Teach What You Know

The boy in red is my oldest. He and his younger brother achieved one of their major life goals last year when they passed their black belt test in American karate. It was a long journey. We often talk about one and five year goals. They stuck to it past five years because there teacher [...]

Read Full Post »

Find a Way to Do a Little Towards Your Goal

Last night I was feeling terrible. I had stayed home due to sinuses but I had on my workout schedule to go run. I really wasn’t feeling up to it, but I knew that if I didn’t go, I would be setting myself back. I needed to do something, at least a little, so when [...]

Read Full Post »

Walk During Your Lunch Hour

I work in information technology. That means most days I’m in front of a computer, sitting down, for the majority of the day. This sedentary work (from an exercise perspective) is why I’ve packed on the pounds over the years. I’ve made a commitment to lose the weight and to run long distance again. However, running long [...]

Read Full Post »

Find Your Heroes

I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. His name is Allen White (blog | twitter) and he’s one of the top folks in our shared profession of supporting Microsoft SQL Server. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him in person at a few conferences and working with him at a community level [...]

Read Full Post »

Family Time: Geocaching

Family fun, some good exercise, and a treasure map. This is a great way to describe geocaching. If you’re not familiar with geocaching, here’s what it is, in a nutshell: Folks have hidden caches, the treasure, all over the place. These could be in the middle of the woods to right by the building you [...]

Read Full Post »

Push Through Discomfort

Life isn’t a series of ideal situations. Much of the time, the situation before us is actually far from being ideal. We cannot let that stop us from pushing forward toward our goals. “Discipline is doing what’s right, even when no one is looking.” – quote from The Citadel I woke up this morning with [...]

Read Full Post »

Deliberate Knowledge to Overcome Weakness

In Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin uses the phrase “deliberate practice” as the method by which one improves in a given domain or field. Deliberate practice isn’t fun. It’s mentally draining, it’s hard, but it’s necessary to get better. I’m going to borrow the “deliberate” part to coin a new phrase, “deliberate knowledge.” When I sat [...]

Read Full Post »

Don’t Give In to Self-Destruction

Two nights ago I was a bit tired and it was getting late. I hadn’t done my workout yet and I heard myself saying, “It’s just one workout. It won’t hurt to skip it.” Then I remembered I said this last week and ended up missing 3 workouts as a result. For someone like me [...]

Read Full Post »

Physical Fitness: Start Slow and Build Up

Getting back into shape has been hard, especially with my allergies. There are weeks at a time when I’m fighting sinuses badly enough that attempting to do anything cardio related just seems like a bad idea. I know, because I was in this sort of situation my last couple of years in the USAF, from [...]

Read Full Post »

Using the Sleep Option on iPhone

I was talking with a co-worker who was unaware there is a sleep option on the iPhone so that you can set it to shut down the iPod portion after a certain length of time. I use this at night to help me get to sleep. It’s not immediately obvious where this is, so here’s [...]

Read Full Post »