12!

I'd actually forgotten what feeling healthy was like. Until this morning.

Yesterday I worked 9 hours, busy the whole time (finally!) and really enjoying myself. Got home at 6.30, spent the evening re-watching Arrested Development (still as awesome as the first time I saw it) and ended up asleep just before midnight, content with a positive day, although unsure how the unaccustomed working would affect me, tiredness-wise.

This morning I woke at 5.45, remembering I needed to send an email to one of my new staff telling him what I want him working on next. So I got up at 6.30, briefly connected to the work network to fire off the email while I ate my breakfast, then headed out for an 80 minute walk (my stepping stones still being flooded over). I got home feeling full of energy and also finding that my latest shipment of DVDs are ready for me to collect from the post office, 2.5 weeks early.

Rainy days...

My walking had been going really well this month, thanks to my fancy graph motivating me. I've already walked 11 times, beating all of June and only 3 walks away from my 2nd best month ever. Sadly, the forecast is for rain all week, which may hurt my plans. We'll see.

In related health news, I weighed myself on Saturday (for the first time since May) finding that I'm down to 95 kg, the first time I've dropped under 96 since I became a Shenanigan in 2001. So even though I've been eating a lot, including tasty assorted cream biscuits, Milo, and a huge huge serve of chicken omelette from OK Corral, my very moderate exercise is still making progress. My buzzwords of moderation and maintainability in my diet are paying off!

Great day

It didn't start too promisingly, but rather than dwell on that I thought I'd list out some of the awesomeness that was my afternoon:

• Watching Pirates 2 with my sisters. The movie had some excellent moments, although pacing was a bit too slow. Hard to live up to expectations after the fun of the first, though.
• Coffee with Liv, hitting some of the deeper discussion topics that I rarely venture into with others.
• OK Corral dinner with B, sharing the Arrested Development love..
• Plus, the cherry on top of this Wednesday sundae, my Belco connecting bus was 5 minutes late, just enough to allow me to make it and avoid a 30 minute interchange wait. So now I'm home and very happy! Hurrah!

More music

Gotta love Cash 'em in - thanks to them (and $150) I have a stack of new CDs

[Music] Will Smith

A new music journal post, espousing how much I like the Fresh Prince's work.

Music for the masses

Because trying to post stuff on 3 different blogs isn't quite enough for me, I decided to make use of my last.fm journal to record my entire CD collection.

Posting to my journal has the convenience of linking (almost) automatically to artist pages which give anyone interested in following the links more info.

Much like my DVD collection, I hope there are surprises in my music choices, as well as a healthy slab of obvious choices.

One less app

I've been using SharpReader to monitor my RSS feeds for as long as I've been blogging, largely for its simplicity. I've tried several replacements and always gone back to basics. But the latest (0.7.1) release of Flock has finally given me a reason to change.

As the screen shot below shows, I can group my various feeds and get a summary of the latest stuff on a single page. I can check the content of any of these groups in more detail, or drill down to an individual feed, very easily. And I don't have to leave the convenience of a Firefox-based browser. Its one down side is that it checks for feed updates every half hour, and there's no way to change the setting. Not a problem for me with a 12GB quota, but very irresponsible as feed monitoring goes.

Add to that integrated blogging, and Flickr photo posting, and I'm a convert. The blog post tool isn't nearly as powerful as w.bloggar, but for most of my purposes it does the job, and even saves a local copy of each post automatically.

More walking

Because I know everyone loves charts, here's a graphical representation of my steady decline in walking since I started back in March. If there's one thing which will kick my lazy butt into gear it's looking at some lines...

[TV] Battlestar Galactica 1.0

Another late-on-the-bandwagon moment for me, yesterday I watched the entire first season of (the new) Battlestar Galactica.

Luckily, it was as excellent as everyone had been telling me (I would hardly have been able to watch 13 episodes straight otherwise). The special effects had the same "reality" used to great effect in Firefly (one of the many things I loved about that show). The conflict within and between characters was always interesting and in the last few episodes I felt there was more confidence in using humour, introducing a few little looks and key pauses to let the comedy come through as a counterpoint to the life or death struggle against the Cylons.

Katee Sackhoff keeps the "Starbuck" character thoroughly enjoyable, adding complexity to the fun stereotype which Dirk Benedict first brought to life. Actually, I think the whole show is evidence of taking what was good about the original series and giving it extra layers. More tension between father and son Adama, less cartoonish villainy in Baltar and more down to earth treatment of the mythic elements of the story.

Season 2 comes out on DVD in Australia August 16 (before the full set is available in the US, surprisingly), so I know what else is on the shopping list.

[TV] Scrubs

Having now watched the first 2 seasons, I can't believe it took me so long to catch on to Scrubs. The writing and performances are perfect and the pacing spot-on. The craziness of the lifestyle being portrayed and the pervasive fantasy scenes are balanced extremely well with touching moments, grounding the characters just enough without cutting back on the almost non-stop laughs.

Like most of my current favourite comedies, this is sans-laugh-track, giving me the freedom to laugh when I feel it's warranted, rather than being frustrated at the strange laugh timing of an artificial audience. When watching How I Met Your Mother and My Name Is Earl on Thursday night, I noticed very clearly how resistant I was to finding the first funny, due to major canned-laugh overuse, while Earl was immediately enjoyable.

P.S. Thanks to Kev for the Scrubs recommendation, saying "I reckon it is awesome" rather than "You have to see this show", thus allowing me to actually enjoy it, and to S-Club for lending me the DVDs.

Every which way

I had a whole lot of blogging planned when I got home from my walk last Sunday afternoon, but real life took over.

After spending all week trying (and failing) to recover from a persistent cold, I had to miss out on farewell drinks for a Melbourne-bound friend on Saturday night. Still not feeling much better Sunday morning, I forced myself ready for my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary celebration. I was so glad I did. After they renewed their vows in front of three generations of family in a simple, touching ceremony, we all headed out for a leisurely, laugh-filled lunch.

Since I'd eaten way too much banquet, I left for a walk as soon as I got home, and on the way ran into a friend I hadn't seen for 3 years, who (I found out) only lives 15 minutes walk away. After a quick catch up, I returned to my walk, feeling really positive and upbeat and looking forward to finally starting in my team leader role on Monday. That cheer was cut short when I returned home to the news that my grandmother had been rushed to hospital, having suffered a stroke. Less than two days later, she passed away in her sleep.

I've been spoilt in my life so far, rarely having to deal with the grief of losing loved ones. To be honest it still doesn't seem quite real that Nanna is gone. I can easily picture her smile, and recall the feeling I always got when seeing her that I had made her day brighter by simply being around.

I'm at a loss for more words.

[Movie] Cars

For someone who has no interest in cars, has a short attention span, and is easily irritated by people of all ages, it was a pleasant surprise that I loved "Cars" the movie.

The animation was spectacular, the characters were well defined stereotypes, and there were plenty of laughs (not just for the plethora of kiddies who shared the cinema). At 135 minutes long, I was expecting it to drag* at some stage, but I think the pacing was really good, and the lack of fidgeting in the tykes indicated the bright colours and loud noises were captivating them too :)

Or maybe I just like hanging with B, and wouldn't really care what movie we saw ;)

* definitely no pun intended...

The end of an era

Last night, the final episode of X-Files Season 9 ended with an "I made this" and I was able to rest the rest of the completist. 2 months and almost 200 episodes after my mammoth viewing experience began, what have I learned?

Firstly, simple maths tells me I've spent 10% of the last 8 weeks watching Mulder and Scully (around 140 hours). So lesson 1 is that I'm wasting my life...

Secondly, The X-Files is an awesome show, and remained so throughout its whole run, despite what less-easily-pleased-than-me people might try to tell you.

Thirdly... did I mention I'm wasting my life?

So, where to from here? How can I possibly fill the X-hole in my life? Suggestions welcome :)

Getting there

4 episodes into Season 8 of The X-Files, and I'm starting to pine for a little variety. Micallef's all done with, and there're months till Arrested Development and Simpsons Season 8 show up (new additions to my Veronica Mars order). This is what happens when I let my life revolve around DVDs...

Luckily, thanks to K (and my money), I now have the next two volumes of Fables to enjoy, so it's early to bed for some reading...

Spicy chilli tuna

Let me tell you that's a nasty thing to eat by accident (or at all). I'm not a big fan of hot food anyway, but this was just hot with no redeeming flavour. In order for this debacle to happen, the following preconditions are needed:

• shopping without my glasses,


• label colour almost identical to tomato and onion flavour,


• having eaten around a thousand tuna and rice meals the past few years, so paying no attention at all to the stirring together of ingredients,
• missing the fact there was a whole chilli mixed in with the rice.

Sadly I had to throw all but the first two mouthfuls out, but it was an excuse to have a beer to ease the burn.

Not even tuna and rice is safe anymore! Thankfully the spaghetti bolognaise, baked bean toasted sandwiches, chicken schnitzels and turkey sandwiches which have been added to my menu overwhelm a single culinary disaster :) Now I'm hungry...

Walking update

I haven't written for ages about my exercisin', so here're some brief stats on my hour long walks:

Walks in March - 17
Walks in April - 12
Walks in May - 12

While I'm not entirely satisfied with the frequency of walking the past couple of months, it's certainly better than the zero walks I'd done before March. Plus there are plenty of lunchtime walks and walks to the shops for groceries which I don't count.

My weight has remained fairly stable, even with the temptations opened up by now being able to eat anything I want. There's still plenty of work left for me to do before I reach my health goals, but I'm more confident all the time that I will continue the small steps I need.

The week so far

After complaining about boredom at work for some time (about 18 months), it reached (another) breaking point for me on Monday. From the moment I woke up, I was resigned to writing code, and throughout the day I hardly spoke to anyone. I became more frustrated as the day went on, and by 3.30 decided I was wasting my time even being at work. So I packed up my laptop and headed home early, immediately heading out to the gym to do weights. Thankfully, exercise did the trick, and all the stress I had allowed to build up dissipated, allowing me an enjoyable evening of TV watching (including an excellent episode of Mythbusters) and 2 hours of refactoring the crap code I'd written during the day, ending up with something I was much happier with. So I went to bed feeling pretty good, discarding my sulky work day as an anomaly and ready to throw myself at more tasks the next day.

I awoke refreshed and positive, and that better attitude was reflected in a much improved work day. At least some of my time was spent away from my computer, discussing things with people and having another tunnel light shone in my direction, with the promise of a real team leader role again. Basically, since I moved to my current section I've felt that it's 1 or 2 managers "heavy" and I've been in a position on the outside, not wanting to steal work/opportunities from anyone else while remaining dissatisfied with my day to day job (I love to play the martyr :). Now 3 of the 5 managers in our section are moving to other areas, giving me more room to create the role I want without stepping on toes. (Tentative) yay!

In X-Files news, I'm now 2 episodes into Season 7, with the promise of the comedic gold of X-Cops, First Person Shooter and Hollywood A.D. The arrival of three seasons of The Micallef Program has slowed down my X-watching, but not by much.

New DVDs on the way

For those "friends" who've already established they only like me for my DVDs :) , no wait |:( ,here's an update on additions to my collection:

Arrived this week: The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) Series 1-3
Will arrive end of July: Newsradio - Season 4, The Pretender - Season 4, The Breakfast Club
Will arrive end of August: Veronica Mars - Season 2, (the new) Doctor Who - Season 1, Threshold - The Complete Series

Still waiting on a release date for Arrested Sevelopment - Season 3...

[Movie] Mission: Impossible III

Lots of big explosions, cool stunts, some funny lines and great gadgets. These all added up to a very entertaining ride for a committed Impossibleite like myself.

This was only the second movie I've seen at the cinema this year, and after 4 ads vs 1 movie trailer, I was wondering why I forked out over $15 to be force-fed crap. Luckily they threw in a few more trailers, including X3 (yeah, baby!), and my ad-rage was narrowly averted...

Veronica Mars picked up for 3rd season

More detail here but basically it means there'll be at least 13 more episodes. Yay! Since I've still only seen the first 4 eps of season 2, that means there's plenty more VM goodness for me to enjoy.

Sadly, Arrested Development's 3rd season will be its last, although all accounts have it going out still on a high.