I ended up being given two of these to play around with by my father who, after buying them on sale, was dismayed to discover that they don’t appear to play well with Macs. Having more time (and I’m guessing a little more patience) for troubleshooting problems of this nature, I took them to see if I could get them working at home. Honestly, I half expected them to just work without any intervention on my part. Call me superstitious, but I’ve seen too many consumer electronics inexplicable work perfectly the moment that someone comes to fix them, or gets rid of them as faulty, to believe in anything truly faulty without a second opinion.
So I was actually a little surprised when I plugged the thing in to get an error message from the OS that a “USB device drawing too much power has been disabled.”
In my mind, that’s a pretty scary message – with its red plastic shell and styling, this thing already looks a little aggressive, and now it’s demanding so much power that my gentle, pacifist iMac has had to disable one of its USB ports to protect itself!? What does this thing want so much power for, I wonder? I’ve already cleared a spot for it on my desk, is that not enough for this maniacal accessory? Clearly I’ve got to get this thing in check, not just for me, but for the sake of all mankind.
My first step was to google the product along with the error message. That led to nothing but one reviewer on Newegg complaining of the same error with no resolution (reminding me of this). Next I check the cirago website to see if they had any documentation, firmware downloads, etc that may lead me in the right direction – again, nothing (On a side note, why do hardware manufactures’ websites always suck? It’s not just the small ones, they all feel as if they were designed intentionally to obscure the information I’m looking for).
At this point I’ve devoted all of about 10 minutes to this thing, and, after unplugging it and plugging it back in (as if that should magically resolve it), am convinced it’s not going to work and realize I should give up on it. So naturally I took the damn thing apart.
Not surprisingly there was nothing of note on the inside that would explain the error I’m getting (or this thing’s megalomaniacal demands for power), but once I put it back together and plugged it in one more time for good measure, it started working like a charm! Seriously, wtf?
After much trial and error, I discovered that that my 4th grade math teacher was right – Order of Operations IS important. For anyone out there who’s been suffering with the same problem unplug everything and try this:
That process does the trick for me every time. Though it’s dependent on the docking station not loosing power. If you turn the docking station off, but leave the USB cable attached the computer will immediately warn you the docking station is drawing too much power and has been disabled. At that point, turning the power back on won’t get the computer to recognize it again without following the steps above.
I imagine that everyone who’s ever tried to run with stock iPod headphones knows what pain in the butt they are. Aside from being slightly too big to begin with, that shiny white plastic they’re made of slides out of a sweaty ear faster than Jay Leno can steal a talk show. I wasn’t even past light jogging before I knew I had to get something new.
One day I swung by a big name electronics store, looking for a new pair that would work better, but didn’t find anything that looked too appealing. I didn’t know what I was really looking for, I mean, I assumed athletic people needed to listen to music while they ran just like I did, so it stood to reason they’d already solved this problem, but if they had, I wasn’t finding it on the shelves.
When I got home, I hit up Google, and in less than 5 minutes I found myself with an incredible selection of ‘sport’ headphones of all shapes and sizes. Still not really knowing what I was looking for (and hating to spend money on something I might dislike) I was pretty reluctant to buy anything without being able to physically inspect them first – especially when every single set of headphones I checked had a mix of rave and terrible reviews. Eventually, I found myself coming back to the Sennheiser MX85 Sport Series again and again, so I figured I’d take a shot.
I’m really glad I did, because I think these things really rock. I’m not an audiofile, so I can’t speak intelligently to the sound quality, but I don’t have any complaints. What I can say, is that these things stay in your ears, even when you’re a big lumbering dude who has no idea how to run properly, and even when you drop your iPod shuffle while doing said lumbering. They stay in your ears, and they’re comfortable, and that’s exactly what I wanted. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with them.
It feels a little odd to be raving about a purchase I made months ago, and even odder still to think that this post about my headphones is twice as long as my post about my 5k. So odd in fact, that I almost didn’t write this out. For someone with steady employment, buying something in the $30 price range isn’t really an accomplishment, particularly when compared with running farther than you’ve ever ran before in your life, so what’s the big deal?
It might sound a bit silly, but buying those headphones was in investment in my health. I didn’t buy a home gym, or a treadmill, or some gimmick on tv telling myself that once I had it, I’d start using it to get healthy – I was already in the gym, doing the hard part, and when an opportunity to make an excuse not to go came up (“I need to get new headphones”), I refused to use it. Instead, I invested in the commitment I’d already made to myself and, in doing so, strengthened it.
So, when I say I love my headphones, I really do. Not because of how they sound, or because they don’t fall out, but because they serve as a reminder of how I’m slowly changing my life for the better.
The WordPress theme I use pushed an update out to fix some sidebar display issues in Firefox 3.6, which I installed today. As far as I can tell everything still works, but if you run into anything that doesn’t look right, shoot me a comment and let me know.
This is a bit much, don’t you think?
I don’t know where I might find a Burgerville, and I’ve no idea if their food is any good, but they certainly have some kick-ass receipts:
Being in California, most places I eat now are required to have calorie counts available upon request, but this is really above and beyond. I love it, and would love to see more places adopt this kind of proactive approach.
Found on Consumerist
The wordpress theme I’m using has had an update released. Of course I made a bunch of little changes to the old version and didn’t record them, so updating isn’t going to be as easy as it should be.
If the site starts behaving badly in the next hour or two it’s probably my fault. After that point, if you encounter anything weird, please drop me line at paul -at- mywastedlife.com.
Today is the first day that my weight trend has completely flat-lined since the first three days of my diet. It’s mainly due to my eating a midnight meal at Casa Vega last night (the very type of full scale late-night eating that contributed to my weight gain for years). Yesterday was also the first time I’ve been over my goal by 1,000 calories plus in over a month. Definitely not a great day.
I read somewhere once, that one of the difficulties with being on anti-depressants is that once you start taking them you feel fine, and begin to think you don’t need them anymore. In a way, I feel like I’ve reached a similar point in my weight loss; a dangerous point where I feel good about the progress I’ve made, and start looking too far forward, at the expense of the present. In past weight loss attempts, this is the point where I would lose my way. I’d justify eating one bad thing “Because I’d been doing so well,” and that one bad thing would lead to another, which would then lead to more, until eventually I’d be right back where I started (or worse).
Luckily, I have a much more accurate and objective response mechanism for my weight than I ever have in the past – this site. I can’t just dismiss last night’s binge in the way that I used to, because now I have the evidence of its impact staring me straight back in the face. Even better, I have the ability to see that yesterday isn’t the whole story.
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In 1988, a programmer by the name of John Walker decided that he was going to approach his weight problem “…as something to be investigated, managed, and eventually solved.” Six months later John was no longer overweight. In 1991, he compiled his personal discoveries and results and distributed them online as The Hacker’s Diet in order to help others achieve the same success.
While it’s certainly an interesting read, The Hacker’s Diet isn’t revolutionary – it essentially boils down to eat less calories than you burn. However, John’s use of exponentially smoothed moving averages to trend one’s weight and become liberated from the tyranny of a fickle scale really struck a chord with me – both as a geek and someone who’s dieted diligently only to see the scale not reflect it.
I knew I wanted to incorporate those calculations into My Wasted Life, and luckily I decided to do a quick Google search before I started, because most of the work had already been done for me via The Hacker’s Diet plugin for WordPress. All of the weight calculations and charts on this site are based off of the code in that plugin. I had to do a bit of poking around to get the data displayed in the way I wanted (details of which can be found here) but that was trivial compared to all the work that had already been done.
So, despite the fact that neither of them will actually ever see this, I want to express sincere thanks to both John Walker and Keith Thornhill. Their work on The Hacker’s Diet and the The Hacker’s Diet plugin helped make this site possible.
After having talked to some of you over the last couple of days it occurs to me I’ve answered alot of the same questions more than once, and I figure that means I should put that info on the site somewhere. I guess a quick Q&A is easiest on me, so here it goes:
Guesswork mostly. I’ve been trying to eat at home more, and since I don’t really cook, those calories are easy to track as they’re listed right on the package of whatever I’m eating. When I eat out it’s trickier, but not impossible. As long as I’m willing to honestly judge portion sizes, I can get all the data I need using sites like Calorie King & Nutrition Data. Obviously in those cases the calories I’m listing are only best estimates (which I’ve been denoting with a tilde before the calorie count), but I’m working diligently to make those estimates accurate.
Eventually I plan to eat out less and cook more, but unless I buy a digital scale to weight out ingredients it will still result in the same basic guessing game. I figure as long as I’m seeing results, then I’ll assume my estimates are correct.
No, I don’t. The scary part is, the meals I’ve been tracking here are exponentially better for me than what I was eating before. Up until about 3 months ago, I was literally eating fast food (Carl’s Jr, Del Taco, etc) 2-3 times a day.
I know I could lose more weight if I drank nothing but water, but I honestly don’t think I could maintain that. I’ve tried going cold turkey on things like that before and it’s never worked out. Rather than give myself rules I know I’ll end up breaking (and thus feel bad about), I’m trying to make intelligent decisions and use my better judgment.
That’s a terribly risky proposition for a ‘diet,’ but it’s a skill I’m going to have to develop if I ever want to live a truly healthy lifestyle. By making small changes, one or two things at time, I’ll eventually reach the same healthy lifestyle I could theoretically implement all at once, but this way I think I actually have a chance of succeeding.
Yeah, but I’m a big guy. When I started building this site, I used just about every tool I could find online to help me determine what were realistic goals.
I discovered that the recommended rate of weight loss while remaining healthy is 1-2 pounds a week in most cases; far less than I would have expected from shows like The Biggest Loser. In fact, most nutritionists seemed to agree that normal, healthy weight loss should not exceed 1% of your total body weight per week, which for me would be no more than 3.25 pounds. I then calculated my BMI, my BMR (2,476-2,809), how many calories I was actually burning in an average day (2,971-3,358), etc.
Armed with those numbers, and the knowledge that cutting 500-1000 calories a day results in 1-2 pounds a week, 2,500 was pretty straight forward – it’s about 500-800 less than I’m currently burning, and allows me room to burn more via exercise while staying in that healthy range of 1%.
It’s not the most aggressive weight-loss plan in the world, but I think it’s a realistic one I can stick to.
