Heath C. Ice

My walking workstation is working out pretty well so far. I just walked 3.2 miles tonight while browsing reddit, watching youtube, and watching podcasts. The only real problem I have found is that I have to lean over slightly to see the screen and this causes my back to hurt after over an hour of walking. I am working on a way to put a monitor at eye-level to alleviate this. I may end up having to buy a monitor specifically for the walking workstation setup

Each time I go back to Oklahoma on vacation, my friend Bill Jones makes a mix CD for the week or so I am there. For my trip in June, the CD contained:

• “Dog Days are Over” – Florence + the Machine
• “The Golden Age” – The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
• “Take Off Your Shirt” – Bibio
• “Step Out of the Car” – The Boxer Rebellion
• “Darling Buds of May” – Brother
• “Numb” – The Airborne Toxic Event
• “Roni” – Chikita Violenta
• “Living in America” – dom
• “Helena Beat” – Foster the People
• “Say My Name” – Holy Ghost!
• “Future Starts Slow” – The Kills
• “Kiss & Kill” – Le Butherettes
• “Young Blood” – The Naked and Famous
• “Still Around” – Toro y Moi
• “Holy Holy” – Wye Oak
• “Get Some” – Lykke Li
• “Love My Name” – Young Knives
• “My Body” – Young the Giant
• “Get Away” – Yuck
• “Morning Thought” – Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.

The entire CD was great, but two songs that will not get out of my head are “Helena Beat” and “The Golden Age.”

I woke up early Friday morning to find that Kevin Smith (@thatKevinSmith) was auctioning off the rights to host “The Sheriff” movie poster for “Red State” on ones website. I put in an initial bid of $1000 and was quickly beat by a representative of @filmthreat with $1250. I then decided to bid $1275, but was again beaten by @filmthreat with a bid of $1400. Things were too rich for my blood at this point, so I gave up. Since Kevin Smith was going to give the winning bid to the Red Cross Japan fund and also match the contribution, I decided to add $250 to @filmthreat‘s bid, bringing it to $1650. A few other Tweeps also donated extra money towards the cause.

If you’re a movie website or film journalist and you want to feature this poster or use it in a story, don’t be a detail-thin dick.

Be sure to tell people WHY the poster was released: because (Gavin Ap’ Morrygan (@Tearsinrain78), Darryl Clarke, Jamie Calder (@jamiecalder), Dan Duffy (@TheHalfFund), Heath C. Ice (@hcice) and FilmThreat.com (@filmthreat)) bid $2050 to earthquake and tsunami relief for Japan.

If you also include the link for Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief (http://www.redcross.org/) in your story/article, you’re not only being a thorough journalist, you’re also helping to save actual lives.

It only takes a few seconds longer to provide all available facts in any story.

Including THIS fact can help save lives.

Please also note, directly from FilmThreat’s terms for using the below image in a post: “If you use or share this Red State poster, then you also must mention and link to the disaster relief for Japan and Wayne Foundation charities.”

Congratulations to FilmThreat on winning the auction. Thanks you for such a generous donation to the Japan Relief Fund also! Here is FilmThreat’s post about the auction and Red State Poster.

Check out the trailer for “Red State” along with more movie posters for the film at http://coopersdell.com/gallery.html.

I’ve had a number of religious debates with friends online lately. This video pretty well sums up a lot of my thoughts from those debates. Here is a transcript of the video.

What the hell happened to me ?  It all boils down to the fact that I let myself get heavily involved in a work project that was stressful, required tons overtime, and had me travelling around the country.  I was too busy and too tired to care enough that I was eating too much and being active too little.

It was too easy to not notice just how much unhealthy food I was eating when I was travelling!  Typically, I would be trying to help a business partner integrate our products with theirs as quickly as possible, so I worked a lot of long days.  It was too easy to grab food on the way back to the hotel.  I would swear I was going to exercise, but typically I was so tired I just didn’t care.  I got into a routine a few times on my longer trips, but typically my thoughts would be “I’ll get into an exercise routine when I get home; I’m only here a few days.”

Unfortunately, when I was not on travel, I was working insane hours at work attempting to get the next software release finished so I could then go back on travel to help integrate it!  I would usually be stressed out enough by lunch that I had to get out of the office for a bit so friends and I would go grab a quick lunch that, typically, was not too healthy.  Hell, even ordering a veggie-burger at a lot of the places in town comes with way too much food.  For dinner, I worked a lot of unplanned overtime by deciding I should stay and “get just one more thing done” when all I wanted to do was get home.  Since I was starving though, I would run and get food at the closest, fast place to work; Taco Bell :-/.  Even when I did go home at a reasonable hour, I would feel so drained that the last thing I wanted to do was hassle with cooking when I got home, so I would stop and eat at a favorite restaurant (it didn’t help that there is an amazing Thai place and an amazing Mexican place in this town that were both on the way home)!  I was not much better about exercising when I was not on travel.  I would get home, eat because I was starving, and then feel drained and just want to relax, and exercise ain’t relaxing!  I even tried getting up in the morning to exercise, but I never got enough sleep as it was, so I always stayed in bed!

Throughout the years, there were a few times where I did ok with diet and exercise, but those were few and far between.  I am sure anyone reading this is asking, “So what’s going to be different this time!?”  First, I finally got fed up with being stressed and tired all the time, so I started transitioning roles at work around May, 2010 and my new job is amazingly non-stressful compared to what I was used to.  I love it!  Plus, even though I have to go in a little earlier, I get off work by 4:00 every day!  Now I am not worn out constantly and I actually have time to relax and then decide to cook some food or exercise.

It took one final thing to kick me into gear though.  I went to a short film premiere in LA on February 2.  While there, I got to meet some people (Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenburg, and Jeff Cannata) from shows I watch online.  I was able to get a quick picture with them, and, to my horror, here is one of the results.

I look horrible in this picture!!!

I’ve seen pictures of me taken over the past couple of years, but none had the affect of this one of “DUDE, you HAVE to get into shape!!!”  My skydiving pictures were pretty bad too, but at least I could blame those looking horrible on me being in a big blue jumpsuit.  I had told myself “It be nice to probably get into shape so you can go skydiving again.”  I plan on going to a lot of Geek/Nerd events over the next couple of years and there will probably be a lot of pictures taken with me in them that I want to be able to look back on and feel better than I do about the above.

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SO WHAT AM I ACTUALLY DOING ABOUT IT?
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So, what am I doing about it?  I decided the weekend after the above picture was taken that I was going to give $1 to PETA (I hate PETA) for every 100 Calories I eat over 1200 per day.  That Calorie count looks low, but I still sit at a computer all day so I don’t burn a lot of Calories.  I wasn’t planning to start exercising right off either.  I’ve done pretty good about it over the past week.  I do owe PETA $2.00 so far though!!!

I decided this morning to change my plans a little!  I was shown a program aimed at getting your endurance up from a couch potato to being able to run 5k non-stop by building up endurance over 9 weeks.  The program is called “Couch to 5k”. There is an iPhone app I downloaded for the program that helps to keep track of the workouts. I like the fact that the App tells you when to start and stop jogging during the workouts. I am modifying it slightly though and instead of building up my endurance running, I am going to use it to build up my endurance on my elliptical machine. If I attempt to go outside and run, I know I will give in to it being too <cold | hot | dark | sunny | etc>. I am also going to start doing the 100 Push-Ups program again. I have attempted to keep with that off and on for more than a year, but I always gave up after a week or so due to lack of motivation.  The $1 to PETA thing is still in affect, but I am raising it up to 1500 Calories per day since I am actually going to work out and be more active.

My ultimate goal is to get to 160lb.  I will be plenty happy once I get below 200lb again and especially getting below 180lb again.

Whiskey Lullaby is one of the favorite songs I’ve ever heard.

I’ve even gotten Bill to admit to liking a country song at one point; Brad Paisley’s “Alcohol.”

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I finally got around to making another big ThinkGeek.com order. Here is my loot! Click on the images to go to ThinkGeek.com.

I need help with my Facebook privacy settings.

I want my default Facebook posts to be viewable by “Only Friends; Except: ExtendedNetwork.”  I have it set up like this to filter those I don’t know well from seeing all of my updates.  There are many updates, however, that I post with the privacy setting changed to “Only Friends” so that everyone can see that particular post.  The posts that I mark as “Only Friends” show up in everyone’s “Top News” and “Most Recent” timelines just fine.  However, when someone from my ExtendedNetwork list tries to view my Wall, they see NO posts at all, not even the ones that were marked so they saw them in their Timelines.

Here is  screenshot of my Facebook privacy settings for the preceding paragraph.

I have also attempted to make a list that is the inverse of the ExtendedNetwork list and the set this as my default.  Therefore, all of my privacy settings that were “Only Friends; Except: ExtendedNetwork” became “CloseNetwork.”  Again, when I wanted to post something for everyone to see, I would change the privacy settings of that particular post to “Only Friends.”  I still had the same issue though, everyone could see posts in their Timelines that I marked as “Only Friends” but only people in the “CloseNetwork” list could see my Wall at all.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions on making Facebook do what I wish.  It may be that what I am trying to do is impossible with current privacy options on Facebook.  At any rate, the privacy options I chose did not have the effect I actually wanted.  I know that is a big surprise to everyone about Facebook privacy settings.

Many iPhone, Blackberry, and Android smartphones are now equipped with high definition video cameras. Most smartphones, however, lack a standard tripod mount connector.

Camera Tripod Mount

GorillaPod Flexible Tripod

I recently needed to mount my iPhone to a tripod to help a friend shoot a show. This made me remember the GorillaPod Flexible Tripod I had seen at the store. For approximately $17, I was able to create a tripod mount for my iPhone 4 that worked great for stationary filming. Granted, this mount is not suited well for a moving camera. All you need is a a GorillaPod Flexible Tripod and a 1/4-20 Coupling Nut. The nice thing about this mount is that it will hold most any smartphone or camera.

Here’s my iPhone 4 mounted using this quick and easy rig.