Monday, 30 January 2006

Diet Progress: I lost another 4.4 pounds last week

For now on I will be posting my diet progress and other diet related posts on the PhysicsDiet.com Blog. You can see my latest progress report here: Diet Progress: I lost another 4.4 pounds last week

01/30/2006 09:31:00 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Sunday, 22 January 2006

Losing Weight

In October I read The Hacker's Diet. I first heard of The Hacker's Diet years ago but I thought it was a joke. Hackers live on pizza and Coke after all.

Two ideas in The Hacker's Diet really stuck with me. The first was using a moving average to track my weight loss. The second was the idea of using frozen dinners to control portion sizes and to count calories. The idea of counting calories never appealed to me because I couldn't imagine myself measuring and weighing all the food I eat. But I could definitely see myself eating just the controlled portions in a frozen dinner. Especially if the frozen dinners were good.

I bought a scale and started my diet on 10/28/2005. At that time I weighed 324 pounds. At a height of 6' 2" that put my Body Mass Index at 41.6. At the time I hadn't calculated my BMI so I didn't realize that I was officially morbidly obese. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing, that I was morbidly obese, or that I didn't realize that I was morbidly obese.

I started weighing myself and recoding my weights every day. At first I tried to use The Hacker's Diet Spreadsheets. But those spreadsheets haven't aged well and they don't work well in newer versions of Excel. So I created my own software to track my diet. It didn't take long for me to realize that the software I created for myself could be useful to a lot of people. So I started to tune the software so I could make it available to anyone who wants to use it. And that is why I'm posting about my today. I'm finally ready to make my software public.

If you'd like to lose a little or a lot of weight, I highly recommend The Hacker's Diet. And if you decide to give The Hacker's Diet a try, I invite you to use my new site PhysicsDiet.com to track your diet. PhysicsDiet.com is free now and I plan to keep it free forever. I plan to support it with income from non-intrusive advertising like Google Adsense and Amazon Associate links.

This morning I weighed 265 pounds. In just under 3 months I have lost 59 pounds. Below is what my current PhysicsDiet.com weight chart looks like.

My PhysicsDiet.com Weight Chart from January 22, 2006

I want to lose another 60 pounds or so in the next 3-4 months. I still have a lot work to do on PhysicsDiet.com, but I plan to do a lot of that work in the next 3-4 months too. As I lose the weight that I've gained over the last 8 years, I feel like I'm getting my life back. A few months ago I posted about Making Meaning. I think I finally found a way to do that through software.

I will post more about my diet and PhysicsDiet.com in the coming weeks and months.

01/22/2006 19:51:40 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Wednesday, 02 November 2005

Why doesn't my custom DataGridViewColumn show up in the ColumnType combo box?

I added a new class to a Windows Forms project that derives from DataGridViewColumn. I expected that type to show up in the DataGridView editor's ColumnType list. But it didn't. After spelunking in Reflector I saw that the designer uses ITypeDiscoveryService.GetTypes() to load the list of DataGridView column types. ITypeDiscoveryService.GetTypes is supposed to find all public types that derive from DataGridViewColumn in all referenced assemblies. And that is when I realized that my custom DataGridViewColumn class wasn't public because VS.NET 2005 doesn't declare classes public by default the way previous versions of VS.NET did.

That is two hours of my life that I will never get back. ;-)

11/02/2005 14:19:26 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Saturday, 26 March 2005

Stall Awareness Training

The FAA Airplane Flying Handbook is a great manual. But in the section on Stall Awareness it does not discuss the why of stall awareness training. I had my own ideas on why it is important, but I wanted to make sure I have a deep understanding so I Googled it. I found this excellent article on the subject:

FCI Emergency Maneuver Training: Review of New AOPA Stall/Spin Study by Rich Stowell

03/26/2005 22:36:11 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Tuesday, 22 March 2005

Aviation Blogs

I'm collecting the aviation blogs I find in del.icio.us using the tag aviationblog. You can see them here:

del.icio.us / tag / aviationblog

So far I'm the only person using that tag but I'm sure that won't last long.

03/22/2005 20:20:49 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

Is renting an airplane your only option?

Is renting an airplane your only option? The editor of $100 Hamburger recently answered that question in this series of articles:

03/22/2005 19:41:00 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Sunday, 20 March 2005

Make Meaning

There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture:

Do I want to make meaning?

Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It's not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of "meaning" are to

  • Make the world a better place.
  • Increase the quality of life.
  • Right a terrible wrong.
  • Prevent the end of something good.

Goals such as these are a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead. If you answer this question in the negative, you may still be successful, but it will be harder to become so because making meaning is the most powerful motivator there is.

It's taken me twenty yeas to come to this understanding. [Guy Kawasaki - ]

For six months I've tried to answer that question. I've thought about the times I was happiest in my life. I realize that I am happiest when I am teaching and inspiring people to do something they consider impossible. That is my purpose in life.

What should I teach? I've thought about teaching technology, but that bores me to tears. One of the few good teachers I've had was my high school chemistry/physics teacher Mr. Seela. He won Iowa Teacher of the Year for 2004 and he deserved it. Mr. Seela was one of the few people who never gave up on me in high school. No matter what I did, he kept trying to reach me. I've thought about following in his footsteps and teaching high school science. But the pay sucks. And the system sucks. Mr. Seela deserves to make 10 times what he makes but most of my other teachers should not be allowed within 100 yards of the nearest classroom.

When I was younger I dreamed of being a software developer, a Navy SEAL, or a Navy fighter pilot. At one point I planned to become all three - a real life MacGyver if you will. Eventually I realized one of my dreams. I became a software developer. I should be happy right?

Last year I realized that writing code to make someone else more profitable, by making banks more profitable, isn't that fulfilling. That's when I decided to go into business for myself. I thought that if I chose the products I worked on, I could make meaning with the products I created. But the idea of writing code in my spare time doesn't appeal to me anymore. I want new challenges. More importantly, I want to spend more time working with people than I do working with machines.

Then I remembered one of the other passions from my youth - flying. I've thought about becoming a flight instructor in the past, but like many teaching professions, the pay sucks. But I see ways to change that. And I want to change it. I want to change the way the flight training industry works. I want to find a way to make flight instructor the premium position in the aviation industry. I also want to find a way to reach kids that are like I was in school. I know that Mr. Seela could've reached me by teaching me to fly. That would have been the motivation I needed to live up to my potential in school. I know that there are kids out there like me, who need something to focus their attention. I know that through flight instruction, I can change the world. And who doesn't want to change the world?

So thanks David Seela. Thanks Guy Kawasaki. Thanks Robert Scoble. Thanks Steve Pavlina. Thanks Dave Winer. Thanks Adam Curry. Thanks Eric Sink. Thanks Jon Udell. Thanks Seth Godin. Thanks Jack Canfield. Thanks Harvey Mckay. Thanks Duane "Dog" Chapman. You have all inspired me to change the world.

03/20/2005 11:16:06 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Tuesday, 15 March 2005

This Is Your Life

This is your life, are you who you want to be?

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be... ...when the world was younger and you had everything to lose?

- Switchfoot

03/15/2005 08:12:57 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback

 Sunday, 30 January 2005

Design Magazines

From the Department of Broader Horizons I bring you two excellent design magazines:

01/30/2005 21:04:31 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback