It’s been a long time since I posted anything here, so I figured I’d post a few updates. Since I’ve got a lotta things to cover I’m going to post several updates so people can comment on different things without having to stomp on other stuff. 🙂

This is something I’ve been meaning to post for a while but haven’t.

I’ve been on a mission to get my health to levels where its never been. I live a very sedentary lifestyle – I’m a System Engineer by day, and someone that uses a computer a lot at night. While I move from building to building a bunch at work, I’m going from meeting to meeting, not actually doing a lot of physical activity. Once I get where I’m going my butt goes back into a seat for an hour or more at a time. This is nothing new — my entire career has been like this.

The most physically fit I’ve ever been was when I was in marching band my freshman year of High School. During that time I was constantly on my feet carrying large instruments around with me the whole time. (I played both trombone and tuba.) That’s about the only time in my life when I can remember actually being in decent shape. We had practices every evening and spend every Saturday on the road at various competitions.

After moving to Ohio my health went downhill from there. I no longer got the exercise I was getting from marching band. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I guess I got a bit depressed then as well — I just stopped caring about things like that and I let it get out of control. Funny how I was blind to it while this was happening and it’s only now that I’m able to see it.

I got to the heaviest I’ve ever been when I was in college. I found some photos of myself (which I won’t be posting here, thanks! 🙂 ) a few months ago and was sorta shocked at what I saw. Scared, really, knowing that’s where I’d come from. I was about 150 lbs more then than I am now.

Right after graduating college (it took me seven years to graduate since I was working full time, but I made it!) I started having back problems. I had a few episodes where I couldn’t move at all I was in so much pain… all I could do was lay flat on my back and not move a muscle for fear of triggering a spasm. My Mom came over for a few nights while all that was going on, and I’m not sure what I would have been able to do without her there. We’ve both agreed that I should have gone to the hospital when that happened, but for some reason we didn’t do it. I’m not sure how I would have gotten there, frankly, since I couldn’t sit upright… short of calling 911, I guess. I am very glad I did survive that time and went on to make a full recovery.

While I was laid up in bed I remember laying there and realizing I could feel my heart beating and then feel the blood rush outward from my heart. It was a weird sensation. I told myself “oh no, this can’t be good, I shouldn’t be able to feel this” and figured that my blood pressure was too high. I made an appointment at the doctor afterwards to go talk about this and get my blood pressured checked.

That doctor appointment was a humbling experience.

When people ask me how much weight I’ve lost I don’t really have an answer to give them — because I don’t know. The scale at the doctor’s office wouldn’t go that high. (This was before digital scales in doctor’s offices.) It was really embarrassing. The figure that he wrote down on my chart was just “XXX>” where XXX was the most the scale could do. We sorta guessed what the “>” might be by how fast the balance beam on the scale would bounce back when pushed, but it was just a guess… and sure enough, my blood pressure was very high.

That doctor visit triggered me to go on a massive diet. I lost a lot of weight by doing nothing more than just cutting way back on what I was eating — I didn’t add in the working out piece, I just simply quit eating a lot. It worked great… right up till when I killed my gallbladder.

If you don’t know what a gallbladder does, it stores excess bile that’s produced in the liver. Bile is used for breaking down fat in the food you eat. When you’re as overweight as I was, your body gets really used to creating a lot of bile since it’s constantly having to digest fat. Since I had radically (unsafely really) changed my diet suddenly that bile was just trapped in the gallbladder and never had a chance to get flushed out. It then crystallized and turned into thousands of little tiny gallstones.

I had a bunch of gallbladder attacks, several of which put me in the ER overnight. Gallbladder attacks are one of the most painful things you can experience — I’ve talked to women that have both given birth and had a gallbladder attack and they tell me that having a kid is easy compared to a gallbladder attack. (And when you’re done giving birth you’ve got a new baby to enjoy at the end of it, vs being really sore for weeks afterwards!) After every single attack they’d send me to get an ultrasound done of my gallbladder, but they’d never find anything. Turns out later that the reason they never found anything is because the entire gallbladder was packed full of stones — thus there was no change in density for the ultrasound to pick up on!

After the last one I had a really skilled ultrasound tech at the ER happened to find “something” that didn’t look right to her and was able to convince the doctors of it. They came into the ER to tell me that not only was I going to be admitted to the hospital, but they had a surgeon coming in to remove my gallbladder right then. Prep for surgery started immediately. (Looking back, this is a good thing — I didn’t have time to get worried!)

The suregon told me he’d never seen anything like what I had. He showed me a photo of the gallbladder that he removed and how it was packed full of thousands of pea-sized gallstones. He was just flabbergasted that it has happened since he’d just simply never seen it before.

Recovery from this surgery was slow and it put a halt to my weight loss. I was unable to eat “normal” foods for a while and I just had to eat what I could eat. The momentum I had built up went away — most likely for the best anyhow, since I was doing it wrong.

Fast forward a few years to three years ago. We had just started a fitness program at the school where I was working, which meant I could join the gym next door to the office for just $10/month, so I did. What possessed me to do that I have no idea, but it was a smart move.

The first time I set paw in the gym I was unable to do more than 15 minutes walking on a treadmill. Really embarrassing. I kept working on adding more and more time to the length of time I was walking each day until I made it all the way up to 55 minutes (plus five for a cool down). I didn’t focus on dieting during this time – I was just trying to get into better shape.

After hitting the wall that doing nothing but cardio will do, I decided to get a trainer and take on weight training. I did weight training two days a week with a trainer and cardio every other day. I did this for six months until I found a job here in Austin and moved.

My trainer in Ohio got me on the road to losing weight again. He forced me to write out a food journal for a week, and then we sat down and went over it. That’s a really cruel thing to have to do. 🙂

He showed me how to cook better and we set off to start dropping weight again. (I had put on some after surgery — never got any close to where I started, however!!) This time I was doing it right. Instead of just eating less, I was making sure I ate the right things *AND* added exercise to my routine.

After working with Dave for six months I moved to Austin. When I got here I was flat broke (I was paying both a mortgage and rent for seven months until my house sold), so I couldn’t afford a trainer. Old habits started to take over again.

That changed about 20 months ago when I hired the services of a new trainer — Jeff here in Austin. I spent the first year with him just working on weight training and getting my back stronger, which worked great.

Last year (2011) in June I started hitting my diet heavy again. My goal was to start right after RCFM, but I got stuck with that really nasty con crud that we all seemed to get right after RCFM and it took me a few weeks to recover. Once I did, however, I started dieting and haven’t looked back.

Since that time I’m now down about 80lbs. According to the scale here at the house I have four pounds to go (vs nine pounds on the gym scale) to reach the goal that my Doctor and I set out to hit all those years ago. I’ve been dropping a pound a week lately, so I’m within three months of hitting my goal weight.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to stop there. If I get to that goal weight and weight is still coming off, I’m going to just let it keep coming off. If I can get to my goal weight and then keep it off for two YEARS, I’ll start trying to think about getting surgery to remove some of the excess skin that built up from my college years.

So what have I learned from all of this? The biggest thing is that I have a food addiction.

The doctor tells me that a food addiction is almost exactly like a drug addiction to your brain. It gets used to the chemicals that are released while eating, and then becomes addicted to that sensation. Unlike a drug addict, however, you can’t separate yourself from your addiction. A meth addict can keep away from the drug, but I can’t get away from food.

It’s a weird thing. Two parts of my brain fight at times. Let’s pretend it’s lunch time… the logical side of my brain says “you need to consume 400 calories of food to provide the fuel that you need to make it to dinner”, but the food-loving part of my brain says “hey, there’s a pizza buffet down the road from here!” (And then it really gets fun when I start rationalizing things… like reminding myself that the pizza buffet is only $4.50, but a healthy lunch is $7.00! Thus begins the internal dialog of “you’re really going to pay more to get less??” ARUGH!)

I have to consciously ignore that part of my brain and just listen to the logical part. It’s a constant struggle that I’ll most likely have to deal with for the rest of my life. I can’t let my guard down or less I’ll find myself giving into that addiction and I’ll be right back where I started, and I don’t want that.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I caught my food addiction in time. Today my blood pressure is completely normal, I am not diabetic, and by and large I seemed to have managed to escape the dangers of being so overweight. Odds are this is because it didn’t happen till I was older and I caught it in time.

I’m in nearly as good of shape today as I was in high school, and hopefully within the next year will be able to surpass where I was even then. (I’m 34 in real life.)

The day I hit my goal weight I’ll be sure and post back here and all over Twitter. I’ll be overjoyed when I finally get there.

I have been using Google Reader for many years to keep track of around 150 websites and read new content on them constantly. In my line of work things change quickly and staying on top of the tech news and developments can be a difficult job to say the least.

Today I have realized that I must be totally color blind. I cannot tell the difference in the gray, light gray, dark gray, light dark gray, lightish gray, medium gray, light medium gray, light light gray and dark medium light gray that now makes up Google Reader. I can’t tell what’s been read and unread unless I look very, very closely.

To make matters worse, I work my day job almost 100% from a laptop with the monitor dimmed a lot to save on battery life. In this state I’m completely unable to see what’s read and unread in Google Reader. (And even on my desktop PC with monitors running on AC it’s not much better.)

You would think that a company with so many bright colors in their logo would understand that there is more than just gray in the color spectrum, but I guess not. They know more than I do, and I don’t see a way to revert the changes back to something with more contrast and/or colors.

I’m dismayed. I’m not sure what to do. Google Reader provided a service I can’t get anywhere else – a way to stay on top of tech sites from three devices and have my read/unread counts follow me. (I use the web interface on my Mac and PC and Feedler on my iPhone.)

I really don’t want to have to write an RSS reader that syncs back to a database, but if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I have to do. 😦

Last week I had minor surgery. It was all external and I’m fine and going to be fine long into the future, but the recovery from this is pretty terrible.

I’ve been spending the last five days recouping at home… which has been interesting, since I’m not really up to sitting in front of the computer for too long. I’ve had time to realize just how much I depend on my computer for entertainment! 🙂

On the bright side, I got to see a few baseball games from start to finish, something I haven’t seen in years. (And if St. Louis makes it into the World Series with Texas, I won’t know who to cheer for — the local team, or the NL Central! I guess no matter what happens I’ll be happy.)

I’m going back to work tomorrow and I’ll play it by ear. I hope to at least be able to stay up till lunch, and then come home and work the rest of the day here. My sofa is a nice comfy place to sit, an office chair… not so much.

At this time last week I was at work, in the “WSUP War Room” as we pushed the new hardware and software live. I worked from 7:00am to 11:30pm that day.

We basically replaced EVERYTHING, so we were expecting this week to be really really rough. We had been set to work 24/7 for as long as we needed to get our website up and stable again… I was going to be on the morning shift. We were all prepared for the worst – we’d prepped upper level management about what could happen, gotten all ready to basically live at work for a while…

…and then nothing happened. It went totally smooth! This week as very boring, which is awesome, considering how much had changed! There’s been only 20 bugs filed this week (compared to 200 the first week after the ERP system upgrade!), and only four emergency bug fixes pushed to production. (Even a normal release will have 4-6.)

All that work, and it paid off. 🙂

It reminded me of a chat I had with Brody at MFM last year – we get ourselves ready for the worse… calculate all the things that could go wrong… and then “or that could happen” – none of those things happen and it’s all easy in the end.

Such an amazing project. Can’t wait to see what comes next!

Tomorrow is moving day!

When I moved to Texas from Ohio I still owned a house up north – I was having to pay rent and a mortgage at once, in addition to paying to heat an empty house in a cold part of the country for months. It was a very difficult time.

That all changed in July, 2010 when I accepted a low-ball bid to sell my house in Ohio. It was the first offer I’d gotten in seven months, and it might have been another seven months until I saw another one. I lost several thousand dollars that day (I had to take a loan – which I am still paying off to this day – to cover the mortgage at closing).

However! Tomorrow I finally get to move into a much bigger apartment. I’ve been living in a tiny 580 square foot apartment for the last 13 months. This apartment is so small that Moose’s pen takes up most of the living room. The new place is over twice as big! I get my home office back.

I have been looking forward to this day since I moved to Austin. My life is finally getting back on track and things are coming together. Woo! 🙂

I have been doing a lot of soul-searching lately.

As just about everyone that I’m friends with on LJ knows, about a year ago (early Jan 2010) I packed up everything I owned and moved across the country from Dayton, OH to Austin, TX. I have a new job down here, and I moved following work. (And I was just ready to get out of Ohio after being there since 1993!)

After getting down here my social life went from slow to nearly none. I have very few friends down here. Traditionally I make friends at work and that carries over into non-work hours, but it just hasn’t happened here. Given how hard I work, and the long hours, it’s not that surprising. Unlike at my old job, I rarely have an idle moment now. From the moment I walk in the door it’s go-go-go.

So, I’m kinda stuck with doing a task I don’t do very well – find a group outside of work to hang out with and eventually start building up friendships like I had in Ohio.

Which brings me to what I have been struggling with… how well do I “fit in” in the furry fandom. The reason is, I know there are Austin furry events. I’m on the TAFF mailing list and I can see them being planned and people talking about it afterwards. I have also run into Austin furs at RCFM and MFM, so I know they actually do exist.

The problem I have is this: I’m not so sure that the furry random and I are a good fit. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much a furry and consider myself such to the core, but I have little in common with a very very big chunk of the fandom.

I’m a 30-something straight male that’s working hard on his professional career. In everything I do, both inside of work and out, I try to ooze professionalism. My image and how other people think about me is very important to me — because in your career, for better or for worse, who you know often trumps what you know. (I don’t want to argue if this is a good thing or not, it’s just how it works!)

This seems to fly directly in the face in a lot of the attitudes and norms in the furry fandom. For some, and the majority to me it seems, there exists an attitude of “I don’t care what people think about me, I’m just going to be myself.” I have a hard time arguing with this, and fully support that in private, but when it comes to going out in public, I sort of disagree.

I get really uncomfortable hanging out with people wearing ears and tails in public, for example. It’s easier for me at a con since I’m far away from home and not worried about running into my manager or a coworker while out in public, but I just can’t make myself do it here at home. The risk outweighs the reward.

I suppose having an attitude of not caring about others is fine when you’re young and still exploring life, but it’s just not a good fit for me. I’m 10+ years into my career and have worked hard to get where I am – and I’m just not willing to risk my reputation over something like that. (Even in Austin, where weird is a good thing, there are limits!) I *DO* care about other people. I care very much.

When I look at the things that I do in the furry fandom, I realize I fill a bit of an unusual role. I tend to be more of an organizer and administrator. I really like things like that – running a website, figuring out how to get a process like registration in order, etc. It’s more “work for fun” for me than a social thing.

This is why I often get frustrated at things inside of the fandom, like poor communication. I’m trying to “work for fun” and do my job, and it’s frustrating when I have people acting as blockers and not letting me work at the level I want to work. And all of this is fine – that’s just how the furry fandom operates – but it’s not how I operate. This is a me problem, not one of the fandom.

So what’s the point to writing all of this?

I’m still trying to decide what to do. What I’m doing today isn’t going to work for forever; I’m tried of being lonely and having nothing to do on Friday night. It would be really nice to have friends to watch football games with, or even *gasp* find a girlfriend someday. It seems that the furry fandom and I aren’t all that good of a match – so where do I turn?

I don’t know. I need to figure it out. My world is changing around me.

We’ve had a weekly dance in the Second Life virtual world almost every Saturday night for many years. These events give us a chance to reach to our community and give them something fun to do on a Saturday night if they don’t already have plans.

They’re also a good way to get people out of them comfort zone and talking to new people. My very first night at Rocket City I was pulled into a dance in the space rink of our old, old build. It was my first chance to listen to music that I normally wouldn’t listen to (and have since come to love) and to talk to people as it’s going on.

Tonight’s even is rave themed. We do a bunch of these. We’re furs and shiney stuff is always fun to look at… and there’s no shortage of rave gear in Second Life.

We normally have a live DJ at our events. This is pretty critical – it allows guests to make requests and lets people interact with the music stream in a way that wouldn’t be possible with just a radio stream. (We sometimes have a live DJ even when there’s no event going on and it’s a big hit!) Tonight’s DJ is charles_fox. He’s been a DJ at Rocket City from the start and is amazing. 🙂