Birthday and Beyond!

Today is my birthday* and the last of my 20's which doesn't really bother me or seem significant. I'm lucky enough to have an eclectic group of friends and coworkers who throw the "traditional milestones" that define my age out the window. Some friends are older, single, have successful careers, and enjoy life like they are fresh out of college. A few of them are starting families well into their 30's and early 40's. Other friends are younger, raising large, happy families but haven't really started their intended careers. And then there are friends who are in one of those categories but wish they were in the other.

Essentially, I know some respectable "twentysomethings" who fit my childhood perception of "thirty/fortysomethings" and vice versa. And neither path is "right" or "wrong", just different. As such, age really means nothing to me. As long as you are happy with life and where it takes you then age is but a number.

And for something that doesn't bother me much, I've already wasted two paragraphs on the subject. Time to put it away, enjoy my new birthday cartoons/clothes/candy and look forward to another fantastic year with friends and family!

*written on time, posted late

Months of photos

And I return! October flew by and before I knew it November was here. I have a backlog of posts to add and the vast majority of them will be photo based since the following events happened in the last 4 weeks:
Two 10 year high school reunions
2 week trip with the family
A trip to the World Series
Halloween party madness
An "escape the stress" trip to Southern California
and smaller events too...

So even though it is November, you will soon see some quick posts from October and September (all the posts I wrote before I left for the 2 week trip in Arkansas/Texas) appear below this post. After a week the newer posts will appear and then we are back on track to follow up with the passions!

A tale of two (World Series) cities

I had a (likely) once in a lifetime sports opportunity happen this week: a sports teams from each of my two hometowns competed against each other in the championship game of the sport (and I could afford a ticket to the game)!

I grew up in the Dallas, TX area and moved to the San Francisco, CA area seven years ago. In both cities I attended the local sports events but never thought I would see my dual allegiances challenged in the ultimate game for the sport. In some sports the event can't happen since both teams are in the same division and could only play each other in the playoffs. In other sports, one team or the other, to put it bluntly, has no chance to play in a championship game in the foreseeable future.

When this year's baseball season began I thought the latter would be true. The San Francisco Giants had never won a World Series, and the Texas Rangers had never even made it to the World Series. Yet, as luck would have it, both made it to the Fall Classic and played in the opening game just minutes from my house. I couldn't miss this opportunity, bought the first available ticket, and was on my way to the game of my life.

In the end, my heart leaned towards the Rangers as I had been to more of their games and wanted closure with them so I could move on to the Giants. But the Giants won the game (and the series) and I am just as proud for my new home team. Plus, I can actually see the winning ceremonies here in town (and I don't have to bear the ire of my California co-workers if the Rangers won)

Steak a la Pizzaiola

One of my good friends and co-worker is a phenomenal chef who loves to experiment. She invited me over one night for some cooking and musical fun and that night we decided to create a new dish. Technically it is Steak a la Pizzaiola, but what made it fabulous was the mashed potatoes mix which contained numerous ingredients (such as cayenne pepper and thai spices) that don't normally go into a Southern potato mix but tasted wonderful. Below you can see the end result, along with a few of my steps to get there:

You Will ads

I cam across these videos at work today and realized at how much has changed in the short span of time since they aired:
I remember seeing these ads during the Cowboys Super Bowl games of '93 and '94. At the time the features shown in these ads seemed so far off, yet now many of them are so common place that we forget about living in a world without them (well, other than the phone booth aspect). When I was 13, the "3d character animation for motion pictures and games" industry didn't even exist. And now I train people who live thousands of miles away from that industry, and we do it while seeing each others faces in real time. Similarly, I can call my family and see their faces from my phone and send them movies and photos at the same time. And I can even write this post and update it to a digital blog from the comfort of my bed without having to worry about wires, monitors, overheating, or any of the other early 90's computer annoyances.

With advancements like these, I wonder what we will be taking for granted in another 17 years when my children graduate...

Passion: Healthy progress

When I created this blog I stated my different passions and goals, one of which involved my health:

A decade ago I was underweight and couldn't gain weight no matter much I ate. 2 years ago I was overweight and lazy. Through hard work and dedication I was able to lose 40 pounds and get back into decent shape. Now I want to really work on being fit and being able to get the most out of life.

At the time of my first post I had run a 5k and 10k at roughly 10 minutes a mile and was proud of my growth from couch potato to amateur runner. One year later, I am running unplanned half-marathons for fun (also at 10 minutes a mile but my first 10k is at about 9 minutes a mile, the last one kills me). I've brought my 1 mile speed down to sub 7 minutes from 9 minutes and will get it even lower by this next year (it would be great to see a mile in the 5 minute range). And overall I've just had fun with running, something I never thought would be possible.

As for my weight goals, I began working out more. As mentioned above, I had lost 40 lbs before beginning this blog, but it the process lost a lot of muscle too. Below you can my transformation from 10 years ago to 3 years ago to last year at the time of my first post:

While I am not at the "fit" point that I want to be I am on the right path. I have gained 15 pounds since last September, yet my pants size has dropped one size so most of the weight is now in my upper body. My workouts now have me lifting double/triple the amount of weight I was a year ago. My max pull ups doubled, I went from roughly 10 max "perfect push-ups" to over 50!

I am building a future post (likely for 2011) on this subject that will include more embarrassing before and after photos so I won't go into too much here. Without giving too much away, here are some photos one of running buddies took, without me knowing, of my obsessive relationship with pull ups (both overhand and underhand): If I see a workout bar on the street, you can expect to see me at least pump out 10 pull-ups. You can even see the sequence where I drop down and suddenly realize they were taking photos. Not shown: the severe beatdown I gave to them afterwords. But hey, at least I have something to show now, right?

I am on my way to a fitter Jay!

The Goals: my blog's 1st year

So last week marked the one year anniversary of this blog. At the time I was busy running an impromptu half-marathon and was unable to address it, but my plan in creating this blog involved a yearly check-in to verify I continued to meet my theme:

This blog will document my passions, progress, and random musings so at the end of the day I can look back and see that, while I have not reached everything I have hoped for, I am further than when I started. And tomorrow is always another day on the road to a new Jay.

So how did I do? Well, for base stats I posted 220 stories in 365 days, blogging for roughly 60% of the year. While this is far from a 100% posting rate I had imagined, it is a vast improvement over the 1 post per year rate I had previously. I also noticed a trend of 3 months off and on for my posting habits. I was really strong September and October (literally posting everyday) and then posted only 30 times over the next 3 months (having a new baby may be a good excuse though). I then did well from Feb-April, but disappeared from May until July. Although at this time I was stuck on the notion of emphasizing the posting date over the completion date, and many of April's 29 posts were actually written throughout May and June. I then picked it back up for July and August and have maintained roughly a 60% monthly average since. Not bad, but it could be better.

Then again, one hypothesis that I am looking into this year is whether posting too often about productivity is detrimental to my actual productivity. Maybe I need that other 40% of time for my projects? Or maybe not. We'll see how my numbers are in September 2011...

My most common themes were:

Jay (53) - it is a blog about me, so this is not surprising
photography (53) - did not expect this, but in retrospect it was far easier to spend a weekend with the family and a camera to create 5 posts than it was to animate for 3 weeks to get 1 post
animation (44) - it is my job and hobby, but not enough of these posts were showing progress in my work, they were informative articles or links
family (41) - a vast majority being photography of my frequent trips to visit the family. These will be fun to look at over the years
music (34) - surprised it was this high, I feel like I didn't create enough performance videos this year
theme (33) - a somewhat nebulous category since the majority of my posts do involve my theme of progression, I just got tired of tagging them all and only tagged the major milestones.

So that is a brief look at my first year in blogging. Over the next month I will create a retrospective post for each of my passions to see reallly how much I progressed during this year...

And with that, I shall end this much like I began it: it's my blog and I will do what I want!

(and I have)

Die Pennies, Die

I admire this man's passionate diatribe against pennies, plus he gives some very good points as to why pennies are no longer needed:

Streaks - the Seinfeld methods meets the iPhone

Exactly one year ago I wrote about Jerry Seinfeld's method of marking a calendar each day he worked towards a goal and trying to create a visible "streak" each month on the calendar. I implemented this into my workflow and found it very helpful. But I did have months where even though I did work on my projects each day I never wrote them on my calendar since I wasn't near it when I completed the goal. Recently I was told about an app for the iPhone that recreates this goal method perfectly called Streaks. The app is very simple: you have a calendar with a task title, such as "Work Out", and each day you do the assigned task you mark it in the calendar. The app then tracks your streaks each and lets you know how many times in a row you have done it! You can create a separate calendar for each of your various tasks and track them all.

If you are serious about tracking your work towards a goal then I highly recommend picking up this app, otherwise pick up an actual calendar and try it the "old fashioned" way.

Parallel Parking

This 30 sec short should help to remind everyone to always pay attention to the street signs before parking, else you could end up like this:

Parallel Parking from Yum Yum London on Vimeo.

Nice stop-motion style to the piece too, kudos to the creators.