Big Dan’s Site

Howdy and welcome to Big Guy Little World or it’s better known and faster to type acronym, BGLW! Big Guy Little World is an offshoot to my personal blog intended to chronicle my weight loss trials and tribulations along with my path to leading a healthy lifestyle which includes quitting smoking, exercising more, and watching what I put in my body.

It is my hope that my chronicles will help others to get on the path to “wellness” and realize that while it may not be easy it’s definitely well worth it!

I plan on writing a few times per week as well as keeping a daily log of what I eat and exercise. My writings on this blog will generally be reflections and ruminations on what I can do better and thoughts on outside factors that help or don’t help people’s wellness.

What you won’t find here is me hawking weight loss scams through advertisements. It seems the weight-loss blog arena is flooded with blogs that take advantage of fat people’s yearning to be thin by displaying ads that promise ridiculous things. You will see Adsense which is a contextual advertising program that scans the page for keywords and places ads based on the text on the page. Clicking on those links gives me a few pennies to taking you to their site and helps to cover hosting cost for me.

That in a nutshell is what BGLW is and will be about over time I hope to expand and possiblely include guest posters as well as interesting tools for the site.

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About the author: Dan or Big Dan as I’m known around the internet is the author of several blogs. You can read more about him here on his personal blog.

This week I haven’t been doing much blog posting, I’ve still been online but doing other things and spending some time offline trying to heal up my leg which requires me to have it raised above my heart. In any event there’s is no comfortable way for me to use the computer (even my laptop) whilst keep my leg raised, this has led to me putting new and current projects on the back burner, yet again. I had to cut off my boot early again this week due to it being too loose. Last week it was too tight, this week too loose. I tell ya you cannot win for loosing. This week, the boot is a different brand and didn’t “shrink” itself after being put on and the swelling in my leg subsiding due to having the boot on which ment the whole boot was fitting like a sock with stretched out elastic. That’s not good for business and as uncomfortable as it is in the first place, why keep it on if it’s doing me any good? I’m sure doc will piss and moan but at least I’ve been using the stocking in place of it to keep some compression on it.

Aside from that, I played with Kubuntu featuring KDE4 a bit which led to me doing 4 reinstalls of Ubuntu yesterday on my desktop, laptop, and my old desktop mainly because I didn’t want all the KDE cruft left after installing ‘ubuntu-desktop’, which is the meta package for Gnome and all it’s dependances. I do like KDE4 it seems a lot faster than Gnome however there are very few desktop widgets included with the default install which is typical of KDE and I wonder why quite frankly. Gnome has plenty of panel widgets installed by default. I realize you can install a package to get more desktop widgets and I did however there still wasn’t a weather widget which is pretty basic stuff.   However I did read something about the possibly of KDE 4 being compatible with OS X widgets which seems pretty cool but I didn’t have time to read further.

Last Friday night I drove for the first time since I’ve been home. I love driving but with the boot on it’s very uncomfortable. I took Mom to Wally World and got some Dunkin’ Donuts, so that was nice.

Tomorrow is Mom’s birthday, I ordered some stuff online from a catalog I got in the mail called LTD Commodities. They have really good prices on all kinds of stuff for the house and trinkets but their website has a bit to be desired. My biggest qualm is they don’t tell you the shipping price when you checkout, they tell you when they package it you will be billed for it. Not even an email telling you how much before they debit your card which is pretty assine in this day and age. I think I got rooked on shipping, I ordered $31.26 worth of stuff, nothing heavy and my card was charged $48.31. $17.05 to ship a 3 light items! Me thinks I got screwed over, perhaps that’s why their prices are so cheap because they rook you on shipping! None the less it’s some nice stuff so I won’t complain. However I placed my order on Sunday as of today it’s still ‘preparing to ship’ WTF kind of company is this? Most online companies ship the same or next business day.

Anyhow today for one reason or another feels like Friday to me, perhaps because of the upcoming holiday weekend who knows, so I’m going to the store in order to buy Mom a birthday cake and am going to stop for a beer or two on the way home.

As we’ve already established I’m an organization and neat freak. One place where that doesn’t seem to carry over is in my online affairs. I have domains at 3 different registrars and strewn across about 4 different hosts. I move domains from host to host without removing them from the old host. Half the times I don’t know when domains are expiring thanks to 1&1’s crappy control panel so I get surprise credit card charges. Other times I actually have to do a whois to see where my domains are hosted.

Yesterday, I started up yet another DreamHost account. DreamHost may serve pages especially database powered sites slowly and while I’ve complained about them before DreamHost just makes since for me. They’re cheap and allow unlimited domains, their custom control panel is really top notch and makes managing multiple domains super easy even though their CP crawls along like a turtle.

With Dreamhost my thoughts are I’d host all my redirected domains there along with sites I’m just starting out, once they gain some momentum and become self sufficient I’ll move them to one of my VPS’s or maybe a dedicated server.

Yesterday I spent a good two hours updating the DNS for all those domains I was moving to DreamHost. GoDaddy makes it super easy to update multiple domains at once. Meanwhile 1&1 sucks, you have to update each domain individually, I suppose this is to deter you from moving away from their hosting services. It also took me sometime to add all the domains over at Dreamhost because of their slow control panel.

Another thing about 1&1 is there is no way to view your domain’s expiration date, you have to go to https://cancel.1and1.com and start the cancellation process to see the expiry dates which again I believe is so they can charge you for another year, sometimes without you even knowing about it. Which is ridiculous. In the future I’m going to start moving domains to GoDaddy little by little as soon as I have a few spare bucks.

Today I decided to get things in order and made a spread sheet with all my domain names, registrar, expiration dates, and where they’re hosted. I wound up doing a whois on all my 1&1 domains as it’s easier than monkeying around in their CP. I’m already enjoying it with a few clicks I can sort by date and see what is expiring before it does and decide to renew or not. I have so many redirects tomorrow I plan on spending a couple of hours writing out plans for each domain. If I cannot plan for a domain I’m going to let it expire, no sense wasting money for a domain I’m not using.

How about you..How do you manage your domain portfolio and hosting?

Another rhetorical question.

Ever since I’ve been a young teenager I’ve been a night owl. Half the times I couldn’t get up for school because my body just wouldn’t let me fall asleep before 1 or 2 AM. I’ve read a couple of studies that a majority of teenagers are this way and that the school day should start later as for the most part the first 2 or 3 periods of class time are practically useless to them.

I never grew out of being a night owl. As much as I love being out in the sun and enjoying the spring/summer/fall weather, I just cannot seem to stay on a ‘day schedule’, unless I have to.

The only time I’ve ever been able to stay on a day schedule is when I’m working a 9-5, although since I’m a teenager I only worked a couple of 9-5 jobs the rest were either in bars and clubs as a DJ which is a night job or a couple of other jobs that were over night positions.

Working on the internet building and managing websites probably contributes a little bit as I truely don’t have a schedule to keep and often times I have to meet with clients when it’s convienent for them in their time zone which can sometimes be in the middle of the night for me, especially with Australian and European clients.

Staying up nights has it’s positives; For instance shopping is whole lot nicer when people aren’t bumping into you with carts you don’t feel so rushed. Traffic is virtually nothing so driving is pleasant and relaxing. Generally at night it’s quiet therefore I’m able to concentrate on what I’m doing without interruptions.

Of course there are negitives; it always kills my diet and excersise plans as I’m not going walking around my town at 2-3 in morning as there are no street lights where I walk and there’s wild animals out there. There’s been many times I’ve missed company at my house because I slept through them being here. It’s only mom and I here and mom likes the company when I get on a night schedule, we only see each other maybe 2 hours a day, of course that sometimes can be a positive, depending on how you look at it.

What about you? Are you a night owl or early bird?

Another rhetorical question.

Ever since I’ve been a young teenager I’ve been a night owl. Half the times I couldn’t get up for school because my body just wouldn’t let me fall asleep before 1 or 2 AM. I’ve read a couple of studies that a majority of teenagers are this way and that the school day should start later as for the most part the first 2 or 3 periods of class time are practically useless to them.

I never grew out of being a night owl. As much as I love being out in the sun and enjoying the spring/summer/fall weather, I just cannot seem to stay on a ‘day schedule’, unless I have to.

The only time I’ve ever been able to stay on a day schedule is when I’m working a 9-5, although since I’m a teenager I only worked a couple of 9-5 jobs the rest were either in bars and clubs as a DJ which is a night job or a couple of other jobs that were over night positions.

Working on the internet building and managing websites probably contributes a little bit as I truely don’t have a schedule to keep and often times I have to meet with clients when it’s convienent for them in their time zone which can sometimes be in the middle of the night for me, especially with Australian and European clients.

Staying up nights has it’s positives; For instance shopping is whole lot nicer when people aren’t bumping into you with carts you don’t feel so rushed. Traffic is virtually nothing so driving is pleasant and relaxing. Generally at night it’s quiet therefore I’m able to concentrate on what I’m doing without interruptions.

Of course there are negitives; it always kills my diet and excersise plans as I’m not going walking around my town at 2-3 in morning as there are no street lights where I walk and there’s wild animals out there. There’s been many times I’ve missed company at my house because I slept through them being here. It’s only mom and I here and mom likes the company when I get on a night schedule, we only see each other maybe 2 hours a day, of course that sometimes can be a positive, depending on how you look at it.

What about you? Are you a night owl or early bird?

This past week I decided to start a subscription to NetFlix. Seeing as how I like movies but renting movies and getting them back on time is a pain in the ass. I always wind up watching something out of my DVD Rack which is far from up-to-date as I won’t buy a movie unless I really, really like it.

The other day I started the account with a two week free trial and selected the 2 at a time plan. I read on their website that they were having some delivery issues but it still said that my first movies would go out Friday. I checked on Friday and it said my movies wouldn’t go out until Monday. Today I got the mail and my first two movies were in, sweetness! My mom, sis and I watched the first one this afternoon.

The Bucket List with Jack Nickelson and Morgan Freeman. What could be better than two of my favorite actors in the same movie? While it was a very good movie, I expected much more of a comedy than the moral-drama that I seen, I still very much enjoyed it though. The whole premise is that a rich guy (Jack Nickelson) and a poor guy (Morgan Freeman) share the same hospital room while both are diagonesed with cancer and are going through treatments. They’re both given 6 months to live at the same time and wind up creating a “Bucket List” that is things to do before they kick the bucket most of it was crazy stuff like Skydiving but some was more sentimental such as seeing the Himalayas. The middle of the movie was pretty funny but the rest was touchy feely stuff. As I said I still enjoyed it but expected more of a comedy.

Anyone else have NetFlix and want to be friends on their site so we can see what we’re watching?

I finally figured out how to install XP on my laptop. Funny thing is I had settled on Vista and was quite happy with it. I was messing around in BIOS changing something and seen the setting to change my HD to read as an IDE rather than SATA. I had read about this earlier and how to get XP installed on another model. Funny thing is my XP OEM license key activated on this computer, it was originally for my desktop..I’ve already updated to SP 3.

Once XP was installed, virtually none of my hardware worked. No wireless internet or even Ethernet connection, so I Googled. I found this (second post) on a forum, it’s an exe that installs all the drivers necessary and I installed it the install took about 10 minutes and when I restarted I had everything I needed. The only issue was some error about the bluetooth driver but I don’t use it, I’ll explore it in the future, if I need it. I’m going to upload the file here as it’s hosted at one of those file hosting sites and you never know how long the file will be available. <FILE REMOVED – Virus detected>

The package includes the graphics driver however it didn’t install correctly and I had to download it from Intel’s site: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProductID=2800&DwnldID=16463&strOSs=44&OSFullName=Windows*%20XP%20Professional&lang=eng

Overall I was happy with Vista even though it was a little slow. XP runs like a champ on this machine, it simply flies. Even with additional software running on boot compared to Vista. On startup I’m running ZoneAlarm and Google Desktop it which I didn’t run on Vista and I still go from login to a usable desktop a lot faster! Firefox starts very fast too. Over all I’m more happy with this laptop than when I first bought it and I was happy then. Battery life even seems better.

Update: 11/21/08 – Avast Antivirus found a trojan in the download previously included here. Link removed and file deleted from server.

Yesterday I spent most of the day cleaning and putting stuff away. Mostly what was laying around from Mom helping me unpack on Tuesday.  We’ve already established that I’m a packrat and had a nice discussion about it over on New York Chat, a New York Discussion forum that’s nice enough to syndicate my ramblings here on BigDan.us.

Anyway I had promised pictures of my cleaning fiasco. I ripped apart my closet on Tuesday night and really wished I had remembered to take before pictures. Basically I had boxes of CD Jewel Cases stacked up to the ceiling on the one shelf that I have in my closet. Back in the day when I DJ’ed I switched over to Case Logic Binders, much like these but always held on to my jewel cases in case any copyright issues arose. Years ago I threw out about 200 hundred of them but still have plenty o’ boxes of jewel cases from my purchases since we’ve moved into this apartment. Part of me wants to throw them all out and part of me wants to take the CDs out of the binder and put them back in the cases. However I don’t have all the cases and my room is stuffed already, so no storage.

Stage One: Was cleaning everything off that shelf. Mom was nice enough to put the boxes in her room behind her entertainment center. I then stacked all my new clothes in a column almost up to the ceiling on one side. I now have plenty of space on that shelf for my pants instead of putting them on the bottom on top of the bin.

Stage Two: Folding all the shirts & pants that I currently don’t wear because they don’t fit me. They will eventually fit me again but they’re just wasting space for me to see what’s actually in my closet.

Stage Three: Pulling the big plastic bin out off the floor of my closest and emptying it. This bin had lots of stuff I never used, so I bought a new smaller bin, put stuff I didn’t use in it. That stuff went in the hallway closet. All my newly folded clothes from Stage Two went into this bin and it went back on the floor in my closet.  Now I can store my shoes on top of that bin instead of my everyday clothes.

Here are some pictures and before you ask, no pink wasn’t my color choice.

All nice and neat

Yes all those empty hangers used to hold clothes that don't fit me

Wow I can actually use that space now!

In addition to that I hooked up my PlayStation, GameCube and AV Switcher. No surround sound yet as I need to buy new speaker wire but it looks neat.

Other than that I changed the orientation of my work area again. I like the monitor to my right as I’m right handed and tend to look to my right more than left, naturally. I really wanted to put my monitor stright head on as I had it before but for just a couple of inches of wire my speakers and montior wouldn’t. I really like my tower off in the corner as it gets things out the way. Here are some pictures of that..

This is a lot more comfortable for me.

Almost Zen..if only I could more inches on the speaker and VGA cable

Other than that the trolly (white plastic thing) on the side got sorted and stuff moved around. Now I actually use it for everyday things. My laptop is on a little table beside the main desk as it’s not really often that I use it in conjuction with my desktop and if I need to I can swing over to the table on my right for quick useage.

There we go my room is pretty much all set. I have a couple of more things to do, namely my surround sound which is a PITA job but I’m just waiting for speaker wire. Once I quit smoking and before winter I’d like to throw on a fresh coat of white paint, this stuff looks dingy from all the smoke. Now I just have to keep up with the dust..every day there’s a thin layer of dust all over the place. You wouldn’t believe I just cleaned yesterday by the looks of my keyboard!

Yesterday I spent most of the day cleaning and putting stuff away. Mostly what was laying around from Mom helping me unpack on Tuesday.  We’ve already established that I’m a packrat and had a nice discussion about it over on New York Chat, a New York Discussion forum that’s nice enough to syndicate my ramblings here on BigDan.us.

Anyway I had promised pictures of my cleaning fiasco. I ripped apart my closet on Tuesday night and really wished I had remembered to take before pictures. Basically I had boxes of CD Jewel Cases stacked up to the ceiling on the one shelf that I have in my closet. Back in the day when I DJ’ed I switched over to Case Logic Binders, much like these but always held on to my jewel cases in case any copyright issues arose. Years ago I threw out about 200 hundred of them but still have plenty o’ boxes of jewel cases from my purchases since we’ve moved into this apartment. Part of me wants to throw them all out and part of me wants to take the CDs out of the binder and put them back in the cases. However I don’t have all the cases and my room is stuffed already, so no storage.

Stage One: Was cleaning everything off that shelf. Mom was nice enough to put the boxes in her room behind her entertainment center. I then stacked all my new clothes in a column almost up to the ceiling on one side. I now have plenty of space on that shelf for my pants instead of putting them on the bottom on top of the bin.

Stage Two: Folding all the shirts & pants that I currently don’t wear because they don’t fit me. They will eventually fit me again but they’re just wasting space for me to see what’s actually in my closet.

Stage Three: Pulling the big plastic bin out off the floor of my closest and emptying it. This bin had lots of stuff I never used, so I bought a new smaller bin, put stuff I didn’t use in it. That stuff went in the hallway closet. All my newly folded clothes from Stage Two went into this bin and it went back on the floor in my closet.  Now I can store my shoes on top of that bin instead of my everyday clothes.

Here are some pictures and before you ask, no pink wasn’t my color choice.

All nice and neat

Yes all those empty hangers used to hold clothes that don't fit me

Wow I can actually use that space now!

In addition to that I hooked up my PlayStation, GameCube and AV Switcher. No surround sound yet as I need to buy new speaker wire but it looks neat.

Other than that I changed the orientation of my work area again. I like the monitor to my right as I’m right handed and tend to look to my right more than left, naturally. I really wanted to put my monitor stright head on as I had it before but for just a couple of inches of wire my speakers and montior wouldn’t. I really like my tower off in the corner as it gets things out the way. Here are some pictures of that..

This is a lot more comfortable for me.

Almost Zen..if only I could more inches on the speaker and VGA cable

Other than that the trolly (white plastic thing) on the side got sorted and stuff moved around. Now I actually use it for everyday things. My laptop is on a little table beside the main desk as it’s not really often that I use it in conjuction with my desktop and if I need to I can swing over to the table on my right for quick useage.

There we go my room is pretty much all set. I have a couple of more things to do, namely my surround sound which is a PITA job but I’m just waiting for speaker wire. Once I quit smoking and before winter I’d like to throw on a fresh coat of white paint, this stuff looks dingy from all the smoke. Now I just have to keep up with the dust..every day there’s a thin layer of dust all over the place. You wouldn’t believe I just cleaned yesterday by the looks of my keyboard!

…that’s a rhetorical question.

Yesterday one of my boxes got here from Florida and as Murphy’s law goes of course it was the smallest one with nothing I needed but I unpacked it. In the process I decided to clean out my night stand drawers. My night stand is like my catch all storage spot. I only actually use one of the drawers on my side which normally holds a book or two and some late night snacks. The bottom draw in that one holds a bunch of stuff I think I’m going to need at some point in the near future but never actually do.

On the other side of my bed, in the nightstand I don’t use, I have a bunch of keepsakes in the bottom drawer: Pictures, old letters, birthday cards, drawings from my sister, etc. The top drawer holds all my extra wires for A/V and computers. Normally that’s stuffed full a mess of tangled cords.

Now, I’d like to think of myself as a neat and tidy person. Generally I am but when it comes to  drawers I just keep stuffing stuff in them. In my ‘keepsake’ drawer I found Time magazines from 2001 and 2002 a newspaper from 2004, and a credit card receipt for chips and soda from Wal-Mart circa February 2000.

What the hell is with that? I am a sentimental person, pretty much anything anyone gives me I save. My sister loves drawing and stuff like that so I have tons of pictures from her. Birthday/Christmas and other cards I feel bad throwing them out. Hey, someone thought enough of me to send me a card, the least I can do is hold on to it….but for how long?

I wound up filing up a garbage pail full of old paper work. I found a report card from school back when I was 15. On a positive note, I found my GED (high school diploma) and my small business certificate from a local education center. I was looking for my GED for a while. I need to get frames for the both of them.

Today my the rest of my boxes came from FL. They were huge, 50 + pounds each, the girl in the post office could barely lift them onto the counter, I felt bad she was kinda cute too. I brought them upstairs and mom helped me unpack them. Mom’s help unpacking meant she stuffed everything back in the drawers I just cleaned out. LOL I was glad she helped though. Now I have a bunch of brand new clothes in plastic on my bed which have to go some where. That means I have to clean out my closet tonight or tomorrow. I have boxes up there still sealed, I wonder what the heck is up there. I know I have 3 or 4 boxes of CD jewel cases since I went to binders for my CDs but other than that I don’t know.

I may have to take some pictures of my closet cleaning fiasco..so you can see what I have to deal with!!