Sojourns
Fat Head
I watched this Hulu documentary, called Fat Head, a couple of weeks ago and immediately shared it via my Gmail status:
It's a direct response to Super Size Me, where filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats a ton (well, almost a ton) of McDonald's in one month, gains a lot of weight, and argues that many poor people in America have few choices for food and end up becoming unhealthy because of McDonalds and other fast food restaurants.
If this sounds like a weak argument to you, like it did to me, then you might also enjoy Fat Head where commedian Tom Naughton eats fast food for every meal during a month while losing weight and having better cholesterol counts by the end! He explains the science behind his diet (which minimizes carbohydrates and limits calories) and talks about how America was falsely led into the food pyramid mentality all while keeping you entertained with witty narration.
Fat Head - Video on Hulu
Fat Head Blog
Barefoot Running!
I have been taking a break from running since I ran the Golden Leaf Half Marathon which is a great race that I highly recommend!
Today, it was great to get back out there and run... barefoot! Yep, that's right, I've been running barefoot for off and on for almost two years. I read an article in Nature and saw the accompanying video about how much easier it is on your body and, being a scientist, was sold on the idea right away. I've been living with some injury-prone legs and it seemed to help (but also could be that I suddenly had to limit my distance because my feet weren't tough enough!).
I've also tried running with socks that I sprayed some rubber onto (using Plasti Dip) but the rubber deteriorates really quickly (I was considering uploading a picture, but they really just look like dirty socks :). I've decided I need to get some cross-linking rubber to put on the bottom although it'll be kind of messy. Or, I could just get grippy yoga socks like my wife bought for running...
Moving Day!
So my idea for this blog is for it to be primarily picture based with a little bit of text. That way it's faster for me to write and faster for you to enjoy! I'll have some fun entries and some programming-related entries
I helped one of my best friends ever, Ben, move down to Colorado Springs a few weeks ago. He bought some new furniture from Ikea and it came in boxes for you to assemble. The box for the couch was surprisingly small but still big enough for me to fit into! Introducing from Ikea, as seen on TV, Nathan Feaver!!!
Ben also has an excellent view of the mountains and Garden of the Gods right outside his front door:
Learning the Ropes
I've been learning a lot while building my personal website and wanted to use my first blog post to share some of the best resources I've found:
- W3Schools Online Web Tutorials as well as W3 HTML and CSS validators
- A database and learning resource for all standardized web programming. The validators make sure your code is well formed according to the web standard and is a great debugging tool for a lot of basic mistakes. Make sure to read about the new structuring elements in HTML5!
- CSS Zen Garden
- Great examples of how to use CSS for styling your web pages.
- CSS-Tricks.com
- A blog about achieving the design and function you want on your webpage using CSS. I especially like the screencasts (see below for a link to screencast #100!).
- Notepad++
- A free program for writing code in many programming languages (although I would recommend an integrated development environment (an IDE) for non-html programming). It color codes various tags, assists you to keep your code looking clear and organized, and has tabbed editing so you can have multiple html, CSS, and JavaScript pages open at once.
I want to specifically mention Chris Coyier’s (owner of CSS-Tricks.com) recent screencast specifically as a great use of your time if you’re just getting started with HTML (#100 Let’s Write Semantic Markup). In just one hour, Chris takes a pdf visual outline of a new webpage and writes the HTML for it in a way that is all pretty and semantic. He guides the viewer through the whole thought process and introduces HTML5 organization tags. It was incredibly useful to understand how this experienced professional approaches html design.
