I have a blog? What?

Sike. Just to let all 1 of my loyal readersfootnote1 know, I am alive. So what have I been up to? Well, I still try to stick to my resolutions, especially the most important of them all, the ninja one. In terms of the more intellectual categories, I don't really keep up with them as much as I would hope. Some have said that I'm not the intellectual kinda guy... whatever that means.

Okay, so now that all that detailed new years resolution stuff is out of the way, my story of the moment:

So I drive up to my local McDonald's and I order a double cheeseburger with big mac sauce. This little trick is a golden egg that I learned from my friend. One dollar for a delicious and "lower" calorie sandwich that I coined the "little (cambo) mac". I mean... this order kinda goes in line with my losing weight resolutions, at least I didn't order the BIG mac, right? BIG mac is for BIG tummies, heehee :).
...no homo.

Anyway, when I was ordering to the telecomm, I was very polite (with pleases and thankyous.) In fact, I was probably TOO polite and passive, here is why I say that:

Really? Was it that obvious? Well guess what Mcdonalds?
You were so right. And it was so tasty.

I'm not even kidding. They stereotyped me!! Or they just ran out of "special" stickers. For the sake of a gooder story, I'd like to believe the the former.

Well... I thought I actually had a better story than the one I just gave. But I really don't. I ate the sandwich and went on with my merry life and thats about that. I feel like I'm ending my post on a dull note, so here is a random link:

http://www.thingsididlastnight.com/

End.


footnote1: Amount of readers figure based on random survey of 1 persons (including me.)

Back From the Dead...

Sorry I never update. But more about that later, its work related... and who cares about work when you have THIS!:

Words can't describe the feelings I feel
when I see this picture.

Btw, this picture is animated for a super sweet 3d effect in Chris's LJ. Also taken from Chris's Livejournal Entry:

"I like how our skin tones caused the camera to have different white balances and how glazed we are and how homo we are.

Starting Specs
Me: 5'8 162 lbs 17% body fat
Din: 5'4 153 lbs 15% body fat"

In actuality, these stats are from way back in November. And I'm 5'5, assface. But anyway, these actual pictures were taken as our Before pictures about three weeks ago at the end of February. Since then we have agreed to a competition that whoever has the lowest body fat % and the best body by July 4th, would win a paid airplane fair to Vegas ($150 dollar maximum) from the other person.

That gives me three full months to drop these stats and workout more. I believe I have already made some pretty good improvements since this picture. I don't want to get too crazy about it but I'm not gonna lose to that punk. I'll try to keep everyone up to date with my status, I'm making a body fat graph in excel.


P.S Take note that Chris Chen has a scratch across his stomach because he slipped in his socks during the middle of a beer pong game and cut his stomach on the table. The solo cups went FLYING into the air while he was flailing like a swimmer with no water -- they crashed all over the ground and soaked his jeans. Then he had to wear sweatpants the rest of the night. Oh, and yes, this contest/these pictures are questionably gay. But I mean... uhh... ...man, whatever! :]

Top 10 Reasons to be a Ninja Warrior

So I want to train to become a...

Ninja Warrior!! Hiiii-YAH

Haha, I think having these unnecessarily ridiculous skills would be so awesome. Makoto Nagano has inspired me to push myself to the limits of useless strength and obstacle course skill. But is it REALLY useless? Here are ten reasons why I think ninja skills would be useful:


10 - When someone asks me what I do in my freetime, I can say: "Oh, nothing much. I'm just a ninja on the side."

9 - Kaba Modern might ask me to join their crew to do somersaults. I'm going to do that finger scaling thing with my hands to pass the preliminary tryouts :]

8 - Black makes people look slimmer, its a two birds in one stone: health and style.

7 - The ability to back flip is useful in almost every situation I can think of. Beach, Drunk at Parties, Job Interviews.

6 - Who wouldn't be impressed/dumbfounded if they saw a guy walking around the entire gym on only his hands!?!

5 - I'd be one step closer to being the next Jason Bourne. And folks, that's one step closer to amazing.

4 - I could dunk on 10 foot rim standing at 5'5. Think about it. Yeaaaaaaah...

3 - Imagine what kinda CRAZY things you could do in bed. "So who's gonna upside down tonight baby?

2 - Since I don't have multiple lives like in video games, I need to be fully prepared for any situation that involves running away from:
A) An angry Mob with pitchforks
B) The cops
C) The last girl I tried to spit game at
D) All of the Above

1 - Because I can dress like a ninja on a normal weekday and actually look cool.

Ninja 101.

I'm a slacker!!

Its been over 2 and a half weeks since my last post. I'm doing exactly what I tried to prevent with the purpose of this blog, falling through! I have one post already written, albeit very poorly, about a weight loss competition that I am in with the Oyfa 07 class. Hopefully I can get that up tomorrow before my typical weekend extravaganza. In general, so many things have happened that are blog worthy within these past two weeks that I feel too overwhelmed to update. Actually I'm just making excuses, I'm more useless than a guy who has thumbs for fingers and fingers for toes -- though, the thought of being able to type with my toes is pretty appealing. Or I could scratch my butt while sitting Indian style... but I digress.

Thanks to some motivation from my friends, I'm going to pick blogging back up!

In terms of resolutions, I dropped a few, and picked up on a few. I still manage to read current events everyday, and I am now a reading a book for about an hour every night. On the other hand, I haven't drawn anything at all recently, nor have I played the guitar. Unless of course, you count the guitar hero controller as playing the guitar.

Let me know if you want me to serenade
you with acoustic guitar hero

As a general quick update:

• This weekend I went to Massanutten for Miguel's "Silver Selebration"
• Miguel doesn't know how to spell.
  
• I gained 4 pounds.
• It was awesome!
• If by awesome, I mean sucks ass. (Thats two to three weeks worth of exercising!)
  
• Indeblue was too long ago for me to remember, that article isn't coming!
• I got paid 3 dollars by 6 people to be quiet for 30 minutes
• I won!
  
• That being said, I'm still working on controlling the decibel LEVEL OF MY VOICE. People on the other end of the table often join in on my "whispered" conversations.
  

Anyway, a bit of a random post. It feels kind of good to be writing in my blog again, especially since I'm an enginerd and lack writing skills. It's more of a go-with-the-flow feel now.

Budgeting for February 2008

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post about the spending habits of young professionals in the DC Metropolitan area circulating yesterday. Basically, people of varying income levels tracked their expenses for a month and realized how much / how carelessly they were spending their money. Luckily, I'm a step ahead of the game here because I have been tracking my expenses for all of January using my iGoogle Tracking System . Even if, my reaction to some of these numbers for this month are pretty jaw dropping:

My Expenseview Report for January
(actual numbers have been removed)

197.78 spent in gas in ONE MONTH. WOW. It makes sense though, because just in the month of January I drove round-trip to upper Maryland (Wisp) , and twice round-trip to Charlottesville. There is also a large chunk of spending for the Gifts category, but that because I ended paying off my credit card for a couple Christmas presents in January.


The good news is that I still seem to be able to deposit a significant amount of my money into my savings account. Still, I'd like that savings number to be higher than 54% of my total spending; I'd like to shoot for 70%. So the next step from here?

I am going to try to make a budget based off of my ridiculous January spending habits where I ended up spending more money Snowboarding than I did on random gadgets or Bars/Clubs. We'll see how this ends up, I hope my February 2008 Expense chart looks better than this one!

ABS DIET POWERRR -- ITS OVER 9000!!

So after 3 semi-allnighters in a row and a weekend of working, my workload should be slowing down. I have updated my spreadsheet; since I was so overwhelmed with work, there were a lot of unsuccessful red marks. Hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come in the future.

---

I have been getting a lot of questions about my A.B.S.D.I.E.T.P.O.W.E.R resolution that is in the health section of my resolution. Here are the basics of the diet:

I learned about the ABS Diet from Mens Health. The fundamental concept is that instead of eating less often like a majority of diets, you eat more often. By proportioning your meals six times a day, you increase your metabolism and burn more calories throughout the day. In addition to this, your body will never go into starvation mode. Since there is a sufficient amount of energy in your body at all times, your body will never feel the need to store energy as fat for emergency energy purposes. Read more in-depth about its concepts here.

A typical workday for me goes like this if I'm not dead tired from the previous day:

8:15 AM Go running on a treadmill at the local work gym
9:45 AM Eat breakfast, typically an egg sandwich on whole wheat muffin
10:15 AM Take One-A-Day multivitamin, Vitamin E, and Calcium Pills
12:30 PM Eat half a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread
1:30 PM Sometimes I get hungry around here and eat carrots and almonds that I keep in a bag at my desk
3:00 PM Eat some more unsalted unsweetened almonds
4:00 PM Eat the second half of my turkey sandwich
6:30 PM Eat dinner -- Ranges from leftover fried rice to salmon (my favorite)
8:00 PM Workout in my basement and dance in-front of a mirror while on constant lookout to make sure I don't get caught
8:30 PM Get caught by my brother while dancing in front of a mirror and proceed to beat him up

As jam packed as the schedule seems, it is basically routine for me now to eat like this. The last time I dieted using the ABS Diet routine and workout schedule, I lost a whopping 12 pounds. I didn't lose it in two weeks like this ridiculous advertisement below, but it only took me about 6 weeks.

MTV True Life: The Hard Bulimic Life of a Male Model

This time around, I am starting off the diet a lot skinner, 12 more pounds would probably be impossible. Still, I hope to have proportionally equivalent body fat losses to my first trial while following the ABS Diet this time around.

So why the periods in the A.B.S.D.I.E.T.P.O.W.E.R? They are acronyms for the 12 essential foods that I try to fit into my diet. As a rule of thumb, Mens Health recommends eating at least three of the 12 "power" foods a day to gain a healthy, protein rich diet.

Almonds and other nuts (... yes, I love nuts)
Beans
Spinach and other green veggies
Dairy
Instant Oatmeal (I don't do this one)
Eggs
Turkey and other lean meats
Peanut butter (a very good source of protein if chosen correctly)
Olive oil (or as the Wifey McCutie Rachael Ray would say, some E.V.O.O)
Whole Grains
Extra Whey Protein (Are they allowed to use adverbs as acronyms? CHEATERS.)
Raspberries and other berries

So these are the 12 power foods that I try to fit into my diet. Surprisingly enough, I was able to produce that list without having to reference the website. All in all, this is a very summarized overview of the diet that I am following. If you are considering a diet, I highly recommend the ABS Diet for these reasons:

1. I can still party (drink beer) and it lets me live my life without feeling like a prisoner calorie intake
   
2. The diet allows for one or two times a week where I get to eat whatever I want; thus I can enjoy my weekends and restaurants without the nutritional guilt trip
   
3. The proportioned meals made my stomach smaller, meaning I feel full much faster and easier now
4. I love eating, now I get to do it all day!

I've read a ton and ton about this diet and its associated workouts, if you want to know more or are interested in starting, leave a comment or toss me a message. By the way -- If you don't get the it's over 9000 joke, it's totally nerdy and not worth explaining :]

An Unavoidable Temporary Hiatus

Sorry that I haven't been able to update my spreadsheet or make a new blog as of lately. I didn't manage to keep my two blog posts a week resolution last week either. I've been really busy with work, spending multiple 2-3 AM nights in a row (on a weekend too, crazy right?). I have some really great posts I want to add in here too. I have a new restaurant to review-- Indeblue, I want to add a post about some great additions to my workout routine, and I have a brand new weight competition to explain. But for now, I need to pull another semi-all nighter to get this work done. I was pretty down at one point, but I just finished working out and all the endorphines have me really pumped up and ready to be productive again. That in-and-of itself is enough motivation for me to always try to find time to stay healthy even when my schedule is crunched. Take it easy until next time-