So far, so good!  I'm down 24.6 pounds in 5 weeks.  Jill's doing well, too. Here's what 25 pounds looks like...

So, what's it like to misplace 25 pounds?  Well, my doctor cut my blood pressure medicine in half after week 3, and in half again after week 4.  He also cut my diabetes medicine by a third after week three.  My dress pants won't stay up unless I cinch my belt to the last hole.  And, I'm down a size in my Levi's.  Plus, my shirts are fitting better - in fact, many of them are just plain billowy on me now.  In other words, I can't wait to misplace another 25 pounds!

I now have most of my 20/20 appointments scheduled, starting with a counselor session tomorrow morning before work.  Here’s the skinny:

• Counselor starts 10/28 at 7:50am.  Will schedule remaining appointments directly.
• Initial fitness assessment on 11/1 at 7:30am.  Next assessment sometime in March.
• Initial physician meeting on 11/4 at 8:30am.  Next appointment sometime in December.
• Dietician on Mondays at 5:30pm, starting 11/8.
• Training on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, starting 11/9.  Weekdays at 6:00am.  Saturdays TBD.
• Group counseling TBD.

I managed to get the same counselor and trainer I had last time.  I’m excited about that.  I liked both of them.  And, I’m looking forward to meeting my new dietician.  (They promoted my last dietician to the director of the program, so she doesn’t see patients anymore.  Bummer.)

Jill has her times, too.  She starts the same week I do.  Wish us luck!!!

My wife an I are busy people.  I work all day.  She chases twins all day.  On occasion, we find it useful to know where the other person is, or what our plans are for next Tuesday.  So, we’d like the ability to see each other’s calendars.  It’d also be nice to be able to exchange appointments from time to time.

FAIL #1:  Unfortunately, the iPhone mail app cannot open .ICS calendar files.  So, if I send Jill a copy of an early morning meeting request (so she knows to kick me out of bed), she has to wait until she can open the email on her Mac before she can add the appointment to her calendar.  Seems to me like this is a fairly standard requirement for email/calendaring systems.  I wonder why Apple left it out. 

FAIL #2:  Also rather unfortunately, Apple’s MobileMe product has a rather gaping hole in it between two related features, called sync and publish.  Sync is the feature that allows a MobileMe user to access all their calendar, contacts, bookmarks and more across all their OS X and iOS devices.  Publish is the feature that allows a MobileMe user to share their calendar (or contacts) with anyone on the web.  You can read more about these features here.

iCal supports both of these features.  But, the iPhone only supports sync.  Therein lies the hole.  Here’s how an event travels from my iPhone to hers:

1. I create a new event on my iPhone.
2. The MobileMe client on my phone syncs the event to the cloud.
3. The MobileMe client on my computer syncs the event to my computer.
4. iCal on my computer then publishes the event to my shared calendar.  (I’m not sure whether this happens automatically with “auto-publish” turned on, or whether I still have to manually refresh.)
5. The event now is visible to Jill’s iPhone – if she’s chosen to subscribe to my shared calendar directly from her phone.  But, if she subscribed to my calendar via iCal and she’s using MobileMe sync to get that calendar onto her phone, then the entire process above has to happen in reverse, including a manual refresh that forces iCal to go download my shared calendar again.

The practical result of this missing use case is that Jill and I cannot see appointments that we add on our iPhones until both of us have had a chance to refresh in iCal – which can take days.  (Did I mention that Jill chases twins all day?)

Granted, Jill and I are still using our ancient iPhone 3G phones.  (We’re holding out for Verizon.)  So, perhaps the new iPhone and the new MobileMe calendar (which is only compatible with iOS 4) solve the problem.  If you can confirm (or deny) this, let me know.  In the meantime, I’m going to try syncing our calendars via Google, rather than MobileMe.

In January, 2006, I weighed 293 pounds. I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Type II Diabetes and severe obstructive sleep apnea. Six months later, I weighed 218 pounds, I was off all my medications, and I was sleeping fine without CPAP. How did I do this? 20/20 Lifestyles.

This morning, I weighed 294 pounds. I'm back on CPAP and all the medications. In fact, I'm now taking even more medicines and my metabolic numbers are worse than four years ago. How did I do this? In a word, stress. Over the last three years, my mother passed away from liver disease at 62, my wife gave birth to twins, I left Microsoft under duress, and I spent six+ months unemployed. Any one of those events could have tripped me up. The combination was overwhelming. I reverted back to my previous sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet.

Now that life has settled down again, and now that I've been re-diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, I've decided to take another run at 20/20. Jill and I are both going to repeat the full program. We'll likely start around the beginning of November. This time, my focus will be on identifying ways to manage stress through sustaining an active lifestyle. Sure, I'll be following the 20/20 diet and exercise plans. And, the weight will come off. But, the most important thing I need to learn is how to be active every day.

I'll be posting progress updates as we go. Stay tuned.

Seattle played a road game today and beat Tuscon with an all-time best temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39 C).  Regional temperatures soared, with official readings topping out around 108 in Bellevue, and unofficial reports as high as 120 degrees!  Now, if only the Mariners and Seahawks could beat the Diamondbacks and Cardinals!

The extraordinary news of the "win" made both local and national news.  Here's a round-up of some of the coverage:

Local Coverage

• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Seattle Times
• KOMO 4 (ABC)
• KING 5 (NBC)
• KIRO 7 (CBS)
• KCPQ 13 (FOX)
• Metro Transit Travel Advisory (only 30% of bus fleet has AC)

National Coverage

• Associated Press
• ABC News
• NBC News (MSNBC)
• CBS News
• FOX News (most relevant article I could find on the site)

Oh, and, apparently, the entire state is on fire!

I'm going back to work!  I accepted a position with Symetra Financial last week.  My first day in the office will be this Wednesday.  I'll be a senior developer and agilist working on their web development efforts.  

I can't wait to get back in the groove!

I left Microsoft back in April to stay at home with Jill and the twins. As Hunter and Gracie's six month birthday approached, Jill and I agreed - it was time for me to go back to work!

So, I have spent the last three weeks talking to recruiters and interviewing all over the Seattle area. I talked to companies small, medium and large; start-ups and well established firms. After approximately ten interviews, I have received five offers - all of them quite generous. (Not a bad ratio of interviews to offers, if I do say so myself!)

Jill and I are now weighing the options. We will make a decision this week, possibly as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned to hear how it turns out...

Ever since purchasing my iMac several months ago, I've been searching for decent OS X desktop blogging software.  After test driving several of the products on the market, including both MarsEdit and ecto, I have yet to find anything that I like as much as good old Windows Live Writer.  So, I'm going to keep using WLW.  I just got it running in "Unity" mode under VMware Fusion on my iMac.  So, now, it appears on my dock right next to all my other favorite programs.  Yeah!

If you're out there, watching, lurking, viewing this site, take a minute to post a comment to let me know you care.  It's starting to feel like I'm talking to a wall.

After a couple of full days of using Flock, I've come up with a couple of niggles:

1. Flock seems to prefer it's formatting to the formatting on my blog.  I wish it didn't.  I don't want to have to use my control panel to "fix" every post I write.
2. Flock seems to prefer Technorati tags to the tags built into my blog engine.  I like the idea.  I just wish it would use both.

On the plus side, the blog editor did correctly handle the Categories used by Graffiti.  I wasn't expecting it to.  But, as it stands, these issues will probably prevent me from using the Flock blog editor for any serious blogging.  But, the rest of the browser is pretty darn cool.  I especially like the "my world" view for the sheer volume of information it presents.