Right now I am easily the fattest and most out of shape that I have ever been in my life. Not only do I see it, but worse: I feel it.

It Sucks. So Much.

I’m not at all big on New Year’s resolutions – ones involving weight loss in particular – but I AM a fan of arbitrary resolutions. Deadlines and goals, general and ill-defined though they usually are, seem to work well for me. Pride seems to be my greatest motivator (right up there with Fear), so the plan is to make my glorious return to health a public spectacle. Whether anyone actually cares or not (and I would bet heavily on the Not), I can easily delude myself into thinking that a public failure in my endeavor would be a source of horrible shame. I fail not only myself… but also you.

I actually first thought about inventing an arbitrary weight loss target and deadline and then offering cold cash to each of you for every pound I come up short. That incentive worked well back in the days of NaNoWriMo, but while researching weight loss and exercise routines I discovered that a 1-2 pound weekly weight loss is considered “fast.” The Biggest Loser makes it look so much easier.

My rough goal is 2 months and 20 pounds, but since I expect to be adding a good amount of muscle – I’m not sure I have any right now – a more realistic expectation is probably closer to 3 months and 15 pounds. I won’t be doing any special diets or calorie counting (that offends my sensibilities on a deeply personal level), but I’ll be making an effort to generally improve what I eat. I figure that semi-healthy eating coupled with twice-daily trips to the gym will go a long way towards achieving my goals of lowering my body-fat while increasing my strength and endurance.

Anyways, I won’t be offering up free money but I will be publicly recording my daily efforts. I have prominently displayed a link (it’s bold!) to my new exercise log in my right navbar for anyone who cares to occasionally check in. It still needs some work (header image?), and I won’t be writing full posts over there, but I will be sure to make daily notes of what I am doing for those who are otherwise bored and curious. Like I said, I don’t actually believe anyone is especially interested in my weight-lifting schedule, but simply having that schedule available to the public serves as a strong personal incentive for me to stick to it.

Whether anyone reads it or not, I feel horrible having to write “I’m a huge pussy” on the days I decide to blow off my workout. Oh, and write that I most definitely will.

As for the schedule itself, it is something that I put together after an afternoon of online research. In particular I read through these two websites and then crafted a hybrid approach of my own. Both sites seem to especially focus on gaining weight and building muscle, but my goals are to get lean and gain strength. They are both anti-cardio / pro-creatin, whereas I am more anti-fatface / pro-flexibility.

Aside from what I’ve read, I know basically nothing about exercise. While the jocks were all taking weight lifting in high school, I was busy dominating at pickle ball in co-ed gym. Still, I see no reason to blow a few hundred dollars on personal trainers just to be told one of the seemingly hundreds of equally valid opinions on the subject. I see personal trainers mostly as a motivation for the otherwise lazy – whether to knock out one more set, or even just to show up in the first place – but I’ve already solved that problem. My only real obstacle is in knowing what to actually do once I get to the gym. The program I’ve come up with seems like a pretty good starting point, though, and I’ll stick with it for a while and see how things go.

Still, if anybody has a suggestion I would be grateful and eager to listen.

Well… be careful what you wish for because this. is. awkward.

via WWTDD.com

…and finally his ridiculously awesomely weird roast of Bob Saget.

Well… we’ll get to that eventually.

I finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold yesterday, and then tonight I went ahead and watched the movie that Peter Jackson made out of it. I don’t know whether anyone else who visits this site has read or watched it as well, but for no better reason than to kill a little time I will break down my particular opinions of them both for you.

On my most recent flight into Vegas I was seated next to a woman who I noticed to be reading the final few pages of The Lovely Bones. At the time, I knew of the book only because of the movie trailers that seemed to run during every single commercial break around Christmas. The trailers made the movie look pretty interesting and when I asked this woman if she liked the book she gave me a short, but extremely enthusiastic dose of praise. I think her exact words may have been, “Oh my God! I LOVE IT!”

Having just been given a Kindle for Christmas (thanks!) I decided to hop onto Amazon’s 3G network and download the book while waiting for our plane to takeoff.

Ok, I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who still plan on reading the book or watching the movie. Come back when you are done and let me know your thoughts, but for everyone else you can click on the following link to read the rest of this post…

While the first seventy percent took me only two days to dominate, the final thirty lasted nearly two weeks. I honestly can’t remember ever reading a book where my opinion changed so dramatically partway through. The first hundred pages of Lord of the Rings was a massive chore for me, but the next thousand were amazing. Aside from that, though, I usually have a pretty solid grasp of a book after the first few chapters. Weirdly, The Lovely Bones completely fell apart in the second half. What started as an interesting, enjoyable read quickly devolved into an eye-rolling sack of girly nonsense. I literally used the final few chapters to practice speed reading.

When the book was finally over I really didn’t even feel like watching the movie anymore, despite having been so eager for so long. Of course, I sat down and watched it anyways, but mostly out of a sense of obligation. I could only hope that Peter Jackson had somehow saved the story from itself.

He didn’t.

For those that don’t know, The Lovely Bones is a story written from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl named Susie who gets murdered. That’s only the setup, actually, since she gets raped and killed in the book’s first chapter. The rest of the novel follows Susie as she watches her family from Heaven. The book tells a tale of the heartache of a senseless tragedy, the struggle of a family to survive in its aftermath, and the mystery of trying to catch a killer.

That description sounds like a pretty good read to me, and for the first half of the book it actually was. But then… things got super weird.

Around the two-thirds mark a cute, sad story about a dead girl watching her family from Heaven somehow transforms into a helplessly stupid literary clusterfuck. For no imaginable reason Alice Sebold suddenly decided to take a page from Stephanie Meyer’s approach to Breaking Dawn: she threw away everything that was good about her novel and instead asked herself, “what would a stupid 12-year old girl write?”

I don’t know, maybe the author just got bored.

Having watched from a distance for so long, Susie suddenly leaves Heaven and starts actively haunting the human world. She follows people around and randomly reveals herself to them (a power which no other ghosts seem to have, by the way, and which she didn’t have before either). The living people on Earth are never scared or surprised at seeing a ghost, naturally, and her haunting always makes them smile and feel loved. Nobody tells anyone else that they are seeing a murdered spirit, even though they all are. It is like each character has their own totally romantic secret.

Then, one of the girls from school suddenly develops the power to see other dead people. She becomes a stereotypical loner outcast and moves to New York City where she wanders the streets by herself, seeing the ghosts of murdered people. When she uses her powers to see what happened to a murdered child, she doesn’t bother calling the police or telling anybody. Instead she makes a little note of it in her five-star and goes about the rest of her day.

All of a sudden, everybody starts having sex with one another.

The killer keeps killing people, but we don’t hear much of anything about that – or the still unsolved murder investigation that dominated the first half of the book – because the main detective starts having sex with Susie’s mom. Unable to stand being around her family, the mother abandons her husband and children and runs away to live in a California wine orchard for five years. A few pages later it is suddenly five years in the future. Susie’s mom comes back from California and her husband takes her back immediately, the two now more in love with each other than ever before. Awww, it’s romantic AND realistic…

Towards the end of the book, the girl who sees dead people randomly comes across the spot where Susie’s body has been secretly buried for five years. In a completely unexpected twist (unexpected for a good reason), Susie comes down from Heaven and possesses the girl’s body. The audience gets twisted again though, because rather than tell someone about the body buried only ten feet away… or tell the police who killed her… or go see the family that she had been haunting relentlessly since her death… now-human Susie immediately has sex with a boy from her school that she barely knew, but always liked.

This tale of supernatural passion is a little weird when you remember the fact that she is still 14 and he is about 20. Bad gets way, way worse when in the middle of their preteen sexual escapade she looks into the boy’s eyes and tells him, “I am Susie.” Instead of being at all surprised to be having sex with a girl who has been possessed by the ghost of his murdered adolescent sorta-friend, the guy smiles longingly and says, “I knew there was something different about you.”

W.T.F.

After she finishes knocking boots, Susie leaves Earth again and decides that now it’s ok to finally leave the world behind her. Her unfinished business has been taken care.

Seriously…. W.T.F…

Her unfinished business was that she desperately needed to jump some dong? It had nothing to do with her horribly grief-stricken family? It had nothing to do with an unsolved murder and catching her killer (who is never caught, by the way)? There is no higher lesson to be had about finding acceptance in death, or forgiveness in the face of tragedy? All she needed was to ride some teenage dick.

At the very end of the book, before she finally ascends into Heaven, Susie makes one last Earthly stop and watches as the man who killed her tries to lure another young girl into his car. Susie uses her ghost powers to snap an icicle dangling over the man’s head, killing him.

Ugh.

So that sweet young innocent girl who we have lovingly followed for a few hundred pages spends the final act of the novel…

1) forcing control over a human body like some kind of demon
2) tricking a boy into statutory raping having sex with her
3) murdering a man

… and then she goes to Heaven with a giant Happily Ever After.

Hey, Alice Sebold: Shame. On. You.

Not at all surprisingly the movie plays out exactly like the book. The first half was decently good, but the final third was borderline unwatchable. I would actually say that the movie is probably better than the book, to be honest, if only because Peter Jackson goes nuts with his CGI. The story is still really bad, but P-Jax does a good job of making things look cool (I am a big fan of the ships-in-bottles sequence). The end result feels like a complicate mix of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fall, What Dreams May Come, Zodiac, The Sixth Sense, and Twilight… but clearly nowhere close to as good as any one of them (except Twilight).

Take that however you want.

Oh, and the reason I say that The Lovely Bones is why I don’t have a girlfriend is because looking at reviews on Amazon the book has a 4+ star rating after 3000 reviews. On IMDB the movie has a 6.8 rating after more than 9000 reviews. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that no matter what their age may really be, all girls are still twelve years old at heart. They will completely love anything, no matter how stupid in concept or how poor in execution, so long as the annoying teenage girl gets to eventually have sex with the annoying, older boy.

IT’S TRUE LOVE!!

Chuck Klosterman wrote wrote a series of funny essays about how all girls have a deeply rooted, but thoroughly unrealistic expectation of love that can be most clearly represented by the works of Coldplay and John Cusack. Klosterman whines that he will never be able to fully satisfy any woman because they are only interested in a fantasy that no man can possibly uphold.

I agree, but I think it’s more than that. I believe that for girls the ultimate romance is being passed an anonymous note during third-grade recess. The girl basks in the secret danger of that note, then follows its directions to an unseen part of the playground where she meets a mysterious boy with a bad reputation who the girl never before even thought about liking until that very moment. He gives her a simple kiss just before the bell rings and everybody has to go back inside.

In my mind, it all breaks down to that. Forget roses and chocolates and exotic getaways. Girls just want that secret kiss.

If I could somehow bottle and sell that I would be a rich, rich man. Clearly, I wouldn’t even have to package it well at all. As proof just take a look at Sebold, Meyer, or the tens of thousands of overt romance novels that don’t even bother pretending to be real literature.

Honestly, I may never vote for a woman to be president. All it takes is a hundred pages of Nicholas Sparks (who I also think is a terrible writer, for the record) to reduce any woman to a blabbering mess. “But Allie and Noah were meant to be together!! It’s SOOO romantic!!” Two hundred years ago stupid girls had their bonnets in a bunch over Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Today it’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (and sadly, still Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy).

In her defense at least Jane Austin could write. Stephanie Meyer, Alice Sebold… not so much.

I am now dripping with electronic allure.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for everybody else. While flipping through my 200+ back-logged potential love connections, I am routinely stunned by some of the choices that people make when crafting their profiles.

For instance, I just came across Amber – a 24 year-old office assistant. And here is her primary profile picture.

Other than to capture it with a screen grab, I didn’t alter the actual image at all.

Brilliant.

It’s hard to tell, but that looks like a fairly decent camera in her hand. Presumably it is capable of taking more than one picture… so was this actually the best photo of the bunch? Does she not have any friends who can take her picture instead? Is her sense of self-worth so low that she figured a blurry picture is better than a clear one??

Ahhh, I get it… she’s just trying to leave something to my imagination, eh? Every girl plays hard-to-get, but she goes one step further and plays hard-to-see.

Oh, Amber, you crafty vixen.

I closed my match with her, but I almost regret it now. So many questions left unanswered…

Although I am technically unemployed (self-employed?) at the moment, right now I am in the middle of several different programming projects. In addition to the random weekly bug-fix work that I do as an independent contractor for Netstudy (to pay the bills) I am also working on a large independent project that I will hopefully be able to sell to Netstudy when I complete it. The company needs a significant upgrade to their system, but unfortunately nobody knows how to actually go about doing it. Times are tight and they can’t afford to waste money on “maybes” so I made them an offer: I will teach myself to do what they need done, and if/when I get it working I will sell the code to them.

If I can’t accomplish the task then they don’t have to pay me anything.

That works out well for both of us. They don’t have to assume any of the risk – worst case they don’t spend any money and merely remain in their current situation – and can still end up with what they want. Meanwhile, I assume all of the risk (mostly wasted time and effort), but in the end my sale price will necessarily be higher than my hourly rate would have been had I simply been hired to do the task. True, it could be a bit of a raw deal for me in the event of failure, but of course I hold my abilities in fairly high regard. In my mind there is effectively no chance of failure.

And so it came about that I have been spending a lot of my time lately teaching myself Flash and ActionScript and how to read and write XML.

At the same time I have also been developing a pair of Facebook applications. There’s no money to be made from these apps (at least not yet), but I find myself spending more time and effort on the applications than on any of the Netstudy stuff. Like my project with Flash, I have had to learn how to do everything on Facebook from scratch. Even more difficult is that the programming languages involved in writing these apps are completely different than any of the ones I use for either my contractor job or my Flash project. Not counting any FantasyBlueBook stuff, I am actively developing in (something like) eight or nine different technologies, half of which I am learning as I go.

Jumping from task to task it can all get very confusing.

Anyways, I probably shouldn’t discuss my Netstudy project in any detail here, but suffice to say that my progress has been good. Hopefully I can hammer that out in the next few days, and then with any luck I can actually get paid for the hours I’ve been investing.

The facebook apps will take a bit longer to complete, I think, but they are more fun to work on. Just as I’ve heard the saying “write the book that you would want to read” (or the movie you would want to see), I am writing the app that I would want to actually use. I do not have any plans to patent these apps so I don’t think there’s a problem in discussing my ideas. Plus, I am really counting on you guys to give me feedback on how to make these apps as useful as possible.

Idea 1 – A Friendly Wager

I can’t speak for anybody else, but I make A LOT of bets with people. Whether I’m wagering a trip to the fridge or several hundred dollars, I am pretty much always in action with somebody. Keeping track of all those bets is extremely difficult and I am constantly arguing with people over the particular details that we each (differently) remember. Further complicating the situation is the fact that my friends are always quick to exploit any possible loopholes. It all becomes a big mess, but of course I keep making bets anyways.

I thought about building a website devoted to making and tracking my bets in a public way. Rather than making notes on my dry-erase board or an excel file on my hard drive, I figured it would be useful and fun for people to be able to see what, when, and how much I actually bet with various people. Quickly I realized that Facebook is already the perfect place for such a system to exist. With their architecture I can actually improve my idea by being able to build out a robust system that allows me to negotiate and confirm these wagers with my friends, eliminating not only the possibility of forgetting a bet, but also marking down in digital stone the exact terms of those wagers. I can propose a bet to my brother, say, and he can then accept that bet. When he inevitably loses to me, he can’t go back on his word… I have the exact date, time, and wager details of when he provided his e-signature.

For the more casual wager I am going to provide each user with a bank of ‘widgets’ which they can use to bet with their friends. I can, say, bet my sorta-buddy in New York ten widgets that the Jets will lose next weekend without either of us needing to actually risk anything. The widgets is just a way of keeping score really. In addition to trying to run-up a widget bankroll, these scorecards will also let me run stats on people to calculate things like win %, ROI, etc… that can make the system more interesting and fun. I am also building a series of privacy settings so that people don’t need to actually install the app to see it. You will be able to browse through your friends’ wagers and see what kind of stupid bets they have made. Each bet can be individually controlled so people can keep particular wagers private if they’d prefer. If you then want to join in the fun, cool… it’s a one-click install.

American Idol starts on Tuesday (and The Bachelor already has), so I had better hurry up and get a working version out there so I can prove my dominance to Jim and Zurek.

Idea 2 – Story in the Round
Unlike “A Friendly Wager” I haven’t actually built any of this app yet, but I think it could be fun too. Basically it’s just a collaborative story-writing app: the sort of thing we all did back in grade school. Friends can get together and take turns adding to a story, probably restricted to one paragraph at a time, and gradually build something. There are a few apps already out there that are sorta like this, but none of them (that I found) work the way I would want them to. I imagine being able to write a paragraph and then tag a friend, who would then be obligated to add a paragraph. Nobody can take over a story, but groups of friends for each story can be as big or as small as the creator likes. I think a lot of people like to write, but don’t have the time or courage to take on anything of length. This could be a fun outlet for people (like me). Plus, it’s another excuse to learn something new and practice building a Facebook app.

Any other ideas…??

Perhaps one that we can make a little bit of money on together??

Hopefully these first two “for-fun” apps will get me familiar enough with the Facebook architecture that I will be competent when I eventually come up with the good “for-money” idea.

Putting ‘finally’ in bold AND italics there still isn’t nearly enough to adequately describe how numbingly long it took me to polish off that medieval bad-boy. At this point it feels like the only book I have ever read. Weirdly, World Without End isn’t even bad; it isn’t hard to read, and it isn’t boring either. It’s just pretty long. One thousand pages is hardly a record for me – I think two or three Harry Potter books came close to that number – but for some reason or another I kept putting the book down before picking it back up again a few days or weeks later.

Anyways… that part of my life is over now. Let’s move on.

Having tossed aside that vanquished tome, I am already 8% of the way through The Lovely Bones. I have to describe my progress in percentages now because this is the first book that I am reading on the new Kindle 2 that my parents bought me for Christmas. Unlike my Sony Reader, which counts page numbers, the Kindle uses its own somewhat bizarre system of measuring progress through a book. Rather than describe the paragraph number (or some such similarly pointless metric) it will have to be enough to say that I am at x-percent completion, as though I were moving through a game of Metroid. Fortunately, that is an experience with which I am very familiar.

Last night I also watched the final episode of Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. There are still two more seasons left in the series, but I am going to take a short break from those fracking Cylons to watch Season 1 of Veronica Mars. Jim swears by this show – plus, Kristen Bell is super hot – so I will give it a shot.

Zurek and I watched the season premiere together tonight (… sniff… just like old times… ) and he was there when I declared Ali the winner as soon as she climbed out of the limo to meet Jake for the first time. Also for the record, Zurek’s pick is Tenley… who he picked closer to the end of the episode… but I guess that still counts (sort of).

This season’s bachelor is a pilot so of course the first episode had a few hundred stupid references to girls wanting to be his co-pilot or to climb into his cockpit. The best/grossest line was when the Cambodian girl said that she wanted him to come onto her landing strip.

Anyways, they better cool it with all those stupid puns or this season will be one bumpy ride… they will have to turn on the seat belt sign… some lucky lady might join the mile-high club… this guy is tired of flying solo… ugh…

This is insanely well done. Here is a video mashup of the Top 25 Billboard hits of 2009 and I don’t even want to guess how much time it took to create.

It’s 2am on Christmas Eve as I write this, and despite needing to wake up in a few hours I stayed up later than planned so I could watch the movie August for the second time.

It’s not a movie that will suit everyone’s tastes, but I am a big fan for obvious reasons. In my mind the best movies are the ones that stay with you, that can inspire you towards becoming something better than you already are. For me they are films like Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Stay, Miracle or even something more silly like Rounders. August is one of those movies that lasts longer than the end credits.

Eighteen months ago, back in July oh-eight, I watched August for the first time and wrote a post in reaction. I quote my past-self:

I would like to create a small internet-based company of my own.

Check. What else?

I am not looking to merely find a niche in a well established universe.

eh… ummm… well… let’s just call this a partial success. Eighteen months later I have succeeded only slightly more than I realistically expected to back then, but with a second viewing of August I now wonder about the next eighteen months to come. Honestly, I confess my expectations this time around are at their heart just as hopeful, but on the surface much more grim. Our website has every chance to succeed, and I believe it could do exactly that, but the problem remains that there just isn’t any passion for what we are doing.

Personally I am excited by the idea of personal success. I desperately want to build something out of nothing, have it be good and useful, and have done it on my own. What exactly is that passionate ’something’?

I don’t know yet.

In the wise and immortal words of Scary Movie 3:

George: I have a dream.
Tom: What is your dream?
George: To have a dream.

Meanwhile, with my own passions eluding me I have taken to latching onto other people’s dreams and adopting them as my own. So far that approach has been an epic fail.

Shortly after accepting my first part-time job at Netstudy I was all too eager to envelop myself in the enthusiasm and sense of limitless potential that seemed to surround us all back then. I somehow (quite easily, in truth) convinced myself that I actually gave a shit about insurance, and I told myself that the world would be such a better place if only insurance agents could earn their continuing education credits from the comforts of their own homes. That delusion lasted two full years.

I then went to Hubbard One, a much larger company in the heart of downtown where the people were all smart and cool. Still, even having an office in the same building as a Chipotle could not keep me from quickly realizing that Hubbard was in truth a code factory interested only in generating cash. The company itself cared for my existence only as a series of billable hours. And so, figuring that some passion – even if I didn’t share it – was better than no passion, I went back to work for Netstudy.

Now I work ostensibly for FantasyBlueBook, but oddly there is no passion to be found here either. I think it’s better that I keep the longer discussion largely private, but thinking about both where we’ve been and where we appear to be going it is enough to say that I have significant and growing doubts.

All this aside, for my part I want to resolve that eighteen months from today I can watch August yet again and reflect about the past year-and-a-half to come with a measure of pride. Hopefully FBB will have had another, even more successful year, but either way you can be sure that I will still be out there, continuing to search for my own passion. I would consider myself lucky far beyond what I deserve if I should actually find it.