Gekitsuu's Geekery

I'm the crazy one?

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Since starting Weight Watchers and my exercising routine I have often had people ask me why I decided to lose weight and sometimes almost try to talk me out of doing it. There have been many people who have supported me (even many strangers have offered encouragement) but what I really want to talk about is the negative attitudes I've seen around weight-loss. Some of the things I've heard are:

"This one meal wouldn't hurt"

"You can't eat anything can you?"

"You're married, why do you need to lose weight?"

I was one of three heavyweights in my office, I wasn't the biggest but the best way I can sum up how big I was is that I broke a couple chairs before they decided to give me a chair with a higher weight rating. That is one of my motivators. Another would be that I have a very thin, fit, beautiful wife who I had a hard time keeping up with because of our physical fitness level disparity. It would also to be fair to say that the mirror has motivated me quite a bit.

So let me answer the statements that I listed above just in case there's someone in your life like me who has an answer but it's often hard to understand us.

This one meal wouldn't hurt

For starters, it's internal voices that tell us things like that, that helped us pack on the weight. These sort of self destructive thoughts snowball into many bad meals. The truth is one meal doesn't hurt but it has to be one I choose, one I control, and the BBQ spread at work isn't something that fits into my plan. For starters I don't have any of the calorie, fat, fiber information so I can't easily figure out how many points I'm going to be eating. Another downside is that because I'm guessing, I have to assume on the high end of things which means I'll be eating less than if I just have a healthy meal that I planned out.

You can't eat anything can you?

Actually I can! But now my choices aren't base solely on taste. What makes me happy to eat something now is that it tastes good, and it's good for me. Every now and then I'll have a greasy pizza or something fried but those are much fewer and far between, and I feel better on many levels for it.

You're married, why do you need to lose weight?

What does being married have to do with it? I need to lose weight to feel better, feel better about how I look, and do the things I want to do in life. My wife wants me to lose weight but she's been nothing but supportive, never pressuring me into this. But I don't remember in our wedding vows anywhere that either one of us stated that we'd grow fat together. Losing weight is like quitting smoking in that you have to decide it's time for you.

So let me tell you some of the inspiring things I've heard, I feel they don't need an explanation.

"You're looking very thin, I can see it in your face"

"I've been watching you exercise for weeks and you've lost a lot of weight, keep up the good work"

"Hey....You're disappearing!"

I'm down 65 lbs

I'm down to 40 waist size from 54

I'm Running an 8K race in november and when I started I could barely finish a mile

Making MAMP Local

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:24:00 +0000

This weekend I decided to use MAMP for some of my own web applications that I run on my MacBook Pro but I didn't want them to be accessible to anyone who was on the same network as me. Since there's no easy way to change the Apache and MySQL config files through the GUI I decided to tinker around a little bit and find out how I could accomplish this. I only had to make two changes to get Apache and MySQL listening locally and it was pretty straight forward. The Apache conf file is used in the standard way and is located in /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf find the line in there that says


LISTEN :8888

and change it to


LISTEN 127.0.0.1:8888

Then the next time you start MAMP Apache will only bind to the loopback interface. For me this broke the default website for the MAMP interface because when MAMP parses the file to find out what port you are listening on it thinks you are looking for 127 instead of 8888 so the URL it directs you to is http://localhost:127/MAMP/ if you change the 127 to 8888 it works just fine and then you can make a bookmark.

For MySQL it was a bit trickier since I couldn't find a my.cnf file anywhere in the MAMP install that would let me set the address for MySQL to bind to. I did find a start up script named /Applications/MAMP/bin/startMysql.sh which is used to invoke MySQL so I added the command line argument --bind-address=127.0.0.1 to that script and that took care of MySQL perfectly. Hopefully this will save someone else some time or at the very least me some time when I go to reinstall someday.

Keeping Track

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:09:00 +0000

A few days ago I came up with an easy system for me to track changes when I'm working on a server. For now I've only implemented on my servers at home and one server at work that I am the sole sysadmin of but I think I might start using it more at work. In a nutshell all I have done is add 4 lines to the end of my .bash_logout file for my user. They look like:

echo `date` >> ~/.changelog
echo -e "\n" >> ~/.changelog
vi ~/.changelog +
echo -e "\n" >> ~/.changelog

What this does is force me to edit the .changelog file after putting in the date/time I'm logging out. That way I can make a quick note about what I was doing when I log out of my ssh session.

Updates Galore

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:47:00 +0000

I am now 34.2 lbs from my heaviest and I've started some more exercising. I changed my walk from 2 miles to 3.25 and this week I started adding in some jogging. My plan is to jog the loop Monday/Wednesday/Friday and walk Tuesday/Tursday/Saturday. I also picked up a program to go from 0 push-ups to 100 push-ups in 6 weeks. I'll be doing that on Mon/Wed/Fri too and I started today by doing 12.

Had a good time at my parents house yesterday celebrating my Aunt's b-day and we did a healthy grill which everyone seemed to enjoy.

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:48:00 +0000

My total weightloss is 17.4 lbs

Yesterday my wife and I went to the Herndon festival, twice. The first time we had our dogs with us and they informed us dogs aren't allowed at the fair (although later we saw dogs in the fair, so maybe just our dogs). We both had a good time but it was pretty uncomfortably hot out. We plan on going back today to pickup some of the things we liked from the craft part of the festival.

Recovering my Geekery

gekitsuu@gmail.com (Gekitsuu) — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:23:00 +0000

For some reason I had to go through the process of reclaiming my blog. I guess Dr JJ can't say that it's been over a year since I posted now.