Benfalk Blog

Today wasn’t the greatest day for me.  It started off bad when I waited almost forty minutes to vote this morning… which has never happened before.  I’m assuming a lot more people showed up to vote this year than in years past as the people running the voting booth seemed overwhelmed by the mass turnout.  I don’t plan on staying up and waiting to see who wins the presidential race, I think I’ll just check tomorrow morning when I get to work and make it a surprise.  Just so I could say I did, I am predicting Obama wins.

For some reason it seemed like I was in a battle with myself most of the morning.  I kept wanting to code some miscellaneous odd ends for some work projects I have cooking in my head, but I stayed the course and hopefully finished my “Linux FireFox Kiosk” system for work!

I left work at 4 today so i could get back with plenty of sunlight and ran 10.2 miles tonight.  My legs felt great the whole time and I’m pleased with the absence of pain in my joints right now =) .  I was hoping to work on my user library some more tonight but I feel extremely tired…. I think I am going to take a nap and see how I feel after that; I suspect I’ll wake up from my nap and go to bed though =D .

EDIT: I ended up tagging along on a trip to WalMart where I got the following items haha…

My WalMart Items

Today was on okay but frustrating day.  I was working on some code logic at work today that had me puzzled most of the day.  Near the end of the day the topic of “yesterday” came up and I thought back to when I had the opportunity to make a choice and go further out for college and study game programming at some place like Westwood.  Instead I didn’t… I puddled around at a local college and just scooted by, barely walking away with a two year degree in computer networking =\ .  If anyone where to ask for my advice on college my advice would be this, if you are not fairly sure what you want to do after high school DON’T go to college strait out of high school just because everyone else is.  Sit out for a year or two and work some tedium job and wait until you find something that grabs your interest.  Maybe it’s bad advice, but it’s the advice I am offering anyone reading this.

Enough on “yesterday”, had to get my two-cents advice in for the day I guess.  I’m still working on that user library for CodeIgniter.  I’m going to try and dedicate three hours to it tonight, but I probably won’t finish it yet tonight… good and bad at the same time.  Good in the fact that it’s going to be fairly robust with quite a few features and options; but, bad in the fact it’s just going to take longer to code out and test!

I spent the first hour when I got home working on my upper body.  Did the bench-press and curls and before I go to bed tonight going to see how many crunches I can crack off.  I will say on the plus side my knees feel pretty good for just having ran 15 miles yesterday =) .

I had a fantastic day.  Today was the rollback for daylight savings time, so an extra free hour of sleep was an awesome start to the day =) .  Right when I woke up I felt energized and ready for a run; which I missed yesterday.  I changed into running clothes.  Made a half coffee, half milk drink and put it in my “Livestrong” thermos, grabbed my iPhone and weights and off I went.  I did my first half a mile out to the cemetery with my two five pound weights to get me warmed up a bit faster and shed them as soon as I started my first loop.  Originally I had only intended to do eight loops which would have put my distance at 11.4 miles or so, but I opted to do ten loops for a total just under 15 miles today =) .

When I returned from my run I changed into different clothes, ate a big helping of pasta with tuna and veggies, and proceeded to drift in and out of sleep on my futon for the next couple of hours.  My right leg hurts, similar to how it did after last Sunday’s run, but nowhere near as painful.  I have been stretching about every three hours or so today and doing ten minute icings on it.  I’m hoping when I wake up tomorrow it will be feeling even better.

When I finally got to the point where I could stay awake without feeling tired I began working on my user library for CodeIgniter again.  My goal was to have it finished last night, and I would have been; however, I decided to change how it works in some pretty drastic ways which I believe will give the library more versatility. I have been working on the library for about two hours total today and I’m still not done with it… my new scheduled release date to the world is tomorrow night hopefully of just the raw library.  I want to also put together an “installer” package developers can use to easier incorporate it into their systems.

I read about 15 pages in my C++ book today.  I feel like my added time of working on my Hybertrofy project has slowed down my reading time… but ohh well.  Before I go to bed tonight I hope to get some more blocks of code hammered out in my user library =) .

Side Note :: I bought this shirt from shirt.woot.com today

The Walrus vs The Eggmen

Today was a pretty great day.  Mom called my brother early this morning and said that we didn’t need to come down today to clean up around the house as she was going to be visiting our grandma who was sent home from the hospital today =) .  Lucas and Mason left for Lucas’ place to watch some Ernest movies, so I elected to stay back and read some more in my C++ book.  I am about half way though chapter 7.

At 3pm Lucas came to pick me up for one of my cousin’s weddings today.  The wedding was fairly average and we got a chance to talk to our uncle Dave who just came back from an elk hunt in Colorado.  Unfortunately he didn’t get bag one =( .  On the spot I made the final decision to host the annual LAN party we have the day after Thanksgiving and told him to make plans for it !  He is having problems with his computer from home so after we left the wedding reception we made a quick pit stop by his place to pick up his PC.  I plan on fixing it tomorrow, but it sounds like some of the boot files for Windows XP are corrupted.

Tonight I have been working on the same user library for CodeIgniter.  I am going to stay up tonight until I get it finished, or at least well laid out and ready to document.

Today was a great day.  I worked on making an intensive user library for CodeIgniter today, but it isn’t finished yet.  When I get done with it I’ll post it on my site.  Aside from working a bit on some code projects I just couldn’t stay focused today at work.

Had a spirited debate today at lunch about a comment I heard shortly before noon regarding how the American government system was not set up to be a separation of state and union like everyone believes it is.  Having taken some history classes in my time I felt compelled to make a quick Google search to find the two sections of our government’s founding document that DO state just that very thing.  First a section directly from the 1st Amendment of the Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Next, in the same Constitution, Article VI, Section 3….

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

No matter how you cut the mustard on this… if you break these down into their logical components it defines a very good lay out for the separation of church and state, even though the words to do not literally appear in the document itself.  So the next time you hear someone mention that the “Separation of Church and State” is a myth deal, perhaps you will be armed with a bit of knowledge on the matter.

When I got home today I sat around for awhile before Lucas, Mason, and I headed out to the Critical Mass event for Fort Wayne.  Mason shaved half of his head for the event and kept the other half long… needless to say he’ll be getting his head completely buzzed tomorrow lol =) .  There where a couple really neat costumes and the event all and all was pretty exciting.

Update on my top knot !!!:

Top Knot

Today was a great day.  Worked on some web projects today that made the day go by pretty quickly.  On top of that I didn’t have too many user calls today =) .  I was told I am not to eat tuna in my cubicle anymore because other people are getting tired of the smell, and I can understand that.  So now I hide out in the phone service room to eat my every two and a half hour meals.

At this point I should probably explain what I am talking about with my meals.  Every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is start simmering 3/4 of a cup of uncooked rice before I shave and shower.  By the time I am ready to leave I divide the rice between four containers, add a 8oz of tuna to each container, and a quarter of a pound of mixed vegetables.  Starting at 7:30 in the morning I eat a container about every two and a half hours or so.  This is something I have been doing over a year solid now, and all I can say is, don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it for a while.  When people ask how I can stand to eat the same foods all the time I ask how they can stand not to.  It keeps my energy levels high and I never feel hungry =) .  At some point I may put together some pages explaining the science behind it.

When I got home I changed into my running gear, stretched up, and went for a run for the first time since the pains flared up on the back of my right knee last Sunday.  I started out slow and after a couple of laps around the cemetery I was relieved to find that my knees where okay.  I ended up doing 8.8 miles tonight.

When I got back Lucas was at my apartment, with my sweeper back as I requested so I could finish cleaning my apartment… which I must say is now probably cleaner than when I had everything moved in orginally =) .  Lucas, Mason, and I ended up hanging out the rest of the night.

Lucas & Mason with Mason's Tall Bike

Side Note:  I bought this shirt from shirt.woot.com today =) !!

Splattermare

Today was a busy day back.  I had a series of calls back to back, and a heap of emails to start my day.  On any normal day time would have flew by pretty fast; but my clouded head ensured a slow nagging day of wanting a couple more hours of sleep.  It was only around 6pm tonight that my head seemed to have clear up.  With a hint of pain still behind my right lower knee and the fact that I am just recovering from this sickness I decided to not run tonight.  I am always ever afraid of falling into a funk with my running and I need to make sure it doesn’t happen while I am trying to train for this ultra marathon.

Tonight I made some headway with my “Hybertrofy” project I have been talking about.  If you follow the SVN on code.google.com check it out =) .  Put down a large section of the base framework to work with and am slapping together some documents on how the code logic should flow in the system.  After about an hour of thinking and coding ideas down it became clear that Lucas was pretty bored with being around so we went back to his place and watched “Pulp Fiction.”  I thought it was a pretty good movie and was shocked that the title had gone by unnoticed until now.

I didn’t make any headway in my C++ book today, but that isn’t so bad I guess, I made enough headway yesterday. Tonight I am going to stay up late, probably till 1am, and clean my apartment top to bottom as both roommates are out right now and I have the gumption to do it.

Almost nothing to say for today.  I woke up at 5am this morning with a fever of 104 with incredible aches all over my body.  I took a shower to see if it would help and for a short time it did, but the problem wasn’t going away so easily.  I took some Tylenol and called in sick to work today and slept fairly solid from 6am until 4pm this afternoon, destroying most of the day…

When I woke up I wasn’t feeling so painful anymore and my fever had died away, although I still now feel a light headed and groggy.  I read some of my C++ book today and made it to chapter 7.  Lucas came and wanted to know if I was okay to visit our Grandma, who just had surgery yesterday.  I decided I was and we set off to visit her.  That was pretty much my day, nothing really to talk about.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better….

Why do Mondays always seem to be no good?  While my day at work wasn’t all too bad for a Monday, it seemed worse because my right leg has an irritating pain on the back calf right below the knee =( .  I fear it is the start of tendinitis, and why it cropped up I am not sure.  I know it hurt yesterday; but for the life of me I am not sure why it is flaring up on me now.  I am going to bed early tonight with an ice pack on it in hopes that tomorrow morning it will be better.  It seems to feel relieved for a while if I stretch the leg really good and stay off of it, so that is what I plan to keep doing until it’s subsided.  To many times in the past have I ignored similar dulling pains only to receive over-training injuries.

If the pain is still as irritating as it is today I’m going to look into what could be causing or did cause this problem to spring up so I don’t have a repeat issue in the future.  Part of me thinks it is due to the fact it was raining and nasty out.  I think it threw off my stride and form enough to do some damage… that and it is time to get new shoes too, which didn’t help things either.

When I got home I decided to go to Wal-Mart and get a ton of cleaning supplies because my apartment is past due for a major cleaning… but getting the needed supplies and actually carrying through with the plans of using them are two separate issues.  At this point I think I’ll start that mini project tomorrow.  In any event, I made some great headway on chapter six of my C++ book today and learned more about how the Subversion server works.

Today was a mixed bag.  I got up this morning to go for a run and Lucas came along.  I wanted to get a long run in today and it just didn’t happen like I had hoped.  It began raining about ten minutes into our journey, and even though I didn’t turn back, after about twenty minutes of running in the rain I decided I was only doing about 12 miles today.  Along with the rain, my right leg just wasn’t feeling the greatest… and it is still sore, but not sore to the point I am too worried about it yet.

When Lucas and I got back I went back to my apartment to stretch and shower up.  When I stepped back out to head over to Lucas’ apartment I was perturbed to find the the cloudy and rainy skies had melted away and it was actually quite sunny and warm out!  We set out for the homestead to help mom finish cleaning out one of the messiest rooms in the house and after that we hauled up my youngest brother’s water bed back to my apartment to use, as he won’t be needing it serving in the Marines =) .  Our mom took us out to a China buffet to celebrate my birthday and then we parted ways.

I just finished assembling the water bed and it is ready to use tonight, and I look forward to testing it out.  Before I head to bed I am going to read at least twenty pages in my C++ book so I have a dent into chapter six.