TheWorldofJake

Today is the first day of a new week, a continued regime, and a milestone in my pursuit of fitness. The cabinets clean and bare of anything save good wholesome natural foods , coupled with a continued sense of fear due lead into the week with a hopeful mind and an eager heart. You see over the course of the weekend, I began to develop a series of chest pains that seemed to ache deep down in the depths of chest around my heart and arms. This undoubtedly was one of the scariest feelings I have ever experienced, understanding full well the ramifications of what these “symptoms” could mean.

To me this is one of those “scared straight” moments where I know fully consider the beer I drink, or the extra helping of something taken during dinner. God has a strange way of reaching down, grabbing you by the short and curly’s, and saying hey ass hat start exercising! Lord, message received, and dually noted!

 As promised, albeit a shad late, my first established logging of my fitness endeavors! As of this posting my current weight is an obese 291 pounds! Dear lord fatboy avoid the twinky and eat a brussel sprout! It seems as if spending countless hours glued to a monitor of some sort, a lax diet based solely on convenience, and an all but consistent exercise effort diminishes ones physical condition and external sexual prowess. Who would have thought those could correlate to obesity right?

Past personal self criticism aside, all in all this run was not to shabby for a man of my er umm stature. Granted upon completion I thought I would keel over cough, and poof there goes a lung, but all in all I felt great! It hurt like hell but all was good in the end. Looking at the graph above my run really turns into an interval after about 20 minutes.  Over the next few weeks this should improve but the slow road should yield some fun fruits. My goal for my next run is to run for 20 minutes straight without stopping! Lets see how this turns out.

“Be prepared - this blog post is the beginning of a movement that might *change the world*.” quoted Mr Gray at Gray’s Matter. Well sir my intent is very similar in nature, but the movement that pushes me is a little more broad. I intend fully to “move worlds” but I am going to move into the realm of both business self-improvement as well as development. To begin one must take on the initiative so eloquently put forth by a variety of well respected computer scientists (Insert names).  After stumbling through podcasts, blog posts, and webcasts a plenty only to discover that each person has their own idea of becoming a highly talented code devouring intellectual machine. At this junction I have chosen to follow one common thread amongst the aforementioned posts, and will with my best effort attempt to read one book weekly (at the minimum bi-weekly) until the burgeoning tower of unread books in my office, metamorphosis into the equivalent of the high school baton twirler; daunting and impressive at first, but ultimately forgotten and discarded.

With this I thee pledge to set forth on a perilous journey to self enlightenment, one fraught with danger through lack of the feminine touch, an ever shrinking physical affirmation of self worth, and least of all a decreased social agenda to read one book weekly until the list of books in my office disappears. Here as follows is the list of books I am going to strive to read, in the order they will be read.

1. Test Driven Development with Microsoft .Net�
   1. Completed 12/18/07
   2. Review Pending
2. The Innovators Dilemma
3. Code Complete 2 (reread)
   1. Completed 1/18/08
   2. Review Pending
4. Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck
   1. Completed 2/15/08
   2. Review Pending
5. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
6. Pragmatic C# Unit Testing
7. John C. Maxwell Compilation
   1. The Winning Attitude
   2. Developing Leaders Around You
   3. Becoming a Person of Influence 
8. WPF Unleashed
9. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy
10. Domain Driven Design
11. Beyond Code
12. Data Binding in .Net 2.0
13. Working with Legacy Code
14. ….more to come!

Well there are the first 12 books on my list. I am fully aware that there are copious other books each diserving my time and attention. These will come in time as I widdle down the tower of babel sitting in my office. As the pages fall away from book to book links will be posted providing an overview of each book.

Slowly waddling, I make my way to the keyboard now a record second day in a row!  Like Forest Gump, only larger, entirely more intelligent, and about as whitty  as a 30 year old in a Superman getup outside of Halloween, I will now regale you with a jubilant telling of my running plan for this the week of December 10th 2007.

Monday - Recovering from Jet Lag.
Tuesday - Recovering from Jet Lag and Setting Up Blog.
Wednesday - 3 mile run to be completed after work.
Thursday - 4 mile run to be completed preferable before work, but I doubt that is going to happen.
Friday - Take a day, love the couch, and reacquaint myself with a good book.
Saturday -3 Miles run yet again sometime in the morning.
Sunday - My weekly hell 5 grueling miles of thigh rubbing goodness.

Well ladies and gentlemen thar you be. Let the games commence and week one begin. In the near future I will post a picture of my shirtless self, along with a full regalia of training diatribes for your personal trauma or enjoyment.

Alright, Alright I know it has been a year and a day since I have updated this site with anything meaningful, or even close to relatively useful content. Now that is going to change! Beginning today this site will be a fountain head for all things orienting themselves around my personal life, career, fitness, and explorations into the academic world of both business and computing. Embarking on the journey of publishing my life will be a new experience for me, so please excuse the mental cob webs as I struggle to more eloquently express my thoughts and aspirations. Well to begin I will outline a few areas of my life and the goals I have therein.

 Fitness

Well my current weight sets me at around 286 pounds of pure obesity! Personally that is outrageous and I am fed up with it. In reality the only way for me to loose weight is to completely revamp the way I eat, exercise, and handle social situations. In terms of a goal, my lethargic ass is shooting for an initial goal of 250 pounds by this summer, more specifically my trip to Saint Lucia. This puts my lard loss rate at roughly 8 pounds of pure unadulterated fat per month! Good god, my tubby, flabby ass is going to be waddling its happy ass to the gym more and more.

In terms of an approach I am going to begin with two distinct milestones. First and foremost, will be my training for the half marathon that I was so elegantly conned into participating in. Simply training for this will have me doing at least 20 minutes of lard reducing cardio 4 times a week.  I will track my progress throughout the months ahead by publishing all of the lovely and ever techy Garmin Forerunnner results here for all to see. As a side note if you have not yet experienced the technological geek orgasm that is personal GPS fitness tracking, then I must highly recommend that you visit Garmin and embrace your inner nerd. By posting this information there will be a publicly tangible record of my progress to date.

The second step will be to modify, when, what, and how much I eat in all aspects of life. Every-time I venture onto the Crisco covered trail that is fat loss, I seem to stagnate, progress, and finally revert back to my comfortably insulated starting weight. With my heart slowly failing as I age and the inevitable heart attack, my blessed genes are going to present me with, I figure it is high time to change this. My diet will start to consist of no fast food, more vegetables than meats, and MUCH smaller portions at any and all occasions of personal self gluttony. This will mean a lot of personal sacrifices as I strive to limit my beer, and sweets intake. As things progress, endeavors will be made to track everything I eat, as well as my intended meal plans here. Lets see how things progress on that front.

Finance

This topic seems so utterly cliche, but unfortunately looms an ever present cloud over-top almost every normal human life.  Having a forum for confessing financial sins, aspirations, and progress, seems like a perfectly logic way to self motivate. To begin I am going to start humbly and follow some of the famed Dave Ramsey steps for personal financial fulfillment. The steps are listed below and can be seen by the author here.

1. $1000 Dollars to start an Emergency Fund
2. Pay off all debt using the debt snowball
3. Three to Six months of living expenses in savings
4. Invest 5% of household income into Roth IRA’s and Mutual Funds (We will alter this a bit, as more is to come)
5. College Funding for Children
6. Pay off home early
7. Build wealth and give!

Now a note, I have completed a few of these steps, and have avoided a few others. As of this point on, that will change! Up until step four I am going to follow the plan to a T.  As far as my plan goes to meet each of these steps,  net worth will be outlined monthly, a report on my “Step Status” will be faithfully constructed, and the retelling of some pit falls, follies, triumphs or struggles in my journey to financial superiority will be present.

Followup

Tomorrow I will follow up this sonorous, lengthy, diatribe of cliche drivel with some more utterly entrancing information on my career goals and dreams.  As aforementioned this site will become an espousal of all of my explorations and tribulations as time progresses. Here’s hoping that voicing my dreams, actively tracking them, and reporting on there progress will some day assist me in being like G.I. Joe; you know “Be all that you can be.”

Jeffrey J. Fox’s book regarding career maturation provides a wealth of common sense guidelines or “rules” for increasing your carreer potential and rising to the top of an organization.