barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

Got this note in my Facebook inbox. Tough to address so much misinformation, but I'll try. This list of "Firsts" is clearly in the league of "throw enough poo, some of it will stick", but I was asked by a friend to provide some answers, so here goes.

Quit trashing President Obama's accomplishments. He has done more than any other President before him. He has an impressive list of 34 accomplishments:
First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

Flatly false. This claim is based upon an April Fools joke article that Birthers took seriously. http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/occidental.asp

I know you're all just DYING to know how I'm voting for 2012, so here it is!

If you're in Utah, all the voter information packets are online, as well as in polling places and supermarkets shortly: http://vote.utah.gov/on-my-ballot/candidates/

Here's how much of my ticket is going to look. Some of this may not apply unless you, too, are in RIV002 in Utah :)

Day 1 of Induction to jump-start a lower carbohydrate eating plan is always kind of fun. Note I say "lower", instead of "low", because I'm a believer that one's nutrition should be tailored to activity level. At present, my activity is slow jogging, swimming, cycling, with moderate weightlifting. My injured shoulder precludes a lot of the intensity I'd like to bring to each sport, so I'm really not exhausting my glycogen stores.

Anyway, yeah, it's a special sort of "fun".

Back in 2009, I reached an all-time low weight and body fat unseen since I was 19 years old: 200 pounds, with between 15%-20% body fat. From late 2009 to October 2011, I totally slacked off on my eating plan & exercise regimen. This led to regaining basically all of the 70 pounds I had lost. I was appalled at the family photos of our trip to Disneyland in October of 2011, and although I couldn't get over my fear of what the number on the scale would be, I began quietly scaling back my eating, did some bicycling to & from work, and began going back to the gym on occasion.

In addition, this past year I had a wonderful season of bicycling that unfortunately ended with a bicycle accident & injury. I went from almost zero endurance experience to 12-15 hours/week of bicycling, rode my first Century ride on August 25 (the FrontRunner Century), and lost quite a bit of weight. I dropped from a high weight of probably around 270-ish October 2012 (those Disneyland pictures looked AWFULLY fat!), down to 250-ish by January, to 230-ish as I peaked for my Century. I broke my clavicle during a group ride on September 2, 2013, and today finally stepped on the scale to see the damage: back to almost 238 pounds. It's time to get blogging and have some accountability as I lose it again!

Tonight, Christy and I had an interesting run-in at the local Larry H. Miller Megaplex at The District.

Here are the gadgets I currently use on a daily basis:

I have been using MythTV for several years at home. My family loves the DVR; it's easy-to-use, mostly bug-free, and has allowed us to enjoy television at our leisure rather than at the broadcaster's schedule.

I now have two teenage children. As most parents of teens can attest, this is often a cause for introspection. Therefore, without further ado, here's a list of things I wished I'd known when I was a teenager.

I've been using Python for a few years, but mostly for extremely simple and short stuff. By and large, truly, I've mainly just referenced someone else's libraries in Python to do something that I couldn't do easily in Bash.

Tonight, i wrote the following essay for my entrance assessment to Western Governors University. I hope you might find it informative and entertaining. It was fun to write!