Jack's Diary

aiminglow said:
For sure! I love walking on the beach in winter - I think I love it more in winter than in summer. (But of course, no swimming in winter - some wild people do, in clubs, to encourage each other, but not me! Brrrrr...)
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You're a better person than I, aiminglow. Walking during the summer is a lot easier for me, plus you have more time to get there before it's dark. \
alligatorob said:
Thanks Jack, that is interesting. I will show my ignorance and admit that if I see a guy like you (or like I imagine you) I just assume no eating problems there. But it seems to me you may just be a guy who has managed to maintain his weight despite the binges.

Yeah, it is the point. And now I think I have a better insight into why you are here. It seems this demon we all struggle with has different faces, but its the same demon. I think you posting about it helps a lot of us, we who are trying to better understand the demon in hopes that will help us live with it. No need to be embarrassed, not here anyway, many of us share the problem.
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I originally was lugging around 175-180 for quite a few years. I got down to about 165 back around 2007, and it was then I joined a similar online group. That one kind of fizzled out after being purchased I think, so I jumped on here. It's a great community.
 
I missed my chance to get to the beach today because I was trying to get my finances straightened out. It's starting to dawn on what a monumental f-up I made by not setting up my i401k by the end of last year. Now I'm forced to go out and earn money to match the contributions, instead of already having them in place. One positive is I have a year to figure out if I can make any business expenses. But I still need to make some income. Furthermore, I can't invest it in tax-advanted retirement funds until I'm sure I've made the money, so there's more money lost. I

I will probably end up making in freelance income about the same as last year. But I'll be in a lower tax bracket because of the W2 income I earned in the first half of the year. So yet more money lost because I'll be in a lower tax bracket.

I can't really blame my financial guy, but I did consult with him a month before and he didn't give me any inkling about it and he knew I was thinking about retiring.

It's ultimately my fault. Be he is getting fired.
 
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Yesterday I had a ham salad for lunch, and chicken salad for dinner. After that, probably 3-4 bananas.

Today I had a medium steak for lunch, and 2-3 bananas when I got home.

I was actually down to 166.5 on the scale today. Noice!
 
jackbenimble said:
I was actually down to 166.5 on the scale today. Noice!
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That is good!

It was a significant oversight on your financial guy's part not to tell you about setting up the IRA or 401(k) before year's end. I'd think of firing him too. My accountant is not perfect, but she wouldn't miss something like that.
 
alligatorob said:
That is good!

It was a significant oversight on your financial guy's part not to tell you about setting up the IRA or 401(k) before year's end. I'd think of firing him too. My accountant is not perfect, but she wouldn't miss something like that.
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Well, to be honest, he's not my accountant. He's a guy from Vangaurd that I pay a fee to to manage and rebalance my accounts. I suppose I shouldn't hold him to blame because as I said he's not my accountant. I did call him around early December to ask about my options on Sep IRA, solo 401k, etc. He kind of riffed, but I was tired and didn't know what he was talking about.

I googled late December and saw the deadline, and tried to set up an appt. for Dec. 28, but it was actually January 28 - I misread it - but he wasn't available Dec 28 anyway - and I was getting crushed with work at the time anyway.

I just should've called Vanguard in general, but for some reason, I thought I could only talk to him - he has fiduciary responsibility over my accounts, and it takes a week or two to get an appointment, especially after work. That's another problem, I can't invest, he's got to do it, so it ends up sitting in a money market sometimes.

Early January I had the bright idea to call Vanguard's general number, and they put me right through to a tax guy. I didn't even have to make an appointment or anything - he set the whole thing up then and there. I could just called late December and done the same thing.

It's my fault - I had six months to figure it out. Work just got so busy late December. He's a super nice guy. I don't even know if he supposed to know this stuff. He's not my tax guy. But now I feel like why am paying him to just rebalance my accounts 4 times a year. I thought it would be more than that, but I guess not. I also kind of feel like he went over-conservative with a 50/50 recommendation. But, that's a whole different thing.
 
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So, I had a few bananas last night - maybe 4? Today I had a salad with chicken and two bananas. I was going to cop a pizza slice outside the meeting room, but the admin lady caught me in the act and I had to fess up. But it was actually good because pizza is as bad as ice cream for me. So now I don't have that bloat to deal with.

For dinner I had a Chinese veggie/beef dish called "kinjouhousu" which is my wife made from a packet she got in Japan. I could only read "blue" and "meat" of the kanji because they are Chinese. But it's pretty common, we've had it many times. Also I'm having a bowl of cantelope and a Margarite.

This week I'm going to come in over 40 hours. I think I'm going to end up a lot closer to 40 than 20 on average. If they are ok with it, I'm ok.

It's coooolld outside, 19 degrees. No chance I'm going to the beach.
 
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Today so far I had chicken and a salad with some kind of cheese for lunch. I was doing my Japanese all morning and went to the beach after she got back. Today I walked the whole beach, first time ever probably or close to it. It was cool, there was some ice where the waves had receded and I walked along it and took some pics. Also was listening to the Japanese mid-level listening tests had downloaded. They are definitely making more sense than a couple of weeks ago.

I'm at Panera now. I have a bid of a headache - I think I've been clenching my jaw. I guess I still get stressed despite all my listening to Eckhardt Tolle. But one thing he says that helps is there is your life situation (money, job, relationships, etc) and your "now" situation. The now situation is where the focus need to be. So, it does help when I look at it like that. Forget all the rest.

I slept downstairs again last night so as not to bother my wife going to bed. It was a good thing too because it took me a while to fall asleep. I need to start getting up earlier. I was up late last night trying to get my retirement planner up-to-date, and I also added all my accounts to mint.com. But mint.com doesn't really have much of a retirement planner. It's more oriented toward budgeting and such. But on the plus side, I have a good credit score.
 
Jack your walk on the beach sounds great . And it sounds like even though you have some tax and planning issues you are getting all your ducks in a row
 
The retirement business sounds horribly complex to me - I suppose to someone whose working life had been in the US things would be clearer.
I'm glad you enjoyed your walk on the wintry beach after all! :)
 
aiminglow said:
The retirement business sounds horribly complex to me - I suppose to someone whose working life had been in the US things would be clearer.
I'm glad you enjoyed your walk on the wintry beach after all! :)
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Yeah, it's pretty dumb. The tax laws are needlessly complex in the US because there are so many loopholes built into to exploit by "the rich", lol.
 
I'm just lacking motivation to post my food. Today I had two bananas for a snack. For lunch, it was a salad with some cheese and the high-cal dressing. I had a cafe latte at Starbucks that probably had a couple of hundred calories. The bananas are 100 apiece. For dinner, three pieces of chicken and a salad with the high-cal dressing. I think I'll ask my wife to get the low-cal dressing. She just uses lemon juice, I can't do that. Also, a grapefruit.

My weight is 168. I want to be under that, like 165.

I took my mom to visit one of her old friends in town today. Her friend is like 91 years old and has Alzheimer's, no longer recognizes anyone, doesn't really speak anymore. But her family takes good care of her, she looks good.

I went to Starbucks and did my 6K Japanese vocab deck. It's only 25 new words a day, but it takes about 1.5 hours to get through it due to all the reviews. The deck stats seem to say the time is going to come down, but I'm not seeing it.

I booked a lesson with a Japanese teacher over the internet on Wednesday night. 1/2 hour for 3 bucks, introductory rate. The regular rate (for an hour) is $6. She's just starting out so the rate is pretty low. There was another one who seemed really good, but she was obviously popular and didn't have any openings, so I just went with the cheapest rate. We'll sed how it goes.

I still haven't been picking up my guitar. It feels like I would be losing focus on the Japanese, but screw that. I need to at least play for 15 minutes a day or so.

I also want to start stretching, meditating and doing pushups again. Work is far from part-time at this point, but at least I can charge for the hours.
 
aiminglow said:
I suppose to someone whose working life had been in the US things would be clearer
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Not much, Jack is right they are very confusing and probably mostly designed for the rich folks who can influence congress. When Mitt Romney was running for president it did not escape my attention that he was in a lower tax bracket than I. I suspect the current president pays even less, but we will probably never know for sure.
jackbenimble said:
I'm just lacking motivation to post my food
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Looks like you did a pretty good job anyway. Your food doesn't look bad to me. I gave up using any salad dressings a while back, and at first it was hard but I managed to cultivate a taste for the naked greens. It took a while though. I like your wife's idea of lemon juice, maybe I will try that.
 
I forget to mention I had a couple of handful's of peanuts at my Mom's house yesterday. Last night I had a margarita, probably 200 cals worth. Although for some reason I was down to 167 this morning. Today I had salad a couple of bananas for lunch. I had a couple of bites worth of some sweet stuff (Indian, i think) someone left out on the lunch table.

Work was pretty hectic today. 9.25 hours, that's not part-time. I wonder if I'm going to get some pushback. The next invoice will tell. The good news is the install in Europe went off without a hitch. The bad news is there are major problems at (major airport) with the software. It's weird, the first set of devices had no issues, but the second set there are a lot of problems. I worked with the developer today and ran the same data causing a problem through a couple of our test systems without a hitch. He says there's a duplicated key insertion exception. I'm wondering if the scale of systems (there are over 40 of them) is causing the problem - maybe a race condition in assigning the UUID? The customer is getting pissed, and no one will be around next week except me. Yikes. I hope they figure it out this week. How can I figure this out? I didn't ever work on developing the system.
 
Lemon juice and salt together make a pretty snappy dressing on a salad, or for cooked veg, too - just a bit, though, because those are both strong flavours.

Work sounds stressful, and definitely more than part-time for that day, anyway. :(

That's very lovely (though only what human beings should be, of course) about your mother's friend's family caring for her really well and lovingly, though Alzheimer's has blotted out a lot of her memory, and with it (I suppose) her ability to really engage in her relationships.
 
Hey Jack, your job sounds pretty stressful right now. Nothing intelligent I can say about the subject matter, but hope it gets fixed.
 
Hey Jack, your job sounds pretty stressful right now. Nothing intelligent I can say about the subject matter, but hope it gets fixed.
 
Hi guys,

Thanks for stopping by. Yeah, it was a tough week, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought. The airport issue was solved. I helped out a bit by figuring out some ways show where the problem wasn't, i.e. eliminating variables. Also asking the dev why he wasn't using the test data that he captured as the basis for his search. Either way, they found the problem and developed a script to fix it.

I actually had a 4-hour day Wednesday, but Thursday the infamous (random country's postal system) image reared its ugly head again. The image guy said he couldn't load it (I think he could because I could) but I had forgotten to update the note showing the origin of the image. So, I brought it home and ran windows update, only to find I couldn't sysprep the image. I tried a couple of workarounds that didn't. So, I had to go back to the original image without the windows updates, change the note, and recreate it. I ended up working until midnight Thursday and throughout much of Friday to get a viable image. At one point it wasn't booting at all and I had to try some random stuff I googled to fix it. What ultimately worked was running parted and cleaning partition 0, I think. And it's still not great because production office will have significant windows updates to run every time they create an image. The fix is to get a new release of Windows on which the sysprep will work, but that will mean reinstalling and testing all the software for a (fourth!) time.

We had our Christmas party yesterday, but I was kind of tired and suck at bowling (especially the big balls - when I grew candlepins were popular around here). So I stayed the required time but bailed in time go get home and catch the last quarter of the Celtics. I didn't want to be drinking driving, but I did down a couple of whiskey sours which were pretty good.

There's more to come on Monday as there's an install going on where the customer insists on installing the software themselves. I told them that was fine, but they have to give us root and they will no longer have access. The guy responded by asking "Does it run on Microsoft SQL?". It's like wtf is he even asking about that for? It makes me nervous that the guy installing the software would ask such a question. Anyway, I sent him detailed instructions and we'll see what happens Monday.

Oh, and it looks like my boss is giving some work to our PC provider to pre-load an image and I think it's going to include our software. He's asked me to "guide" them when I'm not even sure the version of the software we're distributing has even been tested on this version of the OS. Also, the customer (ultra-gigantic retail company) is in a massive rush for whatever reason. I wasn't involved in the estimate, and I don't know what's going on with this. The more I think about this, the more nervous I get. Part-time my ass.

Well, at least I have the weekend. So that's good.
 
So, I'm holding steady at 168. I finally starting doing pushups/crunches again this morning, so far I have 50/20. I will also do a beach walk. It's 43 degrees, so plenty warm.

One thing I've been consistently doing is my Japanese Anki kanji and vocab. The kanji goes pretty quick, I'm at 82% mature. The vocab deck (6k) is another story. It takes over an hour a day. I could make it faster but I'm attempting to visualize the kanji in my head for the word, which adds some drag. But my Japanese is definitely improving. I took a lesson Wednesday night on italki (for $3 bucks, less than a latte at Starbucks). The initial rate is like a trial, then it ramps up. But, I think I'll go around to a few more teachers. It's mostly just practicing conversation, like what music to you like, where do you live, basic stuff. But I surprised myself using a few new words/expressions I had learned on the 2K vocab deck.

Another week to go before my wife's concert finally happens. She's ultra-stressed about it and it hasn't been fun around here lately. I'm feeling kind of pinched between the marriage and the work. I could start listening to Eckhardt Tolle again - lately, I've been going to sleep to Japanese podcasts, though. I feel like it's good practice.

Rats. I just remembered I have to do an invoice today. Or tomorrow. Maybe I'll put it off until tomorrow.
 
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