I talk a bit about traffic at Interactive8Ball.com and some generalizations on the nature of the questions and answers posted there:
Interactive 8Ball Picking Up Steam at Stranger Studios blog.
220 Pounds.
No gym today. We headed home to Reading for Kim’s bridal shower, which was kind of a surprise. I thought I would drop her off, say hi, and be on my way. But I stayed for the whole thing and had a decent time. It’s good to see folks ladies I haven’t seen in a while.
Today was another day of cheating. I’m too scared to even count the calories I ate today. I think I’m done celebrating my weight loss by eating it back (although the scale has been pretty good to me anyway). I’m going to start tomorrow off right with a nice long visit to the gym.
Besides my goal of weighing 210lbs by the wedding, I’m also giving myself the goal of bench pressing 210lbs. Last time I maxed out at 185lbs. I’m going to do a bit of research to see if that is a realistic goal for a couple months of working out.
I’m also interested to read about how much weight you can actually gain by building larger muscles. You always hear people talking about “losing inches, but no weight… cause muscles weigh more than fat”. My guess is that I’m not really at risk of having my muscle gain interfere with my weight loss goals.
Enjoy the weekend, kids. It’s kind of nice here on the east coast.
220 Yesterday. 221 Today.
A relatively bad couple of days. Yesterday was an official “day off”. I needed to rest my body a bit from the workouts and dancing I’ve been up to lately. And last night we met up Philly for a little wine party. I definitely over indulged in the cheese and crackers and free wine that was there. A 3000Cal night easy.
Today I did go to the gym for a nice 1-1.5 hour workout, but had a textbook binge moment tonight. I’ve been watching poker and snacking for the past couple hours. A banana muffin and extra small bowl of the casserole we had for dinner adds an additional 600Cal or so for the day.
Overall not too much damage done, but I’m not trying to “maintain” here. We need to be losing. I want to break through 220 hard next week… no this weekend. Yeah!
221 Yesterday. 220 Today.
Still feeling good. I’ve been going over my 2000Cal # pretty routinely the past few days. But on the other hand, I’ve also been working out more than I planned. At the beginning of this, I thought my diet would be the most important part of my weight loss. But I’m having a lot of fun working out and so finding ways to fit it into my schedule.
Yesterday I had about 2300Cal for the day, mostly because I had lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. Two “mini burgers”, which runs about 650Cal, fries at 350Cal, and a 300Cal salad had me at 1300Cal just for lunch. What really put me over my goal though was a relatively harmless muffin and glass of milk I had for breakfast. That 400Cal or so made all the difference.
Know What You’re Going to Have for Lunch and Dinner Before You Have Breakfast
See one of the things you HAVE to do if you are going to try this “I can eat whatever I want, just less” diet is plan your meals out for the entire day. I had a mid-day meeting yesterday, which I thought was going to be at Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee, so I wasn’t planning on having anything to eat or drink during the meeting. Since I was going to be away for a while, I decided to have a muffin and glass of milk to hold me over until I could get a bigger lunch at home.
However, on the way to the meeting I found out that were actually going to be having lunch over the meeting. And at Ruby Tuesday’s no less. Now, I could have eaten something healthier for lunch, but it goes against my philosophy here. I would have much rather passed on the breakfast, which would have been no problem at all knowing I was getting mini burgers in 30 minutes.
Yesterday’s Workout
Kim and I danced yesterday night inside “Founder Hall” at Haverford. I think we’ll be going over there for our dancing practice more often. It’s a lot nicer than trying to squeeze in our dancing in the living room here.
Afterwards, I hit the gym (fairly late – like 10pm). I was shooting some hoops. There were a couple other guys there and we played what they’re calling “21” these days. It was nice. I work pretty hard when I’m shooting by myself, but this game of 21 was much more intense than my usually bball workout.
Also, I stink at basketball. This one guy killed us. I was able to get more points than the one guy though bases solely on my height advantage and rebounds.
I found out though that I missed one of the best episodes of Heroes ever. So I’ll need to find a way to get that sh!* online.
Today’s Workout
Kim and I had another private dance lesson today. Decent workout. I broke a bit of a sweat, probably because their heat was so high though.
I thought that this lesson wasn’t as successful as the first. I guess you just can’t beat the ROI for that first lesson. We did learn a few moves, get some pointers on some old ones, and get a nice long list of stuff to do for “homework”.
We’re going to go back to Founders Hall for some more dancing tonight. We will probably work on our Fox Trot, Rumba, and Meringue. If I’m feeling it, I’ll go to the gym afterwards again, but I’m pretty beat and have a long night of work ahead of me.
Peace out fans.
220 Pounds.
Weighed in at 220 pounds today. 221 yesterday. I need to keep this up. I plan on having a long day at the gym tomorrow. I’ve got a midday meeting and a lot of work, which will make it tough. But if I gain back a lot of this weight I recently lost, I’ll be very bummed out.
So “fatblogging” is all one word I think. I need to make sure I write it that way if I want folks to find my stuff I’m writing. I think I’ll use both “fat blogging” and “fatblogging” tags from now on out. I dunno.
Check this out. My fat picture was in the snapshot of Calacanis’ site on Alexa. Nice.
I think I will credit our dancing for the nice results I’ve had this past week. In addition to going to the gym about every other day, Kim and I have been dancing for at least 1hr every night. Dancing isn’t too rigorous, but it’s about equivelent to a semi-brisk walk. I imagine it’s at least another 200-400Cal burned every day. And we’re having a ton of fun too.
Yesterday I ate terrible, but not too much (quantity-wise). And so I think I stayed close to 2000Cal. I had a Sausage McMuffin with Egg for breakfast. They gave me a hasbrown that I didn’t order, so I ate that too. That’s about 700Cal according to this nutritional chart at McDonald’s website. For lunch/dinner I had a dozen ranch chicken wings and some nachos at the Pike Cafe, a great place to get food and drink in Reading, PA. Chicken wings are about 100Cal each and I’d say I ate 400Cal worth of nachos. That puts me at 2200Cal. I also had a glass of white wine at night for a total of 2300Cal or so.
I’ll go over what I ate today, even though I know I’m over. For breakfast/lunch, Kim and I went to Minella’s Diner in Wayne. I had a huge ham and cheese omelet with spinach, hashbrowns, and wheat toast. I’m thinking 4 eggs, 3 slices of cheese, and 200Cal worth of ham in the omelet for about 1000Cal total. Toast = 300Cal. Hasbrowns about 350Cal, putting me at 1850Cal right there. I also had a slice of toast with jam at home early in the morning for 150Cal. Dinner was some great chicken rice soup Kim made. A couple bowels of that would have run me 500Cal. I had about 400Cal worth of tortilla chips and salsa. Later, Kim made banana bread muffins. I ate one with a small cup of milk for about 400Cal. That puts today’s total at around 3400Cal. I hope I overestimated some things in there because that’s about 1/4 of a pounds worth of calories I overate today.
No worries. If I stay on my regime, I should do alright. One more quick tidbit before I go. Last night I dreamt that I had 2 cans out of a six pack. I was holding my shirt up, and Kim was poking at my abs in awe. I woke up and took a look at myself in the mirror. No six pack. My stomach was still flabby, although less so than usual. I also thought my chin and neck area looked nicer. This is probably the most I’ve been motivated to lose weight in a long long while, possibly ever. I credit about 50% of that to the upcoming wedding and about 50% of it this fatblogging movement. Only a couple weeks old, it’s already having an effect on me. I hope we can keep it up.
221 Pounds! Date Night.
New 12-month low on the Jason’s Weight ETF, and I feel great. It’s just a couple pounds, but I’ve been hovering around 224 lbs for too long. I need to keep the pressure on to take advantage of this momentum.
Spent about 30 minutes at the gym today. I did like 5min on the eliptical, then 7min on a rowing machine (those are fun-like cardio for your arms), and spent the rest of the time lifting weights. It was a quick visit cause Kim and I are pretty busy. We have a ton of new clients in the pipeline for Stranger Studios. Luckily I think we’ll have some help with it, but it will fun trying to juggle these projects with the work on WineLog, which is also taking off.
The real challenge of course will be figuring out how to spend the extra money we’re making on our wedding. Wedding are like black holes of money. Supposedly, like real black holes, they radiate some strange energy. I’m hoping that energy will make for a great time. In any case, we’re lucky to have some financial support from our parents. (Special shout out to Sheri and Manfred Wallmeier. Thanks!)
Date Night
Kim and I are going to a group dance session tonight. We’re excited to try some of our moves in a more public setting. We might have to dance with other people in the group, and it’s a good thing my weigh-in this morning is boosting my confidence. I’ll be less likely to get jealous if Kim dances with some other guy 😉
After dancing, we’re going to try dinner at a restaurant near the dance studio. It’s a BYOB, so I’ll see what we can bring. My goal is to not overeat, which I often do at restaurants. (evidenced by the Olive Garden incident) I have about 900Cal left for today, which should get me a decent meal or appetizer, but not both. So far today I’ve had a big bowl of chilli (550Cal) with some cheese(50Cal), sliced avocado(200Cal), and some bread and butter(300Cal).
Also, I’m upset that no one has commented on my Blog Tycoon post yet. Read it, tell me how cool the idea is, and then find a programmer to make it. I want to play that game.
Have a good weekend guys and gals.
Someone Make This Game: Blog Tycoon
First off, I’m not talking about this Blog Tycoon, which I just found today. I’m not exactly sure what’s supposed to be fun about that game. It looks like a gimmick to get people to visit the blogs in their ad network. I’m talking about something much more exciting.
I guess we’ll have to change the name though. Might I suggest getting WordPress, Blogger, Live.com, TypePad (yuck), or someone else to sponsor your game and call it WordPress Tycoon or something similar.
Some Background: The Stranger Studios Business Model
Part of the business model of Stranger Studios is to incubate business ideas. We specialize in the prototype and the early startup phase of things. We have a long long list of business ideas. Some become prototypes that never get released to the public. Others are released, like Interactive 8ball and Mobilicio.us, but aren’t heavely marketed or developed further. When a site gains some interest and traction, we devote some more resources to it. WineLog is one such project that has graduated to the next level and will be spun off as businesses of their own.
Our original intention was to sell our projects once they reached the phase WineLog is at. The truth is that we just don’t have the experience growing from a functional startup application to a full-fledged business. However, we’ve fallen in love with the project, and are instead bringing on some outside help to continue to develop the business “in house”.
Orphened Ideas
Now most of the ideas in our bank are never going to be acted on. We just don’t have the time and can only focus on the projects with the most potential, or ones which interest us the most, or ones which we can bang out fast, or ones that will gain us contacts at Yahoo!, or ones that will draw the attention of TechCrunch… you get the idea.
And so another important part of the Stranger Studios business model is to give out some of these ideas to the public. If we’re not going to act on an idea, we’d like to put it out there. I’ll be posting these ideas either at the Stranger Studios blog or here at random intervals. Maybe someone will pick it up and make it happen. If so, we only ask that you give us credit. Maybe someone will learn something just from the idea itself. Maybe we’ll learn something from the feedback the idea gets, which will help us come up with even better ideas in the future.
I’m not a Genius
Now I don’t want to suggest that I am some kind of business genius. Most of the ideas I have are probably on the minds of at least 10 other people. However, I’m pretty smart and I do think that most of these ideas are cool. In any case, here is the first idea to be orphaned from the Stranger Studios bank.
The Game: Blog Tycoon
The following is far from a complete design document. It’s meant to get the gist of the game idea across. I wouldn’t be opposed to consulting on this if someone does take it up. Just get in touch.
Blog Tycoon would be a game in the vein of those lemonade stand games we all played growing up (here’s a decent lemonade stand game) and all other “Tycoon” games: RollerCoaster Tycoon, RailRoad Tycoon, Drug Dealer Tycoon, etc.
In Blog Tycoon, your goal is to create a successful blog site or network of blog sites. Your score would be a combination of popularity, power, and of course money earned.
The Beginning
I see players starting out with one blog and no traffic. Users may have a certain amount of income (from their day job) to cover hosting costs or possibly start out with some loaned or saved up money. (How about instead of gonig to college, you took the $10,000 your parents gave you and decided to start a blog!)
The other “currency” that players will start out with is their writing time. Every day players can write 3 blog posts. This number would go up later as players gain “experience” and/or hire staff.
Each blog post will be of a certain type: either (1) personal, (2) link bate, or (3) revenue generating. This roughly corresponds to the blogging decisions we made at InvestorGeeks. Each type of post would affect your Google hits, subscriber numbers, and ad revenue in different ways.
Alternatively, you could forgo 1 blog post and instead write 2 comments on other blogs. Perhaps there would even be a fake Google Analytics for you to figure out who is linking to you so you can go comment on their blogs. The comments would help to bring your blog to new readers at the expense of a bit of content.
The Meta-game
There would be a meta game around designing your blog. Do you go for a 2-column layout or a 3-column layout? Where do you put the ads? How many ads? What type of ad? (Here’s another sponsorship opportunity. Get Text-Link-Ads to sponsor the game and in return their ads would be ensured to have the highest ROI in the game.)
The Mid-game
Eventually, you’ll have to use some of your profits to move to new hosting, hire designers to spiff up the site, and possibly bring on new writers. You can try a revenue sharing model, which will likely fail (it’s so hard to split that $8 up between 5 writers every month). Then a flat rate model or % stake model.
By the time you are ready to start a second blog, you’ll probably have enough experience earned up to be posting like 5-8 posts a day. You’d have to figure out how to split these posts up between your blog network. Think of how much better TechCrunch is when Arrington is posting 5-times a day vs. when he’s on vacation. You might want to focus on the new blog to bring it up to speed, but multiple posts on the same day will always have diminishing returns.
The idea of experience in general could be pretty cool. I see players “spending” points to earn new abilities like: faster writing, better writing, better negotiating skills, upgraded affiliate rates, who knows.
Little side note: a cool feature would be to scrape real blog posts from the web to populate the in-game blogs. And what about getting into blog wars with competitor sites! Ooh, this game is just ripe for fun.
The End-game
Eventually, you’ll hire other staffers to run the books, find direct advertising, and negotiate your sellout deal with AOL.
That’s about it for now. I would have a tremendous amount of fun with this game. I imagine other folks would too. Think of all those aspiring entrepreneurs trying to make a living off their blogs. They (we?) check their adSense accounts everyday and can’t wait to see how many RSS readers they’ll have tomorrow. With this in game format, a day would become 30 seconds… which would make me a millionaire blog tycoon in just a few hours instead of a few years.
Let me know what y’all think. What would you add to a game like this?
Like I said, I don’t have time to program this, but I wouldn’t mind being involved if someone does take up the idea.
223 Again. Cookies for Dinner.
That’s right beeyatches. I had cookies for dinner. This is the best diet ever.
Weight Talk
I weighed in at 223 again this morning. A look at my weight chart shows some support in this 222-224 pound range. I’ve been having trouble breaking through. The good thing though is that, as we know from the technical analysis of stocks, support levels often become resistance once they’re broken. It’s good to know that in a few weeks I’ll be well past 222 and I’ll probably never weigh 224 pounds again for the rest of my life. Well, that’s the optimistic view anyway.
I’ve been writing a lot about what I eat in these blog posts, and I realize that it’s probably not the most interesting thing to read. It’s amazing how important food is in my life though. It’s a wonderful pretense for telling people about my day, as all our major activities usually somehow involve food. Even though the food talk may be boring, it really helps me keep track of calories in a food diary sort of way. So I’ll continue to do it, but try to be as brief as possible.
Total calories for the day is 2150. A bowel of cereal for breakfast = 400Cal.
A Big Lunch at the HC
I had lunch over at the Haverford College Coop today, talking with another alum who might be helping us with some Stranger Studios work. At the Coop, I had a “chicken salad hoagie”. I tried to describe what I wanted to the sandwich artist, but the guy just went ahead and made what he’s programmed to make. I usually see these kinds of situations as an opportunity to try something I might not have thought to order… like provolone on my chicken salad sandwich. The sandwich looked so good after it was made that I didn’t have the heart to take off the cheese. Ok, it just looked really good and I wanted to eat it.
I’ve calculated calories for the hoagie at 350 for the roll, 500 for the chicken salad, 200 for 2 slices of provolone, and 50 for the lettuce, tomato, pickels, and onion. That’s 1100 total for the sandwich.
The sandwich really was a beauty. The guy I was meeting changed his order after he saw it. And it was so beautiful that I made the decision to forgo dinner and use the calories I had left to have some chips with lunch. It was a good choice. 300Cal for a bag of Herr’s Kettle Cooked chips.
The State of Computer Science Majors
After lunch, I hung out on campus a bit and visited some old professors. I talked with one about how the number of Computer Science students is down something like 60% in the past couple years. He cites all the outsourcing talk as a leading cause. You just don’t see those kids who are all excited about Computer Science as a major anymore, and how they’re going to become wealthy programming for a living. I remember how cliche it was to major in Computer Science when I was declaring my major. But I was doing it for the love of the science, man.
(I just took a break from writing this to do an ab workout video with Kim. We did one that was on-demand through Comcast Cable. They have a lot of great exercise videos in there if you’re into that kind of thing. Also, at one point the workout required hand weights, which we didn’t have. So Kim grabbed a couple cans of veggies from the cabinet that worked out well.)
Philosophy Talk and Cookies
I hung out in one of the computer labs at Haverford for a bit, working on a blog I’ll be posting later about a cool game idea. Then at 4:15pm, I went to see Palle Yourgrau speak about his new book A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein
After the cheese- and chips-filled lunch, I had just 200 calories left for the day. By my rough calculations that was about two of the smallish-to-medium cookies at the talk. I had one sugar and one oatmeal raisin. I remember reading somewhere that a typical chocolate-chip cookie is 75Cal, so I thought 100Cal was a good estimate. Kim thought that was small though, and we looked it up online. Some pages had oatmeal raisin cookies going for as much as 280Cal, but then I can’t tell how big their cookies are compared to mine. I’ll have to figure this out if I’m going to be eating more cookies in the future.
Wine Puts Me Over 2000Cal
So breakfast, lunch, and cookies put me at exactly roughly 2000Cal. Kim had a nice two-portion-size glass of wine ready for me when I got home, which puts me over at 2150. I want to end one of these days below the 2000 mark.
On the exercising front, I didn’t hit the gym today. However, I did walk around campus a bit, and Kim and I danced for about 45 minutes before American Idol came on at 8 (I’m not really sure how I got sucked into this show).
I Put on My Dancing Shoes
Our dancing is coming along really well. Our waltz is great (for beginners). Our merengue and swing are decent so far. Our fox trot is shakey, but really good when we nail it. Our wedding song is going to be a fox trot, so we work on that one a bunch.
We’ve been learning a few new moves since our last private dance lesson. I hope our teacher isn’t upset about it. Kim and I are going to try to wow him a bit with some of the stuff we learned. We’ve found some excellent videos at Expert Village. They have videos for all kinds of things. For dance, I’m really fond of the ones put out by Leslie Sack.
Stay tuned for my game idea. I think the bloggers will either love it or hate it.
223 Pounds. Chili Day.
So Calacanis posted my fat pic on his blog yesterday. Nice. I hope he’ll follow up a few months from now when I have a nicer pic to show off.
Calacanis seems to be on a toned down version of the Atkins diet. He’s trying to replace bread and other sugars with protein and fish. I think it’s a healthy way to go. But when it comes to losing weight, I believe it’s just the calories that matter.
I hear that most of the weight loss associated with a low carb diet actually comes from a reduction in calories. However, a low carb (or rather high fat) diet supposedly makes you feel full on fewer calories. So that’s good I suppose. Studies suggest that Atkins dieters can eat more calories and still lose more weight. Thermodynamics buffs say this is impossible, but people are fighting it. If there is any truth to the “more calories, less weight” proposals, I’ll say it has something to do with the fact that eating carbs puts me to sleep (where I burn fewer calories). Here are a couple interesting reads on the subject:
In any case, my goal as stated is to lose weight without having to change the quality of the food I eat. Just the quantity. I really enjoy food, and think this is the way to go for me without burning out on this diet.
Yesterday was rough. So I wanted to start the day off right. I skipped breakfast and got right to work. I was at the gym from about 12-1… some bball again, curls, and some jogging.
Kim made the most incredible chili I’ve ever tasted today. It was made with ground turkey meat, black beans, onions, tomatoes, some other super special stuff. We also topped it off with a little bit of cheese and some avocado slices. Avocado is really awesome with chili. If you take anything away from this blog, it should be to try avocado with chili.
So after the gym I had a couple bowls of Kim’s chili. I think I’m over-estimating things a bit, but at 300Cal per 1cup of chili I’d say it’s about 900Cal there. Add 100Cal for the cheese, 200Cal for the Avocado, and another 300 for some bread and butter, and I’m at 1500 Calories for lunch. Wow.
For dinner, I toyed with the idea of eating the left over pizza from yesterday, but it wouldn’t heat up well anyway. So I passed on pizza and instead had another, slightly smaller, bowl of chili. With cheese, I’d say 400Cal there and another slice of bread at 100Cal. That’s 2000 for me, and I stop there.
Kim’s out to dinner after a networking event. I hope she’s not in the mood for wine when she gets home cause I’ve got no room for the calories. I’m planning on writing a piece about wine calories at WineLog soon. (Actually, I think one of our bloggers already did… nope, couldn’t find it. So I’ll have to write it.)
One of the easiest things one can do to cut calories is to stop drinking high-calorie, low-nutrition drinks… so-called empty calories. I only drink diet soda. I drink diet green tea from Wawa (great stuff). And I drink water during the day. The only drinks I typically have with calories in them are milk, wine, or the occasional glass of OJ. I find myself drinking quite a bit of wine “for work”, and it’s calories I wish I could pass up on.
That’s it for today. I’m going to put my full attention on American Idol now and then get back to work on some exciting stuff for WineLog. Cheers.
A Better Picture of Me
I needed to post another picture of me to balance out the one from my last post. I look a bit better in this one. I’m not sure if I weigh any less, but I have looser cloths on and a nicer haircut. I’ve got a bit of a double chin there, but at least I have a neck in this one.
My guess is that I am closer to my current weight in this picture. This is from Maine last August. I had just left Accenture and my project in New Jersey. While in NJ, I was going to the gym pretty regularly at the apartment I was staying at and doing well with this crazy rice diet (rice + scrambled eggs + broccoli + Goya adobo seasoning = good eats).
