Beosig's Rambling Thoughts

I just finished watching the EliteXC fights that were on CBS tonight. The fighting was high quality, and I have a great deal of respect for anyone that gets in the cage. I also have even more admiration for those that do well, and everyone did well tonight.

However, I have some major complaints about the support staff that surrounded the fighting.

The fight between Gina Carano and Kaitlin Young went to the end of the second round, and then was stopped by the doctor because of Young's eye. I disagree with this stoppage. The cheekbone around under Young's left eye was swollen, but it was not impairing Young's vision at all. Young's eyes were clear, and vision was fine. I think the doctor pussed out and stopped the fight "in case" vision became impaired. You know what? That's the ref's job. He is there to pause the fight if he thinks that an injury has become dangerous enough to warrant a doctor's inspection. At that time, the doctor can review things and stop the fight if necessary. If fights were stopped because something might go wrong, then the fights should never happen at all. I don't know what kind of doctors New Jersey has or what kind the NJ Athletic Commission has, but I'm starting to think that the doctors were proctologists hired to make sure the fighters' visual abilities aren't impaired.

Also, the fight between Robbie Lawler and Scott Smith was a championship match that was stopped before the end of the 3rd round because Smith got poked in the eye. The stoppage was another doctor stoppage. Again, I think it was a proctologist was in charge of checking for eye damage. Because the 3rd round didn't finish, it was declared a No Contest fight. They got a camera right up in Smith's face immediate after the doctor stoppage, and his pupils were equally dilated, and his eyes were very clear. If there was a problem, it was a scratch to the eye. In this case, if the fighter says he can see clearly, then let the fight continue. I know that the fighter will almost always say that they can continue, but without fancy optometric equipment (which I doubt is handy in a fighting cage), a doctor cannot determine if a scratch impairs vision or not. In this case, they must trust the fighter and let the fight continue.

The referee of the final fight (some hard to pronounce Italian name -- Margliannio or something like that) stopped the fight as a TKO while Thompson was still standing and Kimbo Slice was still swinging. If Slice landed two more shots, Thompson was going to go down. However, Thompson had been in trouble a few other times during the fight, and had taken the fight to the ground. Slice showed little-to-no ground skills, and the referee should have allowed Thompson the chance to take the fight to the ground... or be knocked the ground. My guess is that Slice was going to knock Thompson to the ground, but the referee should have waited until that happened before stopping the fighting. I think the referee was just too chicken-shit to jump in between Slice and Thompson if it went to the ground-and-pound by Slice.

The doctors and the referee should not be allowed near another MMA fight until they are better trained to handle the complexities and "normal situations" that occur in MMA fights.

Before I finish, I want to say something: Safety is paramount for the fighters. I've often heard that the #1 job of a referee is to keep the fighters safe. Bullshit. The #1 job is to enforce the rules properly (most of which are designed for safety first and fairness secondary.) The very close second job is to keep the fight as safe as an MMA fight can be. If someone is still standing, and is about to be knocked out, then let the knock out happen. Don't jump in because someone might get hurt. That's an insult to everyone involved in the entire thing, from the fans, to the fighters, to the trainers, to the managers of the fighting organizations. Yes, you want to keep the fighters safe, but their job is to step up and hurt each other in the most effective manner allowed by the rules. You can't guarantee 100% safety during their "working hours" like you can a software engineer, receptionist, or a CEO. It's a different kind of job, dammit.

After about a month of silence from the bosses on getting approval for OSCON 2008, I received a reminder from O'Reilly that early registration ends on Monday. I decided to nag a little (I had also been silent about the whole thing) and found out that my trip had been approved for the time off by my daily manager, and for the budget from my money manager. Now I need the Executive Vice President (who happens to be the boss of both of my managers) to sign off on things. I filled out the appropriate paperwork, and gave it to the budget boss. I should find out in the next day or two if the EVP signs off on the trip.

Things are looking up for a trip to Portland in July! I can't wait!

PVPOnline is one of my daily web comics, and I've enjoyed it for years. I've laughed at a greater percentage of PVP than most other web comics, so I keep coming back. The comic from yesterday made me cry. Not tears of laughter, or tears of sadness. They were tears of happiness and being touched. This is a great moment in the long-term story arc between Brent and Jade, and I can't wait to see what Mr. Kurtz has in store for the cast of PVP in the future.

Registration for OSCON 2008 opened today (or maybe yesterday?) and I put together what I thought was a compelling argument to both my bosses to allow me to go again this year. By the time OSCON rolls around, I'll have the vacation time, and maybe the money to just go on my own dime. However, it would be really nice if the employer would pick up the tab again this year.

We'll see how it goes, and I'm hoping for the best!

I screwed up and must have missed the warning emails from Network Solutions (my domain name registrar) about the fact that my domain name was about to expire. I got an email this morning telling me that my domain name protection service had expired, which meant that anyone in the world could have scooped up my domain name. Fortunately, the domain name is worthless. It's really not a great e-commerce or business name, so it's pretty safe.

I'm just glad someone didn't snag it, park it, and ransom it for big bucks. I'm not sure I would have shelled out the money for the ransom had this happened. I guess it would have depended on the price and how well I trusted the ransom holder.

Anyway, beosig.net is safe for another three years.

PS: I did check my other four domains (yes, I have five total), and they are fine for a while. As a matter of fact, the one I have for my son is good until he turns 10 years old, and he's only four months old at the moment. Heh. That's assuming that the whole WWW as we know it now still exists a decade from now.

As most of you know I went to OSCON 2007 last year. I recently subscribed to the OSCON 2008 RSS feed in anticipation of going again this year. The OSCON 2008 RSS feed had a large dump of articles today, and I was linked in with them!!! This really makes me happy and proud that O'Reilly thinks that my write-ups on the conference warranted linking to.

Here's a blurb that they pulled from one of my posts and put on their site:

"The trip was worth every penny, every bit of effort, the lost sleep, and the crazy schedule. I learned more than I ever thought I would. I met more people than I thought I would, and I got to learn about new companies, new products, and new ideas. I really hope to be able to return next year, but that’s a year off. We’ll see how it goes at that time."

I tend to try to work my links into my wording, but there are too many to try to do that with. Here they are:

OSCON -- Day 1

OSCON -- Day 2

OSCON -- Day 3

OSCON -- Day 4

OSCON -- Day 5

O'Reilly's link back to me

In continuation to the Health section of my most recent post, I've decided to let you know what the last week plus a few days has entailed.

As you already know, I came down with constipation last Friday, overdosing on prune juice last Tuesday, diarrhea, gas, and finally feeling more human last Wednesday.

Turns out that I felt wonderful on Wednesday because my appendix ruptured sometime Tuesday night, and this relieved the pressure that I was feeling in my gut. Shortly after my post last Wednesday, I ended up taking a turn for the worst. I hopped in the bathtub, and soaked in a luke-warm bath that I was trying to make hot for about 30 minutes. Then I went to bed, and I'm pretty sure I moaned my way through the rest of the night.

For some horribly stupid reason, I went to work Thursday morning. I was feeling about as bad as I've felt since my last case of food poisoning, but I wasn't throwing up. I really should have hit the ER Thursday morning. I managed to suffer through Thursday, and when I got home, I had some after-hours work to do. I expected to start it around 8 PM, and finish it long before 9 PM. 11:45 PM rolled around before I was done and shutting down my computer. I emailed my boss and told him that I was going to my doctor or the ER, whichever could get me in first thing in the morning.

The ER won that contest hands down, and I'm glad they did since they had all of the appropriate equipment to take care of me here at the hospital. I got to the ER around 10:45, got triaged right away, got into an exam room within 25 minutes, and started getting checked out. After some blood work, urinalysis, and questions by the doctor, I was headed to radiology.

Something on the films in radiology, and the fact that my white blood cell count was very high made the doctor have me sent for a CT scan of my belly. However, I had to drink this contrast stuff and wait 2 hours. I downed the contrast stuff as quickly as I could, and I was done with it by 13:18.

About 15:40, I was taken for the CT, where that went well enough, and then back to my room. From there, I was hopped up on some pretty good pain meds, but I still managed to call Kiara a few times to let her know that I was still kicking, but had no diagnosis just yet.

I was woken up some time later by Dr. Tracy (her first name, not her last. I never got her last name, but I do remember vivid green eyes that were very soothing to look into) who told me that I had appendicitis!

Well, now I knew what the problem was, and what the treatment was going to be. A specialist was called in, and it took him a while to show up, but he got there. He started arranging for an OR, and staff and such like that. I called Kim to let her know what was going on, what I wanted from the house, and then started calling family to let them know.

At 19:51, I was rolled into an OR, and was out fairly quickly after getting settled on to the operating table. I was told that the surgery took about 45 minutes (as was expected), and that the appendix had burst, and turned gangrenous. Uck. That means that it had burst several days before which the doctor and I figured out after comparing notes later on.

I've been on IV antibiotics since the surgery, and things are progressing well. The pain is getting less and less every few hours, and I'm able to move around a little more. Just a few hours ago, I managed to get my first shower in since Tuesday night, and that made all the difference in the world!

I was hoping to go home today, but that didn't happen. I've been told that the goal is for tomorrow, so we'll have to see how that goes.

I'll try to keep you updated as things progress. I better wrap this up since my early dinner just arrived, and my digestive medicine has finally had a chance to kick in.

Maybe I'll post tomorrow, but no promises.

Life's been pretty busy lately, so no posts even though I have quite a few ideas. Instead of trying to find the time to give everything the full treatment here's some summaries. I wish I could do a full post about each of these, but that's just not going to happen...

GaryCon 2008: In honor of Gary Gygax, we got together the weekend after his death to play some classing First Edition AD&D. We got together Friday night and generated quite a few characters, and then got together Saturday for an unknown module. We had Kolvedic running the game (best 1st ed. AD&D GM I've seen), and we had Jhianna, Spice, Jasmine, Bobo, The California Transplant Couple, and myself playing. We had in the group a ranger, fighter, thief, cleric, mage, cavalier, and another fighter in the group. I was playing the cavalier and had a blast with it. I bellowed orders, charged the enemies, called them cowards, and wreaked havoc. The rest of the group followed me with a great deal more intelligence and restraint, which is good because I died, was reincarnated, came back as a badger, and was polymorphed back into my original shape of an elf. Good stuff. I thought I was a bad-ass during the game, but when we tallied kills, I came away with killing an already wounded hell hound. Yep. The good old cavalier took out a wounded mutt. Dammit. Ah well. That's ok. We all had a blast, and it was a good time. It reminded me of how good D&D could be. The unknown module turned out to be G3 - Hall Of The Fire Giant King. Also, in honor of Gary, I bought some good 15 year old single malt scotch since he liked to drink that. No one joined me in lifting a glass to his name, so I drank most of the bottle myself (across both nights that is.) Turns out that I really like scotch so long as there is a splash of water in the glass. Who would have known?

Kiernan: He's growing, smiling, and being a great little kid. He went through his first head cold, and he was miserable. That didn't make us happy because we didn't like to see him unhappy, and he had a hard time not crying most of the time because life sucks when you're sick. He's finally over it, and life is back to normal. I'm loving every moment of being around him, and after a long, hard day at work, it's good to see him smile at me the first thing in the evening. It really warms the heart.

School: I started two new classes a little over two weeks ago. One is my last undergrad class (computer system security) and the other is my first graduate class (concepts of information technology). The computer security class is really neat and interesting, and not horribly difficult. The concepts of IT class is a bitch, though. The concepts and teachings are very much the same stuff (though updated) that I learned back in jr. high and high school. BORING. However, I have a cast study and a research paper due each week. The case study needs to be 2-3 pages in length, and the research paper is 8-10 pages in length. That's 10-13 pages of research and writing EACH WEEK. Urhg. Oh. By the way. There's a 15-20 page essay due at the end of the class. Damn!

10 Year Wedding Anniversary: Yep. Kiara and I made it 10 years! Yay! She got me some really awesome professional photos of her and Kiernan that are just perfect. I love them all, and most of them are in large format in very nice frames to put around the house and in my office. I finally got to give her the engagement ring that I've been owing her for over 10 years now. I bought it back in December, and I've been sitting on it for four months. It took quite a bit not to give it to her early. The ring didn't make her cry, but she did tear up some. I think that maybe if my presentation was better, I could have opened up the water works. I was just too nervous to make the moment more special than it already was. I was almost as nervous as I was when I asked her to marry me on July 4th, 1997.

Health: I came down constipated last Friday. This has never happened me before as I'm usually on the other end of the digestive spectrum. I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I figured it would pass. It didn't. By the time last night rolled around I was totally miserable. It hurt to move anything but my fingers, I was bloated, and I felt like utter crap... well.. full of crap, actually. I got my hands on some prune juice (nasty stuff!) and downed 20 ounces of it. After the fact, Kiara informed me that you're really not supposed to drink more than 8 ounces at a time. Crap. Literally. After about 90 minutes, the prune juice kicked in, and I spent the next 5-6 hours on the toilet. Ugh. However, I feel MUCH better today. Sorry to share this with you, but I just had to. Oh? You say that I didn't? Too bad.

Doctor: One thing came out of the constipation episode. I made an appointment with my doctor for several things. One was my gnarly toenails, another was my inability to totally quit smoking, and the last was to talk about the history of colon cancer in my family. I was really afraid that I was 100% blocked off due to a tumor. Nope. I'm not a hypochondriac, but with my family history and the way I was feeling, it crossed my mind more than twice. Anyway, I got a prescription for Lamasil for the toenails, but have to wait for some liver tests to come back. I also got a referral to a GI doctor for my first annual colonoscopy. I'll make sure to post the video when I get it. Just Kidding! I also got a prescription for Chantix for the smoking, but the doctor said that with as little as I smoke (about a pack a week or so) that I'm probably not addicted to the nicotine anymore, and it's all mental. Plus, the Chantix is not covered by insurance, only works 3% of the time, can cause massive nausea, and has, in rare cases, caused people to have suicidal thoughts. I'm pretty sure the suicidal thoughts are from the lack of smoking and not the addition of the drug. Anyway, I'm not going to do the Chantix thing. The doctor suggested hypnotism for the smoking. A few other people have told me this, so I think I may give it a try. However, Kiara and/or Craing will be there with a baseball bat. If the hypnotists starts to make me cluck like a chicken or screw with my head, they are under orders to beat the hypnotist to death with the baseball bat.

Eyes: I also had an eye doctor appointment today, and I came out with healthy eyes (same ones I went in with too!) and two years after LASIK my vision is still at 20/15, but I can tell it's not quite the "perfect" 20/15 that it was a year ago. I can see 20/15, but it's slightly fuzzy whereas last year it was very crisp and the 20/10 chart was the fuzzy one.

Work: I normally don't talk about work because I've heard of people being fired for it, but I'm just going to say that things are going great, and I'm loving it here. There was some talk of starting a security team, but that idea got axed because of budget concerns, but it's on the plate for later this year or early next year... maybe. That's ok. I can wait for it as I still have quite a bit to learn in that area. Also, I'm creeping up on my 2 year anniversary at work. I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but I did! Yay!

I think that pretty much sums up the past two weeks. Time to get back to work and homework and such. Going to be a long-ass day!

Over the weekend, Kiara and I splurged and spent about $200 on new light bulbs. We bought the fancy CFLs that use about 1/4 of the electricity of a normal incandescent bulb. We spent several hours moving around the house and replacing all of the bulbs. The only ones that we didn't replace were two outdoor safety flood lights because they are very hard to get to, and don't work so well when it is cold. We also didn't replace two outdoor bulbs because the CFLs didn't seem to want to work out there when they were cold, but the ones in the porch worked fine. Go figger. We also didn't replace the six that are in closets because we hardly ever use them. The last three that we didn't replace were the ones over the stairs. As soon as I figure out a way to replace them without killing myself, I'll swap those out too.

I've noticed that it takes some time for our indoor flood lights to warm up and put out decent light. The non-floodlight styles start a little dimmer than normal, but within a dozen seconds or so get to the point where they are brighter than incandescent bulbs. I also noticed that replacing a few 100 watt incandescent bulbs with "60 watt" (really 13 watt) CFLs puts out more light. Huh. Go figger. The light that we're getting out the CFLs is also more crisp, clean, and brilliantly white than the old bulbs. I kind of like that. It's easier on my eyes.

We're hoping that our nearly $170 a month electricity bill will drop to about $150 a month with these changes. If that's the case, then these bulbs will pay for themselves about the end of the year, and will save us money for the remainder of the approximately five year lifespan of the bulbs.

I just wonder why these weren't invented and released to the mass market sooner?

Jhianna is going to be so proud of me because I'm thinking green blue about our planet!

It seems like anytime I get together with my friends, I have to put up with massive amounts of World of Warcraft talk. At the Superbowl, every single guy there (and one woman) could do nothing but talk about WoW. I really wanted to talk to my friends. I wanted to interact with them. I couldn't, though. All I could do is sit there and stare blankly at the wall while they rambled on about things like: raid, instance, mules, mounts, flying mounts, epic mounts, epic flying mounts, gold, farming, their characters, and the various races and classes that exist.

This is a similar occurrence at my gaming table some nights (though not as bad as the Superbowl thing.)

What brought all this up? Well, it was this Real Life Comic that made me think of doing this post. If you haven't guess yet, I'm the guy that finally speaks in the last panel.

What can I do about this? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

When the WoW talk starts up, I'm like Punxsutawney Phil near the end of winter. Leave me in my damn hole until it's all over, please.

I received this link this morning from a co-worker who doesn't play D&D, but knows that I do. I spent some time searching, and came across here and here as well. Wikipedia also confirms it, but we know how trustworthy that is.

I never did meet Gary in person, but I've touched his spirit countless times through my adventures in his many games. I feel a sense of loss for losing the patriarch of my main hobby, but not a personal loss. It's an odd dichotomy of feelings. I think I should be impacted more, but I'm not. Maybe it's just sinking in.

As I did when Bobby Fischer died, I'll tell you a little bit about why I care about Gygax's passing.

When I was 10 years old and in the Cub Scouts, I got the Boy's Life magazine. On the back of every magazine was an advertisement for selling Captain O greeting cards. The deal was this: For every item you sold, you could either get a point or a dollar. If you chose to collect points, you could "spend" them on various items from the catalog. This didn't interest me too much since some of the points were outrageous (over 300 points for a $120 bicycle) and such. Well, one of the items was a red box with a dragon on the cover, and it looked so very cool that I had to have it! I think the point cost was about 10 points. I figured I could easily sell 10 items. In the end, I sold over 100 items, and collected various trinkets from Captain O, but I don't remember what any of them were, except for that really cool red box.

At the time, I didn't have a group to play with. I didn't care. I fell into the game with a fervor that was only equaled by my passion for computers. I would create characters, roles, adventures, evil lords, evil minions, damsels in distress, monsters, maps, worlds, countries, and so much more. I did this on my own until I hit junior high at age 12. That's when I found a handful of other people that played the games, and things went from there.

We'd game before school (yeah, we got to school early to do this), at lunch, after school, and on the bus home. It was a great time. I still remember J.P., Marc, Van, Roger, and Stephen quite fondly... well... except for Roger because he thought fantasy names like Frodo, Bilbo, Dwalin, etc. were stupid, so he would name his characters Bob, George, Joe, Steve, etc. We all agreed that Roger was the stupid one.

I continued picking up the various box sets as they came out. I went through the Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals rules. Out of all of them, I really loved the Companion rules the best. It added so much more to the game like having followers, controlling your own nations, tournament fighting rules, and quite a bit more. The Immortals rules were the worst because they took the power level of the game to a quite insane level. It was fun for a while, but after the 5th round in a row of dealing out over 200 points of damage with a single strike you become numb to the numbers.

Then my sophomore year in high school rolled around, and 2nd Edition AD&D was released. I somehow managed to totally miss the 1st Edition rules, but I joined in with a gaming group that lasted from 1989 until about 1993. Not a bad run in those days. Every since then, I've tracked D&D through its incarnations, and bought every core book and damn near every supplement that has been released since then. Years ago, I even went back and tracked down all of the 1st edition hard covers, and quite a few of the adventures from that era. They're all on my shelves next to the other role playing books.

I just wonder what it would take to track down and get my hands on the original three D&D pamphlets that were called Chainmail back in the day. Maybe I'll do some snooping on them. I had a chance to buy them in their original box back in the early '90s, but I didn't have the cash for it back then. I still kick myself from time-to-time for not selling a kidney to raise the requisite money to purchase those. Now that Gygax is gone, I'm sure the price is going to go up a few pennies.

Of course, Gary didn't have much to do with 2nd Edition back then, and didn't have anything to do with the 3rd Edition that was released a while back. Now 4th Edition D&D is coming out in March. I've seen and heard quite a bit about the changes, and I'm very happy that Gary didn't live to see his wonderful creation utterly destroyed to ruination.... but that's a rant for another day.

I still have a book that he published many moons ago titled "Role-Playing Mastery" that's quite a good read. Maybe I'll pull it from its shelf, dust it off, and check it out.

Even though Gary is gone his legacy will continue to live on through the millions of role-players out there. I have no doubt that role-playing would have evolved into existence without Gygax, but it would not be the quality experience that it is today without his early foundations and influence.

I've seen word that Gygax converted to Christianity at some point in his life. I'm glad for that. It's one more person at the Heavenly Gaming Table that I'll be able to take a turn with when my time comes.

Update: Story picked up by CNN.

Update 2: Something I had wanted to mention in my original post, but forgot about until just now... It's very ironic that the original Dungeon Master died on DM's Day.

Update 3: Great single-panel comic tribute from Penny Arcade.

Update 4: Some more tribute pages that I've come across today:

Dork Tower

Steve Jackson Games

Full Frontal Nerdity

Order of the Stick

I'm sure there are probably others out there, but I'm not actually looking for them. These are just ones that I've stumbled on.

If anyone finds decent ones that I don't have listed here, drop it in the comments, please.

PS: Somehow this morning it all seemed real that Gary is gone. While doing my daily thing, I came across those above sites, and it hit me that a man that drastically changed my life is now gone. While reading the comics and posts, a few tears were shed. Steve Jackson's words, "And now it's the day when the best-known GM of all time put down his dice." really hit me hard. So final. So true. Gary may not be rolling any more, but we can keep his spirit around by picking up the dice, throwing them around the table, lamenting or cheering or laughing over the results, and being with each other. Gaming isn't about winning. It's about companionship. I've tried to explain this to "outsiders" in the past, but it's never really become more clear to me in the past than it is right now.

Update 5: Another mention of Gygax. Very subtle. Check out the specials board in the background of the Questionable Content web comic for 2008-03-06.

Update 6: Another one. This time from xkcd.

Update 7: Two more

• User Friendly


• NY Times Article Check out the "flowchart" along the left side and enlarge it. Except for the Harry Potter section, it pretty much sums up my life

Update 8: An article on Wired about the history, innovations, movement, changes, inspirations, and personalities that went into the creation and evolution of D&D. Great article, and I highly suggest reading all seven pages of it.

Starting around summer of 2004, I went to working nights. When I'd get off work in the morning, I'd drive past my house by about 6 miles and head to a grease diner downtown. They made some of the best food in the world, but it was horribly unhealthy. I'd almost always have "The Grump" which is basically 2 eggs, bacon/sausage/ham (I'd go with sausage), cheese, a potato worth of hash browns, a ladle of country gravy, and more cheese... all piled together.

Can anyone say cholesterol? I knew you could.

In my defense, I would only eat 3-4 of them a week... Only? Ouch.

This went on for almost a year before I changed jobs. By then the damage was done, and I was getting pretty fat. Worse than that, my eating habits were all sorts of messed up. In the end, I tipped the scales at 245 pounds at age 32. To give you a frame of reference; when I was 17 and fresh out of high school, I was a solid 120 pounds. I was over twice as heavy as I was when I was half my current age.

I lived with the weight (about 230-240 pounds) for a year or so, and then my weight started to creep up again, and that's when I hit the 245 mark. I knew that things had to change, so I started doing some things to help me out. This was around the spring of 2006 that I started making changes.

I started drinking Slim Fast for breakfast. I know their commercials tell you one for breakfast, one for lunch, and a reasonable dinner. Yeah right. Maybe some people can do that, but I was almost passed out by the time I got home if I didn't do lunch. One thing the Slim Fast helped with was that I was not as hungry as normal when lunch time rolled around, so I didn't eat quite as much at lunch as I used to.

After a month or two of this, I jumped into Weight Watchers as well. I used their online program to track my points and eating and what-not. It was rough at first to try to control my eating, eat smarter, and pay attention to what I was putting in my mouth. After about two months of it, I got the hang of things, and wasn't having much trouble doing the dance.

Another two more months went by, and I stopped tracking my points. I was eating right and doing the right things out of habit by this time. Another two more months passed, and I canceled my membership with WW, but I continued to eat right.

Last week I had several people comment on my weight and how much better I look. That's what inspired this post. I didn't realize that change in myself until other people pointed it out. I'm down to 180 pounds as of last week. My doctor wants me down to 175, and I never thought I would get close. For a while I told myself to be happy with 195, but when I got there, I realized that I was in sight of 190. I kept dropping my goal weight by 5 pounds each time I reached the previous goal. It somehow made it easier mentally to do this.

Now that I'm at 180, I'm shooting for 175 to make my doctor happy. When I get to 175, I'm going to try to stop losing weight there. If I keep losing it, then I'll start worrying about my genetics and my family history of diabetes and such. Until then, I'm going to be happy with the weight loss.

All told, I've lost 65 pounds over the course of almost 2 years. Seems like a very long time to lose that weight, but it's gone, and I've changed my eating habits to the point that I think it will stay off. Sure, I'll put on a few pounds at the holidays like everyone else, but it'll come off once those months pass.

I probably could have lost the weight faster had I exercised. I didn't exercise hardly at all during the two years. I did have a spurt at the YMCA for 8 weeks (or was it 12?) that I worked out 2-3 times a week. That was very close to the start of my weight loss, so I didn't see much impact there. If I had done it in the middle of my weight loss, I think it would have helped more. Just a guess, though.

One thing that really helped was when Kiernan was born. The first five days that he was around, he was very happy with being in my arms while I bounced on an exercise ball. All that baby holding and bouncing on the ball really did wonders. In those five days, I dropped from 205 pounds to 190. Heck. Maybe I'd be around the 195 mark now if it wasn't for those days of bouncing the baby around. I'm just glad (for more reasons than just the weight loss) than Kiernan is around.

What's the whole point of this? Well, I'm thinking that you've heard this before, but.... If I can do it, so can you. I'm very stubborn about many things, but when it comes to my creature comforts (like food) I'm pretty weak willed. I just had to decide that I was more stubborn about losing the weight than I was about adding pleasure to my life via food. It was a long trip, but at no point was it a bad journey. I had expected to suffer, starve, and be weak all the time. There were moments like that, but they were brief. In the end, I'm glad I did it.

Maybe I'll be posting about hitting 175 in a few weeks!

I've been getting a number of emails lately from the "usual suspects" that contain information about freedom, religion, liberties, American pride, and all sorts of stuff like that. The emails are nothing new. I've been getting them for years. I actually appreciate most of them because I find them entertaining, heart-warming, or just a good break from the drudgery of my day.

However, in the past 3-4 months, the "please forward this to everyone you know" message has changed. They now almost always read something like "If you agree......forward it to everyone you know, if not simply hit the delete button."

Most of these emails contain statements that I agree with, but the closing statement more or less demands that I disagree with the statements in the email because I'm not going to forward it on. It irks me that people out there emailing me chain letters that require a moral action on my part. I delete the emails, but that doesn't have any implicit or explicit meaning on if I agree with them or not.

Just for the record. I rarely forward these types of emails on. When I do, I clean up the forward-header-hell and reply-indentation-crap that is always mangling the emails. Then I forward the message on to select recipients that I feel might have a personal stake in the email or might get a good amount of enjoyment out of it.

If you chain letter me, please be considerate and remove any moral demands that you may have of me from the emails. They're not going to work and coerce me into annoying everyone in my address book.

Thanks.

Two weeks ago, I made this post railing against the fact that so many schools are cramming Java down the throats of CS students, which is making them become less effective at coming up with their own solutions to real world problems.

I kept my rant short, but there are a few people out there that have talked in much greater detail about why they also dislike this trend in universities. Here are some related posts of people that agree with me:

ekinoderm

Joel Spolsky

Matt at Blunt Object

The news has broken that Bobby Fischer died yesterday.

I'm very glad that he lived, and I'm almost equally glad that he died. His contributions to chess have hardly been rivaled by anyone in modern times. His contributions to insanity, hatred, antisemitism, anti-American propaganda, and general craziness have steadily grown in the last couple of decades.

Most people like to talk about the first half of his life while ignoring the last half. You can't talk about the man without considering the whole man. That's true of anyone, I guess.

The first half:

I learned chess when I was 7 years old from a step-father, and dabbled with it until I was a freshman in high school. At this point, I met Mr. Charles Vetter. He was my history teacher, and sometime during the first week of class, he announced that he would like anyone that knew how to play chess to join him after school on Tuesday of the next week. He was the sponsor and coach of the chess club at my school, and would like to keep the annual tradition of having a chess club going.

I've always enjoyed chess, and I always thought I was good at it. It's also competitive in a mental way, and there's not much of that in this world. Most direct competition is physical. This was my chance to flex my mental muscles. I joined the team, and quickly established myself as one of the top players. I spent hours in the public library (which has an impressive collection of chess books), and read every single one of them. For Christmas that year, all I asked for was chess books, and I received a good number of them. I still have most of them, and some of them were by Bobby Fischer.

During that school year, I spent an insane amount of time studying chess. I studied openings, middle games, end games, gambits, feints, sacrifices, and all of the strategies that go with it. I also studied the "greatest games in the world" to see what the best of the best did when pitted against each other. Many of these games were Bobby Fischer games. Some of the books just specified the moves of the game with no more details on why a move was good or bad. I had to figure that out for myself, and that was fine with me.

I'm not sure how much time I spent doing all of this, but it paid off. Near the end of my freshman year of high school, I entered the Texas State Chess Championships. Mr. Vetter had managed to get it hosted in my home town mainly because of the huge (about 30 students in our school, 25 in the rival school, and another 20-30 adults) number of people in the local chess club. Instead of busing almost 100 people across the great state of Texas, it was more feasible to have everyone else come to us.

The tournament was a weekend full of chess. I did quite well. I played 12 games in 2 days. I lost 2 games, and had a stalemate in another. The two that I lost were fair and square. I was playing a person better than me, and I didn't do my best while they did. The stalemate was an embarrassment, though. I remember the guy's name was Todd, and he was on my chess team near the bottom rungs of the rankings. I got cocky, stupid, and overconfident. I got him to the end game, and was up several pieces. Too many pieces. This makes a stalemate easier to fall into, and that's exactly what I did. I should have won that game, but I didn't.

In the end, I came in 4th place. Had I not had that stalemate, I would have been tied with another guy for 1st place, and it would have come down to a playoff game. That other guy was one of the two that had already beaten me, so I probably would have landed second place anyways.

How does Fischer tie into all of this? His mind and mine (at least as far as chess goes) seem to work in the same manner, though he is much more brilliant than I am. This allowed me to take his discoveries and ideas, and put them into play in a very effective manner. While Fischer was creating these ideas and using them to surprise everyone, I was merely following in his footsteps and trying not to stray from the path. I did my best to try to understand why I was doing the moves, and why they worked. Most of the time I did understand, but there were times that I knew that the best move was the best move, but I didn't know why. Either way, it worked for me.

Now to the second half:

Sometime before 1992 Fischer decided that he didn't like publicity, being American, or just doing what he loved any more and dropped off the face of the planet. Then he surfaced again in Yugoslavia to play in a tournament that was somehow banned by the United States (I'm still not quite sure about the legalities of that.) Fischer wanted to poke the USA in the eye, and he did so. Of course, when you poke someone larger and more powerful than you in the eye, you're going to end up on the losing end of the exchange.

Which is what happened to Fischer. After many years of living incognito in the Pacific Rim (mainly Japan), he was discovered, detained (fancy word for thrown into prison without being charged with anything), and almost handed over the US government for playing a few games of chess in another country. Iceland came to the rescue with citizenship, a funky loophole in their extradition laws, and a plane ticket for Fischer.

If I sound sympathetic towards Fischer, I am. I feel sorry for someone that attained greatness in their field, and through a series of missteps, pushing from other entities, and just plain stubbornness they lose it all. Did he bring some of this on himself? Yes. Was some of it forced on him? Yes. Who's fault is all this? The list is really too long to get into it here, but Fischer is near the top of the list.

My sympathy towards Fischer ended on 9/11. While buildings were still burning (and several still preparing to surrender to gravity and fall into rubble) in NYC, he was on the radio announcing how happy he was about the attacks, the deaths, the harm to the President, the harm to his former homeland, and so much more. I have no sympathy towards anyone, no matter how dire their straights, that exalts the sufferings of other people.

Fischer once again makes headlines with his death, but this will probably be the last time we see this. Unlike other famous dead (Diana, JFK Jr., Elvis, Monroe, etc.) Fischer did not die in controversy, but, rather, obscurity.

Bobby: Thanks for the education of the greatest game ever made. I hope you found peace before your final moments. If you're in Heaven, set aside a game of Chess960 for me. I'd like to play a game with you.