Posted on Monday, 25th January 2010 by Christopher

So… why would I expect you to come to this site if I don’t myself? Going to do a little more housekeeping here and get more fluid. Also want to post some followup stuff to my videoblogs. Look for it soon!

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Posted on Tuesday, 15th December 2009 by Christopher

And so it begins: another new quest to drop the extra pounds and get in shape. Every six months or so, I try to “get serious about it,” and I never seem to pull it off. The last time I remember being close to something I’d call “in shape” was late 2005. Back then, I’d just moved from San Diego, where I’d had a nightly habit of spending one hour running. I ate reasonably healthy food back then, but I will admit I had a fondness for Starbucks’ mochas and banana bread, Bronx Pizza, and On The Border Mexican Grill’s huge beef burrito. It was the exercise that did it then. Every morning, when I didn’t ride my bike to work, I’d run up the seven flights of stairs from the parking lot to the OR where I worked and didn’t even get winded.

Before that, the last time I can remember being in decent shape, I hardly exercised at all. It was 2002 in Santa Barbara and I’d just restricted my diet greatly. Back then, I only had to drop from 190 to 175 pounds. Before moving to San Diego, I weighed about 218. When I left to move to San Francisco in August 2005, I was down to 180.

Right now, I’m tipping the scales near 220. That includes having a huge amount of miles on the bicycles for 2009. I can’t blame my weight on my lack of activity, it’s the food I eat, and this year, I’ve eaten a lot of food.

For one thing, the activity of cycling long distance on a road bike makes you very hungry. Being that I don’t have a very good “checks and balances” system in place regarding my diet, this hasn’t been a good thing. I started out by carb-loading before what I’d considered to be “long rides.” So, pretty much every Friday night at the beginning of the year, I’d plow through a plate of noodles or rice, then in the morning ride 50 or so miles, then eat again. Ineffective. Ineffective for weight loss anyway. I gave up the “carb-loading” even for long rides (I did load up on the Marin Century) and pretty much stopped eating during the rides too. Still ineffective.

The main problem I have with food is willpower. I’m able to stick to very strict rules if they’re simple. If I decide I’m only eating bananas and tuna, I’ll eat only bananas and tuna. If I decide to be vegetarian, I’ll do it. However, when it comes to eating a variety of foods and maintaining a log of calories or portions or Weight Watchers points or whatever, forget it! So, this time I’ve chosen a very simple rule: Nothing solid.

I already drink almost no soda, and I’m sticking to regular coffee instead of mochas, etc., so the “trouble” fluids are at a minimum. I’m allowing myself veggie juice, fruit juice, coffee, tea, creamy tomato soup, and broths. Is this plan idiotic? Probably… but I love these kinds of experiments and I want to see if I can pull off a weight loss like Boobtubious.

“Who’s Boobtubious?”

There’s a video blogger on YouTube by that name. Last year at Lent, he gave up solid food, not for dietary reasons but religious reasons. In the meanwhile, he managed to drop some pounds. I’m not religious, but I admired his efforts. With my weirdness about having “simple rules,” I think a liquid-only routine would probably prove effective for me to get a leg up on my weight loss. I in no way consider it a solution and realize that if I don’t do something in the way of exercise and diet when the solid food starts again, I’ll be back where I started. I know that anyone who reads this is going to think “what a stupid idea.” Whatever. I also know my girlfriend is going to freak when she finds out my intention. That’s one of the biggest issues. What irony that the whole time I was not in a relationship, I thought a big key to getting someone to stick with me would be losing weight… and then I find someone who likes me regardless of the belly. Doh! Still… the belly’s gotta go!

Now where’d I put that V8 juice?

Tags: boobtubious, calories, diet, exercise, fat, juice, liquid, obese, pounds, v8, weight loss, youtube
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Posted on Monday, 7th December 2009 by Christopher

All I want for Christmas is an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle. Oh, but not only will I shoot my eye out, it’s ILLEGAL in San Francisco under Section 602 of San Francisco’s Police Municipal Code. I COULD, however, posess a REAL rifle quite legally. Hmm…

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Posted on Wednesday, 2nd December 2009 by Christopher

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Posted on Wednesday, 2nd December 2009 by Christopher

It’s obvious, right? Tiger was being chased by his scorned, golf-club-wielding wife… he ran to his car to get the hell out of there… she jumped in front of him, swinging the golf club and smashing the window… he veered off the road to avoid hitting her and crashed into a tree. Rachel Uchitel, Jaimee Grubbs, and Kalika Moquin: Can’t fault Tiger for wanting to tap any of the three… he just shoulda put off marriage a while ’til his oats were sewn.

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Posted on Thursday, 19th November 2009 by Christopher

Obviously, I didn’t stick with the dog paws theme

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Posted on Thursday, 19th November 2009 by Christopher

The footprints at the right are going to soon be replaced with social network site logos. Each will lead to my place in a social network. In fact, they already DO (the links are active), I just have to update the pics. Whee… Or maybe I should keep the dog paws?

CM

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Posted on Wednesday, 18th November 2009 by Christopher

Yep… check it out on my Velocurean blog site!

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Posted on Wednesday, 18th November 2009 by Christopher

We all know Al Gore invented the Internet, right?  What many don’t realize is that there was a time when “The Web” didn’t exist!  That’s right, kiddies!  Once upon a time, way before Netscapasaurus ruled the Internet (for those of you who are REAL young, read up on the browser wars) there was a thing called “Mosaic.” Put on your time-travel hats, kids, ’cause we’re going all the way back to 1994 on this one!

Basically, Mosaic was sort of like your modern browser but really slow, simple, and limited. Oh, there were others, like Lynx, a text-only web browser that somehow inexplicably is still around to this day (only for real dorks), but Mosaic was the “good” one.

Back then, you could, in theory, call in to your ISP, fire up Mosaic, and actually browse the rudimentary beginnings of the World Wide Web. I say “in theory” because I was never patient enough to hang around long enough to let a website fully download. I do recall having ordered flowers from an early version of 800-Flowers’ website once… I believe it took over an hour, or just about 400% of the time it would have taken me to drive to a florist. The idea that I managed it on the computer, however, without having to talk to a human on the phone or in person seemed to make it all worthwhile. Ironic considering that now I often long for the days when you’d call a business and actually talk to a human voice.

Back then, the real cool kids on the ‘Net were using Compuserve… There was also a little thing called AOL. These companies basically provided their own content rather than leading you to the “real Internet.” I remember once having an AOL account and seeing on the opening page “World Wide Web coming soon!” I used AOL for an ISP and minimized the program to go to the “real Internet.”

Back in those days, search engines were pretty much unheard of. “Googling” was not a verb. My method of finding things on the Internet? Gopher. Gopher and his friends Archie and Veronica (I don’t know what happened to Betty) would find stuff for me based on crude keyword searches, usually on university servers, and I would fetch my files with an FTP program. Most of the time, I had no idea what I was getting until the file had downloaded, which took a lot of time and patience. It was like fishing.

In those pre-Google days, I would buy a publication called “The Internet Phone Book,” which listed sites for various subjects.  The book was about four inches thick and printed on newsprint.  I think the cost was around forty bucks.

Although Gopher, Veronica, and FTP were very primitive, and checking the results was similar to picking a candy out of a box of See’s Chocolates (sometimes you got a great one, usually just OK, and sometimes it was a godawful chocolate-covered-cherry), I remember a bit later starting to feel nostalgic for that way of using the Internet as I fired up the second generation of Netscape to find what I needed via a search engine called Hotbot.

Usenet was another one of my favorite Internet pastimes… and oh boy would that time pass!  Usenet still exists today, but Average Joe doesn’t know about it.  It’s similar to “forums” or Google Groups, but in a more rudimentary fashion.  To see the messages, you actually need something called a “newsreader” (if you have Outlook or Thunderbird, you have a newsreader… didn’t know that, did ya?).  I would download the latest updates on my favorite groups and read them daily.  Eventually, people started figuring out how to encode files and transfer them via Usenet.  I remember decoding many a picture file and even early MP3 files around 1998.  Yep… you needed WinAmp to play ‘em, but you could get pirated music online more than ten years ago!

Now, pretty much anything you want is just a Google search away.  We’re spoiled.  We carry the internet around on our phones and get impatient when the signal takes more than a few seconds to beam to us via satellite.  We watch streaming movies in relative high-definition on Hulu… Well, what am I doing?  You already know all the stuff you can do on the Internet.

To think that there are children alive now who will never know a world without the Internet… without Google… without HD streaming video… My baby niece likely knows more about computers right now than I did in my early twenties!  …Someday in the future, when we all have computers embedded in our skulls and we download from iTunes by making ever-so-slight eye movements, I’m going to bore the crap out of my niece with this story.

Christopher

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Posted on Wednesday, 18th November 2009 by Christopher

So, after having my old website completely vanquished by my old server company, I’ve switched to a new company and I’m starting from scratch.  I’m looking to do things a bit differently this time, anyway.  More updates, although probably shorter.  More links to my other social network areas where I’m more active… besides, who reads blogs anymore, right?

This, rather than being a self-contained outlet of text and pictures, is rather going to be a hub… nay, a portal for all things “Christopher Mast.”  Yep.  ‘Cause you needed that in your life, right?

Actually, it’s because, rather than try to update a blog site (which I often fall behind in doing) that barely gets read (if you’ve been checking my site for updates, you’re one of the special ones… thanks!), I’d rather have a central reference point for all my wanderings on the web.  As it is, I make appearances on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Velocurean, and sometimes sites like Twitpic, 12Seconds, and the like.  Oh, and I guess I still have a MySpace page.

So… if you’re one of the “special ones,” welcome back.  If you’re new, thanks for stopping by and I hope to see ya again.

Christopher

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