If you’re not tracking calories, you’re not trying to lose weight.  That’s a paraphrase from one of the famed trainers on “The Biggest Loser.”  I think it was Jillian, but I can’t remember.  Anyway, I’ve found this to be true for me.  If I don’t obsessively track everything I eat, eating becomes “autopilot” and my autopilot is set for climb.  Not good.

So, I keep track of everything like a crazy person and it works.  The thing is, I’m also very easily distracted and more easily discouraged, so to follow some complicated formula or to write everything on paper when I don’t always have pen and paper or to use a computer program that doesn’t have a mobile app will not work for me.  Also, I realize programs like Weight Watchers work great for many people, and if that works for you, I encourage it, but converting everything to a “points” system is too much for my little childlike brain to embrace.

That’s why I like the app “Lose It.” It’s really simple, it’s visual, and it’s always with me as long as I don’t lose my phone. Oh, and it pushes all my data to the website in case I want to use my computer to update or I lose the phone.

With Lose It, I can search a pre-loaded database of foods, including an impressive array of brand name and restaurant choices, or I can create a food entry manually which gets stored in my personal database for the next time I consume it.  Since my palate is limited anyway, this is great for me.  Every time I eat a 2.5 oz packet of albacore and six Triscuits, I can tap an icon in my database and it’s there.  No looking stuff up, no writing, no Excel spreadsheets, etc.  Just a bar graph showing you how close to your chosen daily calorie limit you are (you set that based on whether you want to lose 1/2, 1, or 2 pounds per week).

Oh, and the same goes for exercise.  You can search the pre-loaded exercise, select your level of effort and the amount of time, and it subtracts the calories.  For me, this is the program’s one shortcoming.  Everyone is different; we’re all composed of different ratios of muscle to fat, younger people have more water in their body mass than older people, everyone has their own idea of “vigorous exercise” vs. “moderate.”  My suggestion is to get a heart rate monitor (I use the Polar CS200 because I can mount it to my road bike or carry it in my pocket) and set it up to your age and body weight correctly to track calories.  I’m sure heart rate monitors are 100% scientifically accurate, but they’re surely more “honest” vs. the human nature trend of over-reporting our efforts.

Lose It also tracks your weight on a line graph.  I like that because I’m a visual person and I can see at a glance how far I’ve come, when I’ve made better progress vs. worse, etc.  The website also shows the date you’ll reach your goal based on your progress (you can see that on the phone too but it’s a bit more complicated), your most frequently performed exercises and frequently eaten foods, and has a really easy to use interface for setting self-motivational messages via Facebook, Twitter, text, or email.  There’s also a discussion forum.

The app has a social network aspect too, where you can “friend” people and watch their progress, but I can honestly report I don’t use that much.  As it stands I have four “friends” and one is my wife.  I like to keep the nuts and bolts of my weight loss journey private.

This isn’t a paid endorsement.  Honestly.  I just really like this app.  Think it might be for you?  Give it a shot!

Way back before I was a nurse, before I was a YouTube D-lister, before I was a coffee shop guitarist, and before I blogged, I was an aspiring art student.  I painted, I sculpted, and, if I could have afforded it back then, I would have done photography as well.  Of course, back then there were no digital cameras.¹

Now, not only do we have awesome digital cameras (I have a Canon T3i myself), Photoshop, and printers that can produce photo-quality prints in our own living room, but we also have software on our phones that can make our quick snapshots look like carefully planned art.

My favorite by far is Instagram, although I’ve tried Camera+, Hipstamatic, Phonto², a Korean app called “Pudding Cam,” and of course the iPhone’s included camera app.  Really, for me, most camera apps make you do too much thinking ahead of time before you take the shot.  If I’m putting that much effort into it, I’m using my DSLR, not my phone, with it’s tiny, crappy lens.  Besides, taking all that time to set up my app is likely to make me lose the shot.

The photo above was taken immediate after eating a plate of tuna and Triscuits.  I’d used the spoon to load the packaged fish onto the crackers and the plate to catch the mess.  I snapped the shot on a lark without even thinking and used Instagram to give it a dark, artsy edge.  Very little thought went into it but the result is pretty cool (yes there will be naysayers but that’s true of anything we call art³).  Instagram takes a normal photo (although square vs. your phone’s rectangular default) and allows you to modify it after the fact with a choice of pre-viewable filters and a tilt-shift option.  Another thing I love about it is that it’s a social network.  You can “follow” people and they can “follow” you to see what people are posting.  It interacts with Facebook, Twitter, and some other platforms as well, so you can click the link on your laptop or PC and see the image on your screen, although you need to be on your phone to interact with the social network (comment, like, follow, or see other photos by the same user).

I’ve gotta wonder, though, what will happen to the public’s perception of art when it can be achieved with such a glaring absence of any toil.  Sure, the greats will always be great and no app replaces the artist’s skill of composing a shot (yet), people aren’t going to stop appreciating Ansel Adams or Gered Mankowitz, but there still feels like there’s something a bit cheap about being able to create something really interesting visually with virtually no effort.  For example, I took this bridge picture with my iPhone, through the windshield of my car, at about 45mph.  No pre-planning or setup, I just thought the sky looked pretty and I wanted to take a picture of it.  Viola!

In a way, it reminds me of the ubiquitous “MySpace portraits” that so many people learned to take.  You know, holding the camera way about your head and shoot at a downward angle while looking up so that your body looks smaller and your extra chin goes away.  That’s not to mention the psychological factor of the “POV angle” (Google it) and the pouty looks women would give the camera.  Pretty soon, everyone had an awesome self-portrait on MySpace and you couldn’t assume that anyone looked like their photos… in fact I’d dare say the more effort most people put into making their MySpace photos look sexy, the less sexy they actually looked in real life, but I’m digressing here.

Actually, I wasn’t digressing all that much.  Using these new smart phone photography apps takes no setup, no lighting adjustments, no figuring out which lens or f-stop or exposure to use.  Just click and pick a filter.  Art with no effort, and in the meanwhile the scene in the photo looks nowhere near as cool in real life.

An Instagram of the founders of Instagram

My Facebook "Timeline Layout"
(click to enlarge screen shot)

Facebook has been notorious for hitting us with sudden and drastic layout changes. Without warning, we log in to find nothing is where we left it. The public outcry is great, but everything stays “changed” until everyone is used to the change. Then the cycle repeats itself.

Humans, by nature, don’t like change. Yeah, there are a few of you freaks out there who do – very much so – but I’m talking about the majority here. Most people like familiarity. That’s why Mac people buy Macs and PC people buy PCs. That’s why Ford hotrodders dislike Chevy and Chevy guys balk at Ford. That’s why people watch the same TV, drink the same sodas, etc. People get grumpy when their favorite television program is replaced by something else, even if the new show is actually better.

This time it’s different. This time, Facebook seems to have taken after the likes of Ford, Scion, Apple, Google, or a hit restaurant. How? Prior to launching it’s new Fiesta to the US market, Ford provided some of the cars to a select few people with social media influence so that they can drive them on a daily basis and then share their experiences online. It’s genius, because very few people, being given the exclusive chance to be one of the very few to drive the car ahead of time, are going to bitch about it. Scion did something similar prior to its launch, they took their cars to skateboard parks, placed posters in movie theaters, and ran viral online campaigns. Apple, well… we all know about the iPhone hype, yes? Google based the launch of its “Plus” social network on the idea of exclusivity, making it an “invite only” service until just recently (they also originally did that with Gmail). Popular restaurants stay popular by being in demand. Nobody wants to eat at the place with all the empty tables, they wanna go to the little quirky little place with the three month waiting list that was mentioned in Bon Appétit.

So this time, instead of just foisting the new “Timeline Layout” on us one morning without notice, Facebook made it available to those with a “developer account.” People with such accounts talked to other people with such accounts, which inevitably let to someone talking to someone without such account, and then someone figuring out how to game the system by creating a fake app and spreading so that others can sport the new layout themselves, even if the only one who can actually see that layout is themselves.

As it stands now, you have to have a “developer account” and a new “Timeline Layout” to be able to see other’s new layout. Sooner or later, it’ll go public, and everyone’s big dilemma will be picking which photo to use as their header image.

It’s just turned 2:06am as I am starting to type this.  I have about a dozen or so ideas for blogs going through my head, as well as one for a video blog.  My blog hasn’t been updated in a week, so I should get these thing written, right?  Yep.

Once again my cluttered brain can’t get it all out.  I blame my busy life, my job, my wife, housework, etc.  Fact is, I’m just a disorganized person.

I’m going to try an experiment though.  I’m going to add something to this blog every day for at least a year.  We’ll see how it goes.  Of course, if I’m in a Mexican prison or an ICU or something I might miss a few days, but I’m genuinely going to give this a shot.  That way, hopefully the ideas don’t back up and they actually get on paper… um… pixels.

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Image Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Currently, my wife and I live in a one bedroom condo.  There’s the bedroom, the bathroom, and one huge area that comprises the kitchen, dining room, and living room.  We park in a shared garage and there’s  a balcony just about big enough two people to stand on.  While we’re not crowded, space-wise, if one of us is working on something that requires a great amount of concentration or quiet, we usually use to bedroom to hole-up.  Between the queen sized bed, the not-particularly-useful desk, a huge dresser, and my wife’s jewelry cabinet, there’s not a whole lot of room to spread out and work (unless you use the bed for a workspace).

I have a variety of interests.  I play guitar, I manage a few blogs, I make video blogs, I do photography, and I’ve been working on a scale model of a Colombian chiva bus off and on for a long time.  I usually only pick up the guitars when the wife’s not around so as not to disturb her, and if I play when she’s home I play only the quietest stuff.  Making a video blog when the wife’s around is hard ’cause she doesn’t want to be seen in the background of the video, so that requires one of us to retreat to the bedroom (when my video blog has a green wall in the background, I’m in the bedroom).  Besides, the wife thinks a good number of my videos are just plain silly (and they are), so making one when she’s around can be a lesson in humility.  As for building the model, well… there’s basically the coffee table for that, and I can’t just leave things half-assembled, and on top of that all the painting has to be done outside, so my chiva bus looks more like a parts bin.

I’m always envious of the guys that have lots of room for their extracurricular activities.  I recently met a guy who’s converted the workshop attached to his garage into a retreat furnished with a beer frig, drum set, guitars and amplifiers, vintage stereo complete with a high-end turntable, and parked in the garage next to all this stuff is a vintage Dodge Valiant Convertible.  Another guy I know has a virtual bike shop in his garage, with several road and mountain bikes hanging from a ceiling-suspended rack, bike tools and repair stand, and a stereo system controlled by a Macintosh computer and iTunes.  My uncle has a race car and a huge garage outfitted with all the mechanic’s tools and metal working gear needed to maintain the machine.  He frequently spends the entire day out there.  Another friend in Marin County has a garage almost deep enough to park three cars in tandem but no man cave, just an empty garage, which I find puzzling.

The one man cave I’ve seen in recent history that I can most relate to though belongs to our friend Travis.  It’s a veritable tinker’s shop.  Tools, work benches, an air compressor.  From this he’s produced a mildly customized Vespa-type scooter, a hugely customized steampunk-style motorcycle based on a vintage Triumph, tilt-shift cameras, a ridiculously tricked-out monster truck that runs on used fryer oil.  When he gets working on something, he’s more like an artist than a technician, and he’s got the space to do his tinkering as he doesn’t park his vehicles in the garage (I’m not sure the truck would even fit).

When I was a teenager, my room in the basement of my mom’s house.  That was my man cave, although at 17 I was hardly a man yet.  There I would work on art projects (sometimes using materials that should have been used in only a well-ventilated area, which the basement was not), play guitar and drums, build models, and all the other stuff a teenage boy likes to do (yes, I’d sneak  girls down there at night… don’t tell mom!).  Later in life, my man caves would vary depending on my living situation… garages, spare bedrooms, in one house I finished out an attic so I could put my stuff up there; drums, guitars, slot car track, etc.

I began my one-bedroom apartment lifestyle about ten years ago, and for the most part, my living room has been my man cave.  This has meant that any time I would have company everything would have to get put away somewhere.  Usually I’d arrange a closet so everything could tuck away fast (Hmm… a closet as a man cave… somewhere there’s a homophobic joke in that).  Until recently it’s not been that much of a problem, because if I was working on something but suddenly needed to leave the house, I could leave everything in place and continue my activities when I got back.  If I didn’t have anyone coming over, the only person to be bothered by a room full of mic stands and ProTools gear or a bunch of video equipment was me.  If there was no room on the coffee table for a drink because I’d completely disassembled a laptop computer and there were parts everywhere, I’d understand.  Now that I’m married, that’s no longer the case.

I’m not trying to make women out to be the villains here.  There is something mildly dysfunctional about leaving half-finished projects laying about, but I think everyone has a dysfunctional trait or two.  Men seem to be similarly dysfunctional in the need to tinker with stuff, whether it’s building a model, cleaning a gun, or placing stamps in an album.

Soon, we’ll be looking for a home larger than our one bedroom condo.  When we do, one of the “must-have” things will be an area for a man cave.

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Images: 123RF Stock Photos

Americans are stupid with tips.  It’s not unusual anymore to see tip jars at fast food restaurants and self-serve buffets.  The tip jar at a coffee shop is usually right next to the cash register, which is great for the employees, but why would you tip before getting served?  I’ve even seen tip jars at grocery store checkout stands!

It’s become commonplace to tip 20% regardless of service quality at a restaurant.  Yeah, yeah… I hear you with that same ol’ bullshit argument about how wait staff make all their money for tips.  Well, they should act like they do.  Besides, the standard amount is supposedly 15% (I am old enough to remember when it was 10%).  If people in other jobs, say the dishwasher, put crap for effort into their work, they get fired.  My stiffing a waitress because she put crap for effort into her work is my way of firing her, if only for the moment.

If you buy a soda from a vending machine and it takes your money without delivering what you paid for, you feel ripped off.  If you stand in line at a shop only to find when you get to the car that the cashier didn’t put one of your bags in the cart, you go back for the stuff you paid for, you don’t just say “oh well” and leave it in the store.  Why the hell would you pay a waiter who didn’t deliver what he’s being paid for?

I’m all for tipping big if the service is good.  Usually I tip more than 20%, which some would say is extremely foolish.  However, treat me wrong, and you’re not getting my money!  My advice: Got crappy service?  Give a crappy tip.

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Image 123RF Stock Photos

An old man brags to two of his friends that every day at 6:00 am without fail he gets up and takes a healthy piss. He’s done so for several years and he’s glad for it.  After all, he boasts, nothing’s better than starting the day with a good whiz.

The second man reports that every morning for the past several years he’s gotten up to take a bowel movement at 5:30 am.  He happily details his feeling of health and vitality at being able to start his morning with a healthy dump.

The third man thinks for a minute and says, “At about 4:00 am every morning I take a huge shit followed by a long piss.  I completely empty my bowels and bladder without fail.  I just wish I could get out of bed before six!”

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Image: public domain