Cerebrate Good Times

This is kind of a weird thing to think about, but sometimes I get as sad about a company going under as I do a person having struggles. October 2013: I purchased a Pebble watch. As far as I know, it was the first smartwatch on the market. I loved getting notifications on my wrist, and being able to send canned responses without getting my phone out. I could control my music, customize the watch face, track running stats, and do a few other things from it. It was just black and white, but it lasted several days between charges. Later they developed a color display, which I also got, and loved it. Then other companies started releasing them with touchscreens and other bells and whistles. Eventually Pebble went out of business and was acquired by Fitbit, which would supposedly incorporate some elements from the Pebble operating system to their products moving forward. I now use a Garmin smartwatch that is heavy on the running data and GPS but doesn't have quite as many everyday fu...

l like movies. In fact, I like most of the movies that I see. Some people could say I’m not discriminating enough, and that’s fair. I think that I like to see the good in things, because enjoying things is more fun to me than just looking for flaws for the sake of doing it. Here are a couple examples. Star Wars I have always loved the original Star Wars trilogy. The prequels aren’t very good, although the story itself is pretty interesting and there are a few cool moments. When it comes to the latest trilogy, I really like them. In fact, The Last Jedi is one of my favorites, despite how controversial it is. It’s very different from other Star Wars movies, particularly Luke’s story. Star Trek If you watch the original series, or The Next Generation, Star Trek is about peace and the evolution of mankind. If you watch the current movies, or Star Trek Discovery, it’s very different. It’s become far more action-oriented, and most people would probably say it’s not being true to t...

According to the census data I found online regarding male life expectancy in the United States, today is exactly the halfway point of my life. So, as they say, it's all downhill from here!

Just a quick update on the Great Sugar Experiment . It's day 23 and I've still been able to stick to the rules. Interestingly, even with no added sugar or desserts I am still averaging around 50 grams of sugar a day just in the meals I'm eating. It's well below the 80 g allowed by the app (more on the days I run), but you can see how things are not the greatest in the modern diet. There have been a few serious temptations, like when Katie made brownies and frosting from scratch, but I have persevered. There are actually some good sugar-free desserts like Jello pudding that I've been enjoying. And, of course, fresh fruit. I've also been sticking with the protein goal as well, getting at least 120 g almost every day. I've also done my basic strength exercises six days a week and run three times per week (including half marathons the last three Saturdays). And I haven't yet gone over the total calories I supposedly need to meet my goal of dropping a few p...

Well, it seems I've posted about this before here and here . But I've been worried about my weight again lately, in part due to a very long course of Prednisone (like 8 months), which causes an appetite increase and subsequent weight gain. So that number was ticking up a little more than I would have liked, and I thought I'd give it another shot to go without sugar. I started that on August 26, with the goal of lasting one month. This time, however, there are a couple different goals in play here. First, I wanted to stop having any sugary treat or dessert. I'm not worrying as much about the sugar that is in the meals I eat, but I'm not adding sugar to anything, and I'm avoiding things I know are high in sugar like most breakfast cereal. Second, I came across an article online discussing protein intake for runners, and after a little more research discovered that I'm definitely on the low end of what I should probably be getting. A couple months ago I al...

In high school I had three best friends who meant everything to me. I was one of those teenagers who never wanted to be with my family, but spent every moment possible with this adopted family of mine. And because they were good people, it worked out well. I think we had a mostly positive influence on each other, and we made it through those awkward years largely by supporting each other. Predictably, things changed after high school. Two of them went to school in southern Utah, I went to BYU in Provo, and one stayed in Salt Lake. Three of us served missions, and then came the rest of the details of life, with two of my friends settling outside the state (and then eventually me too). After I met Katie she struggled with me wanting to spend time with other friends anyway, and as kids came along I never really had time for a social life. This summer is our 20th anniversary of high school graduation, and there is a Facebook page dedicated to the event. People were posting photos o...

I wasn't going to post this, because it's boring. But then I realized that I don't care; it's something that has been on my mind, so I'm writing it. I might be part magpie or raccoon or something, because I've always liked shiny things. Like watches. I remember getting a little blue watch in second grade and wearing it for years. I loved that thing. Maybe there's a correlation between liking watches and me being obsessed with getting places on time. Anyway, several years ago I decided I wanted a watch with a digital representation of an analog dial, I don't know why. It just seemed novel. In 2013 I got one of the first commercial smartwatches, a Pebble . It let me do the digital/analog thing, as well as showing notifications from my phone, letting me control music, showing weather, and acting as a display for my running apps on my phone. It's first and foremost a watch, and with a simple e-ink display it gets several days of battery life. I...

I was looking through my blog posts and noticed a lot of drafts that I never finished. Either I ran out of ideas, or I realized they made pretty boring posts. Here's a smattering of my incomplete thoughts: --------------------------------------------------------- For some reason, I've been thinking lately about how to rate bands. I think the best way to boil it down to a single number is to use the ratio of songs I listen to vs those I habitually skip when they come up in a playlist. I call this the Rockin' Ratio, or RR. For example, my RR for the band Guster is 98%, because of the 61 songs I have of theirs, there's only one that I usually skip. On the other hand I'm probably the only person in the world who would care about this. --------------------------------------------------------- The hardest things I've ever done: Toilet training a child Running ten miles with an injured knee (incidentally, this also ranks high on the list of the dumbest things I...

I found a list of Disney animated feature films and narrowed it down to those with a human child as the main character. There are 18 such films between 1937’s Snow White and 1999’s Tarzan . So, if each of those main characters had two parents, that would make 36 parents total. If you count the number of (biological) parents actually known to the audience to exist (and survive the film), the number is 9. The only characters with both parents alive are Aurora from Sleeping Beauty (though she isn’t even raised by them, and I’m not sure if they’re both alive by the end of the film), and Mulan. Seven of the characters are orphans from the beginning of the film. This was just another one of those things that I had always meant to look up but took forever to get around to. (BTW, Walt Disney's parents survived into his adulthood.)

“Son, sit down. We need to have a talk.” “Gee, dad, I’m pretty busy right now. Could we talk later?” “It’s important. Put down the video game paddle.” “Fine, dad. What is it?” “You’re becoming a man, now, so it’s time we talk about the—” “Geez, dad. I’m almost 18. We had that talk like 6 years ago. Remember the puppets?” “No, son, this is more important. We need to talk about the elephants and the donkeys.” “…” Seriously, why don’t parents ever sit down with their kids and talk to them about politics? Most of us grow up with only a vague idea of which political party, if any, our parents belong to. But wouldn’t it be nice to sit down and tell your kids why you believe the way you do? If parents cared even a little bit about their children’s political education, maybe we wouldn’t have to rely on news-channel pundits to spoon-feed us all our political information. Just a thought.

A lot of people have been watching the televised debated between the candidates for president and vice president. Sometimes I feel guilty for not watching and seeking to educate myself more about the candidates, but then I realized something: There is no correlation between what a candidate says before election and what he or she will actually do in office. In fact, we should probably elect the loser of the debates, because that person is obviously not skilled enough at lying, which would make their administration a little more transparent. Either that, or we should force them to take lie detector tests.