Oct 29 update

186. I ate a huge dinner at Romano's Macaroni Grill on Saturday and didn't eat very well the rest of the weekend either. I played basketball on Friday.

Exercise:

• ran 4.75 miles today with Tim R (ran 3.75, walked 1)

Food:

• 2 granola bars and coffee
  
• lentil soup
  
• 20 oz diet Pepsi
  
• dinner will be taco salad - I'm going to have spicy fish in my salad instead of ground beef.
  

- schneid

Swimming kids

Ben and Anna have been taking swimming lessons for a few years now. They are doing really well. Ben can swim freestyle the width of the pool. Anna can swim with some floaties or other aid. Both of the kids are moving up to the next level, but the best part is that they will have class at exactly the same time. For at least two months, our lives will be a little easier. And it's the same day as Suzette's class, so she can take them to swimming, I can pick them up, and she can drive directly from there to school. Two of our difficult weekday evenings will be combined into one.

- schneid

New computer!

I finally bought a new computer. The old one is 7 years old with a 600 MHz Pentium 3 processor. I was due! I just found a great deal on an HP Pavilion Media Center with Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q6600 2.4GHz. Ohhhhh yeahhh. I found a deal for $400 off. It has 1 GB of RAM because I can buy RAM really cheap for it. I bought 2 GB extra from Crucial for only $60. I'll probably use some Christmas money to buy an additional monitor to have a dual monitor setup. And I'll need a decent video card and an external hard drive. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

I need to buy a print server so that I can print from our laptop. But most of them sound pretty unreliable or expensive. If anyone has experience with a print server, I'd like to hear about it.

- schneid

Oct 25 update

185 today.

Exercise:

• Ran 4 miles with Tim

Food:

• 2 granola bars
  
• 16 oz coffee w/ equal and h/h
  
• vegetarian lentil soup
  
• 20 oz diet Pepsi
  
• 1 slice supreme deep dish pizza

It was 52 degrees at run time. I wore shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt, which was a little warm when we were in the sun, but fine. It was a great day for a run. I didn't feel like it at all but once we got going we were fine.

- schneid

Oct 24 update

185.

Sorry, I've been slacking badly on updates.

Tim went out of town from Fri-Mon and couldn't run Thursday either. I lifted weights on Wed, played basketball Thurs, lifted weights on Friday, and carried Ben 3/4 of a mile for what turned out to be a very scary Haunted Hike on Saturday.

On Sunday, Mom and John came over for John's birthday. I've been dying to cook some good food for awhile, and here's what I made.

Sunday's Provencal menu

• spinach quiche
  
• goat cheese toasts, aoili toasts
  
• mesclun salad with mustard vinaigrette
  
• baguettes with aoili or herbed butter (fresh rosemary, fresh basil, fresh parsley, fresh garlic, thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, mmmmmmm!)
  
• potatoes au gratin
  
• ratatouille (minus the eggplant)
  
• Provencal chicken
  
• pork loin stuffed and crusted with cherries and bread crumbs, cooked in rose wine with anise seeds
  
• chocolate cake - well, Anna and Mommy made that!
  
• French rose and red wine, Cotes du Luberon, Cotes du Rhone, and one Moulin a Vent.

Yum! Everything was great.

I really didn't feel like running on Monday, and fortunately they needed another guy to play basketball at the last minute. I had an awesome game, hitting a ton of shots, which is rare. I played bball again on Tuesday, not as well.

So, as far as food...I ate way too much of Sunday night's yummy dinner. Then a little too much of the leftovers on Monday. Today is my birthday and I treated myself to a sausage-egg-cheese biscuit for breakfast, but didn't eat lunch. Tonight we are going to Gino's East for stuffed pizza and Oberweis for ice cream sundaes (I love turtle sundaes).

So I missed my birthday goal by 5 lbs. I'll set a new goal of losing 8 lbs by Thanksgiving - that's 2 lbs per week. So I'm shooting for 177 by November 22. I've been keeping up with the exercise but not eating as well, so post-birthday, I'm going to watch what I eat more carefully.

- schneid

How to report a problem

In general, people are really bad at including a useful description when reporting a problem. People in technical fields should be good at this, especially people who are involved in software or product development, since bug tracking is a critical part of development.

I'm responsible for supporting some tools. It's amazing how often someone will report a problem, but not give any useful information. And they do it by phone! I hate receiving phone calls. I mean, sometimes it's appropriate, but I like email because it forces the person to write down a coherent thought. When they call you, they can just blather on endlessly without getting to the point.

A recent example was a phone message like this (almost verbatim): "Someone was having a problem accessing XYZ in the web pages." There is almost no useful information in there. Who is the someone? What web pages? What's the URL? I actually knew what the problem was immediately (that person didn't have permission), but couldn't actually solve the problem since I didn't know the URL and who it was. So I had to call back and get the correct information to fix the problem.

I love when someone includes all the relevant information. It does happen occasionally.

- schneid

Oct 18 update

185.

Food:

• 16 oz coffee w/ equal and h/h
  
• 2 granola bars
  
• veggie stir fry with teriyaki sauce
  
• 2 granola bars
  
• chorizo chili
  
• 30 potato chips
  
• 1 Three Floyds Gumballhead beer

Exercise:

• 3 on 3 basketball for 45 minutes

I grabbed whatever veggies were in the fridge to make some stew with chorizo, but there were only onions, mushrooms, red bell pepper (not much), and cilantro. So I threw those in with chorizo, kidney beans, and a can of diced tomatoes, and it ended up being chili. I added a lot of cumin, chili powder, and a little chipotle powder, and man it was good!

As for the chips, I worked at home from 8:00-11:30 PM, and I just had to have a yummy snack at midnight.

- schneid

Volleyball with Tim at GLC

Last night, I subbed for Tim Y at Great Lakes Center. It was awesome! Everyone played well, passing was great, hitting was great, serving was great, and I set decently. That was the most fun I've had playing volleyball in years. I didn't run out of gas and was reasonably quick. Being 15 lbs lighter helps a lot. One of the players on our team, Igor, was unbelievable. He's a much higher level than this league. He could hammer the heck out of the ball from anywhere on the court, was incredibly fast, and had a huge vertical. We connected on a lot of quick attacks and he just crushed them. Every time he hit, the opponents just looked at each other like "How the heck are we supposed to defend that?"

- schneid

Oct 17 update

186. I can probably drop 3 lbs by my birthday (1 week), although we're having my mom and John over for dinner on Sunday and I'm cooking a big Provencal dinner. If I can hit 183 by the 24th, I'll only be 3 lbs off that goal. Then I'd like to drop 2 more per week until Thanksgiving, which would put me at 175. Not bad.

Tim R has lost 21 lbs in 1 month! He runs at least a little bit almost every day, and I think that makes a difference. I just can't run the day after basketball because my knees are too sore. So I'm tempted to play less basketball and run more, but basketball is a lot more fun.

Food:

• 2 granola bars, 12 oz coffee with h/h and equal
  
• corn green chili bisque for lunch
  
• 4! granola bars for a snack
  
• a Founders Breakfast Stout and a bag of microwave popcorn for dinner! Yeah! I didn't get home from volleyball until 8:15 and I wasn't really hungry. :

Exercise:

volleyball

I have occasionally subbed for Tim Y over the past couple of years, but I haven't been totally comfortable with it because I don't play much volleyball any more, and I've been totally out of shape. Now that I'm in better shape, I can't wait.

- schneid

Oct 16 update

186.

Sorry, it's getting hard to keep up with the blog!

Food:

• 3 granola bars, 20 oz coffee, 12 oz diet Pepsi, corn and green chili bisque for lunch, went to Bennigan's for dinner: 1 pint Guinness (ahhhhhh), sirloin steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, about 10 French fries. 3 Dove bites for dessert.

Exercise:

• basketball

- schneid

Oct 15 update

186 today. Surprising since I ate a lot this weekend, but last night's run (walk) may have helped, and I'm probably dehydrated too. Just glad I didn't gain this weekend. I wish I could run every day, but with basketball it's too hard on the knees.

Food:

• 1 granola bar, 20 oz coffee w/ equal and creamer
  
• taco salad from home
  
• taco salad for dinner...I like taco salad...

Exercise:

• ran 3 miles

- Tim and I ran 3 miles straight today. It may have been more since it took 40 minutes. We had been slacking off a bit and walking too much, so today was a great run. Tim has already lost more weight than me in less time!

- schneid

Impossible to get tech support

Finding technical help on the internet is getting more and more frustrating. The companies that own the web sites are smart to create FAQs, support forums, and have lots of answers available. But ultimately you should be able to contact a person or send a problem report. And it shouldn't be so hard to find out how to do that. If you look at Google, you really have to jump through hoops to finally find a support email address just to report a bug. Same for contacting Amazon technical support.

I just found a bug in a software tool that I use at work. I have a license for this tool, but my company has no maintenance agreement. When I go to the tool's web site, the only choices for getting technical support are for customers with maintenance agreements. Don't they want me to report a bug?! I don't want any follow up, I just want them to know about it. OK, I want them to care, but if they don't, that's not my problem. It's their product.

Even if you report a bug, don't expect for it to be fixed. I reported a bug on dictionary.com many months ago, but they haven't fixed it. Their American Heritage dictionary pronunciation key has a bug, and in fact it's in the very first entry - it shows the symbol for long a (remember, long vowels say their name), but then the example word is pat. It would take them 2 seconds to fix that, if they cared. Obviously they don't.

- schneid

Oct 14 update

187.

Food:

• coffee, taco with ground beef, taco with chicken and peppers, pico de gallo, refried beans, guacamole, corn and black bean salsa, tortilla chips, chocolate cake.

I made all of that food from scratch, except Anna made the cake with Mommy's help. We had Bill, Carol, Caleb, Carlee, and Christi over for lunch and had a nice time. We decided to do something different and had Mexican food. Everything turned out great.

I skipped dinner and played online poker instead, which turned out pretty well and I increased my bankroll by almost 50%.

Exercise:

• ran (but mostly walked) 2.5 miles after the kids went to bed. My knees were still sore from basketball on Friday. So I mostly walked. I felt like I ate too much today, but at least most of it was healthy.

- schneid

Oct 13 update

187.

Food:

• 1 donut, 3 cups coffee, 2 slices leftover sausage pizza

Ah, the breakfast of champions! I finally let myself have a donut. We love to go out for donuts on Saturday morning. I limited myself to one. Then I didn't have lunch, and we had leftovers for dinner. So not the healthiest, but at least I didn't eat too much.

Exercise:

• edged and trimmed every edge in our yard, including the sidewalks, driveway, and curbs, then swept everything. That was surprisingly hard work.

Got some great cheap workout clothes at Kohl's. They had some sleeveless running shirts and sleeveless White Sox shirts for 3.88 each. I bought 4. Probably should've bought more. I'm not a White Sox fan. Don't tell anyone.

- schneid

Oct 12 update

187.

Food:

• 2 granola bars
  
• coffee
  
• orange
  
• small salad w/ bleu cheese dressing
  
• 12 oz steak, veggies, 10 oz red wine

Exercise:

• basketball

- schneid

Oct 11 update

188. I'm hoping to drop 1-2 lbs between today's run and basketball tomorrow. It's 54 degrees today, great for a run.

Food:

• 2 granola bars
  
• 1.5 cups coffee, with non-dairy creamer and Equal
  
• wrap club sandwich (included bacon and cheese)
  
• two slices sausage pizza

Exercise:

• ran at 2 miles, walked 1 mile - didn't sweat a drop

- schneid

Oct 10 update

187 today. Hooray, I finally broke the 188 barrier. 180 by my birthday doesn't seem likely now, that's 14 days to lose 7 lbs. I am exhausted today. Basketball is tiring but also hard on my knees and achilles.

Ah, autumn. Well, it appears to have lasted exactly one day. It was 88 degrees on Sunday, really nice and around 75 yesterday, and today it's 52. Brrr. They say we only have two seasons here in Chicago, winter and construction.

Exercise:

• none - I was up until 1:00 preparing for cub scouts, and had to run cub scout errands at lunch time, I'm tired and sore, yadayadayada. Lame excuses, I know.

Food:

• coffee (x3) with equal and milk
  
• 1 granola bar
  
• 6" tuna sub at Subway, no cheese
  
• 12 oz ribeye steak, onions, zucchini, and red bell peppers

- schneid

Oct 9 update

188 this morning. That's 4 lbs less than yesterday, so I guess alcohol + salt = water retention. Tim and I had a good run yesterday despite the heat (the day after they stopped the Chicago Marathon), and I drank lots of water in the afternoon. Fortunately, it's much cooler today and will continue to be more seasonal. I can't wait to run when it's 60 degrees.

Food:

• 1/2 apple, 1 granola bar, 24 oz coffee w/milk and 2 equals
  
• taco salad - grilled chicken, lettuce, black beans, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, salsa fresca, giardiniera, and 1 tbsp sour cream.
  
• taco salad - yes - I had the same thing for lunch too. Ground beef, and pretty much the same as earlier, except non-fat sour cream and no beans.
  
• small handful of soy nuts

Exercise:

• basketball at lunchtime - it really felt great today. I can play without running out of gas. I haven't been able to do that in about 6 years. And I played decently and hit a few shots.

- schneid

Oct 8 update

192 this morning. That means I gained 4 lbs this weekend. I'm totally embarrassed to admit it, but that's how this blog works. We were out of town and I cheated. I didn't think it was that much but I guess it was. Weekends have been killers for me so I'm redoubling my effort this week. I'm going for a run today and hopefully by the end of the week, I can be back where I should be.

Food:

• 2 granola bars, 1 orange, handful of sunflower seeds
  
• 3/4 pork chop, 1/2 cup brown rice, butternut squash with butter and brown sugar

Exercise:

• ran 2.5 miles and walked 1 mile

- schneid

Hanging out with Tim M

Tim M just became a Green Beret! He passed the Selection last year, and just finished the Special Forces Qualification Course which is almost a year of training. Not only did he complete it, he did a fantastic job. And it's not easy for an old man like Tim. Bahaha! Congratulations Tim!

Tim was in town for the weekend to see his parents, so I drove up to Woodstock to partake in some beverages and lively conversation. We went to some dive bar in Woodstock, and I didn't know the Bears game was on...but believe me, when I walked into the bar, I knew it. The place was jammed with rowdy young people wearing Bears jerseys and face paint. They didn't look old enough to be in a bar. Guess I'm getting old. We were able to find a quiet spot to talk. I always enjoy our social and political discussions. Tim will move back to Chicago in January. He's in the National Guard, so despite being a Green Beret, his military commitment is still only a few weeks a year unless he gets called to active duty.

- schneid

Oct 6 update

Don't know my weight today.

Food:

• 2 cups coffee with sugar and milk
  
• 2 little cinnamon breakfast thingies, about the equivalent of 1 nutrigrain bar

Exercise:

• we'll see

- schneid

Oct 5 update

188 today. Probably no updates this weekend, we're going to Michigan.

Food:

• 1 cup coffee with h/h and 2 equals. Forgot to eat breakfast.
  
• ahi tuna sandwich
  
• dinner at Ruby Tuesday - salad bar, 7 oz sirloin, baked potato with some sour cream. The salad bar there was great.
  
• pint of Sierra Nevada pale ale - I forgot how much I like this beer.

Exercise:

• none today. I'll try to do a run on Saturday.

Have a good weekend!

- schneid

Oct 4 update

188. I was really sore this morning from basketball and didn't feel like running today, but once I got some coffee in me, I'm ready to go!

Exercise:

• 4.5 miles - guess I wasn't ready to go because we walked more than 1/2 of this. My legs were dead from 2 consecutive days of basketball, and Tim ran last night.

Food:

• 1 yogurt, 20 oz coffee, mongolian stir fry with szechuan sauce, 2 granola bars, 3 slices frozen pizza, 1 tbsp peanut butter

The kids had pizza because Suzette had to leave for class at 5:30 and I just didn't feel like making anything for me.

- schneid

Oct 3 update

188 this morning, although I'm reluctant to record it since I feel dehydrated. But I always weigh myself at the same time, in the morning, when I'm feeling lightest.

Exercise:

• played basketball 3 on 3 today

Food:

• 1 lowfat yogurt
  
• 2 granola bars
  
• 12 oz black coffee
  
• 1/4 lb cheeseburger, no bun, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, mustard
  
• 1 orange
  
• seared ahi tuna with zucchini and onions YUM! and some corn with butter.

Yes, I ate a cheeseburger. But I thought that was reasonable since there was no bun, no fries, and no mayo.

- schneid

Oct 2 update

189 this morning - ran 5 miles yesterday and didn't eat much. 9 lbs left to go in 22 days to get to 180.

Exercise:

• basketball 45 minutes

Food:

• bowl of granola cereal
  
• 20 oz coffee with h/h and 2 equals (I may have overroasted the Zimbabwe coffee)
  
• taco salad: iceberg lettuce, grilled chicken, lots of salsa fresca, about 1/4 cup refried beans, a tablespoon of sour cream, and giardiniera
  
• 24 oz diet coke
  
• 1 pork chop
  
• 1/2 acorn squash with 1 tbsp brown sugar and 1 pat butter
  
• 1 cup sauteed mushrooms and onions
  

I felt great at basketball today, didn't get winded. That was nice for a change. And I actually made a few shots. I haven't played in about 6 months. I plan to play twice a week.

- schneid

Oct 1 update

I just ran 5 miles!!!

Yes, I walked a little of it. I ran 0.6 miles to McDowell (that always makes me think of McDowell's restaurant in the movie Coming to America), then ran 0.5 miles and walked 0.3 miles because I was early. Tim and I did 3 loops (3 miles) today. Then I ran back 0.6 miles.

I've only run 5 miles one other time in my life, with Gary 10 years ago. If you had told me just 1 month ago that I could do that in less than 3 weeks, I would never have believed it.

190 today. Yes, that's the first time I gained weight. It was a fun wedding weekend in Bloomington, so I've got my work cut out for me now, especially to drop 10 lbs by October 24.

Food:

• 2 granola bars
  
• 20 oz black coffee
  
• 1 orange
  
• 1 lowfat yogurt
  
• 1 slice Domino's veggie pizza
  
• salad: lettuce, spinach, carrots, homemade curry dressing, added balsamic vinegar because it did NOT taste good. Didn't help much. I missed the onions, green peppers, and zucchini REAL bad but we didn't have any.
  
• 5 cheeseits
  
• 1 lowcal fudge ice cream bar, 50 calories

Exercise:

• mostly ran 5 miles

I'm determined to drop 10 lbs in the next 24 days, so keep checking on my progress.

- schneid