It all started with trying to find a way to top the most memorable Valentine’s Day with my wife. She always talks about the first one after we were married in which I hired a barbershop quartet to serenade her at the front door of our apartment. She claims they sang a song that was a key fixture in our wedding itself, a Victorian song that is also popular with barbershop quartets around Valentine’s Day. I consider it a lucky break.

I managed to (not so subtly) pry the name of the song from her a few weeks ago and found (what I hope) is an mp3 recording of a barbershop quartet performing it. Of course, I can’t verify this because I can’t let her listen to it without tipping my hand. However, even if it’s not the right one, it’s at least a romantic song sung by a barbershop quartet with the same name.

So, what to do with it, then? I finally came up with the idea to write an Android app using the song and a few other elements to create a customized Valentine’s Day greeting card app.

» Continue reading “Be My Valentine (or my first real Android app)”

Here it is December 20th, just before Christmas and two weeks into my journaling project. Although the volume of my daily entries has gone down significantly, I am still doing it. I’m sticking to major events and just capturing the highlights. It’s not exactly what I set out to do, but I’m pleased that I am still doing it at all since I grossly underestimated the time  and effort it takes to be so detailed.

The big news for this week is that I had another visit with the doctor. He mentioned once before in passing that it might be a good idea to try a basal insulin routine as a way to help bring the blood sugar down overnight. It’s also mentioned on the Bloodsugar 101 site that insulin shouldn’t be viewed as a last resort or the “we lost the fight” option, but it is the body’s natural way to utilize glucose and should be used to help relieve the body rather than medications with severe side-effects (especially fatal ones).

So, I led the appointment with the idea of trying insulin since my a1c results were back up and since the last time he increased my medication dosage, it seemed like I was always on verge of going hypo every afternoon unless I ate extra carbs which was not the right thing to do. In fact, I wasn’t going hypo, but the wild fluctuations in my blood  glucose levels left me feeling that way. He agreed to the idea and put me on 10 units of basal insulin at bedtime as well as drastically reduce the medication which stimulates the production of insulin.

It’s been 4 days and my fasting sugars are down and seem to be more stable throughout the day. They are still high and I believe he’ll have to increase the dosage, but I do feel much better. I’ve even renewed my commitment to the low-carb lifestyle.

Since my new job means I have a commute that is over an hour, I’ve been going to the gym at the office in order to allow traffic to ease up so I can spend as little time in the car. This has worked okay, but I’m working from home this week and will be working from home more often as I come up to speed in my duties. As a result, I’ve signed up a membership with LA Fitness. There is one both near where I live and one just down the street from the office so I’ll have one membership and two locations available to me. It should help to have some consistency in routine and available equipment.

I came across this article yesterday which was really satisfying to read since there is so much power behind the false message of low-fat diets. Dr. Atkins discovered the principles in the article and first wrote about them in the 1970s. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the world’s obesity problems can directly be attributed to high-carb, low-fat diets and especially to high-fructose corn syrup (now renamed corn sugar). My favorite quote from the article is:

Carbohydrates are a metabolic bully,” Phinney says. “They cut in front of fat as a fuel source and insist on being burned first. What isn’t burned gets stored as fat, and doesn’t come out of storage as long as carbs are available. And in the average American diet, they always are.”

Particularly if you have a history of diabetes in your family, as I do, you need to read the article and listen to its message. I had many opportunities to listen  and I wish now I had done more about it. I read Dr. Atkins book and had lost over 50 lbs on the diet several years before I gave up the low-carb lifestyle and ended up with Diabetes.

I’ve started a new experimental journaling project using Evernote. The aim isn’t necessarily to help with blogging, but I suspect that will be a side-effect. I’ve tried several different ways of doing journaling and I always allow it to be a Big Deal ™. I allow myself to become obsessed with *what* I’m going to post, *how* it will sound, *what* the audience is, etc to the point that I never post anything.

This new project is essentially to keep a detailed (how detailed is still to be determined) private journal of my activities throughout the day without any expectation that it will ever become anything more than a list of things I did that day. My thinking with this is that if I spend all of my retentive energy with the initial-list making that I’ll be freer to take that information and actually do something with it. I can train myself to not filter the input, but filter the output so to speak.

The corollary to this project is that I’m consider trying  to write a weekly blog post summarizing the week in some way, most likely an actual narrative. This will be the public part of the journal that, when combined with the private part of the journal, tells the whole story. Depending whether you want the complete picture with all of the mundane details or just the reader’s digest version. If nothing else, it will be something I can share with my posterity.

I discovered Minecraft a few weeks ago. I immediately bought two copies – one for me and one for my son so we could play multiplayer together. It was recently picked up by the guys at machinima.com and the videos are getting a lot of attention on youtube. The author is saying he’s getting 2500-4000 sales per day. Actually, these are pre-orders for the full game which gets you access to alpha.

The original game, now called classic, was a basic block-building sandbox game which has been around for about a year. You had unlimited resources, so other than building cool stuff, there wasn’t much to do. This version is still available and it’s free to play. The fun, however, is in the alpha version which costs 10 euros.

The entire world is randomly generated of blocks of different textures: stone, dirt, sand, gold ore, coal, water, lava, etc. Your job is to gather resources, craft tools, an explore. However, the bad guys comes out and night and try to kill you so it’s a challenge just to survive.

Here’s an intro video..

Here’s another video that shows some off some of the cool stuff you can build..

This is such a fun game and there are so many neat things to discover and do. I highly recommend reading the wikifor more ideas.