Austin's Thoughts

So after one month of Tim Fer­riss’ slow carb diet and going to Title Box­ing Gym three times a week, I have lost a total of 14 pounds.  The biggest chal­lenge of the diet is the diet restric­tions of no dairy, fruit, or starches.  I have worked around this by intro­duc­ing new meals into the diet.  One of my favorite meals so far is the Hearts of Palm Salad. It is such a quick and easy meal.

Heart of Palms Salad

1. Rub the cut sides of the gar­lic clove all over the inside bot­tom of a large salad bowl; dis­card the gar­lic or save for another use.

2. In the bowl, whisk together the 6 T (90 ml) vine­gar, 1 t salt, and 10 turns of black pep­per until the salt is dissolved.

3. Add the 2 cans hearts of palm, 2 chopped toma­toes, and 2 diced avo­ca­dos. Driz­zle the 8 T (120 ml) extra vir­gin olive oil  around the sides of the bowl and toss to com­bine. Taste and sea­son with more salt and pep­per if needed. Serve. The salad can be made up to 1 hour before serv­ing; keep at room temperature.

Reference:

“Fer­riss, Tim­o­thy (2012–11-20). The 4-Hour Chef: The Sim­ple Path to Cook­ing Like a Pro, Learn­ing Any­thing, and Liv­ing the Good Life (Kin­dle Loca­tions 13033–13040). Ama­zo­nEn­core. Kin­dle Edi­tion.”

Started Weight: 236 lbs.
Last Weigh In Weight: 224 lbs.
New Weigh In Weight: 222 lbs.

The new offi­cial weight is now 224 lbs.  Actu­ally, I have hit 224 lbs in week 3 and have plateaued in week 4.  The rea­son­ing why I think that I have plateaued is because of the head cold that had stopped me from from work­ing out for two weeks.  Since I have started back in the gym, the recov­ery from my “cheat” day has been a lot quicker.  My wife, Audrey, see­ing the results has also decided to join the diet also.  Her first week, she lost 3 pounds.  (Editor’s Note:  My wife’s weight will not be men­tioned in this blog out of respect and com­mon sense.)  My goal for the month of Feb­ru­ary is to hit 220 lbs. This gives me 11 days to com­plete my goal.  I look for­ward to the challenge.

Started Weight: 236 lbs.
Last Weigh In Weight: 230 lbs.
New Weigh In Weight: 224 lbs.

The thing that I am focus­ing on now is the phys­i­cal con­di­tion­ing of the body.  I am try­ing to tackle this in two steps.  For the diet­ing por­tion, I am doing Tim Fer­riss’ “Slow Carb Diet”.  The jest of the diet con­sists of just eat­ing meat and veg­eta­bles with­out bread, rice, pota­toes, dairy, and fruit.  Half the food that I like is now lim­ited down to one day a week which is clas­si­fied as my cheat day.  This is a major test of dis­ci­pline because all the good­ies that my son has in the house is now off limit.

To match the diet­ing prac­tice, I had to do an inspi­ra­tional work­out pro­gram based on Joe Rogan’s phi­los­o­phy of doing some­thing tough to make your­self feel like a man.  I looked at the options around me and decided to learn box­ing.  I learned quickly that I am out of stan­dard.  I have not left one time with­out hav­ing that puk­ing feel­ing but it is good to have the sore feel­ing in the body again.

Update — So after one week of imple­ment­ing the diet­ing and work­out pro­gram, I have lost six pounds and feel great.  I was look­ing to start the next week like I did the week before, but I have a hel­la­cious head cold that is slow­ing me down.  I have stopped going to the gym but con­tin­ued with the diet.  I hope I feel bet­ter again so I can get back into the gym next week.

Start­ing Weight: 236 lbs.
Weigh In Weight: 230 lbs.

I think that every­body hits a plateau in their life and they become com­pla­cent on what life has to offer to them.  In the past three years, with the bless­ing of my son, I have had to restack the pri­or­i­ties in my life.  I have been work­ing for a income instead of enjoy­ing what I do, I have stopped work­ing out and put on extra weight because I did not have time to PT (mil­i­tary term for phys­i­cal train­ing), worked an obscene amount of hours because of overly com­mit­ting myself to the wrong pri­or­i­ties, and neglected the rela­tion­ships that are impor­tant to me.

Why am I mak­ing excuses for myself?

I have this arti­cle filed away in Ever­note called “From Vet to Vic­tim — and Back Again” that I have been read­ing and reread­ing lately.  The crux of the arti­cle is about a Marine that gets put through the meat grinder and after the meat grinder, devel­ops a men­tal­ity of vic­tim hood and that his life sucks.  What made it worse, he knew that his life sucked so he did things to make it worse.  Until one day, he fig­ured out his life was steadily going in the wrong direc­tion and with the proper moti­va­tion, he stopped being the vic­tim of the sit­u­a­tion and slowly over­came it.  This included the fail­ures and progress.

By no means am I com­par­ing my sit­u­a­tion with the Marine.  I would not insult the Marine.  What it does do is gives me a gut check on what am I going to do.

The plan.

I want to com­bine the philo­soph­i­cal mind of Joe Rogan (if you have not lis­tened to his pod­cast, do it), the work smarter not harder men­tal­ity of Tim Fer­riss (one of my dad’s favorite say­ings), and the over­all gen­eral awe­some­ness of the  “Art of Man­li­ness” blog.

So how am I going to do that?  I do not know yet but I am plan­ning to write it down in this blog and use this blog to track my progress and my fail­ures.  Why in the hell would I do that?  The prin­ci­pal actu­ally comes from Tim Ferriss’s book “The 4-Hour Chef”.  If you write it down and share it, it cre­ates account­abil­ity.  Sec­ondly, the fear of God of me pub­licly fail­ing.  That in itself should be moti­va­tion itself but when my son get’s older, I want him to be able to read this blog and under­stand that you have to own your life.

Update: The story got cred­ited to Gen­eral Petraeus instead to Mr. Nick Palmis­ciano.  Regard­less, very good points.

His sta­tis­tics are accu­rate and revealing…….as well as his insight on the effects on those who have borne and are bear­ing the sacrifices…….

Nick Palmis­ciano, CEO of Ranger Up, for­mer Army Cap­tain, 1998 grad­u­ate of West Point, and Duke MBA  Gen­eral Petraeus’s remarks require much reflec­tion by our society.

Thanks to my fel­low veterans:

I remem­ber the day I found out I got into West Point. My mom actu­ally showed up in the hall­way of my high school and waited for me to get out of class. She was bawl­ing her eyes out and apol­o­giz­ing that she had opened up my admis­sion let­ter. She wasn’t cry­ing because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was cry­ing because she knew how hard I’d worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry offi­cer. I was going to get that oppor­tu­nity. That same day two of my teach­ers took me aside and essen­tially told me The following:

“David, you’re a smart guy. You don’t have to join the mil­i­tary. You should go to col­lege, instead.”

I could eas­ily write a theme defend­ing West­Point and the mil­i­tary as I did that day, explain­ing that USMA is an elite insti­tu­tion, that sep­a­rate from that it is actu­ally sta­tis­ti­cally much harder to enlist in the mil­i­tary than it is to get admit­ted to col­lege, that serv­ing the nation is a chal­lenge that all able-bodied men should at least con­sider for a host of rea­sons, but I won’t.

What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attend­ing West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dan­ger­ous dis­con­nect in Amer­ica, and entirely too many Amer­i­cans have no idea what kind of bur­dens our mil­i­tary is bearing.

In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four (4) years. Dur­ing the Viet­nam era, 4.3% served in twelve (12) years. Since 2001, only 0.45% of our pop­u­la­tion has served in the Global War on Ter­ror. These are unbe­liev­able sta­tis­tics. Over­time, fewer and fewer peo­ple have shoul­dered more and more of the bur­den and it is only get­ting worse. Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Con­gress con­sist­ing of 10% vet­er­ans with only one per­son hav­ing a child in the mil­i­tary. Taxes did not increase to pay for the war. War bonds were not sold. Gas was not reg­u­lated. In fact, the aver­age cit­i­zen was asked to sac­ri­fice noth­ing, and has sac­ri­ficed noth­ing unless they have cho­sen to out of the good­ness of their hearts. The only peo­ple who have sac­ri­ficed are the vet­er­ans and their fam­i­lies. The vol­un­teers. The peo­ple who swore an oath to defend this nation.

You stand there, deploy­ment after deploy­ment and fight on. You’ve lost rela­tion­ships, spent years of your lives in extreme con­di­tions, years apart from kids you’ll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even pro­fes­sional ath­letes don’t under­stand. Then you come home to a nation that doesn’t under­stand. They don’t under­stand suffering.

They don’t under­stand sac­ri­fice. They don’t under­stand why we fight for them. They don’t under­stand that bad peo­ple exist. They look at you like you’re a machine — like some­thing is wrong with you. You are the mis­guided one — not them.

When you get out, you sit in the col­lege class­rooms with polit­i­cal sci­ence teach­ers that dis­count your opin­ions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can’t under­stand the macro issues they gath­ered from books, because of your bias. You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the vio­lent strain at that. Your Con­gress is debat­ing your ben­e­fits, your retire­ment, and your pay, while they ask you to do more. But the amaz­ing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your coun­try will never pay back what you’ve given up.

You know that the pop­u­lace at large will never truly under­stand or appre­ci­ate what you have done for them. Hell, you know that in some cir­cles, you will be thought as less than nor­mal for hav­ing worn the uniform

Just that deci­sion alone makes you part of an elite group. “Never in the field of human con­flict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” –Win­ston Churchill– Thank you to the 11.2% and 4.3% who have served and thanks to the 0.45% who con­tinue to serve our Nation.

Mac vs Windows

I recently had a con­ver­sa­tion with one of my Air Force co-workers, who the other day bought a brand new Mac book.  Her exact words were, “So in love!.…yes…with my Mac Book Pro!”

The prob­lem that she has is that she still needs access to her Microsoft pro­grams because the Depart­ment of Defense is still on a Microsoft cen­tric envi­ron­ment.  So I explained to her that she has three options.  The options are:

Ora­cle VM Vir­tual Box

Par­al­lels Desk­top 7

VMware Fusion

For a seam­less inte­gra­tion, I would rec­om­mend Par­al­lels Desk­top 7 or VMware Fusion. It will allow you run a vir­tu­al­ized ver­sion of any Win­dows (XP, Win7, Win8, Server2003, etc) sys­tem on your Mac. In sim­ple terms, Win­dows and Win­dows’ pro­grams becomes an app for your Mac.  Bet­ter yet, the installed Win­dows apps (Word, Excel, Out­look, Visio, etc) will be on your Launch Pad for easy access.  The cost break down is the following:

Ora­cle VM Vir­tu­al­Box -> $0.00

Par­al­lels Desk­top 7  -> $79.99

VMware Fusion -> $49.99

(***Please note that you still need a valid copy of the Win­dows soft­ware with these options ***)

Why not the FREE option?  Vir­tu­al­Box is more reserved for the pro­fes­sional geeks that are con­stantly build­ing and destroy­ing their machines and the design is not as pol­ished as the other two. If you need any assis­tance on any get­ting Win­dows on your Mac, please feel free to con­tact me at www.austinitconsulting.com

Links:

VMWare 

Par­al­lels

Vir­tu­al­Box

(Dis­claimer:  This arti­cle is based for a PC user.)

Why spend $80 dol­lars on Nor­ton Antivirus or $50 on McAfee Antivirus Plus when you get the same thing  for FREE with Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials.  When you look at the bench mark tests that Anti Virus Com­par­a­tives Orga­ni­za­tion con­ducts, the fol­low­ing prod­ucts received the fol­low­ing score:

Symantec’s Antivirus PC Mark Score:  2018

Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials PC Mark Score:  2014

McAfee Antivirus Plus PC Mark Score:  1975

The scores are based on when antivirus soft­ware scans files, when you open files, install appli­ca­tions, and other typ­i­cal daily use.  Click on the link HowToGeek.com and they pro­vide an excel­lent guide on how to install Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials on your system.

Resources:

AV Com­par­a­tives Orga­ni­za­tion Decem­ber 2011 Report

If you need any assis­tance with Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials, please feel free to con­tact me at www.austinitconsulting.com

This is a con­tin­uum of a story that broke cou­ple months ago about how Dover Air Force Base has severely mis­han­dled the funeral process that lead to ser­vice mem­ber remains being deposited into a land­fill.  Based on Army Gen­eral (Retired) John Abizaid’s “The Dover Port Mor­tu­ary (DPM) Inde­pen­dent Review Sub­com­mit­tee”; it is now doc­u­mented that the first doc­u­mented inci­dent occurred Sep­tem­ber 2005.

Part of the report

Ref: The Dover Port Mor­tu­ary Inde­pen­dent Review Sub­com­mit­tee Report

Some of the other inci­dents that are high­lighted in the report that spans across the past eight years include:

• - Sep­tem­ber 11 vic­tims buried in the same land­fill as the ser­vice members.
• - Mis­han­dling of a Army Mas­ter Sergeant remains
• - Mis­han­dling of a Marine remains (resulted in $25,000 settlement)
• - Ser­vice mem­bers being dis­posed as med­ical waste
• - Mis­han­dling of fetal remains of mil­i­tary spouses miscarriages

If this has been doc­u­mented for the past eight years, why has this not been han­dled eight years ago?  The com­man­ders should be dis­charged with a  dis­hon­or­able because as a tax­payer, I should not have to pay for indi­vid­u­als that could not do their job right.  As a mil­i­tary vet­eran, I am deeply sad­dened that my broth­ers and sis­ters were han­dled this way.

Bot­tom line:  If you are going to do a job, do it right.

Update:

The NY Times has done a fol­low to The Dover Port Mor­tu­ary Inde­pen­dent Review Comit­tee and the Chief of the Air Force response.

Link: NY Times Report

The Air Force needs to fol­low Office of Spe­cial Coun­sel guid­ance of remov­ing the DPM offi­cials instead of giv­ing out LORs and demot­ing the civilians.

After our trip to Boston, Audrey and I thought what a great city.  With a well built tran­sit sys­tem, side­walks, and bike paths; we said that we love to live in a city that offers the same.  Hills­bor­ough County offers the same thing on a much smaller scale.  So I started to take the bus to work and walk to where needed to at work.  In the morn­ing and after­noon, Audrey dri­ves me to the bus stop and picks me up in the after­noon.  Great process if you think about it if the car bat­tery does not die.

Audrey and I in Boston

So I take this time to incor­po­rate other parts of the Boston lifestyle like walk­ing home (great way to break in new boots) and bik­ing to the bus stop when it is 45 degrees out­side.  If you can not tell, there is a bit of sar­casm in that last sen­tence.  We joked how healthy peo­ple in Boston looked.  I think that it is not by choice.