Facebook, Schmasebook + Crossfit

I get into the good habit of posting things relatively regularly, but have the unfortunate side-effect of liking this posting method and not having a way to distribute to anyone of consequence. So now I'm able to post my ramblings on blogger, and have them magically show up in facebook through the magic of facebook, notes, rss import thingymajig. I guess that's pretty positive

Here's a recent conundrum of mine. I'm getting pretty good at this regularly scheduled gym thing. Cross-fit is hella fun, the people are most excellent, and it seems like a good idea. I'm feeling better generally and I have the soreness to prove it. The one stumbling block for me now is I know that if I don't make some sort of effort to control my nutrition, then it's almost in vain. Not totally, but it seems like I'm only selling myself short at that point.

My paradox is that over the summer I started riding a motorcycle, yay. It's just about the most entertaining activity that I've taken part of and the closest thing to an addiction that I've ever felt. As part of that I made the conscious decision that instead of the normal 1-drink, 1-hour rule for driving, when I'm riding my motorcycle or potentially riding, it's more like 1-drink, 12-hours. And you know what, I haven't budged an inch. I've been to plenty of parties with friends, out socially, everything and not drinking, knowing that I get the satisfaction of riding, there's no problem.

Now extend my thinking to working out. I know that working out, eating right and everything go hand in hand. So if I want to be able to improve more in my workouts and fitness, I know that I should make better decisions on what I eat. The biggest problem for me then I guess is that I don't get such an immediate gratification for the work. Choosing not to drink for 12 hours, I know for a fact then when I'm going to be able to ride my motorcycle. Choosing not to have that cookie, or piece of candy from that huge basket they just put out at work... Well that's not a 12 hour payoff, or a 12 day payoff for that matter. If I'm lucky, 12 weeks of staying away from that candy basket will have made some sort of difference.

I'm not that patient, at least not when it comes to myself. If I want to do something, I'll go for the route that promises the most immediate gratification possible without sacrificing any of my original goals, within compromise of course. It just makes it that much more frustrating. The one motivating factor that I still have is the gym that I go to and the people there that I am fortunate enough to train with. Their motivation is my motivation, and trust me, they're damn motivated. There's a guy there, 30+ pushup / situp combo, after fatigue, in under 40 seconds. He's almost twice my age and looks way great. Plus the women that show up to train aren't eyesores themselves, but it's rude to stare ;)

There's a little challenge that's coming up for the next month, a little motivator if you will. The whole details of which haven't been announced yet, but I'm just a little more than interested to join in on the fun. I think giving myself a nice reasonable 30 day goal will be much more to my style than some indefinite goal off in the distance.

It's wel past my bedtime, so toodles.

Weekend activities

I have to say I enjoyed this past weekend very much. I had something to do the whole time, regardless if I was actually doing the thing I was planning to do at that time. The only real change of plan was my Sunday morning. I was planning on getting a little snowboarding fun in during the morning and come home during the afternoon to clean up a little bit and the sit down for an Oscar party even planned for our place.

Well, I ended up going out to enjoy a VIP booth at a local nightclub Saturday night, so sleeping ended up being the morning activity, followed by laundry, more Cocoa book learning, and the the Oscars.

I don't like to go out for evenings often, especially during the winter. But if I do end up going out, I must say it's much more fun if you do it right. Sure it's more than the typical $20 cover charge + $8 per drink, but it's sure worth it to be treated like the VIP I am. I couldn't see myself doing this often, but I can definitely see myself doing this again.

I didn't end up leaving until around 2am to go home, at which point I got a second wind of not being tired, so I stayed up a little while, being the cs kid I am, and knocked out a couple more chapters of my intro to Cocoa book.

Sunday was filled with much of the same, laundry - cocoa - laundry - cocoa - groceries - cocoa - cook for oscars - oscars preshow - cocoa - oscars. The highlight of the evening was Slumdog Millionaire taking the cake as far as I'm concerned. I'm a huge fan of the movie, and picked it to win all the way on our little pool, and I was right for 8/9 nominations. It was a suprise to my friends who haven't seen it, and an even bigger suprise to my friends that had. Apparently they didn't think the move was "all that". All in all, I won a bit of money to pick something I enjoyed and stick behind it 100%. It's not some epic "moral of the story" or anything, but it's something.

Today, I moved

We played a bit of musical chairs in the office today. Interestingly enough, I ended up with one of the most visible cubes in the whole office. To make it more interesting, the person who was in this cube was quite the popular fella, so today was filled with "oh, you're here now? Well that will take some getting used to... ".

The downer parts of the move: my cabinet door opens above the cabinet instead of into the cabinet, so I can't really count on being able to keep things on top of the cabinet like I used to. The keyboard tray in the new cube is slightly smaller, so my mouse is on a different level than the keyboard. I'm in a very public place, I see everyone walk by and vice versa. The founder / "boss dude"'s office is right in front of me, along with the rest of the C<>O's and their offices lining the wall. Plus now I have a window to another cube to my back. That's probably the weirdest part. I have no one looking over my shoulder, but I sure as hell could have someone stalking me through the glass. I miss the privacy.

There's a couple sips of lemonade though. The cube was much brighter when I first moved in. That just took unscrewing a couple of the light bulbs above my cube. Problem solved. The cube also has a bookshelf inside of it, taking up more space that I'd really like. But since I can't readily keep anything in my cabinet anymore, the bookshelf works famously. Lemonade from Lemons. The desks were arranged so I faced away from the entrance of my cube. I really didn't like this because then people coming up to me couldn't easily get my attention. A few stripped screws later, the desks are arranged "correctly". Crisis averted.

The intent of the shuffle is to get some of the teams that work together to sit closer together. AT least that's what the end result looks like. The architecture / engine people all sit together, closer to the embedded (dos) programmers. The UI team is all sitting in a pretty little row. The "new super secret project" people are also all sitting in an area together as well.

The only part of the move that was inconvenient was the not announcing it. I sort of just came into work today and that was the big part of the morning for me, moving the horde of computers and misc stuff. Everything seems to be in place now though. It's still never home, but it'll do.

Today is day one!

So I decided to take the plunge and get into some Mac OS X. My first stop as always was Barnes and Noble to get a book to learn from. I decided to pay the "now tax" instead of getting the book online. I'm usually pretty impulsive like that. I also got another book just for fun.

So far in an afternoon, I've made it through five and a half chapters. Objective C is quite a different language than the C# that I'm used to. The cool thing is I sort of get it. By no means do I know anything, but I'm always curious about parallel programming and recently I started reading about Erlang. The only reason I bring it up is after browsing the internet about things Erlang, I was more comfortable with the mental state of passing messages to objects rather than calling methods on them. Once you get over that hurdle, and the syntax to boot, it's actually not all that bad.

The one thing that I'm not ready to get completely used to is XCode. It's no visual studio, and I'm not completely comfortable with the debugger yet, but it's only a few hours into my first excursion. I haven't traveled too far from the book's code, but the challenge exercises. The one thing that is very much so missing is the comfortable autocomplete that I'm used to from visual studio. The autocomplete in XCode isn't bad, but the completion keystrokes are quite limited. Only the arrow key or enter seem to complete a word, not space, tab, ;, ), ], or any of the other non-alphanumerics that complete a work THEN insert that character. There is an option to add a "complete" keystroke, but if it's something that you can type after a keyword, then it'll never get inserted. At least that's my initial experience.


So far I've learned how to make interfaces in Interface Builder, this is the part I'm most comfortable with. However I was completely lost when it came to hooking up code to the controls. That's where the book came in and saved the day. Now I can hook up my code to the obvious actions on a control and make buttons work and whatnot. So far I've counted letters in a string, made the computer speak, and generate random numbers. My goal is to get together some of my more recent common C# test applications I've made (color fading, animation, dragging and dropping).

If there's any ideas, I'm willing to entertain them. So far my best idea is to have the computer read you a random joke from the internet somewhere. Not the most interesting, but it's certainly pretty cool.

Harold's code of the day: MyClass *foo = [[MyClass alloc] init];

Harold's cool observation of the day:

In C#, this code will crash:
MyClass foo = null;
int bar = foo.myMethod();


In Objective C, this code will just set bar to 0:
MyClass *foo = nil;
int bar = [foo myMethod];

Makes chaining calls when a potential middle call is NULL so much easier. I don't care if an intermediate step fails, I want to know if the result is kosher. Wish me luck tomorrow!

Hebrew is wierd...

I just had the chance to sit down with a computer that has a Hebrew version of Windows Vista installed. I have to say, it's all damn backwards! I'm not sure what to make of any of it...

Actually it's very dramatic, unfamiliar, but recognizable. It makes me nauseated to look at the screen for too long. Not just the text is from right to left, that I can handle. But the start menu, the clock, the little - [] X in the top is on the other side, everything. I find myself constantly going left, then realizing that I need to go right to click something. Way too many years of built up reflex and intuition.

Bottom line, if I do end up going to Israel, I'll be getting a hebrew keyboard, installing all of the hebrew language files and fonts, I might even let the OS change some of the words. The language can be right to left all it wants, but my applications and by extension my brain will likely never catch on.

Just like every other blog...

... It never gets updated. Shame on me. Actually I have a decent excuse. During my trip to Israel, I decided to keep a journal for the trip, including experiences leading up to the trip and also as a result from the trip. There's quite a lot of good stuff in there, and a large amount that I did miss. Importantly though, my current mental state for each day is somehow captured in my comments. Unfortunately, dates, times, and places are painfully lacking.

Our first day we landed, we spent the night in "Abu Gof"? and got our speech with Momo about Love and Jewish babies. The next day I spent in Jerusalem, at the wall, on the bus, and at the bar. Then we drove to tel aviv to see the place of rabin(?)'s assination, and also a "tel" in jaffa. That night was pretty lame for me, but everyone else enjoyed a stay at the bar across the street in netanya(?). Then a shabbat day lazing around on the beach, and a nightclub at night, I wish I knew the name. Then a trip to Ceasaria and to Tiberius. A trip around golan heights and a battle ready bunker on the north east border. A drive down south with our new soldier friends to the Dead Sea and an evening in the bedouin camp with my newly acquired cough and somberness. Another bus ride to eilat with the malls and club scene #2. A drive up north to mt. masada (awesome) and a jaunt back west to Jerusalem. Friday night at the wall (also amazing) followed by alot of walking because the bus doesn't run on Shabbat. Havdalah in the hotel bomb shelter followed by tearful goodbyes.

There were additional nature hikes, scenic overlooks, inspirational stories, and moments now fleeting into the past. So for everyone interested in how the trip went, to quote the artist Avraham in Tzfat, it was "AaawwweesoooooooOOOOOooomme" (awesome).

Since then, I've just been trying to evaluate all of the things that are tying me to Reno. Definitely my friends here, all of them I consider family. My job, I couldn't imagine working somewhere with people as smart and as real. My "stuff", of which I have entirely too much of. My "obligations" which I've only recently been able to realize that they're all self imposed.

Over the next little while, my goal is to just talk about each of these things and how my perspective on them has become so much more clear.