck, a Romulan deck, a Klingon deck and a Deep Space 9 deck. Its kind of interesting, actually. First off, unlike Magic, you're not trying to kill off the other players - you're trying to be the first to reach x-many points. Now, you want to slow down the other players, but your goal isn't to kill them! Not as I understand things, anyhow. You get 5 mission/destination cards. 1 is your "home," the other 4 are places to go and do things (ie, they have missions and a point value for "mission accomplished"). You get 7-points to do things with. Drawing a card is one point per card, playing a card will depend on its value. You...

Most people have hobbies – things that they do, enjoy, and spend time on that isn’t work. I’m a gamer, so obviously one of mine is playing games. I enjoy getting together with friends, playing board games, card games, dice games, role-playing games, video games, etc. Its fun, social, and generally keeps me out of trouble. One of the video games I enjoy playing is City of Heroes (COH for short). Long story short, its a super hero based online game. I’ve got a regular group of folks I play with (mostly night owls due to the time zone differences between me and the rest of the USA), and have been playing for almost five years now. Create a hero or villain and off you go, making the world a better, or worse, place. Well, there’s a group that I’m involved with in COH called the Liberty Alliance. Its a role-playing light super group (encouraged, not mandatory), and has a bunch of nice folks scattered throughout North America and Europe. We even had the privilege having one lady in the ar...

I love arcade-style racing games. Pick up and play, zoom around, and generally drive like a maniac without the speeding tickets or wrapping yourself around a tree. On top of that, I like things that are either free or cheap (if free is good then cheap is usually better). I just got done playing in the open beta for EA’s Need For Speed World . It runs well on my computer, can be played with a USB control pad (I’m using a wired Xbox 360 pad), looks good, feels good and is just plain fun. What more can you ask for? You pick a car to start off with and go from there. You can drive around the city looking for racing events, drive around exploring or start causing trouble with the cops. When you go racing in events, you can choose to do an open multiplayer with other people, start a private race just between you and friends or go single-player against 7 computer controlled cars. Some events are a sprint from point A to point B, others are doing laps. What’s an interesting twist, and hones...

Over the past few months I’ve been sort of settling into things. If anything, I guess its almost like I’m settling into this phase of my life… I’m settling into a more mature, responsible way of handling my money compared to my twenties, thank you Dave Ramsey. I’m still not there yet, but I’ve got a plan, goals and know where everything goes now. I’m starting to settle into my age and some of the expectations that go with it for appearance. I’ve already gone through two rounds of thinning out my wardrobe of clothes I had gotten in my twenties. Stuff that was less professional, stuff that I wouldn’t wear here in Hawai’i, stuff like that. At the same time I’ve already done one round of getting new clothes that are more appropriate for work and I think better reflect where I am in life. Following that line of thought, I’ve been going through all the stuff I’ve picked up over the years. Old books, movies, VHS tapes, junk mail that I promised I’d sort later and more. Things are getting ...

A couple of years ago Shonen Jump , a monthly collection of Japanese manga (comics) began publishing in the US (end of 2002). I saw it at the Bi-Lo in Royston, Georgia, and picked it up immediately. It was kind of neat to see Jump in the US with all these comics I had seen as manga or as anime such as Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho when I was a kid. Made me a bit old, to tell you the truth! “Listen dude, I know how this fight goes. This comic ended before you even got into high school!” Needless to say, picking up the new Jump became something of a ritual for me. Buy it at the store, sit in the parking lot to read the whole thing (or at least my favorites), and go home to pass it on to my roommate. I’ve been doing that pretty much ever since. What can I say? Its cheap entertainment! It was also very cool to finally be able to read the comics instead of looking at the pictures and trying to figure out what was going on. Of course, I found new favorites like One Piece, Naruto and H...

In the past decade or so I’ve come to feel that the government gets involved with the needs of society, not because its the best option, but because of a failure of the citizens to tend to themselves. When there’s need in a community, a community is best served by trying to meet that need. No, it won’t always be up to the full scope of the task, but the first reaction should be, “what can we do” rather than “someone ought to do something.” I’ve just started reading Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World . My brother is letting me borrow it and so far I’m about three chapters in. Its rather interesting to read about what the super-rich are doing these days, true, but its also giving a bit of history concerning philanthropy in general. I think its coming at a good time in my life. Back in September I took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University course at a local church. One of the lessons is expressly about giving. I know for myself there’s always been a desire to give;...

When I was going to ʻĪao Intermediate School a teacher by the name of Mr. Takadi introduced me to the Apple IIe, and more importantly, a word processor. I don't recall much of it; the screen was black and white (or green and white, depending on the monitor), everything was on 5.25 floppies, and the program was called Bank Street Writer . During recess I would go into the computer lab, putting in my floppy disc and would just write. About ideas I had, thoughts, things that happened during the day. Kid stuff, naturally. Now, these were my writings, so I put a little password lock onto the file. I don't recall anything being super-personal, but it was mine after all! With that I stopped journaling. Throughout the years I’ve written here and there, but with this I’m returning to regular journaling of sorts. A little more open than my old journal, of course. ~Sam