Marching right along.

March has been a good month for me so far. School has been crazy but I have also found a certain balance that has been great as of late. My gym efforts have not been perfect, but have been acceptable. I am -6 lbs from when I started and feel great when I keep a regular gym schedule. All good things.

I confirmed my plans for Idaho for the summer. I will be flying out on May 18th and beginning work on the 19th. There will be exactly a month before I fly back for my sister's wedding (man of honor duties woot woot). Then I will head back to Idaho for about another month until I fly back for Brian's wedding (best man duties, woot woot). Then I will head back to ID once again until a tenative travel day back to NC of August 11th. So I have a busy summer in store but it should be productive! I will have a great opportunity to learn a lot at the lab and to make a little money to help pay for the rest of my master's degree, so I am pretty stoked. Of course, I would love to be closer to family and friends for the duration of the summer, but I just have to do what is right for me at this point, which I firmly believe is found in Idaho at this point.

That's all for now.. more later...

Updates:

Going to the gym is working out well. I have been at least 5 times week so far (sure, it's only been a short time, but I find myself actually wanting to go to the gym now). I have started sending my weight to my brother every Monday. I am joining his and my other brothers competition to get into shape. I really don't have anything at stake in it, but it will be a good motivator for me if I have to send someone else my weight on a weekly basis.

I have been ridiculously busy as of late. I should be working on my web applications assignment, but I'm not. It's just no fun. Besides, I have an excellent distraction in that I just put OS X on my Dell. I have created the hackbook mini, how awesome is that?
On a personal happiness note, I must say, despite the crazy busy pace I have been moving at, I have been doing really well of late. I would like to get to Asheville to see the family and my Asheville cronies. It has been a month or so. I will be heading up the mountain in early March, so hopefully time passes quickly between now and then.

I like the direction that things are going... And I am beginning to think that I might not be cursed, after all.

New Goals

I have finally found a way to internally sike myself up enough to go to the gym. After this morning, that makes 2 days in a row. That being said, I am not killing myself at the gym, I don't want to get discouraged by trying to do too much in the beginning. So I am starting out with a little exercise bike action (15 minutes or so or ~2.5 mi). Then I move on and do long sets on the weight machines. I feel like a wimp with the amount of weight I am using now, but I am working more on my muscle memory and stamina at this point in the game. Then I go a mile on the treadmill. I found the way that works best to keep my heartrate at optimal cardio rate is to run/jog for .2 mile and walk for .1 mile. Then it's back to the weight machines for another round.

I feel great immediately following my trip to the gym, although I do need to eat something soon or I will get sleepy. The reason why I have decided to hit the gym is simple: I lost a lot of weight last year (50 lbs to be exact), but I have plateaued and let a few of those slide back on... So with the gym time and a carefully monitored calorie intake, I hope to lose about 20lbs by the end of June.

There is really no excuse for me not to find an hour to go to the gym each day, but I am going to shoot for 4-5 days (M-W-F-S) being the minimum.

Here's to a healthier (and happier) me.

Today was a nice day. Although it started on a frantic note (thanks to waking up at 7:45 for my 8:00 class). So I sprinted out of bed, found the pair of pants with my wallet in them, put them on; ran to the kitchen, started the coffee pot; back to my room, gathered my books and found a pair of shoes; I then grabbed a travel mug and filled with coffee and out the door I went. I arrived just in time for my name to be called by my loony professor who is a stickler for attendance... Awesome

So after the frantic start, I set through class. I have my office hours for HCI on Thursdays, so I hung out and graded task analysis assignments and worked on grading criteria for the upcoming project report that is due. I got distracted about half way through my office hours talking about the supreme play of the heels last night with a friend. Oh how I enjoyed that game :).

I got a call from the client I did the website for ( you can see it at http://www.myitexecutive.com/). He was complaining of a very isolated rendering problem. After investigating the issue, turns out he was using a super old browser (IE6) that, as a result of rejecting open browser standards, sucks at rendering css, even if it is w3c validated, which mine is. So I don't think that I am going to take any further action there without additional compensation (it's not my fault his browser is like 2 years out-of-date, right?).

I then finished researching my vulnerabilities from the NVD and am ready to present my findings tomorrow morning, fun stuff.

Perhaps the most exciting news of the day came in the form of a phone call all the way from Idaho. I saw that my divisional manager at the lab was calling and I thought, uh-oh, here we go. Turns out, since I am a contract employee (at the present time), I wasn't eligible for the standard raise. Instead, my manager has elected to give me a lump sum bonus. The check is in the mail and I anxiously await it to see if I can buy that new sports car with it (haha, yeaah, right). Anyway, I guess I was just blown away. They definitely didn't have to give me a bonus; I had already committed to returning this summer. Food for thought when I weigh my career choices next year following my graduation... hrm

An Introduction

So I am sure that those who read this already get a reasonable amount of my daily musings. I guess this is the spot that I can gather my thoughts that are otherwise fragmented, online and off.

Current happenings:

• Semester is in full swing. There are plenty of class assignments, projects and research to keep me occupied.
  
• I have confirmed that I am going back to Idaho to work over the summer. Needless to say, I am pretty excited to get back out there and explore the surrounding areas. I will be coming back to NC for weddings twice in the three month span (my sister's and my friend Brian's).
• Just finished a little side project website for a local technology company. I am pretty happy with how it came out. With the extra cash, I bought a dell mini 9 and am currently in the process of hacking it with OS X. Yay.

The rest of my day will consist of Operating Systems and Networking class at 6:30, hopefully sushi on my way back from class, and then the UNC-Duke game. Go Heels!