The Column

Motto: These Mottos Do Not Accurately Reflect Anyone's Actual Motto Now that January has almost passed, let me tell you about my present plan for the future. This is about to get meta, folks. At the beginning of each month, I plan on writing a column that both summarizes the previous month's 30 day challenge and announces the next one. In a few days, expect to see a post titled "Paleo is so last month" or something similarly childish. That post will be a subjective reflection upon my 30 Day Paleo Challenge coupled with an objective analysis of how it affected the data I record in my Life Tracking System. I plan on doing these analyses at or around the 1st of every month this year, summarizing the challenges Melissa and I are embarking on. The Column is essentially becoming a very real part of the whole 30 Day Challenge project. It will be where I draw my official conclusions regarding the previous month's challenge; and it will be where I officially dec

Motto: Boldly Going Where Chrome has Gone Before Chrome books are specialized laptops that run Google's Chrome OS. For those of you who don't know about Chrome OS, just picture a laptop whose only program is the Chrome internet browser. That's basically Chrome OS. Now, because the operating system is that simple, it works great on inexpensive computers. Also because the operating system is that simple, it is not recommended that a Chromebook be your only computer. Having said that, Chromebooks make excellent supplementary computers. If you are out and about and you don't want to lug around your huge laptop, you probably could get by with a Chromebook. That's their ideal usage case. Ever since I bought my Nexus 5 phone I haven't used my Nexus 7 tablet nearly as much. While I love the Nexus 7, it isn't capable of doing anything beyond what my Nexus 5 is capable of. The extra 2 inches of screen real-estate just aren't compelling enough for

Motto: Good Times This weekend was a good one. I saw my family. I did things for the wedding. I played videogames with my two best friends. I had all of my paleo cheat meals back-to-back. My cousins and I took this photo, which is now officially a tradition: This is the whole series: Pictures circa 2005, 2011, and 2014. Another way to look at that: I was in high school, then college, and now working. We looked at suits and stuff. We played Battlefield and stuff. We got haircuts and stuff. We talked about life and stuff. It was a grand old time. Life Tracking - I first came up with the idea just before I went to Thailand. Although that was 8 months ago, I'm celebrating the end of my 6th complete month of Life Tracking. I took a few weeks off every now and then... just to maintain sanity. Either way, I now have tracked half a year. All the money I've spent, all the food I've eaten, all the exercises I've done, and all the goals of the Demet

Motto: Mod podge I keep a backlog of ideas for the column. Every time I write, I draw from the backlog... but I don't always get through everything. Slowly the backlog fills. Right now, I have several Top 5's stacked up and a couple other random topics to talk about.  This is post is a menagerie of goodness. First... Over the holidays I got to play the board game Telestrations with my family. While playing, we discovered that my father and I have eerily similar thought processes when it comes to playing Pictionary. Check it out: Which of those did I draw, and which did my dad draw? (Dad's were the better ones.) Next subject... I think people don't understand the Incredible Hulk as a character. At the climax of the Avengers movie, Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk and works with the rest of the Avengers to save New York. Now, I've heard several people point out how "convenient" it is that was able to control his rage at the end

Motto: Sugar, Replaced by Spice, is not quite as Nice Melissa and I have been living the Paleo life for the past 5 days. Originally, we decided we were going to keep a few things in our diets:  - Milk - Potatoes - Rice - Altoids After reading " The Paleo Solution " and " The Paleo Diet ", we've decided to nix out a few more things from the diet. No more milk. No more potatoes. We are including rice because Melissa got a really nice rice cooker for Christmas and it's basically not an option to leave it in the box for a month. We are including Altoids because I like Altoids. So now, we are not eating (among other things):  - Milk, Cheese, Butter, Ice Cream, or Yogurt - Bread, Tortillas, Chips, Cereal, Corn, Oats, or anything with Wheat - Open your fridge and point at something... I can't eat that We picked up those two books from our local library. The local library is an amazing resource and nobody utilizes it as much as they sh

Motto: Have a holly, jolly Christmas, a happy, slappy Hanukkah, a hippy, trippy Kwanzaa, and/or a pleasant end of the year, non-religious vacation. Way back when I was first starting the October project (a.k.a. "The Hugening") I wrote to you about a Google Engineer by the name of Matt Cutts who has been doing self-imposed 30 day challenges for the past few years. In October, I tried my hand at a 30(ish) day challenge, and found out I really enjoyed it! Melissa and I have resolved to do 12 challenges in 2014. One challenge per month, to be decided upon on the 1st of the month and reviewed at the end of the month. We are starting January off with a challenging challenge: the Paleo Diet. The Too Long; Didn't Read of the Paleo Diet is that humans now are essentially the same creatures as we were in the Paleolithic era. The "food" we eat today is not at all what our bodies are expecting - and it causes significant health problems. Obesity, diabetes, heart d