Miles to go before I sleep... (Actually, four to be exact)

January 5th of this year I got on a bike for the first time in ages. I rode indoors on rollers, and I rode 7 miles.

It took me 35 minutes.

I nearly died.

When I got off the bike, I thought that if I averaged about 5 miles a day this year, I'd be able to finish the year with about 1825 miles under my belt, and I'd consider that quite the accomplishment.

Today I hopped on the bike to ride a quick 4 miles. I wanted to end the year on a round number, and when I was done with my 4 miles, my total odometer read 4,600 miles. That's more that twice was I was hoping for. That's an average of 12.6 miles every day this year.

But here's the cool part. I didn't ride every day this year.

In fact, I only rode 228 days this year. That means that every day I rode, I rode an average of 20.175 miles.

I'll take that, thankyouverymuch.

For 2010? I'm gonna try and exceed that by 25%. I think that's a nice, modest goal. That puts me this time next year blogging about riding 5,750 miles for the year.

I'm gonna enjoy tonight with my family, because tomorrow I've got some riding to do.

Happy New Year.

P.S. It's going to be a lot easier this coming year riding a Madone... I'm just sayin'

Hey, you wanna contact me? Text me? Call me?

Google Voice, daddy-o. Here's how you do it.

You call 916.91-JEFFS or text the same number. I've got a Google Voice account, and dammit, I need to use it. If you're not on Google Voice, go get you an account, or better yet, text me your email address, who you are, and I'll send you a Google Voice invite. I've got like, 3 of them. You can pick a number, send and receive SMSes, etc, and it won't eat into your existing data plan. I don't care where you are, Oregon, California, Denmark. Just hit me up at that number and I'll hit you back.

I mean, how cool is it to have your name as your phone number?

Merry Christmas!

Wow. What a truly amazing year. If you had told me this time last year that my life would be this good and I'd be looking back on a year this personally rewarding, I would've offered you $150 for the weed you were smoking.

Of course the most obvious, superficial thing is the weight loss and subsequent lifestyle change, but it goes much deeper than that. It's about changing your life. It's about seeing that you have the power to change everything about who you are and what you represent. It's about looking straight in the mirror and saying, "Oh yeah, we're going to change this. We're going to change all of this, and we're going to be happy and fulfilled." and then going out and doing it. It's about realizing what you have in front of you: A beautiful, smart, loving, supportive wife who really does love you unconditionally, and a daughter who doesn't even know what "conditions" are and only has the purest form of love to give. It's about making positive changes every day you're alive & walking and choosing to enjoy life. Choosing to LIVE life and not merely be content with life living you. It's actually moving your arms as you go down the stream and changing the course of your journey rather than simply floating along, taking whatever life hands you and thinking that's all there is.

There's a lot out there, and all I had to do was grab it, and it became all mine... and it didn't cost me a cent.

I'm better this year. I feel better, I think I look better, I think I act better, and I think I love better, and nobody else gave it to me but me.

I'm happy, and that's all there is to it.

I hope you're happy too, and if you're not, just make yourself happy. It's easy. Nobody else can change your life but you, and it only takes the simple act of waking up every day and deciding that you're going to be happy, and you're going to live the absolute fucking shit out of life.

Because life is good.

Merry Christmas.

reBlog from fooducate.com: “Less Bad” is “Good” in Bizarro World

Excellent Article today on Fooducuate:

Well versed, intelligent, thoughtful and well intentioned health and nutrition professionals who have latched onto a notion that must warm of the heart of Big Food executives the world over – that less bad is in fact good.fooducate.com, “Less Bad” is “Good” in Bizarro World | Fooducate, Dec 2009

I couldn't agree more. It's baffling. You should read the whole article.

Merry Christmas from the Small family

My wife loves to write up a little Christmas newsletter every year and I always enjoy reading her perspective on the past twelve months. This year I thought I'd let her have a spot here and reprint her musings:

Tammy Small - Special Guest Blogger

Dear friends and family, I told myself that I wouldn’t do a newsletter this year, but the past year was such a blessed one for us that we wanted to share a bit of it with you!

Abigail is nearly 4 years old and continues to bring us so much joy. She has been attending Montessori school since January 2007 and her development and socialization has been amazing. We are so grateful that this school is just around the corner from our home and that she loves the Director (her teacher) and family so much!

During the summer of 2008 we took our first family vacation to Disney World and Sea World in Orlando and we had such a wonderful time watching her enjoy herself and relaxing at the Blue Water Resort where we stayed. In February I was sent to Orlando for a meeting so I took advantage of that and brought Abby and my mom down with me to squeeze in a visit to Disney again! She loved it! While we didn’t take a family vacation this year with Abby, Jeff and I did vacation to Chicago for a week to attend Lollapalooza in Grant Park and we had an awesome time! Chicago was a beautiful city to visit, the food was spectacular and the lineup at Lollapalooza this year couldn’t have been better! Maybe when Abby gets bigger we will take her with us because she loves music as much as we do.

With the end of the year approaching, I have to brag about Jeff and the tremendous commitment he has made to live a healthy lifestyle. Since Christmas 2008 Jeff has lost 70 pounds and kept it off with a regimen of cycling (4800 miles this year) and healthy eating! At this year's Heart Walk, he was awarded the American Heart Association 2009 Lifestyle Change Achievement Award! He was also sponsored by his work, LHWH Advertising, and was accepted into the 2009 Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce Leadership Grand Strand program, which trains future leaders of the community. I am so very proud of him! As for myself, I am still employed with the University of South Carolina managing the environmental data and activities of the NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserve’s Centralized Data Management Office. I am thankful to work with such wonderful people and work in a field that is so important amid the global climate crisis we are all facing (Ed. Note: I couldn't possibly be any more proud of the work my wife does).

Lastly, I want to update you on the loss of a beloved family member, our Shar Pei, Chelsea. She died suddenly in October at the age of 10 and is now in dog heaven. Not a day goes by that we don’t think of her and miss her presence, especially Abby.

In closing, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and hope that each of you and your families stay safe, healthy and happy in the coming year!

Love, Jeff, Tammy, and Abigail

Oh, I'm going to write a LOT more about this, but here's what I need now...

Don't worry. My latest decision is actually going to be the focus of a LOT of upcoming blog posts as I work my way through this, but yeah, I'm moving over to PHP from ColdFusion after almost 15 years as a ColdFusion developer. There are a LOT of reasons why I'm doing it, most of which I'm going to try to capture in a bunch of upcoming blog posts, including blogging about what the experience of moving over is actually like, but for now, I really am looking at one thing, and one thing only: An IDE.

I haven't been a huge Eclipse user, but I'm familiar with it, in a more, "hey, I know you, I have some friends who talk about you a lot" kind of way. For those that aren't familiar with me, or live under a rock, I'm the lead-developer-slash-digital-specialist-slash-interactive-director at an Advertising Agency. As such, my whole world of development experience tends to be on the "design implementation" side of development. I create boutique websites for clients that are more creative and marketing solutions driven. I don't create intranet applications, or enterprise applications. I haven't had much use for Flex (More on that later) and the Flash Remoting work I've done over the last decade could best be described as "Here's what we were able to sell the client, given their budget and marketing needs".

I started developing web applications using ColdFusion around 1995-96 and started with HomeSite. Once Macromedia entered into a licensing agreement with Allaire and started licensing a copy with Dreamweaver, I started using both Dreamweaver and Homesite. Around 1999 Dreamweaver became "Dreamweaver UltraDev" and after attending the Max Conference that year, I switched over to using Dreamweaver for all of my development and in 2001 when Macromedia acquired Allaire, that was all I needed to cement Dreamweaver as my principle IDE. I never looked back, and never needed to.

Now, I'm ready to move on.

I develop mostly (okay... exclusively) on the Windows side using a MacBook pro that's running BootCamp. I've owned my MacBook now for about four years and have honest-to-God NEVER booted into Macintosh. I probably boot up in Mac OS about two times a year...if that.

HOWEVER, part of the process of moving over is going to be re-learning how to develop web apps on the Macintosh. As my college friends can attest, I was the first Macintosh user on the block, the ONLY person at my college who actually OWNED a Macintosh, and all of my Biology Undergraduate work was done exclusively on a Macintosh. When I went back to college to get a second degree in Computer Science, I went back AS a Macintosh developer, and convinced my professor to let me turn in work using CodeWarrior.

Then it happened. I had to take Assembly.

Once I walked down that path, I never came back, having purchased a Toshiba Laptop running Windows 98 in order to do my Assembly assignments. My conversion to the Dark Side was complete.

As a result, here we are over a decade later, and I work in an Ad Agency as the ONLY Windows machine in the building (well... my department is windows-based) surrounded by Macintoshes. You can only imagine the Sisyphusian life I lead constantly pushing that boulder up endless hills.

Okay, so where does that leave me? And why do I need you? I want a new IDE. I want a cross-platform IDE that runs on Windows and Mac, is FREE, open source, and plays well with PHP and MySQL. Ideally, it'd also be best friends with CSS and have a "design mode" but that's less of a requirement than playing nice with PHP in a cross-platform kinda way. I'd like to set up both my Windows side and my Mac side as almost "mirrored" development environments and as seamlessly as possible, move between the two. I really want to do most of the work/learning on the Macintosh side, but I have legacy work in place that uses SQL/ColdFusion that I'll have to be able to get in and work on so I'd like to be able to slowly integrate PHP and MySQL solutions in an easy, somewhat effortless way.

So here's what I want. Turn me on to some IDEs and let me know if you have any recommendations. I'm tempted to try Eclipse as my solution. Do any of you out there use Eclipse for PHP/MySQL development? If so, do you like it? Hate it? What else would you recommend?

My time line for this isn't really compressed in any way. I'm meeting with a colleague on December 31st to sit down and set up my Macintosh side as a working development environment, and after the start of the year, I'll be programming in earnest. Right now I'm just reading, looking for PHP references, and learning a little bit about MySQL.

So hook me up interwebs! Turn me on to a good IDE!

Gretchen, baby. Come back!

Hilarious clip, but the point remains. Why feign ignorance in order to "connect"? Do you think the audience for Fox is fruit that hangs THAT low on the tree? Do you think other women admire a woman who "stashes her IQ in an offshore account"? Is this Fox's idea of what news should represent? The lowest common denominator?

By the way, the "denominator" is the one on the bottom. You know, in case you had to "google it", Gretchen.

"Could anything be more cowardly and contemptible?"

Christopher Hitchens is my hero.

I see him as a sort of intellectual heir apparent to Hunter Thompson. Hmmm... so then does that make Slate the new Rolling Stone?

Only Hunter could've honed in on the danger of Palin's brand of populism in such a brutally honest (yet deliciously entertaining) fashion. God Bless him.

(I really hope I don't have to explain the wonderful irony of "God Blessing" Christopher Hitchens. Come on people... I don't want to have to work at this...)

And the Game of the Year for 2009 is...

Okay, so I went to Gamefly to check my rental history for the year 2009. I rented 22 games over the course of the year, for an average cost per game of about $12. Considering most games cost about $60, and once I beat them, I never play them again (more on that later) that's a pretty significant savings, in my opinion.

I've highlighted the games that really stuck out this year, and I thought I'd take a moment or two to throw down some thoughts about my reactions to them off the top of my head.

Halo 3 ODST was a romp, and I enjoyed the story. It's not the story of Master Chief, and the openness of the worlds in some of the levels was a bit surprising. It had the feel of Halo, but with the depth and story that the Master Chief focused games of the past were lacking. My only complaint was that it was a little anti-climatic. In fact, I was mildly shocked when the credits started rolling.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 was so well done that I overlooked the fact that it was Marvel Superheroes, who I normally loathe. As a side note, if MUA2 was such a success, and it was basically X-Men and MUA 1, doesn't that mean there's an audience out there that just loves those games? Like me? And doesn't that make you wonder why nobody has thought about doing that exact same game for DC? It sure makes ME wonder...

The Beatles Rock Band was just stunning. The entire experience of playing that game from beginning to end was just pure joy. Everything about that game just underscored the attention to detail the EA team put into that game and it paid off in spades. I only wish I could've played with Paul's left handed bass. I'll be on the lookout for a used/previously played controller and will pounce on one when I see it.

Batman Arkham Asylum was perhaps the biggest surprise of the year. When I saw the trailer, and learned of the details about the gameplay, I was a little put off. I wasn't sure I'd be into the game ("You're telling me I have to SNEAK everywhere? Ugh..."), and I didn't even try the demo. However, when the reviews from friends (See? Social Media WORKS, people!) started coming in and unanimously people were overwhelmingly positive, I went ahead and added it to the queue sight unseen. Boy, was I glad I did. That game was just straight up fun. The accomplishments were great, just challenging enough, and it had a fantastic story. And let's be honest. It was the Joker. Not to give anything away, but the ending has me dying to play the obvious sequel starring the notably absent former Gotham City District Attorney.

Wolverine Origins was extremely well done, followed the movie without actually following the movie, and had really enjoyable gameplay. I loved the "Feral Senses" game mode, and it made sense (no pun intended). After all, this is Logan we're talking about. He's always had those senses and integrating them into the game in a way that added to the experience was a minor stroke of genius on the part of the developers and only served to make a good game better. Well done.

That brings me to the last game I highlighted, and my choice for game of the year.

But first, a bit of explanation...

Fallout 3 was released by Bethesda Studios in October of 2008. I got the game in December, again, based on word of mouth reviews from friends, played it during the entire Christmas break and into January.

Then my wife picked it up.

She played the game from January into February and fell in love with it. She played her game almost completely different from the way I played mine and we had a great time yelling at the screen as the other went about their way in the wastelands of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. It's a credit to the game that two people in the same place, one male, one female, picked up the same game, played it two different ways, and got just as much enjoyment out of it.

Then the DLC packs hit the Live Marketplace. We immediately purchased "Operation Anchorage" and had a blast playing MORE of the game that we loved. Then in May, Bethesda released "Broken Steel" which had the most impact on the game. Anchorage was just another set of objectives. It existed somewhat "outside" the game, and didn't really impact the original game that much. Broken Steel however, deeply impacted the game by changing the potential ending of the game and extending the player levels another 10 levels and adding more weapons, characters and gameplay. By this time, I had used several Gamefly Dollars coupons I had accumulated thru their rewards program and had purchased the game specifically because of the additional gameplay provided by the DLC.

All in all, there have been FIVE additional DLC (Downloadable Content) packs for Fallout, adding an incredible depth to a game that already had an astonishing amount of gameplay. Three different levels of "Karma" play, altered endings, additional chapters, and an almost infinite amount of choices, each altering your experience tremendously make this game a no-brainer for "Game of the Year". In fact, it's been out for over a year, and my wife has been playing it all morning on this rainy, cold, wintery Saturday morning, and as soon as she gets done, I'm going to go in there and download one of the three remaining DLC packs that I haven't purchased and start playing it again myself.

Hope you had as much fun playing games this year as we did, and I'd love to hear any additional games that I might've missed.

The Games of 2009 A chronological list of the games I played this year.

• Ghostbusters (Xbox 360)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii - (Wii)
• Halo 3: ODST - (Xbox 360)
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 - (Xbox 360)
• The Beatles: Rock Band - (Xbox 360)
• Batman: Arkham Asylum - (Xbox 360)
• Red Faction: Guerrilla - (Xbox 360)
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - (Xbox 360)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - (Xbox 360)
• Ghostbusters - ( Xbox 360)
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition - (Xbox 360)
• FIFA Soccer 09 - (Xbox 360)
• UFC 2009 Undisputed - (Xbox 360)
• Resident Evil 5 - (Xbox 360)
• My Fitness Coach - (Wii)
• Left 4 Dead - (Xbox 360)
• WWE: Legends of Wrestlemania - (Xbox 360)
• Fallout 3 - (Xbox 360)
• Bond 007: Quantum of Solace - (Xbox 360)
• Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon - (Xbox 360)
• Mirror's Edge - (Xbox 360)
• Prince of Persia - (Xbox 360)

In praise of George W. Bush

James Fallows nails it.

love, awesome, dude, time, watching, gonna, nice, yeah, shit

Earlier, over the holidays, I went to ICodeForLove.com's Tweet Cloud page and did a yearlong assessment of my Twitter activity. It showed me, in order, what words I most used this year. I actually use Twitter more functionally than most, I think, so the list reflected that activity. For instance, I'm a huge Ugomo user, and I use Twitter to track all of my riding. I also have my Xbox 360 hooked up to twitter via the Xbox Live Nation Twitter page and my Xbox regularly tweets what I'm up to on Xbox.

Here's an example of a Ugomo Tweet:

• #bike 35.13 mi 2 hr 4 min 45 sec 145 bpm 88 rpm 49 recovery @ugomo

Here's a couple of examples of what XLN tweets when I'm playing an Xbox Game online:

• Xbox Live: jeffsmall is currently Away. Last seen 5 minutes ago playing Xbox 360 Dashboard (Xbox Live Nation)
• Xbox Live: jeffsmall is currently Online. Playing Halo 3: ODST. Solo on Normal Campaign on Coastal Highway. (Xbox Live Nation)

Notice how those tweets will always contain several words? "bike", "recovery", "Xbox", "Live", etc?

So with that in mind, here are the top... oh... 60 or so words I used this year on Twitter:

xbox, live, playing, love, jeffsmall, currently, nation, ride, online, awesome, dude, time, watching, gonna, bike, nice, video, yeah, shit, totally, home, week, dashboard, okay, wait, morning, blog, post, cool, getting, seriously, looking, little, tonight, looks, wanna, read, weekend, actually, people, facebook, completely, tweet, miles, night, hahaha, look, riding, beach, thanks, seen, book, google, sweet, real, minutes, comics, marvel, days, recovery

Okay, let's do a little "filtering" on this, shall we? Since those services automatically tweet with a set list of words, let's try and filter out some of the "automatic words" that we know I'm not tweeting:

xbox, live, playing, love, jeffsmall, currently, nation, ride, online, awesome, dude, time, watching, gonna, bike, nice, video, yeah, shit, totally, home, week, dashboard, okay, wait, morning, blog, post, cool, getting, seriously, looking, little, tonight, looks, wanna, read, weekend, actually, people, facebook, completely, tweet, miles, night, hahaha, look, riding, beach, thanks, seen, book, google, sweet, real, minutes, comics, marvel, days, recovery

So there you have it. Filter out the words that I automatically tweet (that is, the words I don't actually tweet), and the number one word I used last year was "love".

Pretty cool, huh?

In fact, when I look at the sum total of my tweets from 2009, I'm struck by one overwhelming impression:

"I'm a pretty happy guy"

Apparently, I love things, things are cool, things are awesome, I say "thanks" a lot, and I'm generally a positively actionable guy ("gonna getting wanna looking riding"...).

You know, that feels pretty damn good. There are no, "sucks" or "fucks" or any other negative thoughts emanating from my stream of tweets. Just a bunch of... well... happy shit!

A Happy 2009, FTW!