So I’ve been struggling over the course of the last… hell, five months, with continuing to lose weight. Laura and I have been losing weight and dieting since sometime in February, I think, and Laura’s hit her mark and actually gone under it a bit. Me, on the other hand, I never really set a mark to meet. I’ve been more interested in shrinking my man-jugs and belly.

The first 20 pounds went relatively easy, actually. I dropped from 210 to 190 pretty quick, by early May. It was a cinch, essentially. But the last 10 have been hell so far. In May, Laura and I took a trip to San Francisco and I regained my larger appetite as well as lost some of my willpower to eat properly during that trip, and it’s been haunting me since. It took forever to lose another 5 pounds to hit 185.

Well, I’ve recently rediscovered my willpower and lower appetite, or so I hope. And today I stepped on the scale, and despite eating a poor lunch yesterday, it read:

179.7!!

Man oh man. The last 5 pounds were tougher than the first 20, but they were easier than going from 20-25, so I think I have some momentum. I’ve also identified that I think I’ll end up at the 160-165 range, which means I have another 15-20 pounds to go. But since I’ve already lost 30, I’ve lost at least 60% of the weight I need to lose already, which means I’m definitely more than halfway there. I just need to keep working at it! It’s tough, avoiding all those Pizookies…

In other news, I’m on Facebook and Twitter a lot, so if you’re looking for the random day-to-day stuff that doesn’t warrant a full blog post, check me out there to keep up with me.

So I have Twitter loaded up in a tab often and have found that their website alone doesn’t satisfy the features I’m looking for. I know there are Windows applications that plugin to Twitter and all that, but…

I’ve decided to slake my small thirst for non-work PHP development and I’m going to develop a utility for myself. If it turns out to be good, then I’ll allow other people to use it.

Alright, so recently I got on Twitter. All of my trillions of readers should know this, as I keep my Twitter feed running here on my blog as well.

In any case, I’ve begun following different celebrities, such as LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton. I’ve also started following people whom I’m not sure if they can be considered celebrities, such as Libe Goad and Trixie 360. It’s gotten me to thinking about my level of excitement when they Tweet and, after I reply to something they’ve said, when they actually reply to me or reference something I’ve said publicly.

It’s semi-exciting for me when Wil Wheaton, for example, completely destroys my suggestion that Van Halen’s OU812 album is better than some other album out there, or when Trixie replies back to me in a discussion on music (see previous post, haha).

I think the reason for this is because Twitter is very social, and a lot of people get excited about the idea of being social with celebrities. Not only that, but social in a medium that makes the “average person” feel on the same level as a celebrity.

I mean, celebrities all eat and sleep like the rest of us, but we never get excited about that parallel. We don’t get excited about celebrities’ MySpace pages because we know they’re probably not the one doing the actual updates. But Twitter is different.

LeVar Burton, for example, is very active on Twitter and is a big proponent of other celebrities starting to use it. The fact that he uses it all the time probably makes people feel like they’re on a more personal level with him because in Twitter, they’re more like equals than anywhere else, be it financially, social status, etc.

So I’m just going to continue being happy that Trixie thinks I’m cool enough to reply to once in awhile, and that Wil Wheaton totally annihilated one of my opinions. lol

So while Laura’s got her 365-Day Project going on, I figured I should do the same. You know, take a picture once a day and post it online. Little did I know that my wonderful wife would refuse to alternate which days each of us got the DSLR camera we have. It’s more her camera than mine, but nonetheless… I got locked out.

I briefly toyed with the idea of a 365-Day iPhone Project, but then decided I didn’t want to have to constantly connect my iPhone to my home laptop to do it.

Well, the other day I got TwitterFon on my iPhone. It’s a nice little Twitter client that has built-in support for replies, direct messages, searching, etc. And when I was writing a Tweet on it, I noticed an icon for a photo… Lo-and-behold, my savior!

It integrates with TwitPic, a picture hosting service for the purposes of putting short URLs to pictures into your Tweets. The thought occurred to me: I could use TwitterFon to get my iPhone photos into my Tweets! Granted, it’s not posting the photos on my blog or Facebook, but in my Tweets!

All I needed was a way to tag my Tweets that are in this project as such, and the nice convention of #<keyword> helped. Basically, I put #iphonephoto in all of my iPhone Photo A Day Tweets to tag them, which makes them searchable in Twitter.

I’ve already posted two, which you can see here. If you’re on Twitter, start following me, I’m rfludwick. All you need to do is keep up with #iphonephoto and you’re good. And I highly suggest participating if you’re on Twitter and have an iPhone. It can be random posts, anything really!

Sorry I haven’t written in awhile. My Mom was in town for a little over a week and my Linux computer’s been disabled, so I’ve been busy. But here I am!

So in reference to my Mom being in town, it was awesome. I haven’t gotten to see her as much as I’d have liked, so it was really nice to spend some time with her. Thanks to her, chaos did erupt in our household. She suggested for us to get a new water softener the weekend she was here, and we also got a new addition to our family: our new black fluffy cat Samantha. I’ll get to her in a later post.

We ate out, we hung out and watched movies, it was really great. It sucked having to take her to the airport on Wednesday morning, where her flight left at 6am no less. I slept in my car at my work’s parking lot from 4:30-6:45 because it wasn’t viable to go home. 1/2 hour each way whereas work is about 5-10 minutes from the airport. You do the math: more sleep.

I promise I’ll get to the Halloween pics sometime soon, really.

Oh, a couple more things. I’m finally on Twitter, but I have my account configured to only alloy people I know to follow my updates. Hop on there and look for me! That, and I heard Wal-Mart is having some huge, absolutely huge Black Friday deals. Two of them that I’d love to do: a 50″ Samsung plasma HDTV for under $800 and a Magnavox Blu-Ray player for under $130. Crazy! An HD setup for less than $1,000? The only thing missing from that combination, really, is an audio receiver that can handle HD signals. Oy! I want $1K now.

I’m going to see if I can integrate a Twitter updater here into WP…

And I want to post about Obama soon…

And my Linux computer woes… Man… I’ve got a lot to talk about soon.

[Update]

Scratch that, my Twitter is publicly viewable instead… And you’ll see my tweets on the side of my blog now.