mike's musings

W00t, a quick post. Last night I officially past the 10 pound mark that I’m down. Yay me!

Well, as some may know I’ve started to try and reduce my weight a bit. As a nerd, its pretty easy to understand that weight loss is just math. What I’ve found so far is that even small changes in the amount of diet and exercise you do can have results.

I’ve reduced (but not eliminated) the amount of red meat I eat, and reduced soda intake from several a day down to just a couple a week. I also use some of the diet tv dinner type things (healthy choice meals et al) as I know that I have an issue with portion control. After I meal, I’ll wait 10 or 15 minutes and if i still feel hungry maybe have some fruit or a veggie snack pack to curve any remaining hunger pangs.

Combining these dietary changes with maybe 60-90 minutes of exercise on my wii fit per week has already had me lose 8 pound in the last 25 days. Its not crazy weight loss, but what the graphs and math shows is steady sustainable weight loss, and thats whats important. None of the changes I’ve done are so drastic that I can’t live with them long term.

Also, I like it when my little wii balance board is happy with me :p

So that’s where it’s at right now, and I’ll post updates as I go I guess sometimes, if I remember. Cause I’m lazy like that.

Why yes, I am playing with it, and no its not done yet.

-written while i was flying to florida last month, never posted it cause i’m a lazy bastard-

Upon listening to net@night recently, Amber McArthur made a statement that struck a chord with me. To paraphrase the conversation, essentially someone showed her the “Macbook Wheel” Onion video, and she told her friend “oh yeah, that’s old”, then stopped and realized that it was really only about a week old. But the constant stream of data we are now immersed in made it old after the first 5 tweets about it, let alone before it even hit any blogs, then the “old” new media of Digg or Reddit.

And now I’m sitting on airplane, completely unplugged for the world, and it makes me antsy. I want to know whats happening, what tweets did I miss, did I miss a meme because I was offline? When I hear about what happened, will it already be “old” news?

As I come crashing towards 30 this year, I find myself thinking about the age of things more and more. I’ve a few more gray hairs in my beard, a few more pounds on my waist, and a bit more crotchety “get off my lawn” impatience with things, specifically those damn kids today and their crazy musics. And I keep thinking “is 30 really that old?” I mean, man when I was 16, 30 was freakin’ ancient. Like, old people were 30. But now, all of a sudden and quite by accident I assure you, I’M gonna be 30. What the hell happened? Where did those years go? How did my daughter suddenly turn 9 on me? SOMEONE SLOW THIS DAMN TRAIN DOWN.

But I don’t think it’s just me. I see A LOT of nostalgia these days. Remakes of movies barely 20 years old, our childhood cartoons come to life on the big screen, with a big budget and an adult storyline. Are we getting older faster, since there is so much going on, all the time, that we feel we must be clued in on? Is it because of the unending stream of NEW information in the RSS feeds and twitter and Digg, that we long more than ever for the comforting embrace of the old and familiar? Is it because now nothing stays around long enough to even BE familiar, because by the time the masses know of it, it is already old news and we’re onto something else?

Maybe that’s why I dress up as a stormtrooper on the weekends, and keep trying to find torrents and DVD’s of old cartoons. Maybe we’ve paced ourselves to death, where if we’re not into the newest of the new, we’re already old and useless. And who wants to be old and useless? We all want to be young, right?
However, the problem with all this looking back, is we do in some respects stop looking ahead. We crave the new in our data stream, but the old just keeps coming back in our entertainment. How many new movies are ACTUALLY new movies? They are either sequels, or remakes. TV Shows are beginning to follow a similar trend, with both positive and negative results. It is possible to take we loved and reimagine it in new and creative ways, to tell a story a different way (re: Battlestar Galactica). But this tends to be the exception, and not the norm.

What all this makes me wonder though, is will our kids go through the same thing when they are 30, or will they even have much to remake at all, since so much of today is remakes of OUR past. Will they be making the new new Battlestar Galactica? Or will someone finally remake Jem?

Or maybe these damn kids just need to get off my lawn.

Art is confusing, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

And a copyright violation…

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Waiting, waiting…, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

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Iriver wavehome, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

Home communications box, pretty slick looking

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There’s a giant blue turd at ces, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

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Lg wearable mobile communicator, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

Awesome!

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