Putting procrastination to good use when it comes to bad food cravings.

After leaving work this morning there was a strong urge to stop by a fast food place for some coffee and donuts (my shift was from midnight to 6).  I succeeded in not making the stop.  First, using a Buddhist approach, I thought about the hole that was there, why was it there, where did I feel it and the other ways in which this hole could be filled with something other than food.

I also considered that those donuts and coffee will always be there. Food companies expend considerable effort ensuring that their products are consistent.  So, instead of stopping I decided that this craving could be satisfied later, I could put it off one more day and consume those items whenever I wanted at some point in the future and it would be just as satisfying then as it would be today. This is like that joke sign which hangs in some bars and reads, "Free beer tomorrow".  And tomorrow I will do the same as I did today.  I will put it off one more day.

At first, one might think, 'sure, McDonald's will always have the Big Mac, but what about the McRib?' To which I say, every 'limited time only' product that is worth consuming can be expected to have a highly advertised & celebrated return.  And if it doesn't, I will have forgotten that it ever existed.

For the past couple weeks, I've been learning CSS, testing out design ideas and implementing them. Jon Duckett's book, HTML & CSS Design and Build Websites was my primary source of information. To come up with a color scheme I gather images of a variety of potential subjects of this website and then color matched them using Adobe Illustrator. I went with a color palette based on the red-tailed hawk, which is a bird I see every day. Other interesting palette combinations found at Design Seeds were also considered. Additional options were compared options using Color Scheme Designer.  I then made sure my text and backgrounds gave enough contrast using Colour Contrast Check.  Further inspiration came from browsing through Dribbble.  

The initial layout of the webpages used HTML tables because that was how things where set up in the book that I followed when learning PHP. So, the vast majority of my time in implementing CSS was spent replacing the table based format, adding a three column layout, researching design ideas and thinking about how I wanted the site to look. After implementing the main elements of the style, I then spent a good deal of time tweaking and testing out other ideas and making sure things worked as intended. Another thing I had to work on was cleaning up my CSS file. I documented sections and design elements that were new to me and organized the file into major sections. I also spend a good deal of time deleting parts that were no longer needed and then simplified the code a bit by combining areas that called for the same design elements. 

One of the other lessons learned while creating the CSS components is that the names of variables can get quite confusing.  Because on several occasions, I had started to name CSS elements with the exact same names I had given to PHP variables. This is something I'll pay closer attention to when building my next website.

Overall, I'm OK with how it looks. I like that the navigation menus highlight when the mouse hovers over them and is highlighted while visiting that section of the website. There are many things I want to add, like drop down menus and auto-fill search boxes but it seems that it would be best to learn JavaScript and jQuery to do those things.

As far as content goes, I may change course a bit and offer different information from what is already provided.  For now though, I think its important that I learn more code and how to implement design and user interface elements.

Starting Out

I've been thinking about building websites and creating online content for quite some time.  For instance, one can see when this blog was started.  The difficulty was trying to come up with an idea of what I could do that is unique and beneficial.  However, every idea I came up with seemed to have been already thought of and done by someone else.  Then I realized that even something as complex the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently developed in the minds of two different people in the mid 1800's.  So, it would be quite conceited for me to assume that I could come up with a completely new idea that no one else had even considered.  I also recently learned that Google is delivering another means for streaming TV over the internet despite Apple, Hulu and Netflix already being in this space.  So, the world is full of ideas and there is much overlap between them.

I've been listening to NPR's Science Friday for 6 or 7 years now and one of the themes of this show is citizen science.  In addition to my bachelors and master's degree work, volunteering at the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge has included several opportunities to participate in scientific research.  This an area that many people could contribute to in a big way.  Furthermore, with the connected way in which we live today there are many projects that could only be accomplished if it had 1,000s of participants doing something on the same day.  Like the Christmas Bird Count.

There are already several sites dedicated to listed and informing the public about citizen science projects like SciStarter and Citizen Science Central, but I decided to add one more.  It'll give me the opportunity to develop my skills and a starting point from which I can learn about these projects.  More importantly, the website I'm building will hopefully give those projects another venue where they are mentioned to help improve their presence in the public domain.

Project Search Page

Started constructing the project search page.  Got it so a user could select from any of the four option menus and get a list of projects based on that query.   Won't have much time to work on it this weekend but next steps will be to implement the keyword search and allow users to combine each of these queries to get one result limited by all the options.  Hopefully its as simple as anding all the queries or perhaps I'll have to use the arrays from the query results, combine them into one array by intersecting them and then display the one list.  It was also cool that I didn't need to search for too many solutions since I could cut a paste from the other code that I had already written for the other pages.  I'll probably have to learn jQuery or something like that to implement the location based search.

One Win at a Time.

I'm working on building my first website.  Currently muddling my way through HTML, PHP and MySQL.  I knew that things would not be as blissfully simple as all those beginner tutorials and free online classes would have me believe.  However, its all good though because I love those daily wins I get when I finally get something to work.  I feel that I'm in a sort of beginner to intermediate stage where I know how to do things but its done in an inefficient and cloogy way.  But I also know that there are ways to simplify things, however, using those bits of code tricks is not straightforward.  Nonetheless, I'm getting there.  This past week was focused on figuring out how to create a form in HTML, which includes textareas, selection and option menus; then, using PHP, get that data into a MySQL database.  Today I finally got all of the elements of the form to go into my database and populate three different tables.  So, one might think that is pretty much all that has to be done.  However, I'd say this one webpage is at the halfway point because now I need make sure its defensively programmed and protect it from being used in ways I never conceived of.  I read somewhere that a good programmer still looks both ways when crossing a one way street, because there's always that one person who's going to do the unexpected.

I also need to add a proper way to input a date on my form and then learn CSS so I can make it look pretty.  Eventually, I'll also want to add Ajax and Javascript to make it more dynamic so that as one begins to add a project it will show a list of projects that seem similar to prevent any duplicates from being added.  Also I'd rather have scrollable checkboxes instead of requiring people to hold down CTRL while they click to select multiple items.  I'm sure as I do more I think of more things to do.  For now, I'll have to settle for one win at a time.

Another Fat Guy Blogging About Weight Loss Plans

Why blog about this?

Yep, this is another entry going out to the blogosphere about someone's weight problem and what they're going to do to get in shape.  There are probably 1,000s of blogs out there which are better written, more inspiring and highly informative.  So, this undertaking really isn't for everyone else, its for me. 

It's my situation that brings me here.  Being alone, I really don't have someone around to tell me to stop doing things that I shouldn't.  There's no one here to say, 'get off Facebook' or 'don't eat that' or 'let's go do something today'.  I sit here and eat and add calories to my mass instead of burning them off.  Those moments where I do go out and try to be active are getting harder and harder each time because I'm not maintaining my health in between.  Ideally, I would have a drill instructor next to me 24/7 for the next 4 weeks yelling at me until I've adopted new, permanent and good habits.

I hope that by making this public, it might make me a more responsible member of society.  Therefore, I'll feel like I owe status updates to the world showing improvement over time.

Where am I at today?

Dimensions:
I'm 39 years old, 6'0" tall and 56" around the gut at the belly button.  I weighed 337 lbs on Monday morning.  Right now, my heart is beating hard, which I believe is due to the martini I had with dinner.  This has been happening off and on for the past 2 weeks, so I'm going to have to put the alcohol away for the rest of the year.  If this doesn't do it, I'll re-attempt getting someone at the VA to follow through with scheduling a doctors appointment for me.

Exercise:
I walked a round trip of 1.5 miles out to the of the Seal Beach pier twice today and have made that my goal for every day.  Well, at least I've put it on my calendar.  The only pain I feel is my lower back and achilles.  The ankles will feel better as I stretch each time after walking and the back will improve if I actually do this each day.  I also did some crunches and push ups.  I have my Fitbit and will first seek 10,000 steps/day and then strive for 12,500 steps/day.  I'll also log my activity in Fitocracy.

Diet:
For the past several weeks I've been eating all the crap I've had in my apartment without replacing it.  I've also enjoyed a few meals at various restaurants that I like.  Only this time, each meal that I've had, I consciously enjoyed it as if it was the last time I was ever going to eat that thing.  So what's left?  I still have the stuff to make 2 or 3 more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  And the remainder of the food that I have is fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, eggs, juice and yogurt.  Drinks include some orange juice, coffee, ginger ale, Monster energy, tea, Gatorade and several bottles of liquor.  My plan is to for now on, only buy the least processed food that I can without being ridiculous about it.  Caffeine will be the last thing to go if at all.  Once I get down to just having fruits, vegetables and good source of protein, I'll begin a transition to where juicing and smoothies dominate my diet.

Got some new head phones.  The others were good and I really liked them because they were the first pair I ever had that actually stayed in my ear.  This was possible primarily because I could swap out the buds with the different sizes I need for each ear.  Unfortunately these Phillips headphones lived their entire live in my back pack and I guess after a year or so of always being in the sun, the cords started to break down and got sticky.  The sound is still good, but I don't like them sticking to everything.  I try to cut expenses by not replacing things until they are really broken and unrepairable but I just couldn't live with that cord sticking to my face.  It gets annoying after a while.

http://www.skullcandy.com/shop/titan-red-black

So I got some Skullcandy Titans and am really enjoying them. The bass is the best I've ever had on headphones including a pair of over the ear Sennheisers that I cost twice as much.  I'm aware that I've got to be careful about blasting it too much or I'll end up loosing my hearing too soon.

Now that I've got great sound coming into my head, the only thing that's missing from the club experience is being able to feel the bass on my chest, someone needs to develop a pad, which simulates that experience and I can slip into my shirt.