Stuff to Do

January's been a busy month, and it's just about over!  There's always a lot of cleaning up and catching up to do after the holidays, of course, and work tends to be busy this time of year as well.  Laura and I saw my parents last weekend for my mom's birthday, and finally caught up with Laura's mom this past Friday night, too.  There are still some Christmas gift exchanges to be made, though...

Why, yes, I have been losing weight; thanks for noticing.  Laura and I have both shed some pounds since starting on the South Beach diet at the beginning of the year, and I'm now at 141.6 lbs. as of this morning, which frankly seems to be on the low end of where I should be as a 5'9" 41-year old male.  While I'm glad to be able to fit into an old pair of jeans again (woo-hoo!), my goal was never to drop ten or twenty pounds, but to eat and feel healthier.  Now that I'm doing that, and planning on mostly sticking to phase three of the diet, I've decided that I want my weight to hover around 145.

Of course, the fact that my beloved Up by Jawbone band finally died on me has put a minor cramp in my style.  It was nice to be able to easily monitor how much sleep I was getting (and how deep a sleep it was), how much walking I did, and what I was eating and how it made me feel every day.  I'm not alone in having problems with my Up, but I believe in the product enough to have opted for a replacement rather than a credit or refund.  Hopefully, Jawbone will get the kinks worked out soon, because I still feel the band has great potential.

In other technology news, I finally got around to upgrading my beast of a MacBook Pro, Athena, to OS X 10.7.2 (Lion) today.  I'm also going to start utilizing the Time Capsule I got from Microwize Technology at Christmas to run automated backups wirelessly.  I've been better with backups lately than I used to be, but it's nice to have a solution that doesn't require me to plug in an external hard drive before it'll run.  I took the opportunity to jailbreak my iPhone 4S as well.  Maybe I'm not quite on the bleeding edge of technology these days, but the cutting edge is still shiny.

My andersensilva.com and joyinthenew.com Web sites both got 'blacked out' for the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests on January 18th, and while I'm sure that had much less impact than Wikipedia's and Google's and Reddit's (and others') blackouts, I still felt the need to do it.  Both bills have been temporarily thwarted, but neither is dead yet, and ACTA is at least as scary as SOPA and PIPA, and international to boot.  People need to be aware and pay attention to more important things than the Kardashians and "Jersey Shore."

Speaking of Web sites... I'm maintaining a new one!  Starting this Thursday, Laura and I are publishing our original Web comic, Slime, at slimethecomic.com.  There's nothing really going on at the site just yet; I'm waiting for Thursday to put everything up, and then a new strip will be published every Thursday.  We've been having a lot of fun putting it together (Laura does the art, we come up with story ideas together which I write, and I'll keep the Web site chugging along) and we hope you'll have just as much fun reading about our friends in the Field!  I even put together a short theme song for Slime.  I will be promoting the frak out of the Web comic.  Just wait and see...