Don’t continue reading if you’re not prepared to see a few pics of me in boxers.

You were warned!

This summer I finally decided it was time to stop saying, “I wish I could lose some weight,” and actually try and do something about it. It’s really easy to say you want to lose weight, but never do anything. The hardest part may just be the getting started.

I had a little extra push on 2 fronts. One, the Gaijin Gamers forum was doing another (their 4th) Un-fat Challenge, which would provide some kindred spirits and good-natured competition to help keep my motivation up. The second push came from my bike. I picked it up last October and really had yet to put it to good use. I used to ride constantly years ago, and riding again was the reason I got the new bike.

So, this is me, on June first of this year:

Yup, all 100kg of me. 220 pounds of me. Not in terrible shape, but not great by any stretch of anyone’s imagination.

Changes were needed!

The first thing was no more riding the train to work. I’ve got the bike, the weather’s good…let’s do it! Not only did I ride to work, I started finding longer routes home. More time in the saddle meant more calories burned. I started off easy, but the more I rode, the longer the rides home got.

The other big change was in my diet. Junk food out! No more sodas, cut way back on the canned coffee (lots of sugar in those) and stay the hell away from the snacky breads in the convenience stores. I figure I dropped at least 1,000 useless calories from my daily diet right away. I also started eating healthier.

This is what I ate pretty much every day for the last 3 months.

Breakfast
1 egg and 3 sausages. At first I cooked these in the microwave, but then moved to a saucepan. They tasted better with a little butter, too.
1 english muffin with butter or cream cheese and jam.

Lunch
I made a good-sized salad with corn, mixed beans and occasionally a can (46g) of chicken/
A basic ham and cheese sandwich on wheat or rye bread.
On picnic days during summer camp the salad was replaced with cucumber and carrot sticks and some moromi miso for dipping. Yum!

Dinner
125g of whole wheat pasta with one of a variety of sauces (meat sauce, carbonara, napolitan, avocado cream with cheese)

Treats!
low(er) calorie frozen treats like Coolish or Papico

Energy Foods
While cycling I usually pack a Clif Bar to eat if the ride is a longer (over 40km/25mi) one.

Drinks
Water, and lots of it.
Diet Sodas – Occasionally a Pepsi Nex, but not that often.
Sports Drinks – Aquarius, Pocari Sweat, generic brands of the same stuff. These were my go-to sweet drink for the last 3 months. Good for a recharge after a long ride, too.

So that was the plan. Eat healthier and ramp up the exercise at a comfortable pace. Here’s how the months progressed, both in terms of exercise and weight lost. (My scale measures in kg, so I had to do the conversion to pounds with an app. Pounds have been rounded to the nearest whole number.)

June
Cycling
163km / 101 miles
approx. calories burned from cycling: 6885

Weigh-ins
June 1 – 100kg / 220 pounds
June 8 – 98kg / 216 pounds
June 15 – 96.2kg / 212 pounds
June 22 – 95.4kg / 210 pounds
June 29 – 94.4kg / 208 pounds

July
Cycling
639km / 397 miles
approx. calories burned from cycling: 26918

Weigh-ins
July 6 – 94kg / 207 pounds
July 13 – 92.8kg / 205 pounds
July 20 – 92.0kg / 203 pounds
July 27 – 91.2kg / 201 pounds

August
Cycling
1065km / 662 miles
approx. calories burned from cycling: 46925

Weigh-ins
August 3 – 90.2kg / 199 pounds
August 10 – 89.8kg / 198 pounds
August 17 – 88.4kg / 195 pounds
August 24 – 87.0kg / 192 pounds
August 31 – 86.0kg / 190 pounds

Summer Totals
Distance ridden: 1867km / 1160 miles
Approx. calories burned from cycling: 80,728
Weight lost: 14kg / 30 pounds

I didn’t measure my waist at the start, but I’d say it was around 105cm/41″. Now it’s in the neighborhood of 91cm/36″. That’s a much nicer neighborhood.

So what’s the final result? This:

And here’s the before and after, placed side-by-side:

Not too bad! ^.^

I feel a lot healthier, and have much more energy than before. I used to get winded after 15km or so when I started out back in June. This week I did a 102km ride and wasn’t really tired until about 90km or so.

Now the challenge is to keep the weight off. For real this time!

Pics of this bus, and ones like it, have been around for quite a while. But I needed something to test out WordPress on the Droid, so here we  are.

I’ve seen it driving around plenty of times, but never parked.

It’s official, so get used to it.

From this day forth, references to homosexuality to mean something bad are out of date. So the next time you’re playing Halo or Modern Warfare, please use the new accepted vernacular:

TEEN

In the past, you might have said, “5 headshots in a row?!? That’s fucking gay!”

Now you’ll say, “5 headshots in a row?!? That’s fucking teen!”

For noun usage, please replace “faggot” with “teenie.”

You used to say, “How you like me teabagging you now, faggot?”

Now you will say, “How you like me teabagging you now, teenie?”

This is by no means a comprehensive list.

The internet is filled with millions of people, and I can’t wait to see their combined creative energies seize this new meme and go wild with it.

Because “Clean something!” just didn’t sound fun. ^.^

Now, not a “hack” in the sense of coding and breaking into stuff. More like “cobbling something neat together, but it’s still slightly technical, so we’ll call it a hack.”

Tuesday is usually when the WoW servers go down for weekly maintenance. Not a big deal if you’re in the US, as it’s 5 AM to 11 AM, and chances are you’re either still asleep, heading out to work or at work. But here in Japan, that’s 9 PM to 3 AM our time. So no WoW on Tuesday nights.

So you’ve gotta do something to keep busy.

My Xbox 360s have always been white. Yes, there was a time I had one in a custom translucent green case (and I still use the faceplate from that one), but they’ve always been plain white plastic at heart. When the black ones came out, and the matching wireless controller with the, I thought it’d be cool to get a black controller and make a zebrafied pair by mixing their top and bottom shells.

Good idea in theory, except the black-topped one would still look odd with the standard 360 grey thumbsticks. Hrmmm…where to get black sticks and a matching D-pad? Oh right! The original Xbox controller! But will they actually fit on the 360 one?

YUP!

Thanks Microsoft, for recycling your component molds between hardware generations.

Even with that bit of luck, I wasn’t exactly rushing out to drop $45 on a second controller for a system I rarely play solo anymore. That just wouldn’t make sense.

But $25! That makes sense!

Okay, perhaps not, but it was the deal I found at Book-Off today. New in box, “used” black wireless controller for $25. A very easy purchasing decision.

I came home, had dinner and set to work. The end results can be seen below.

Not too bad, if I do say so myself. ^.^

(The white battery pack on the left is a rechargeable one, while the black one is just the case that holds 2 AA batteries. But since that’s the controller I’ll be using the most, I guess it makes sense to track down a black battery pack…)

Because everybody loves wombats!

Some smart dude (or dudette) on the WordPress site found the one bunged up line of code to edit in order to get WP working on the iPhone.

Thanks, unsung hero of the internet!

…because the WordPress for iPhone seems to be broken. Or at least it doesn’t play nice with WordPress 3.0 blogs.

Which I just upgraded this one to….

So, in order to get my “Mobile Moments” going, I’ve set up a Twitter account:

@Wheres_Drew

There’s not much there yet – and there may not be much there ever – but the novelty of instantly adding pics and geotagging stuff may get me doing a bit there before I move on to something else.

Or who knows, it may just keep going and going and going…

There is a ticket shop near my school that keeps a bear out front. Not a real one, mind you, but a bear nonetheless. I like it because it’s always wearing different outfits. Now that it’s Summer, the bear is dressed in a spiffy yukata. ^.^

So, about that World of Warcraft thing….

Almost a year ago I made a post about how I’d started playing WoW. It seemed harmless enough at first, and was a decent way to fill time during the lean months while M was job hunting. We were on a pretty tight budget, and $15 a month for the amount of entertainment I was getting out of it seemed like a bargain.

And then it became a compulsion.

A lot of games can keep you playing with “just one more level, then I’ll turn it off,” which is great for a game that has a definite end. You will beat the game at some point, and then it’s done.

MMOs don’t work like that.

Sure, you can get one more level – all the way up until you’ve maxed out your character – but you haven’t beaten anything. There are tons of things to do once you reach the max level. Daily quests, crafting professions, achievements, dungeons….it never ends! (Not a good idea for somebody with OCD tendencies to get into something like this.)

Only I did. And in a bad way.

I was playing most every free moment I could. 20 minutes before I have to get ready for work? No prob! I can do a quest in that time! GF’s taking a nap? I can run a whole dungeon! I’d spend whole Saturdays (and sometimes Sundays, too) in front of my PC, questing away the weekend.

And it was fun!

It is, there’s no denying that. Leveling up, getting new skills, exploring new areas. And when you want a break from one character, just make a new one and try the game from a whole different persective. Hell, change factions and see how the other half lives. I did all of that.

And it still wasn’t enough.

I learned about dual-boxing, which is where you have two accounts and are able to team up with yourself and run two characters at the same time. OCD-gasm! And if you refer yourself to join up a second account, you get all kinds of sweet bonuses for 3 months.

And I played a fuck-ton of WoW in those 3 months.

Then something happened. Maybe i was approaching burnout. Maybe I’d had enough. Maybe I just needed a break. So I took one. From the day my bonuses ran out, I didn’t play for a whole week. I read books, played 360 games, started blogging again, took photos, watched movies, cooked dinners…

You know, the things normal people do with their time.

And it was all really nice. Once the week was up, I started playing again, but the compulsion was completely gone. I think I only played about an hour on Sunday this past weekend. I used to play a couple hours most every night after dinner, but not this week. I’m enjoying a broader collection of things now.

Do I still like WoW?

Hell yeah! It’s great fun and I’m not going to cancel either of my accounts. I may not get the bonuses anymore, but dual-boxing is still a great way to experience the game. It’s only costing me $30 a month, and that’s less than a night out at the pub. I’ll jump in and play when the mood strikes, and when I’m in the mood for other things, I’ll do those instead.

Now, back to Banjo! ^.^

And, no, I don’t mean Idolm@ster.

Being an expat in Japan who does not have great Japanese skills can be limiting. Especially when it comes to gaming. Lots of great titles come out here that never make it to the US, but the language barrier is high. Still, I do what I can and play as much as I can. With the advent of region-free gaming – big thanks DS, PSP, PS3 and moderate thanks Xbox 360 – it’s easy enough to get my game on in English. I have the Japanese version of all those systems, and the 360 is the only source of frustration.

When it launched a fair bit of the titles were region locked. With the small install base in Japan, only the biggest names came out over here, and even then, some of the had all the English stripped out. (I’m looking at you NFS: Most Wanted!) The local version of PD:0 and Ridge Racer 6 had full English menus and gameplay, which was nice.

Over time, I’ve learned to make do with what I could get here, both local versions and the US imports. The real treats come in the Asian territory releases, though. These are NTSC-J, and will run on Asian and Japanese systems – which are not the same thing. These releases come from Hong Kong and are usually the US version of the game with Chinese subtitles and an English/Chinese manual.

They also cost less than their Japanese counterparts.

Generally only about $10 less, but still, when Play-Asia will give free shipping to Japan, it’s worth ordering online.

But what about this has to do with finally having a great reason to own a J-360?

How about Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for $9.90!

Brand new copy, free shipping and it’ll only run on NTSC-J consoles.

My copy just arrived today! ^.^