my name is john
these are my words.
Bike Blogging
Jan 26th
Greetings from the bike! It’s been a while since I’ve pounded out a few thoughts on the ye olde iPhone keyboard while sweating to the indies (rock, that is). And so I figured today would be as good a say as any!
Bike talk time is 2:58.
WTF. They’re BLASTING Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul” right now. I thought this was supposed to be “power hour” with “loud music” and “explicit lyrics”. Boo. Cue the Eminem in my earphones.
There. That is much better. Eminem is such an angry old man. That anger translates well when trying to burn a few calories.
In case I haven’t had a chance to brag to you, my magic digits these days are 214. Yep. 214 pounds is where I’m currently at, down from 235 at the end of November. The goal is still 29 pounds away when I get to 185 (and I WILL get there!) People (don’t) ask me “John, how’d you do it?” The answer is simple – a highly disciplined diet, working out 4-5 times a week, and routines.
The food was an easy thing to fix. Yeah, there is still dinner out with friends, but I’m smart about it – and I do build an occasional cheat in to my food planning. I also graze at work – lots of almonds, fruit twice a day, and portioned, pre-packed lunches. (Yep – they have a little more sodium than I’d care to get in one serving, but it’s the portioning that matters most to me.)
The thing I realize (and it is a sad realization) is that to keep the momentum up, I’m probably going to have to shake everything up again going to a new level of routine, hard work, and discipline. But I think I’m ready.
Bike talk time is 15:20. (Yes, I’m a slow iPhone typist.)
Speaking of food, two of the guys from Frozen have embarked on something that is in my list of “100 things” – going veggie. @dejong and @selfreflexion have been solid on the veggie front for some time now. I have to admit, I’ve tried veggie stuff a few times with various results. Yves Mexican ground round is sweet for tacos. But what turned me off the veggie train were a couple of veggie burgers I picked up about 2 years ago. It was like eating paste. Not good.
All that said, the guys swear by extra firm tofu. Hmm. Might have to find an excuse to use it.
Bike talk time is 21:02.
Remember that episode of “The Office” where they’re participating in “Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meridith Palmer Memorial Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race for the Cure”? I always have visions of Andy Bernard in that episode whenever some hardcore guy gets on a treadmill next to me at the gym.
Bike talk time is 28:30.
There are now dolls in the image of President Obama’s daughters? That is reeeeeally disturbing.
On that note, I’m going to wind things up. Coming up on cool down time here and I plan to enjoy the ride.
Later!
+J
Diggnation #1
Jan 18th
On Monday, episode 3 of The Frozen Show hits. Brian and I finished editing last night… and it’s far and away the best episode yet. Be sure to check it!
In the meantime… I thought I’d share this with you. All the way back to July 1, 2005 — the very first episode of Diggnation. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht look SOOOO much different here! What is really impressive, though, is how the premise and format of the show has remained reasonably unaltered over the show’s four year run so far.
Check it…
+J
100 things to do before I die
Jan 10th
I’m not huge believer in new year resolutions… but I did want to do something that resembled goal-setting this weekend, and as a result I’ve come up with the following list. On it — the 100 things I want to do before I die.
Some things are a little wild, some things are a little tame, some are a little on the bizarre (and possibly out-of-character) side. Some things will take a lot of work and a little luck, others will be easy to cross off.
Regardless, these are my 100 things. What are yours?
100 things to do before I die (in no particular order) :
1. Visit Belgium.
2. Backpack across Europe.
3. Get in a hockey fight.
4. Go to a European soccer match, and sit with the rowdies.
5. Be an extra in a movie.
6. Work for CNN.
7. Write a screenplay.
8. Be free. (Debt free, responsibility free — just free.)
9. Spend New Years in Times Square.
10. Be the centre of attention on a red carpet.
11. Become “internet-famous” (even if for only 15 minutes.)
12. Learn to skateboard.
13. Be quoted in Time Magazine. (Bonus points if my picture is in it!)
14. Take the red eye from LA to New York.
15. Launch an internet start-up
16. Spend a month on sabbatical from the internet.
17. Get lean.
18. Grow a mustache (only to shave it off and never let it grow back again.)
19. Meet Oprah.
20. Study a non-Christian religion.
21. Try being a vegetarian for a month.
22. Write a song.
23. Ski a double black diamond run at Whistler-Blackcomb.
24. Go on a completely unplanned road trip.
25. Be a barista at Starbucks.
26. Visit Vietnam and Thailand.
27. Have a long distance (500+ km) relationship.
28. Learn to tango.
29. Be fit enough to do the parallel bar dip.
30. Live in Vancouver.
31. Stay at The Plaza Hotel in New York City.
32. Shoot, write, edit, produce a documentary.
33. Be on a reality TV show.
34. Treat my parents to an international vacation.
35. Hang out backstage one-on-one with a rock hero. (I have a few to choose from.)
36. Unwittingly be “the other man.”
37. Learn Japanese.
38. Close down a small town bar.
39. Go on stage and bomb horribly during an open mic night at a comedy club.
40. Master snowboarding.
41. Be stranded somewhere on Christmas.
42. Crash a wedding.
43. Invent something.
44. Be caught up in a protest. (Not necessarily participating…)
45. Go on a humanitarian mission.
46. Grow, maintain, and harvest a garden.
47. Be arm-candy at a black-tie event.
48. Own at least 1 share in each of of AAPL, GOOG, and MSFT.
49. Ghostwrite a book.
50. Go on a LONG hike in the mountains.
51. Serve Thanksgiving dinner at a soup kitchen.
52. Fall asleep at my desk.
53. Throw a huge house party.
54. Get a tattoo.
55. Spend a winter working at a mountain resort.
56. Learn to surf.
57. Storm out on a date.
58. Learn to play the piano.
59. Have a blog posting dugg to the front page on Digg
60. Fast.
61. Run a marathon (or a half marathon).
62. Join an improv group.
63. Tour a chocolate factory.
64. Volunteer for a major event.
65. Be in a boxing match… and win.
66. Camp out at a major music festival (Bonnaroo, ACL, etc.).
67. Go watch Saturday Night Live in person.
68. Write a script for a TV pilot.
69. Be storm-stayed at a truck stop overnight.
70. Create an application for the iPhone.
71. Have a holiday not unlike that portrayed in “Sideways”. (Minus the whole nefarious affair, and forgetting one’s pants at a woman’s house…)
72. Solve a mystery Scooby-Doo style.
73. Act in a Shakespearean play.
74. See Ben Folds live in concert.
75. Be *that* reporter during a hurricane (you know… standing outside, holding on to a garbage can, and hoping not to fly away.)
76. Help build a Habitat for Humanity home.
77. Be a bartender (like for real – not just at a social gathering.)
78. Work retail one year during Christmas shopping season. (As a part-time gig… to see how people get treated.)
79. Have dinner with the Prime Minister.
80. Go to a geeky convention (ComicCon, CES, MacWorld).
81. Attend a hockey game at Madison Square Garden.
82. Learn a martial art of some sort.
83. Write something for Wired Magazine.
84. Be part of a broadcasting team covering a major emergency (24+ hours of continuous coverage.)
85. Build something out of wood.
86. Simply *attend* (not plan, organize, cover or otherwise be part of the staging of) a Hollywood VIP party.
87. Meet Sidney Crosby. (Fitting…)
88. Get a piercing.
89. Go skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa / at Rockefeller Center in NYC.
90. Make a scene. In public. Loudly.
91. Learn yoga.
92. Go to an old fashioned, deep south, Texas-style barbeque.
93. Make an impromptu trip to see something I’m passionate about (a show, a band, something.)
94. Go to a major movie festival.
95. Acquire a taste for sushi.
96. Try wakeboarding.
97. Spend a day eating fast food in Los Angeles with Zsa Zsa Gabor while cruising around in a convertible. Barring that, spend a day cruising around Los Angeles in a convertible.
98. Learn rock climbing.
99. Own a motorcycle. (Sorry, Mom.)
100. Knit something (toque, scarf, or sweater.)
Seven things Apple should have announced at Macworld
Jan 6th
Apple’s Phil Schiller took to the stage of San Francisco’s Moscone Centre on Tuesday to announce a number of updates to the Apple product line. While many additions are welcome (DRM-free iTunes, 3G music downloads), there are some things Apple didn’t announce which I think would be serious upgrades to the company’s offerings.
1) Flash support on iPhone. Adding Flash support is a double edged sword for the Jesus Phone. Upside is that we all can enjoy services like Hulu (in the US) and other flash-based media streaming services. Downside is the bandwidth that might get consumed as a result. Might get REAL easy to use up a 6GB data plan…
2) Cut & Paste. I haven’t really gotten on the cut-and-paste-on-the-iPhone bandwagon until I started using Twitter real heavily on my iPhone. Simply put… Posting URLs inside iPhone-based Twitter clients is painnnnful.
3) TV room killer. Yep… Boxee is pretty cool. But DVDs are so passé. As much as I want to be all-Apple-VOD, I might want to pop in a Blu-Ray disc every once in a while. And I might even want to watch Anderson Cooper on PVR at 2am. Apple TV has a great interface… But it needs a take-three to get it right.
4) Multitouch in the home. I want multitouch on my next iMac. Period.
5) Better TV lineups in Canada & abroad. It isn’t fair that our US friends can toss away cable and live off Apple TV and Netflix on the 360 and we’re stuck watching 3 year old catalog shows from Comedy Central. Really… “Strangers with Candy” and “Stella” weren’t *that* funny.
6) Sideways mail on the iPhone. Really, I shouldn’t have to turn to third party software to make mail typable in landscape mode.
7) iMovie for not-dummies. The traditional, broadcast-standard timeline approach to editing video is not hard to learn or understand. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel! And rename the damn thing! It should be a product line : Final Cut Home, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Studio.
Oh… And one more thing…
Wireless sync between iTunes and iPod Touch/iPhone. That would SO rock!
But all that will have to eait until (hopefully) the next Apple “event”…
Boxing Day Shopping
Dec 26th
December 26 is more than just the day after Christmas for consumerists… It is the day when people line up for discounts (read anywhere from a piddly 10% to a grandiose 90%).
If I was in Saskatoon or Regina, I would have been lined up outside the big box meccas of consumerism like Best Buy or Future Shop. But I’m not in the city today. I’m back behind the garlic curtain — in Yorkton.
A quick drive down Broadway at 7am confirmed one thing : there indeed are only a handful of places to go Boxing Day wild. I’m standing in one of them now as I type … Wal-Mart. (I **was** at Zellers… but that was just wrong.)
Granted… I’m going to find a good deal of some kind here… But it just doesn’t have the same geeky afterglow of shopping at an electronics temple.
