As is my tradition, I thought I would review my progress at my 2010 goals.

• Gain Weight … Err, Eat Better and Exercise – As of this morning, I have lost four pounds. My progress to actually gain weight has been a roller coaster. I was up about ten pounds pretty quickly. When I started biking, I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. I have gained that back in my leg mostly. I probably wont fight to get to my, now, 27 pounds by the end of the year. I will keep trying though.

  My real goal of eating better and exercise is working though. I virtually bike everywhere. I lift weights. I could be better at this though. I eat like crazy. Without being anal, I have almost cut red meat, pop, and candy out of my diet.

  I feel great. I think there are two times in my life I have been in better shape. The first was late in my high school running career (about 16-7 years old) when I was running 60 miles a week. The second was my last summer working construction (20 years old). I was lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, jack hammering, etc 30-50 pounds for 60 hours a week.

• Updated Net Worth – I am a little behind the original 126.3158%. I have a 55% change thus far which puts me at 110% by the end of the year. I had a couple large purchases which impacted the progress – bike, rain gear, and Wisconsin trip. I might be able to cut some costs in the last half of the year to catch up.
• No House – I have not bought a house, but I did move to NE Portland. Double win. I do want to own a home but still do not know if Portland is where that will be.

The rest of my life is going well. I am still working at Conducive Technology and our FlightStats project is growing like crazy. I still have the life goal to start my own company and Conducive is teaching me some powerful knowledge which will pay off one day. Unless a business opportunity comes a knocking, I plan to stay where I am.

This past weekend, that all changed. I am now (half) living in Portland again. Thus far, it rocks. My commute this morning as a three mile bike ride down hill into the city. Not a bad way to start summer.

My goal for the weekend was to move my day-to-day things, making sure I could begin living at the new place by the end of the weekend. Strong friends were busy this weekend, so, at times, that seemed like a challenge. After seven car loads and no truck, we got it. I am now living at the new place minus my bed, couch, dining table, and desk.

Planning a move around a holiday is less than ideal. Tomorrow I leave for Wisconsin.

Now I have mooched off a couple people from time-to-time to avoid riding home at 4:00 a.m. or the monsoon that was May in PDX. I, like most people, am far from perfect.

The car took a couple cranks today, but mostly had no issues starting. For a 14 years old, this car is lasting quite nicely. GM might take note of how it used to make cars.

How did I celebrate my re-entry into the car world? Apartment hunting, purchasing bike parts (ironical), sitting in traffic (woohoo), and grocery shopping. (For all those would be no-car-peoples out there, grocery shopping is a pain without a car.)

No, I am not going to now stop biking. I will be riding to work tomorrow – rain or shine. Pattern continues. I will probably only drive to errands.

I actually have not felt this great, physically, in years. About seven years. Exercise rocks. With exercise comes, eating to keep up. For those of you who thought I ate a ton before, now I eat double that, making grocery shopping even that much harder.

Hopefully, I will be moving to PDX at the end of this month.

I had just a moment a couple weeks back. This time a song caused it. When it came on my Pandora station, I literally stopped working and could not focus again for about a half hour. Since this day, I have had the song on repeat.

The song: Where have I been all my Life from George Strait.

You can listen below:

God bless.

If you are uneducated in this realm of spirituallity, they sell Dutch Tacos. Imagine all your breakfast rolled up in a waffle taco.

Today, I had the ham & cheese. Ham, cheese, and, well, waffle.

If that is not Heavenly, there is no hope for you.

Summary: Malcolm answers the questions of how truly successful become that way. Ben Franklin rose from virtually nothing, for instance, to sit with kings. Outliers explains how people in Franklin’s position do work hard but also get very lucky, come from the right family, and in some cases born in to ‘correct’ month.

What I thought: After reading The Tipping Point, I was a bit reluctant to grab another Gladwell book but I tried anyway. I found this text quite interesting though. The examples used clearly construed how a person not only truly needs to work their butt off to get ahead but also needs to get really really lucky.

Perusing the Internets, I found a couple opinions of its definition. Generally, they fall into one of two categories:

• Of or relating to the software created for an enterprise. Otherwise known as, an organization’s software.
• Bloated, excessive, unnecessary – in all meaning of the words.

The former is basically saying enterprise software is just software. The latter is just annoying.

Unless you are lazy, you would probably not find these definitions representative of your career.

Without getting into too much flowery marketing mumbo jumbo, there needs to be another answer. Here is mine:

Software architected to support the breath and depth of its users needs while producing a minimalistic footprint on its own and neighboring systems. This system should not only be easily created but, more importantly, well maintained.

Well that is the definition I have come up with today. This might change over time but will a good start.

I am curious what you all think.

I have not found a good way to copy and paste on this phone, so you will need to do your own searching today.

WebSockets are a new-ish way for web clients and servers to communicate. This is bi-directional though. Unlike the typical AJAX (client to server) method used today.

PJUG was your typical nerd-alert affair but free pizza and knowledge of new techologies for people more smarter than I was worth it.

This phone warms the hands nicely!

Although I find finance fascinating, I am no expert. I do know there is some ambiguity between how GAAP applies to derivatives. This miscommunication causes investors and the public to be unaware of the true state of a company’s assets and debts. AIG is a good example of this. At its peak, it was 11 times leverages. That means $11 of debt for every $1 of assets. I personally do not feel all debt is bad. There becomes a point where my investment becomes hindered.

Chris Dodd thinks would we should publicly trade derivatives. Rather I would vote we get them completely on balance sheets. This get the numbers in the hands of investors quarterly. Public traded assets get forgot; quarterly reminders puts pressure of executives.

This domain actually uses it for its email purposes. Although, I would be reluctant to use it for business use.

Yale, yes that Yale, recently decided not us switch to Google Apps. The reasoning, lack of control particularly when data crosses political boarders, is one of my major dislikes of these type of services.

I did not understand how the author of this article thought flying in another country’s airspace was still governed under US law. Silly.

Yet another reason why we need an OpenData standard.