Heath C. Ice

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.

A friend today posted on Facebook that the Admiral Twin Drive-In Theater had burned down before she ever got around to going. She was unhappy that she would probably now not get to see a drive-in movie. I decided to go on Wikipedia.” I searched for “drive in theater” and was instantly brought to the page for Drive-in theater. Skimming through the article, I found nothing about current theaters, but the “See Also” section of the article contained a link to List of active drive-in theaters.

This list contained theaters for Australia, Brasil, Canada, United States (broken down by state), and India. Listed under Oklahoma were Admiral Twin Drive In Theatre in Tulsa (uh-oh, this is out of date), Beacon Drive-In in Guthrie, Chief Drive-In in Chickasha, Corral Drive-In in Guymon, Tower Drive-In in Poteau, and Winchester Drive-In in Oklahoma City. Now, I was afraid this list was outdated since they still listed the Admiral Twin, but then I read the small description under Admiral Twin which stated “Note: The Admiral Twin burned down on 9/3/10, no word on if it will be rebuilt.” So short a time after it happened and Wikipedia has already been updated. Almost any other website listing something as random as current Drive-In Theaters would have been out of date much longer.

Is Wikipedia always accurate and update-to-date? No. But I have found over the years that it has given me far more right correct answers than incorrect answers. When everyone can edit everything (basically) on the site, it is bound to have inaccuracies at times. This same editing power, though, is what has allowed it to become one of the most vast and up-to-date repositories of knowledge I’ve ever found.

This is a panel discussion from the 2009 Christian Book Expo. The panelist are William Lane Craig, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Wilson, Lee Strobel, and Jim Denison. Some good discussion. Compiled for you here on my blog simply to save you the effort of finding all 12 videos on YouTube. Enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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I am a lazy bastard and I have been meaning to test this for days. Last week, Apple released a software update as shown below.

I found this strange since Apple is typically pretty vague about what it has fixed in many software updates. Good job on the part of Valve and Blizzard though in putting pressure on Apple to fix it’s graphics drivers. Anyways, I was curious if this would allow my Starcraft II install to run better on OSX. Previously, I could not run Starcraft II on “Ultra” graphics settings without having a framerate issue on my quad-core i7 iMac. With this new update though, I am not able to run with “Ultra” settings! I am happy. Granted that when I ran this test, Blizzard also installed an update, so that could have also affected the results. Anyways, I am looking forward now to better and better graphics performance in games on OSX!!!