Archive for May, 2006

In another case of “wish I would have had a camera” – on my walk today right near my home, I saw a squirrel eating an ear of corn left out on one of those “squirrel feeders.” There was a low 2 foot high metal fence around the yard, on which was perched a blackbird (crow or some other annoying bird). The bird was intently watching the squirrel looking for any pieces to fall to the ground. Underneath the bird, nestled into the long grass was a small rabbit, itself waiting for a few delicious kernels to drop.

Sounds like a bad joke…

A rabbit, a crow and squirrel walk into a bar….

Ok, so when I signed up for Colin’s weight loss group, I didn’t know people would actually CHECK!!! Colin busted me yesterday for eating ice cream on day one. LOL. I deserved it.

So today I kept to it, ate healthy all day, AND walked 2 miles this evening. If I was really ambitious I would wake up at 4:30am every day and walk a couple miles before work. Im trying to wake up earlier a bit every day just to ATTEMPT to get up earlier… but 4:30?? nah. 5 or 5:30 mebbe.

I went and bought some more Michelinas Lean Gourmet things tonight at Cub Foods. 10 for $10. Woot. I also bought lettuce, low-fat western dressing and hutns fruit cups. I was going to surprise Tony, but now he’ll know what I’m bringing for lunch tomorrow.

I updated my fitday profile today, it temporarily went up for some reason (pizza mebbe) but by Grapthar’s Hammer, I will try to lose the 2 and some odd pounds a week until September’s renaissance faire opening.

As for a tan, maybe I’ll have to convince people I know with kids to go to Whitewater University this summer after the play is done…

OK, I made a Fitday “graphic widget thing” and placed it on the Nav so I can see it better. Feel free to use it on your site, it’s nothing fancy.

I have also, I hope, re-activated the cron job so I can autopost again. (yay) I guess we’ll find out in about 10 minutes if it works.

I received a comment yesterday in regards to my FitDay journal. The comment by Victoria was concerned over the low calorie count I was reporting. Well, there’s an explanation, I haven’t been very good in filling OUT the journal.

For instance, yesterday started ok. The slimfast bar for breakfast, Lean Cuisine for lunch and then Subway Club for dinner. Not bad. Then… half a dozen freshly baked cookies. AIGH! Why did I buiy them? And then a regular Coke. Aiiiiiigh pure sugar and 200 something calories.

So, I am officially going to start on June 1st. And everything WILL be reported… good and bad. I had to reset the starting weight this morning (must have been that cheese pizza I had on Sunday) and so now I need to lose 2.68 lbs a week to be at 190 by 9/1/06 – the opening of the renaissance faire.

May the Great Maker help me.

Today I joined the ranks of the few, the proud, the weight-loss challenge over at Colin Devroe’s site. I am NOT brave enough to do pics like he did, but we’ll see how far the motivation goes.

Of course I just had an ice cream sundae after lunch. D’oh!

With almost 3 months to go until my portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham, it is time to get serious about losing a few extra poundages. Last September I managed to lose quite a bit by just walking every night, so I know in three months, I should be able to achieve my goal of under 200 by September 1.

So here it is, the return of my fitday.com link

If you haven’t tried fitday.com – it’s free, and super easy. You don’t have to make your profile public, I just chose to. So as you can see, currently according to my new scale, im at 224.3. So that leaves about 24 lbs in 3 months, which is 8 lbs a month which is a little less than 2 lbs a week. Definitely should be able to accomplish that!

I have already stocked the freezer full of fronzen dinners so I wont order pizza or go out to the chinese buffet. The exercise ball thing has started to actually be used, and I am taking a little bit of Chromium PIcolinate and DHEA to see if it helps. I don’t want to be the “fat sheriff” in the same way Sean Astin was the “fat hobbit.”

Anyway…. as Kosh would say.

And so it begins.

Whittled down over 1200 “new and unread” messages in my inbox to Zero – all filed and the nexessary ones deleted.

I STILL LOVE BABYLON 5!!!!

How lucky I was to work on the show. Too bad I didn’t take full advantage of it. I have a renewed vigor with the thing and am enjoying watching the DVDs again – LONG LIVE PRESIDENT SHERIDAN!

So, you may be asking yourself why I got the Commodore’s out of storage to begin with. Well, it all begins with a few days ago. See, I told myself I was done with the current theater season. Bye Bye Birdie wasn’t that interesting, and I already had lead parts in 2 out of the four productions so far, including a musical, so I needed a break. But, there was a lack of male peeps auditioning for the show, and I was asked to play a small character, Maude, in the show. No problem.

I went to rehearsal Thursday and totally sucked. I haven’t been able to sight read since high school, and even then I was bass and they wanted me to do tenor 2. Eek. So after failing on tenor 2, they put me at the baritone spot (its a quarter) and I still sucked, or rather, I sucked and was unsure of myself… which meant I really sucked.

Enter the Commodore.

Back in the days of QuantumLink, I was a very avid SID arranger. Basically, the Commodore SID chip (still a legend) had 3 native voices and could expand to 6. Making songs sound good with only 3 voices is an art form, and I was into it heavilly in junior high and high school, and made a bunch of SIDs under the name DATASID. Only a few survive to this day.

So, I had a revelation, I would dig out the Commodore, and put my part into the computer! Brilliant! Now, mind you, these are C= 64’s I bought on eBay and not my original system (which was sold at a garage sale in the 90s, how I wish I had her and all my stuff back today). In addition to the 64, I have 2 disk drives, and probably the most important thing – a cable that connects my Commodore disk drive to my old Compaq laptop. Yes, I can download from the INternet directly to a Commodore drive using my PC laptop.

So this morning, instead of hooking the C= up to my big TV, I went to Best Buy and got a small 13″ TV for $69. Sigh. Ok, well, I can use it other places. I then got home and went through the painful process of getting the music editor working. I did have the basic music editor disk, which was awful and a pain to use. I thought I had the Stereo Editor downlaoded already, but I couldn’t find it. So I booted up the laptop and found it online, downloaded it, got it to a disk. But… it is archived.

Commodores used an archaic (even by their standards) of compression that was called LHAarc, and was available in self-extracting or just plain .arc files. You needed a dissolving program to dissolve the un-self-exptracing ones. So, I sorted through the C= library I ripped from the old Ames usergroup and finally found… Omega-Q! Woot! So I went to dissolve, and it wouldnt dissolve onto one disk. Gr. So, I had to hook the drives up and flip switches to get them to use device 8 and 9, and finally everything worked.

After about a dozen reboots for some reason, finally I can get the Stereo Editor to work. Now, I just need to input the damn song so I can learn my notes. I went to WalMart and Kmart tonight threatening to buy a small computer cart to put everything on, but do I really want to spend $30-40 on a computer cart for my Commodore setup? I don’t think it will be out of the closet very often after this is done. But it is kind of fun to play with, and an emulator doesn’t give y ou the same feeling.

So… Long live the Commodore!

This show dedicated to Pete from the Des Moines Cast!

00:00 Intro
00:57 Welcome to the podcast
01:05 Visit www.ruttersramblings.com for more content and call the hotline at 206-3Dubya3
01:43 How the hotline works, go ahead, try it
02:45 Recording Skype calls on a PC
03:28 Zacarias Moussaoui trial and sentencing concludes
05:47 Promo: Slice of Sci-Fi Promo
07:00 Mentioned on the Daily Source Code – clip
08:40 Strange Brood and Unemployment Line mentioned as well
09:00 Brobdingnagian Bards sweeper
09:18 Mega Ramble on my podcasting equipment

Computer – Dell Dimension, on-board audio
Mixer – Eurorack UB802
Microphone – Shure SM58
CAD EPF-15A 6-Inch Flexible Pop Filter
Home-made adjustable microphone boom arm
Recording software – Goldwave
Multitrack Software – Multiquence

23:50 Vote at podcastalley!

http://www.ruttersramblings.com/media/ruttersramblings013.mp3