Fitocracy and My Lifestyle Change

So I joined this site in September of last year thanks to The 404 Show. In the past eight months, Fitocracy has successfully trained me to take the stairs in my office building, so much that I am actually starting to feel guilty about the six to twelve points per day.

This is how I know that the site works: Fitocracy has helped me develop one healthy habit to the point that I no longer think of "walking up the stairs in lieu of the elevator" as a workout or even a habit; now it's just part of going to work.

Fitocracy served as my springboard into healthy living. First it was just noticing what I am doing and what I am not doing. Eight hours a day on my butt in front of a computer screen. That's my job. Seven hours of sleep. That's so I can function. Total 24 hours in a day, minus 15 hours of combined work and sleep, leaves 9 hours of whatever I want. Most of those 9 hours are spent on my butt in front of a computer screen, playing junk and watching junk. A sedentary lifestyle doesn't quite cut it; I'd go with severely sedentary. Maybe even fatally sedentary. Coming to this realization sparked the need for change.

Sometimes change is difficult and sometimes it's easy.

I wasn't always sedentary, fat, overweight, or obese. The Nintendo Wii Fit calls me obese. I was incredibly active and fit in high school; I played soccer in the fall and ran track in the spring. During the winter months I was lifting in the school weight room and over summer break I was conditioning for soccer. I was an athlete. I was fit, toned, and powerful. And I looked "good" in all the pop culture sense.

While conditioning for soccer in the gawd-awful June heat before my senior year, I questioned all of it. We were running sprints, my body ached and burned. Sweat stung in my eyes as I bolted from goal box to goal box. The moment of clarity: none of it made me happy. There was no joy in my actions. I almost quit, right there. The team mentality kept me for the season, but once soccer was over, I was done. I didn't hit the weights in the winter or run track in spring. I chilled, relaxed, and vegged out. I went from high school to college with the same outlook. Freshman fifteen? I was more of a freshman fifty.

Going from active to sedentary was an easy change for me. Because I'm naturally lazy. I'm the DoNothingMan, remember? Discipline helped me perform in high school, athletically and academically. I threw the athletic discipline out the window my senior year and never looked back. Until now, eight years later.

Making the change from sedentary to active looks to be difficult. I'm not going to post my goals up here, just yet. But I have found a number of awesome tools. Fitocracy is joining LoseIt! and Calorie Counter as my tool set to achieve healthier living. LoseIt! serves as my primary food and weight tracking app; it comes loaded with tons export features, perfect for the data junkie like me. The My Fitness Pal Calorie Counter has a very large food library, much larger than LoseIt! (I hate unnecessary punctuation in titles). This calorie counter will supplement LoseIt! and Fitocracy. I'm not starting all this craziness until May.

Which means I am eating Taco Bell tonight and drinking as much Baja Blast Mountain Dew as I can handle until they kick me out.

Let's Make A Move

April is more than halfway gone and it still feels like it's crawling. May 1st marks a monumental day in the long, sorted history of the DoNothingMan; I'm finally moving out of the campus area to a more adult residency. Gah, that already sounds boring as hell. Part of the challenge in moving, at least for me, is eliminating all the excess crap that I have accumulated over the years; trimming the fat, so to speak. Under the most scrutiny right now is my collection of DVD movies. A couple discs will be kept; there's no questions about the South Park seasons. But most can be sold; probably only for a buck or two. So, I'm dividing the my list of DVDs. The first section contains the DVDs that I am definitely selling:

1. Appleseed
2. Batman Begins
3. The Covenant
4. Escape from New York
5. Harry Potter 1
6. Harry Potter 2
7. Harry Potter 3
8. Leverage Season 1
9. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
12. One Hour Photo
13. Pan's Labyrinth
14. Pathfinder Unrated
15. Spider-Man
16. Spider-Man 2
17. Wanted

Previously, this list included Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World which I picked up in a box set. When I showed by stack to-sell DVDs to my roommate he immediately asked if he could buy the Jurassic Park pack. Knowing that he would give the movies a good home, I just let him keep them. I'm just that nice.

Now for the tough part, the next list consists of all the DVDs I intend to keep. It's still a long list and I would like to weed some more out, but I don't think I can. Maybe sharing will spark my desire to downsize.

1. 28 Days Later
2. 28 Weeks Later
3. Akira
4. Alien
5. Aliens
6. Alien 3
7. The Animatrix
8. Batman: Gotham Night
9. Benny and Joon
10. Black Hawk Down
11. Brother Bear
12. The Cell
13. Donnie Darko
14. Firefly - The Complete Series
15. Friday Night Lights
16. Fullmetal Alchemist Season 1 Box
17. Fullmetal Alchemist Season 2 Box
18. The Ghost and the Darkness
19. Gremlins
20. Gremlins 2
21. Hard Rain
22. Independence Day
23. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
24. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
25. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
26. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
27. Jeepers Creepers
28. Jeepers Creepers 2
29. The Matrix
30. The Nightmare Before Christmas
31. Predator 2
32. The Simpsons Movie
33. Sleepy Hollow
34. South Park Season 1 - 15
35. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
36. Spawn
37. Stargate
38. Starship Troopers
39. They
40. John Carpenter's The Thing
41. TMNT Season 1
42. TMNT Season 2
43. TMNT Season 3
44. The Venture Bros. Season 1
45. X-Men
46. X-Men 2: X-Men United

Holy crap, that's a long list. There are, of course, some funny stories associated with many items on this list. I picked up the Indiana Jones Quadrilogy reluctantly, asking the clerk in the movie section of Hastings if I could get it without the fourth film-astrophe. She laughed, but she wouldn't let me open it up and leave the fourth movie in the store. I guess I would have done the same, had I been in her shoes. To this day, I have not watched the fourth movie (and I know that some on this list are probably worse films) but curiosity will eventually get the best of me and I'll watch it, my eyes will bleed, and I'll melt into a puddle of special effects goo.

Data Without Borders

Tragedy struck yesterday morning. Performing my normal Sunday morning responsibilities as the designated technical export for our youth group, I was setting up the Sunday school classrooms to play a couple video clips. Boring stuff mostly, but one was the scene from The Last Crusade with Indiana taking the leap of faith to reach the Holy Grail. Awesome. Anyway, I finished the setup and my laptop borked. Just gone. Like all the internal components completely disappeared. Unfortunately I had to do my job so I set my computer aside and hopped to a back-up machine. The entire morning I just figured that my little Acer, my mobile writing machine, was a goner.

After I did the standard plug/unplug/remove battery shuffle (which didn't solve anything), I hopped on the interwebs and discovered that this is a pretty common problem for Acer machines. I was able to fix and update the bios, but the scare really got me thinking about data back-up and what steps I should take to avoid a real disaster in the future.

Being the avid PSP gamer that I am, I was instantly reminded of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and the Militaires Sans Frontières or MSF for short. I need a solution that is essentially data without borders. A means to access all of my data from any machine. My first thought was Dropbox, which I have, but only a measly 3.25 GB free account. The only problem is that I need my 3.25 GB account to transform into one of those free 16 GB accounts. To do that, I have to recruit users to Dropbox. And I'm doing that with some assistance and success. But I need a better option.

Lifehacker posted a timely article about backing-up data today and it was a stern reminder that I'm not doing everything that I can to keep my information safe from the inevitable failure of technology. That's correct people. Technology will fail. Stuff will break. The glass is already broken. So is my laptop.

The Future of Video Games?

I guess I understand the precautions and the security that are seemingly imminent in the next generation of video game consoles.
I don't like it.

Consider the PSP. I believe that there were two types of people excited to hold the portable powerhouse of 2004/2005. The first type (this was me back then) plucked the PSP from its packaging and said: This amazing little machine can do so much!

The second type saw the potential of the PSP and said:
This amazing little machine can do so much more!

Sony already knew this (or realized it shortly after) because newer iterations of the PSP unloaded features and updates left and right. Still, we wanted more out of the PSP and people hacked it up, adding even more features to the amazing machine. Of course, hacking led to stolen games, which Sony claims is the reason for locking the PS Vita down.

I slowly grew into the second type of PSP owner. Unfortunately, Sony won't acknowledge the hacker ingenuity and creativity that grew out of the PSP. For example, you can use a hacked PSP for a USB monitor now. That's crazy. And amazing. And awesome.

My point here, when it comes to video games, give us Isla Sorna instead of Isla Nublar. Set the limits: it's an island. If you want to play with this video game console, you're going to have to stay within these boundaries or you'll drown. However, imposing too many limitations and needless security is going to cause problems, just like it did on Isla Nublar. With Samuel L. Jackson dying.

Sony needs to make something awesome, then sell that awesome thing and its island to the consumers, saying: here's the PS4 and here's the PS4's island, now make this awesome thing better.