VexVox

Back in late September — about a year after I started working out regularly — I hit a plateau. The lowest I've reached is about 167 pounds, and I've bounced back to an average of 170 ever since. Two pieces of equipment in the workout room of my apartment complex had broken down, and the manufacturer was taking its sweet old time repairing them. (Only in the last few weeks was the equipment working again.)

These confluence of events spurred me to do something different with my diet and exercise regimen. The Abs Diet was recommended in a few threads on Ask Metafilter, where I learned about The Hacker's Diet. I used the method of measurement in The Hacker's Diet to gauge my progress, and I figured if the Hive Mind were right about that, it would be right about this.

After reading through the book — and cringing at the writing — I went ahead and tried it out. I bought some dumbbells to substitute for the broken gym equipment, and I rearranged my diet to accommodate the "power foods" recommended by the author. I stopped watching calories, as instructed.

But I had some suspicions. Because I was at a plateau, I didn't think ignoring calorie counts would really help. That would be the point where calorie counting because more important.

A lot of the testimonies in the book came from people who lost 10-15 pounds in the six weeks promised by the book's subtitle. Thing is, I got those same results without using The Abs Diet. Those first few pounds are water, and five of them went missing in my first week of exerce. I lost 10 pounds from the very end of August to the very end of September. By October, I was down 17 pounds. During a plateau, I would not register such a change. If I did lose weight, I predicted it would be very, very nominal.

The Abs Diet recommended snacking between meals, which I did at the start of my diet because the smaller portions at lunch and breakfast left me wanting more. But once my body started adjusting to the new portions, snacks actually got in the way. Now I don't snack, but I still eat those same small portions. If I try to eat the way I did before, I'd feel sick fairly quickly. I didn't want the snacking to get me into the habit of expecting bigger portions.

But I decided to follow The Abs Diet as closely as I was comfortable, regardless of my instincts. Over the course of six weeks, I gained five pounds.

It wasn't until the fourth week — when it was clearly obvious The Abs Diet was not doing what it promised — that I got a second scale with a body fat monitor. In the last two weeks of The Abs Diet, I consoled myself with the steady daily reading of my body fat — an average of 22 percent, which is considered an acceptable body fat percentage. The ideal for me is closer to 17 percent.

I even read on the BBS of the book's official site that The Abs Diet would make some people gain weight at first, but they would then lose it. Right.

Once the six weeks were finished, I ditched a few of the diet's guidelines. I stopped eating nuts when I saw the calories from fat consisted more than 30 percent of the recommended daily allowance. I stopped snacking because it felt better not to snack. I went back to watching my portions.

A few things I kept — I've started eating eggs on the weekends, if only to stop me from driving across town to get a bagel. I eat quite a bit of spinach and broccoli. And I still do the exercises demonstrated in the book.

I think The Abs Diet made me gain some muscle, but it wasn't enough to burn the remaining fat lurking around my gut. My weight seems to be trending more toward 169 than 172 now that I've adapted a few of the diet's ideas.

I still have 15 more pounds to go, but I'm not quite in a rush to get there. I haven't been 170 pounds in about eight or nine years, and I'm relishing it. It's also the holidays, so there's little point trying to be good in a season that encourages gluttony. When the new year comes, maybe then I'll start thinking drastically.

My mom's birthday is Dec. 10 (yesterday, relative to the timestamp of this entry), and I intended to call her to wish her happy birthday. I live in the Central time zone, and she lives in the Hawai`i time zone, which means the earliest I can call without waking anyone up is around noon. But she beat me to the punch and called me up at work.

I thought that was odd. She's not the type to ring someone up and ask them why they forgot her birthday. In fact, when I greeted her happy birthday, she had forgotten. She cares for my dad day-in and day-out, and it would be an understatement to say he's not in great health. That she would forget her own birthday didn't really surprise me.

But the purpose of her call was even weirder — she wanted to know how I was doing. I had talked to her over the weekend, so I immediately suspected she must have had a dream alarming enough to spur her to call. Sure enough, that was the reason. She dreamed I had gone out somewhere, and when I didn't come back after a long while, she went looking for me. My grandmother, who died in 1992, went with her.

I'm not sure what she found more disturbing — the fact I went missing, or that my grandmother was in her dream. So I stated the obvious.

"Well, the anniversary was this past Sunday," I said, referring to the day she died. Dec. 7 was the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It's also the day the New York Philharmonic first debuted. And it was the day my grandmother died.

"Oh," my mom replied, realizing she had forgotten that date as well.

It seems nobody in the family remembered. Or if they did, they forgot to call my mom up. Usually, she and my uncles and aunts would get together for a vigil on the anniversary, and they would call each other up to make sure it happens.

It didn't this year.

Perhaps everyone is so busy that the day slipped them by? Or maybe 16 years is just enough time to make that date seem distant? Or perhaps my dad takes far too much of my mom's time and energy?

Maybe it's all of that.

I'm just kind of surprised by how the subconscious works. My mom has a dream about me, but it's ultimately a dream about my grandmother. Actually, I think there's a deeper analysis there, but I'm not a psychologist, not even on TV. So I'll save my head shrinking the next time I talk to her.

I just dig the fact I was able to make the connection her subconscious was trying to point out — to some degree.

If you want to put some real hurting on my computer, just write a blog entry with dozens of YouTube videos embedded therein. A friend of mine has a blog, and he does it all the time.

I must be really lazy if I'm going to take content from my one of my other blogs and post it here. But I have an unstated policy banning the use of embedded YouTube on that site. This site does not have such prohibition, and the interface, in fact, makes it easy.

So here then is the Musicwhore.org Favorite Edition 2008, complete with a whole clusterfuck of YouTube videos. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, so the saying goes. Rather than read the list, it would probably be more helpful to listen to it instead. (LiveJournal readers may want to click through to Vox to experience the video overload.)

Musicwhore.org Favorite Edition 2008

1. MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS
2. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
3. Emmylou Harris, All I Intended to Be
4. ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, World World World
5. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
6. Samamidon, All Is Well
7. Chris Walla, Field Manual
8. LEO今井, FIX NEON
9. Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Sorry … this music doesn't really lend itself to video.)
10. Spangle call Lilli line, ISOLATION

For anyone thinking about shopping for me for Christmas, I have this one piece of advice: don't do it.

The kinds of things I would ask of Herr Sinter Klauss are either too pricey for casual gift-giving or too specialized. It's not like you can pick up Hajime Chitose's Shima Kyora Umui from Best Buy. And do I matter that much to you to spend $300 on a pair of studio monitor speakers? Didn't think so.

I know there's some debate or other about giving cash as a Christmas gift, but for me, cash is so much simpler. I know where to get what I want, and I'm not afraid to risk my credit card number to get it. My gift-givers in the past, not so much. And most of them can't read Japanese anyway.

The first time I made a list of various sundy items for which I was desirous, I ended up getting a lot of them. The last time I made a similar list, I later decided I wasn't really in a position to make much use of them. (A camcorder? QuarkXpress upgrade? Really?)

This time, I'm making a list of things I actually foresee myself getting in the near future. That all depends on the tax return and the second half of the company bonus. It also helps that I'm in the last few months of my car payment.

So I want but not necessarily for Christmas …

• A pair of studio monitor speakers. I'm tired of using my computer speakers, of having to anticipate how the bass presence on these speakers may translate when I listen in my car or at work. I would like to have some monitors that have no color — like the headphones I bought in September — so mixing isn't such a guessing game.
• Bass traps. I've already treated the room with some acoustic foam to handle the high frequencies. I'm not sure if I really have much of a problem with standing waves, but I could feel a subtle difference when I installed the foam. Perhaps bass traps will enhance that difference even more.
• Singing lessons. My breath control sucks, my timbre is off and my mic technique is non-existent.
• Mastering Audio by Bob Katz, or The Mastering Engineer's Handbook by Bob Owsinski.
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. I'm probably going to get this when I start doing my Christmas shopping.

Now if you're not going to heed my advice and you insist on shopping for me, let me make it easy for you: Guitar Center Gift Card. I actually tell people this every year, and it never happens. One of these days, it's going to stick.

It occurs to me that I didn't really make a proper Holidailies introduction post, in the autobiographical sense. I often run under the assumption that I never acquire new readers — I just have the same ones from 10 or 12 years ago. So I don't bother catching people up with what's going on.

I never really know how far back I'm supposed to go with these kinds of entries anyway. I think perhaps 12 months is a good span. Laziness — more a mother of invention than necessity — spurs me to employ a bullet list.

• I work in Austin, Texas as a web developer in a job I've held for five years, depending on which start date you use.
• I grew up in Honolulu, where I visited earlier this year to attend my dad's birthday party.
• I have an unhealthy addiction to Japanese indie rock. Browse my Vox audio library to get a better picture.
• I released an EP back in June as an experiment to see how involved the process is. The production part is easy. The promotion part totally eludes. (Wanna listen? Better yet, wanna buy?)
• Since 2005, I've been writing and recording a lot of songs. I have about five albums in various states of unfinished.
• I've lost 45 pounds since September 2007. I'm still working on that last 15, but the plateau, it is a hard mistress.

I'm probably going to talk about these topics over the next month. Particularly the music stuff. I'm back in the home studio again, and I am trying — really, really, trying — to get something absitively, posolutely finished. Could be this month is nothing but a recording diary.

I should be so productive.

(Another follow-up to the creativity hangover. Bear with me.)

Back in September, equalization finally became clear to me. I would toy with EQ plug-ins, not really knowing what sliders I was sliding or knobs I was turning. After a bit of web surfing and a video demonstration — the location of which I no longer remember — I understood. So I went on a tear and retracked a whole bunch of songs so that I may properly apply equalization on the various parts.

I went through a good 40 songs in a week. That got me hungover.

I've spent the last three years recording and writing like a madman. Lots of songs which have been in limbo for more than a decade finally took shape, and I even added a few new songs to fill in the gaps. At this point, I have about 95 tracks in progress, and all of them are about 80 to 90 percent complete. Thing is, that last 10 to 20 percent are the persnicketty details which tend to make any project drag.

Also, 90 percent spread over 95 tracks is a big whomp of 10 percent unfinished.

I already have these songs organized by albums, EPs and singles, so why not just concentrate on finishing one album, EP or single? Well, that would make sense, wouldn't it?

I'm still learning how to do all this home recording studio stuff, and when I figure out some new technique, I want to apply it — to everything. Usually it's because I've listened to these songs in one fashion for a number of months that I want to hear them differently. So I never just work on one particular piece.

But now I'm hunkering down, and I'm focusing on the first album I finished writing in 2005. The vocals are the only thing on which I've been dragging my feet — mostly because I suck at singing — but I think I've got a few performances that don't make me totally wretch.

Getting some new toys also helped ease me out of the hangover. I recently purchased a $233 condenser microphone, which is nearly 4 times more than I paid for my previous condenser microphone. And yes, I can absolutely tell the difference. I also bought a pair of $100 headphones, to replace the $50 headphones I bought 10 years ago. Now I don't have headphones bleeding into the vocal track — it makes pitch correction easier. (Yeah, I use pitch correction. Believe me — you will thank me.)

These past few weekends have me encouraged that I can get one album done. Of course, that leaves four others to finish. And five EPs. And three singles.

About a month and a half ago, I complained about being creatively hungover. I've slowly recovered from it, and I have been chipping away at some work.

One thing that jolted me out of my website-building slump was the adoption of a third-party framework to replace one I built over the past five years. In the office, I built a number of web applications using code I fashioned for my personal projects, and now I'm moving them over to CodeIgniter. I should have done it years ago, but even as recently as 2005, I felt I needed to build everything from scratch because I wanted to be familiar with how every little detail works.

Then I started learning more about MVC patterns and took a look at code that implements it far more effectively than my own. I saw two options:

• Turn my patchy framework into something comparable to Ruby on Rails or CakePHP
• Actually move my applications to Ruby on Rails or CakePHP

But I knew the amount of work to adapt existing code to a new structure took just as much — if not more — time than writing from scratch. And I have a lot of code — code which has gone through numerous rewrites before. Reinventing the wheel just didn't sound appealing.

The work applications, however, have a glaring Achilles heel — I'm the only person who knows what's going on. It would take more time than is worth for someone else to go in and figure it all out. If I didn't move all that code to something already documented — and my patchy framework is not documented very well — it would rot.

I was immediately sold on CodeIgniter because integrating the Smarty template engine was easy and quick. CakePHP doesn't seem to encourage such integration. (Some developers believe a framework with its own template engine shouldn't need to use Smarty in the first place.) That's important because I have far too many templates to adapt to a new templating engine.

Once I started moving the code over, it felt good finally to impose a better sense of structure on what was quickly turning into reams of spaghetti code. My framework was kind of, sort of object-oriented in spirit but not in practice.

When I managed to move over a registration and login system in three days, I felt engaged with code again.

Of course, this means I'm essentially trashing five years of my own work. But honestly? I'm so ready to move on.

I'm past the point of wanting to learn the ins and outs of functions, control structures, logic and data types. I read articles on weblogs extolling the virtues of good developers, and they all described me three years ago. I'm not so eagar to code after work, to refactor applications over and over again, to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. Eight years ago, it was all new to me, and it tapped into a part of my creativity that craves logic over expression.

Since 2005 — not coincidentally when I started making music again — the figurative pendulum has done its proverbial swing. I have a good idea of what I'm doing now. I don't need to prove much more to myself.

Hello, Holidailies readers.

A few days after I signed this site up to participate in Holidailies, I hit upon the gimmick I could have spread out over the coming month. The only problem? It's content more appropriate for my music blog, Musicwhore.org. I thought perhaps I could do it here on Vox, but it involves a bit of multimedia, and Vox is a bit inept in accomodating my exacting specifications on how it's to be presented.

That's a fancy way of saying I'm too lazy to make it work on this site.

I had actually been hemming and hawing over which site to register — this one or Musicwhore.org? I chose this site because it's been neglected, and a one-month challenge to write would force me to neglect it no longer. I had an online journal I kept for 10 years, but I ended it back in September 2006. I set this site up about six months later because I kind of missed the whole personal, online journal style (as opposed to short-burst, informational blogging). As days spread to weeks spread to months spread to years, it became apparent what little I had to say became even less.

As in, no-more-than-140-characters less.

Most of my personal blogging these days happens on teh Twitterz, because that 140-character limit really, really appeals to my love of conciseness and crypticness. But a series of Twitter posts amounts to little more than an autobiographical scrolling news bar at the bottom of a television screen. To get a full story, I would need to write a full story.

And that is my intention for the next month or so.

Whether I continue after that, I hesitate to guess.

I decided to take some new photos for an internal website in the office. Compare and contrast how I looked like in 2003 (left) as compared to 2008 (right). If you're reading this on LiveJournal, you may need to come hither to Vox.

I'm bored with everything right now.

I'm not in the mood to work in the studio. I'm not in the mood to write reviews or post blog entries. I'm not in the mood to shoot videos. I'm not in the mood to write creatively. I'm not in the mood to watch TV or movies. I'm certainly not in the mood to build web sites.

If I try to engage in something, I get fatigued mentally. I just don't want to do anything.

And I finally figured out why — it's a creative hangover. I jumped head long into a whole bunch of endeavors this summer, from releasing a CD to shooting music videos. I even self-published a novel. I had the sense I was really pushing myself, but I didn't really realize till now just how much creative fuel I've exhausted.

Just about everything, really.

Now I'm in this curious nether state where nothing engages me. It's kind of alarming and comforting at the same time. Part of me wishes the creative juice would get replenished, but like the Central Texas weather as of late, I'm going through a drought. Guess that's what I get for not conserving.

So I pretty much sleepwalk through the work day, then veg out in front of the TV at night. I have been hanging out in gay websites more often, and a series of events in the past week resulted in my giving my phone number to a guy. I'm working out still, but even that's reached a lull — I hit a plateau in August, and I've actually been gaining weight instead of losing weight. (Could be muscle, though.)

I'm pretty much disconnected.

I'd be annoyed, but annoying is boring too.