http://www.comeandsee.com/view.php?sid=1190

Well, 60 days ago I decided to drop $100 and get the RushFit program. RushFit is designed by the trainer of World Champion UFC fighter George St. Pierre. So I plugged in the DVD’s, started working out, watched my diet very carefully and today I’m down to 198.5 pounds! Yeah baby!

I’ve written about fitness a lot on this blog because I honestly feel that being fat and out of shape is a crime. Not a literal crime, but it’s just a shame because it’s not necessary. When I’ve been at my heaviest, I know in my heart it’s not because of anything but laziness and consumption. Or in terms of the 7 Deadly Sins; sloth and gluttony. Man those are tough words aren’t they? But America in general has a real problem with sloth and gluttony.

Anyway, I’ve kind of done the up and down rollercaoster ride of fitness but every time I reach a peak, I realize what I did wrong during the last cycle and this time I realized that even being on a “cycle” is wrong. The key to staying fit is not getting fat in the first place. And what it takes not to get fat is consistency in eating and working out.

This time around, I worked out every single day except for Sunday. I did this religiously and it really paid off because it’s not really what workout you do that matters, it just matters that you work out. You have to raise that heart rate for 30 minutes to an hour and give it your all. Every. Day.

I also use MyFitnessPal.com to both track my calories and get support and accountability from others. The calorie tracker is great because I guarantee if you try and count your calories yourself, you will always take in way more than you think you do. One meal at a restaurant is a guaranteed full day or even two days of calories. And when you consider most people eat out several times a week or even several times a day, it’s no wonder we’re all fat. Count your calories religiously. What it comes down to is this: You must burn more than you eat to lose weight. Simple.

The last major change I did was cut out alcohol. I drank zero alcohol during the week and kept it to one or two drinks on the weekends if I was hanging with friends or something. I won’t lie, I’m a heavy drinker, and what I found was that alcohol is a huge stumbling block if you’re trying to get fit, because it’s basically a poison so your body will work to get it out of your system instead of burning your food calories. If you’re not burning calories, they get stored as fat. So cutting out alcohol really made a huge difference in both how I feel and how much weight I lost. It was a discipline exercise for me as well. I had to really focus in order not to have my evening glass of wine or whiskey, and when out with friends it took a lot of willpower to stop at two. I wasn’t perfect every time, but I proved to myself that I could exert control over this part of my life if I wanted to.

So I’m pretty happy with the results. The key for me is going to be keeping up the consistency. I have a few more pounds I want to lose to get my stomach as flat as I can, but then it will be about maintenance. That doesn’t make it any easier really, I will still need to workout every day but I’ll be able to take in a more calories a day.

Well, I hope this gives a little insight into losing weight. Sign up for MyFitnessPal.com and add me as a friend (username: danapellerin) so we can all push each other on!

This weekend however I decided that I needed to buy some technology to replace some stuff that was just getting old so I went shopping to replace my printer and my TV.

First, my printer. My old printer was an HP Deskjet 5850 and I gotta say I hated to see that sucker go. It was reliable, fast and printed beautifully. The downside was that it was only compatible with Wireless B and did not use WPA2 encryption. This meant I had to keep an old Apple Airport router around to make it work and it also means that I had to have a physical cable connecting my Cisco router to the Airport. So I decided to buy a new printer so I could get rid of the extra router and cabling. I ended up buying an HP 3050a. The 3050a is a low end combo printer/scanner. It’s 100% wifi, connects to my existing network just fine and has really good mac support. It cost me $70 which is crazy cheap. I can also print to it via the iPhone/iPad and even over the internet. I don’t know why I’d want to print over the internet, but printing from the iPad is really handy.

My second purchase was a new TV. We had an old tube Sony 36″ for the last 15 years and honestly I just grew to hate looking at it. Everything is in letterbox these days which means on my square TV I was looking at this tiny little picture. And when you have a Roku or computer hooked up to it, the graphics on the menus are horribly blurry. So I went to Costco and bought a new Vizio 47″ LCD. Now I know what some are saying…. you gotta have LED, you gotta have 120hz refresh, blah, blah, blah. No I don’t have to have any of that crap. The hottest price point right now in my opinion are 60hz LCD’s. To get a substantial increase in viewing quality you really have to just go up a few sizes and for that you’ll spend a grand easy. The increase in quality between LED and traditional LCD is not worth it when you consider it’s at least 30% more expensive, especially when moving up from a tube TV. We watched a few HD movies on it last night and it looks STUNNING. I’m really happy with it.

So those are my latest technology purchases. That will probably be the last things I buy for a while.

A few things I found interesting though; Many people pointed out that they were shocked that Christianity is so ingrained into our culture and how open we are to talking about our faith. In the same breath they would voice amazement at how plentiful everything is here. Don’t see a connection?

I also thought it was funny that people were amazed at how great the customer service is in general, but then were dismayed that tipping is expected. Again, don’t you think these things are related?

I also found it interesting that foreigners were shocked at how worried we are about being able to afford healthcare. That’s disconcerting to me. Definitely a black eye for the US.

I think it’s fun though to see our quirks through the eyes of visitors. Check out the forum at the link below. The site is kind of clunky and hard to read, but it’s very interesting.

http://ask.metafilter.com/200224/What-are-Americas-quirks

One thing I find interesting as I get older is the fact that the more control I try and exert over my situation and others, the more fearful I get of everything coming crashing down. Yet the more faith I have in God to handle those things that are out of my sphere of responsibility, the more comfort and security I feel. And so I found the following quote from Bernie Maddoff’s interview with Barbara Walters timely and fascinating.

Hey says: ”I feel safer here (in prison) than outside. I have people to talk to, no decisions to make. I know I will die in prison. I lived the last 20 years of my life in fear. Now, I have no fear because I’m no longer in control.”

Life has been pleasingly mellow lately. Since I stepped down from the worship team at church, it’s freed up a lot of my time. A two day commitment to play at church really means at least 4 days of playing when you take into account personal and band rehearsals. So that’s been nice having that time back. Though at the same time I’ve been wondering where I will serve next. I don’t think I can just go through life living all for me again after serving for so long. I do the occasional Yerxa band gig. I do the tutoring thing on Wednesdays and that’s cool but honestly, I don’t think it’s where I really belong. So I guess I’ll keep praying and seeing where God leads me. I’m feeling it needs to be music, but there’s really nothing really tugging on me right now. Maybe time off is the thing I actually need right now.

I’ve been enjoying that time off that’s for sure. One thing I’ve really gotten into lately, and I don’t know if this is just an age thing, but I love working in my garage. I never thought I’d say that, especially 10 or 15 years ago when I was a “rock star” playing in a bar band three nights a week. But I find that being out there and tinkering on stuff is really relaxing and satisfying. So much so that I bought another motorcycle a few weeks ago just so I’d have something to work on.

This weekend I built a new workbench from some scrap I had laying around the garage and then got a storage unit so I could move some stuff out and make some room. I organized the whole place and now I’m ready to get down to some serious motorcycle tinkering! It’s going to be awesome.

Of course now I feel just like my dad, which makes me cringe since i’ve always been a bit rebellious when it comes to anything about my old man, but I think it’s inevitable that we become our parents to some degree as we age. Hopefully I’ve only inherited his good points. LOL.

Anyway, the new bike is bad ass. It’s a 1984 Kawasaki KZ700. I bought it for $350. Yes, it’s basically a jalopy. But the motor is in good shape and that’s the key. I started taking the carburetors apart this weekend and holy crap they are a disaster. the rest of the bike is pretty much a filthy rust bucket. But the great thing about old machines is that they can be restored, and usually for not a boatload of money if you’re willing to put in the work.

When I bought it, I decided I would give myself at least a year to fix it up. Just work on it a bit here and a bit there. But now that I’ve started taking it apart and making an inventory of what needs to be done, it may be more like two years. Whatever it takes though, I’m not going to rush it. I bought the bike in order to make something awesome out of something that has been neglected, and so it’s the process of the restoration that is the exciting part, not so much having another motorcycle.

I’ll be posting updates as I make progress.

I played a gig this weekend up at a church in the mountains. I’ve played a lot of gigs at churches over the years and unfortunately you just never know what you’re going to walk into. Some churches are really laid back and mellow, some are upbeat. Some are full of younger people and some resemble retirement homes. In a lot of ways a church is like a club. Yes, they are supposed to be all about learning about and worshipping God, but they are also a place where people gather and enjoy community, and so each one develops a personality.

In a way that’s a good thing, because people need other people to associate with, relate to, and lean on. But in another way it’s really bad, because if you’re somebody who outside the club and just trying to learn about God, that club can be a tough group to penetrate. It can also be downright alienating to walk into a room where people are used to doing things a certain way, and you have no clue what’s going on.

So that’s how it is every time I walk into a church. You just never know what the routine is going to be, if you’re going to fit in, or what’s going to be expected of you. Most of the time though that experience is, if not enjoyable, at least non eventful. My experience this weekend does not fall into either category.

There’s a segment of the Christian church that is commonly known as “charismatic”. Charismatic churches are generally distinguished by very high energy preaching (yelling), audience participation (also yelling), something called “laying on of hands”, where people touch each others heads and stuff like they are transferring some kind of energy to you, and a very unique practice called “speaking in tongues”, which is basically yelling in a made up language. That’s the kind of church we played.

All I can say is that it was two and a half hours of complete and utter discomfort. It was distracting, unnerving, and honestly, pretty creepy. Now, I’m not going to go as far as saying these people are not Godly people or anything like that. I’m not to judge, and in normal conversations I found them to be very pleasing and kind. But I have to say that once the service started, it was like somebody opened a can of crazy.

Now, charismatics will argue that the bible talks about speaking tongues and about laying on of hands, etc, etc. I would argue that those passages in the bible haven’t been taken completely out of context. I would also argue that even in the early church Paul saw this stuff going on and argued for some sanity. (1 Corinthians 14).

The real problem here though for the church going forward is that I feel these churches are going out of their way to alienate people. I simply could not imagine walking into a church like that, never having been exposed to the Christian faith, and seeing all that chaos going on. I’ve been in many churches like that and I was still extremely uncomfortable. My wife who was raised Catholic and has never experienced this was in near tears by the time I could get her out of the building. Neither of us will ever go back there, even if you paid us.

So I think every church has to ask itself; Is what we’re doing the most effective way to tell as many unbelievers as possible about God? Because that’s really the primary mission of the church. And if you’re sitting in a room with the same 15 people week after week and everyones screaming at each other in some unknown language, then maybe you’re doing something wrong.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/07/BAEG1L1BNF.DTL#ixzz1XSoP8uM7

If there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s being all worked up by the media and then discovering that something SUCKS. And Spotify really, really, really sucks. I checked out a competitor called Rdio, and it sucks too. Here’s why.

When I fire up a piece of music software I generally want to do three basic things which can be related to three real-life music experiences:

1. I want to listen to specific pieces of music (like a Walkman/iPod)
2. I want to browse music in a certain category (like a music store)
3. I want to listen to pre-programmed music based on category (like a radio)

The problem with Spotify is that it doesn’t really do any of these well in my opinion.

The first requirement, listening to specific pieces of music, it does best. however, having collected music for the last 35 years, there’s nothing I really want to hear that I don’t own. I suppose there’s some benefit to having my music “in the cloud”, but considering the fact that a LOT of my music is not on Spotify, it’s still a better experience to just sync my phone with my library.

The second requirement, functioning as a music store, is probably the most frustrating failure of these services. Spotify has a crazy boolean search where you can enter stuff like artist:”grateful dead” year:1965-1970. REALLY? Are you serious? I’m a programmer. I write code for a living and this really makes me cringe. I would NEVER, EVER make my users learn some crazy syntax like this. I mean, is it too freaking hard to have a list I can click on??? On top of that, it just doesn’t work. Searching for “rock” returned zero results. Searching for “heavy metal” returned a bunch of plain rock, but then without anyway to sort and filter by release date my entire list was just old crap I already have. Useless.

Lastly, niether Spotify or Rdio has actual channels like a radio where you can just pick one and hear a pre-programmed stream of songs. I find this incredibly ironic for Rdio since… well, the name of their company is RaDIO.

So in my opinion, subscription music services are just a ridiculously lacking. You are never going to topple Apple unless you get the basics 100% right. And none of these services do that.