Losing 20 lbs... one day at a time

I need to lose some weight. Not a lot, but I need to start shedding a few pounds this year if I'm going to have a long term healthy lifestyle. My BMI is a not so fantastic 26.4, which puts me pretty comfortably in the "overweight" category for a male of my height and age. I was exactly 200 lbs the day I wrote up my resolutions.

I have traditionally been a pretty skinny guy. In high school I tipped the scales at a massive 130 pounds and I didn't break 150 until after I started college. The majority of my weight gain came after I returned from my trip to China in the summer of 2009. I lost a lot of weight that summer due to sickness/food poisoning and went from around 160 to about 135 in one summer. When I got back home I started gaining weight and I haven't really stopped since then. Maybe my metabolism finally decided to level off. Maybe I've been less physically active. Who knows. Either way, I'm aiming to hit 180 pounds by the end of the year. That's about 1.7 lbs per month, which seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.

I haven't made any large changes to my lifestyle yet, but I'm beginning to implement two strategies as of this week. First, I'm going to stop cleaning my plate and going back for seconds at meals. I think that portion control is an area that I've been doing pretty badly in these last couple of years, so that's at the top of my list. Second, I'm going to start running again. Today my wife and I went to the gym in our complex for the first time this year and running on the treadmill for 30 minutes felt great. It should be pretty easy to put three or four short workouts per week into my schedule this year. I used to run 3 miles per day in high school and I'd love to be back at that point by this time next year.

The final strategy I'm going to try involves using Runkeeper. Runkeeper is an up and coming health startup that is supposed to be pretty awesome. It lets you log activity and track tons of different stats. The engineer in me will hopefully be compelled to keep building data sets to analyze and track as the months go by. Only time will tell, but this should be pretty interesting.

2012

Is 964 days a long time to wait between blog posts?

Yes?

Ok.

I'm back on blogger and ready to start a new season of life. 2012 is the first time that I have made any serious new years resolutions. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. First, I read this article and thought it sounded like a good idea. Second, in 2011 I accomplished a lot, but I only had a few set goals (like getting into this and this) for the year so most of the things I did just felt like they sort of happened without any real planning or direction. I'm determined to avoid that this year, so I've set a number of goals for myself that I plan on documenting here. I don't expect anyone to read this, but it should be a good place to record what happens in my life this next year.

I've broken my goals into categories as suggested by Dave Ramsey in his book Entreleadership. In no order, they are: Career, Financial, Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Family, and Social. Here's what I have managed to come up with so far.

Career:

Oso Simple Tech: Close funding round. Sell 1st set of final units. Figure out a viable exit strategy.

UIUC: Publish a paper. Attend a conference.

General: Network with someone new each month. Write a 5 year career plan.

Financial:

Complete baby steps 2 and 3.

Spiritual:

30 minute quiet time each day.

Read through the bible in one year.

Physical:

Run a 5k.

Lose 20 lbs.

Intellectual:

Learn how to program in Objective C.

Complete 1 personal electronics project each quarter.

Read 3 books per month.

Maintain a 3.6 GPA in grad school.

Family:

Go on one date per week with my wife.

Attend younger brother's graduation in May.

Bring my younger sister to Illinois for a visit.

Social:

Call or email at least one long distance friend each week.

Don't eat lunch alone.

I obviously plan on doing more than just these things this year, but I thought this was a good starting point. Most of the posts in this blog will deal with one of the things on this list in some way or another.

Until next time..

Talk about sporadic..

Ok, I'll admit it: I have done an awful job of keeping up with this blog. I haven't posted a single thing in the past six months. It isn't so much that I haven't had any interesting experiences as much as I have had too many interesting experiences to find time to write about them in here. Highlights from the past six months include going on a mission trip to McAllen Texas with my church's college group for spring break, making all A's in my classes and having a pretty good time with school and life in general.

However, now that everything is said and done I have quite an adventure ahead of me. In the next 12 weeks I am going to be in the United States for about 6 days. I'll be spending the next week in Honduras and then I'm traveling to China for 11 weeks. I'm hoping to blog about my travels as they happen, but I suppose we'll see how that goes. I think I should have some interesting things to say though, so stay tuned for future updates!

A map of anchient China. I think they might have re-arranged some things since then.

It's all over...

My semester finally ended this week. It has been a hard one academically and my grades are somehow managing to work themselves out here at the end of everything, but I wouldn't want to go through all the headaches of this semester over again. I've learned a lot of lessons about myself this semester though, and I'm looking forward to applying that knowledge in the future.

In other news, I think that I'm starting to realize that I'm not quite cut out for pure academic work for the rest of my life. I don't really know what that means for my future, but I guess its always good to cross things off the list of possibilities...

Trip to USC and other such things..

Baylor had its annual fall break this past weekend. Instead of taking my usual trip up to Arlington to visit family I headed out to California to visit Los Angeles and check out USC's graduate engineering program. A friend and I both received travel grants to make the trek, so the trip was mostly free. Yay for hard work paying off.

Famous Trojan Statue on USC campus

Greg standing next to a really big thermal vacuum chamber.

The visit was pretty amazing and I am so glad that I got to see what the school was like first hand. It was a totally different experience from Baylor's engineering school. We have one building and a really limited amount of lab space for our small amount of faculty; they have eight or ten buildings with what seems like limitless lab space for their 200 or so faculty who are doing groundbreaking research.

I know that the schools aren't really comparable due to the fact that Baylor's engineering program is pretty young, small , and pretty much ignored by the university as a whole. USC on the other hand has an established program that is the academic gem (or so the dean called it..) of the school and the university president is an engineer.

Despite all of that I can't help but find myself thinking about all of the ways that our engineering program could be better here at Baylor. There have been multiple times when I have approached a faculty member with an idea for entering Baylor into a competition or a conference or something along that line and the response is almost always "Baylor isnt' ready for that / we don't have the funding". The same thing tends to happen when I discuss graduate school with most of my professors. Even though the department is always touting how well prepared we will be for industry or grad school once we finish here the faculty usually recommend the same old schools for graduate work and they don't seem too excited by the prospect of a student of theirs applying to somewhere like USC or Stanford or MIT. If we are really just as well prepared as our peers shouldn't a student who excels here at Baylor be ready for the big leagues?

In the end I think that Baylor has a pretty good department, but I can see us becoming a truly great department one day. I guess I'll just have to check back someday and see when it is ready for greatness.

Sticking With It

I sit at desks a lot.

When I'm in my dorm room you can often find me sitting here:

Hey, at least I have two monitors...

When I had to write a program for my computer science class project last semester I spent multiple tens of hours here:

I usually sat at the second one in from the left.

Whenever I have to study for a particularly intense test I usually find myself at one of the nooks on the third floor of Moody library at a desk that looks like this:

I once spent 40 hours in a desk much like this one during finals week.

All of the work that I have done in the wind tunnel lab so far has happened at this desk:

Oh Dell computers, where would the engineering department be without you?

This past summer I spent most of my work days sitting at this desk:

Cubicles really aren't so bad... (who am I kidding, they're awful)

Long story short: I sit a lot. During all of that sitting I sometimes find myself wondering if all of the study time is really worth it. Is sticking with engineering really worth all of the monotonous hours that I have to end up spending at desks? Wouldn't I be happier if I could just go outside and throw a frisbee for a little while? Maybe in the short term, but without all of the work I have put into engineering in my dorm room, at the library, in the computer lab, and at my cubicle I would miss out on things like...

Working with a wind tunnel.

Building part of a wind turbine for Engineers with a Mission.


Messing around with the space shuttle simulator.

Sitting in the Apollo 17 crew module.

I guess you could say that sitting at all of those desks has paid off a bit.

To top it all off I recently found out that USC is going to pay for me to come out and visit their graduate school of engineering in mid October. I'm thinking that's probably going to be a pretty fun trip.

I might not really enjoy the time I spend at all of those desks, but I sure do enjoy all of the benefits that those hours of study bring me.

So yeah, I guess it is worth it. Maybe I'll stick with this engineering thing after all...

Identity

I've been thinking about this issue for a while now, and I might as well blog about it so I can move on and blog something different down the line...

For the past several years I have heard a lot about how men in our society struggle with identity. Some of the opinions I have seen blame popular culture for instilling a sense of false identity in young boys (e.g. you are only important if you have monetary success, be tough at all costs, etc...), others attribute the lack of identity to the massive amount of fatherless homes that exist today. I'm no expert, but I tend to agree that growing up without a father would probably mess your sense of identity up quite a bit.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't had a perfect relationship with my own father, but he was always there to tell me that he was proud of me, to tell me that he thought I had what it takes to succeed in this life. Whatever problems our relationship might have, I know that his words on this issue will stick with me for the rest of my life, and for that I am so thankful.

In case you're wondering what brought on this train of thought, I was in a store a week or two ago and saw a short scene from the movie Michael Clayton. I don't particularly like the movie as a whole, but there is one scene that I think is amazing. (This is where I would post a youtube link of the scene, but sadly it has a few... non-choice words in it, so I've just included an edited version of the dialogue below. Michael is the dad, Henry is the son.)

Henry Clayton: What?
Michael Clayton: Your uncle Timmy, and I mean this, on his best day, is never as tough as you. I'm not talking about crying or drugs or anything like that. I'm talking about in his heart. In his heart. Do you understand me? And all this charming crap. This Big Tim, Uncle Boss crap... and I know you love him and I know why... but when you see him like that you don't have to worry... because that's not how it's going to be for you. You're not going to be one of these people who goes through life wondering why crap keeps falling out of the sky around them. I know that. I know it. OK?
[Henry nods]
Michael Clayton: I see it every time I look at you. I see it right now. I don't know where you got it from, but you got it. OK?
Michael Clayton: [phone rings] Hold on...

The dialogue doesn't really hit home as well as the scene itself, but oh well.

I'm just glad that my dad is one who was willing to tell me I have what it takes. Thanks dad.