Link to Wired Article

I’ve wrote ‘The “oh s#!t moment”‘ post about 10 months ago last year in which I explained my fear of getting lung cancer due to smoking. I have since quit smoking (since about mid August 2011), however I do occasionally indulge while drinking a beer with my cohorts. I did say I had a plan in the original post, however I didn’t type it into the post for some reason… Who knows, I was probably all doped up on cigarettes or something!

My Plan:

1. Switch from “full-flavored” smokes to regular
2. Switch from regular cigarettes to light cigarettes
3. Line up a quitting partner (my awesome girlfriend)
4. Quit cold turkey after a few days of not smoking due to circumstances*

*having my daughter all weekend, whom i never smoked around

So, if you don’t count the few I’ve had while imbibing, I’ve been smoke free for about 5 months!

-PoisonDad

Baby Poison is doing great, work is going great, everything is great!

I’ve been working on the Swim a Mile in 6 Weeks program. In doing this program, I started remembering how I’ve always wanted to attempt a triathlon. I never put much effort into it, however now I have the drive to get some crap done with my life. The 1 mile swim will be more or less my cardio base to begin the running and cycling with.

Running has always been a huge bane of mine; I’m making it my goal to NOM NOM NOM on running, and then eat cycling for dessert.

Right now I’m on week 3 of the program, which has me swimming 1200 yards three times per week. Next week is 1500 yards, then off to week 5 at 1600 yards. I’d have to say, the first two weeks were cardio from hell, but no real muscle fatigue or soreness. Boy lemme tell ya what! Week 3 has been more soreness and fatigue than 8 bitches on a bitch boat!

I’m ready to start running here soon after getting some running shoes. I’ll use my mountain bike and my dad’s street bike for cycling later on. Wish me luck, I’ll keep posting updates like which tri’s I’m looking at, my diet and exercise schedules.

Stay Classy Webninjas!

Open your refrigerator. What do you see? A vegetable drawer containing week-old bok choy and cauliflower? Half limp celery and a quarter onion? Now turn to that good old wooden pantry door. Did you find a quarter bottle of Teriyaki sauce, a clove of garlic and a half-eaten bag of mixed nuts? Amazing! Those are exactly the items you will need to cook this “dear god, I only have a few disparate items to cook dinner tonight” asian masterpiece! Okay, so grab everything and place it on the counter. Also remember that you will need to run to the store right now (yes, now) and pick up a 16oz package of Tempeh or about a pound of chicken. I’ll wait…..Got it? Ok great.

What you will need: (you can use limp celery and week old bok choy if you want, because it’s what I did. If you’re not comfortable with that, then go get some rich people produce and stop reading this)

• Tempeh: 16oz package
• Teryaki Sauce: 1 1/2 cups (Recommended Soy Vay Veri Teriyaki Sauce)
• Bok choy: about 3 full sized stalks, cut into strips (make sure to slice the leaves from the stems)
• Celery: Three medium sized stalks, chopped
• Cauliflower: 1 1/2 cups
• Onion: Quarter, chopped
• Garlic: one clove, minced
• Mixed Nuts: One hand full or so. You could be fancy and use cashews, but then that would make this recipe Cashew Tempeh, which it’s not.
• Large Skillet

Chop the tempeh into 1/2 inch cubes. Pour 3/4 cups soy sauce into skillet and set heat to medium. As the soy sauce begins to heat, add tempeh onion and garlic. Sautee for about 10 minutes. Add the nuts, cauliflower and celery and the remaining 3/4 cups teryiaki. Continue to cook on medium heat for approximately 15 minutes stirring occasionally. Add bok choy leaves and stems, cook for another 10 minutes or until the bok choy has softened and mixed into the….mix.

Serve with some steamed rice and sake.

(originally posted Jun 25, 2010 @ 17:32)

This dish was inspired by the move The Pink Panther with Steve Martin.

Well, not really the dish but the name. The recipe came from wanting to make some homemade hamburger helper.

I found this base recipie and used it as a guideline for the one below.

Thanks ThriftyFun.com! (Link to original recipie)

• 1 LB Ground Beef*
• 8oz pasta of your choice (I went with the gluten free Ritoni pasta)
• 2 Cups Beef broth or 2-3 bullion cubes
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup milk

1. Brown beef on low/med heat and drain
2. Add water, beef broth, milk and pasta
3. Simmer for about 25 minutes or until pasta is soft to your liking
4. Add salt and pepper to taste
5. Optional: the original recipe suggests adding some “squirt” of flavor like soy sauce, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. I oped out of this, as I wanted my hamburger helper like Ma always made it.

Serve with some bread and butter.

*The ground beef: I used some organic, free range, super natural, hippie ground beef. Seriously, I think the cows wore tie-dye and multi-colored beads.

(originally posted on Jul 11, 2010 @ 2:26)

Happy Birthday, I miss you and wish you were still here with us today.

So much has changed since we last talked, and I think you would be proud to see me today; my daughter, my career.

I often think of what our lives would be like today if you hadn’t have passed to the great beyond. Would we still be together? What would you be doing for your career? Would you have started playing World of Warcraft with me? Would we have raised kids together? Would we have gotten divorced? I bet you would have played a Night Elf Druid :p and then when we switched to Horde, you would have rolled a priest (or maybe you would never switch to Horde!?)

You gave so much to me during a time at which I was angry with the world. You gave me the stability and assurance and love which I never really had before. I miss you a whole heap these days, but it’s a different kind of “missing” someone. I miss you and wish we could have had more. Now I am in love with my daughter and my life and am loving every day I get to spend with her and grow in my career.

I found the first drawing you gave me, it’s amazing! I hadn’t seen it in years and it brought a smile to my face I thought about the writing on the back and admired your beautiful handwriting and artistic ability. I also remembered that song I sang/played for you when we got back together in high-school. I miss you.

Love,

Me

Recently I have been considering how my presence in my daughter’s life is one of the things that motivates everything I do. I also find myself considering mistakes I have made un the past. I often think of that “oh s#!t why did I do that” feeling you get when you realize you could have stopped your bank account from being overdrawn or your engine from burning up from lack of oil. I think of these things and put myself 30 years down the road and imagine sitting in the doctors office…

“We have your results”
Silence on my part.
“We have found a cancerous growth in each one of your lungs”
The “oh s#!t moment” hits my heart like a brick and anxiety floods my veins.
I think “Why the hell did I smoke all of those years? I have to pay for each and every puff, drag and hit I’ve taken from a cigarette.”

I will face numerous cancer treatments and daily fear of being away from my family and dearest baby girl. I will regret every day that I enjoyed a smoke outside on a porch, on a crowded bar patio and in Perkins with Bobby (when you could still smoke in there). Needless to say I don’t look forward to that day.

My dear reader, by now you’re thinking “just quit you numbskull” and I agree with you. However we all know quitting smoking is extremely difficult and often not successful. My motivator is my own life and being present in the lives of my loved ones. It is ensuring that the “oh s#!t” moment never occurs due to smoking my lungs and throat away.

I have a plan thought up, I’m considering how my personality works and how I deal with difficult issues in my life. For that my dear reader, there must be another blog post.

Happy Smoking

-Poison

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

-edited on PC

Disclaimer: These are very specific to my field of work and likely not be understodd by anyone (except WellNow) reading them. As Lando said: “Here goes nothing!”

I needed an update, so here’s one comin’ at ya!

I may be a bit late into the game on this however I’ve been really enjoying the Dubstep music genre. It’s a nice middle ground between techno/house/whathaveyou and ambient. The half tiem beats and ‘lectro bits really draw me in. Perfect music to listen to during work, when I’m configuring servers, firewalls, you know, day to day stuff. A few of my favorite songs currently:

Freestylers – Cracks – Flux Pavillion Remix

Skillrex – Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites Remix

Brokenkites – Elim <—not necessarily dubstep but I really like it atm

Take a look at the Wiki for Dubstep, it has some really good history on the Dubstep genre.

Prefessionally I have grown immensely with my job experience. I have setup the network, server and storage infrastructure for our new private cloud environment. It was a great undertaking and had many mentoring sessions with our senior engineer. I’m very familiar with the aformentioned technologies and am very confident on being able to create a “cloud” and maintain all aspects of it. We are running 100% virtualized which is awesome from a server management standpoint. To add power to our cloud, all we have to do is add another server to the datacenter and bam, you’ve got plenty of machine to run your virtual servers.