I submit for your consideration, Food Porn:

I wrote a long time ago on Psychotic Resumes about Persistence – and how Wii Fit made me want to curl up into a ball and die.  That was back when I was perfectly healthy, still had an appendix, and the thought had never occurred to me that putting on pants would soon become an accomplishment.

It was, too – I wore pants for the first time since my surgery on Easter Sunday, and the lord saw it, and it was good.

And Wii Fit still makes me want to die. But I’m giving it another try.

I had a conversation with @empowerfitness on Twitter – she’s a personal trainer. She got me thinking that exercise is a really important part of my life that I’ve been neglecting.  As fast as I bounced back after the appendectomy – out of the hospital after two days, working after a week; I could have done a lot better.  I also think I could eat a lot better.  I want to be able to feel dizzy without thinking it’s some sort of stroke.

Starting today, I’m going to make it better.  I’m going to go to Kings and buy some somewhat healthy breakfast food.  I’m also going to get stuff for lunches and dinners.

The whole thing is hard for me.  Instead of cooking, I’d much rather go out and get something to eat, save myself the time, and use that time to be doing something creative.  Instead of bringing something to work that I’ve had to re-heat or leave cold, I would just as soon go get something and pay a little more.  And breakfast… well, I’m fickle.

I’ve taken a liking to these pre-split pink grapefruits, but each one has something like 300 calories and a TON of sugar.  Since it’s simple sugar, I guess I shouldn’t freak out so much, and I’m actually eating a decent breakfast.

Eating out works fine when you don’t have a ton of massive bills. I haven’t tallied them up yet, but I owe somewhere around $3,000 for my appendectomy. Maybe a bit more.

Besides the money aspect, I could be making a lot healthier choices for food.  I’d resolved to do this when I had my appendix out – mostly because my body just would not tolerate horrible food anymore.  Well, that went out the window after the first few BK chicken sandwiches.

It’s a difficult thing for me to think about – ultimately I know that I’m the one letting myself down. Maybe I’ll figure that out before it’s really too late to do anything about it.

First – the Technology Student Association (TSA) conference on Friday.  I judged three events (Music Production, Leadership Challenge, and Prepared Speech).  I’m very impressed by the students who participated and I’m confident that there’s some good kids coming out of Colorado schools.  I took a picture of the Castle Ballistics competition: on the right was a PVC ballista built by high schoolers (I think from Ponderosa).  On the left is a trebuchet (the top arm is folded down).

During the banquet dinner, one of the student officer candidates had plants in the audience, tailored his speech to revolve around the “audience interaction” and ended up getting a lot of votes… which I think was dirty pool, but an easy way to get attention.  Even if it’s in the short-term.

I ended up driving back to Fort Collins in a complete blizzard, which was fun… it’s much less stressful driving in the Jetta rather than the F-150.  There was a lot less sliding and skidding; the only scary driving moment came on Saturday morning when a crazy lady jumped in front of my car and made me stop a lot faster than I wanted to.  I missed hitting her bumper by about a micron.  But, one scary moment out of two round-trips to Denver from FoCo is a pretty good ratio.

Later Friday night, we took Darcy out to the Sundance for her 21st birthday party.  Her roomie, who has no class whatsoever, spent the entire night trying to get Darcy to puke and had her idiot friends spinning her, dancing too rough, and “gifting” two Prarie Fire shots – and you’d better believe they let her take those alone.  It takes a lot of nerve to try and ruin someone’s birthday.  In any case, Darcy took it like a champ, downing two Prarie Fires but smiling the whole time.

Then Saturday morning I got up early to go to the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta (pictured above at lunch outside the conference room) – it was a great event and I learned a lot.  Mostly about MVC and LINQ.  The shocker: besides ONE demo in VB, every code example was written in C#.  I tried to talk to a few of the Microsoft experts – I think they were put off by my directness.  These are the guys and gals who write the Wrox books… their pictures are on the covers.  They’re big-wigs.  It wasn’t really awe-inspiring though so much as awkward.  The three or so I talked to clammed up pretty fast.

I did have two awesome moments though:

1. Asked the Microsoft Product Evangelist if IE8 would finally support DOM Level 2 or if they still intended to pave their path to the web with the bones and blood of their developers.
   • Every slide said, “DOM Compliance Improvements” rather than “DOM Level 2 Compliance”.
   • The MPE did NOT have an answer to my question, and said I should speak to him after the presentation so we could figure it out.
2. Asked the Geomapping expert if there was a way to track Z-Index (height), trajectory, speed, angle, or any native way to track a moving object as it changes elevation.
   • Turns out, there is no native functionality in Microsoft’s Geomapping tools.

Then, after the conference was out, it was time for Leslie’s mom’s birthday celebration.  We went to Pasquinis Pizza for dinner, and it took them an hour and thirty minutes to seat our group of 7.  The worst part was watching smaller parties get seated, snipe tables, and otherwise act like jackasses.  Some lady sat down at a table for four, next to another empty table for four, which kept us from putting the two tables together.  We could stand upstairs at the bar, which was fine – but it quickly became crowded and they were moving incredibly slow.

When we finally got to sit down, they’d run out of grenadine.  The food was good, but it took a long time to get it.  Add to the fact that there was absolutely -no- parking and crossing the street was about as close as you can get to real-life Frogger…well, it was definitely not a restaurant I’d like to go back to.

The play, however… Defending the Caveman – that was funny as hell!  Definitely go while you can, it’s not here much longer, I think.  It was about 90 minute monologue played by a CSU grad.  Here’s what the set looked like:

We drove back to FoCo that night, and I was running on about 6 hours of sleep over the last two nights… so today was mostly sleeping and a treat – getting a massage!  Last time I went, they thought I’d asked for a deep tissue massage, but since I don’t like being turned into a pretzel, I ended up not enjoying it every much.  This time was much better!

I’ve got tomorrow off and plan on putting some work into WTF Marketing and Psychotic Resumes and clearing off my RTM List.  I’d also like to write a good first draft of Star Trek: Dimensions, record two or three Psychotic Resumes podcasts, work on the edit of the Sci-Fi Sound Off podcast, and get The Trek Project some new content pre-written.

Wish me luck!