Our society has an issue, our processed foods. It may make it cheaper and earlier to feed people, but the quantity that we eat those foods in is what is causing obesity in our day and age. Our processed food are so high in calories but contain very little in nutrition, I very rarely eat those processed foods anymore looking more at more organic foods. What I am speaking of is meets, vegies fruit and the most important of all drinking enough water. I realized over the last 8 months that I has mistaken the signs from my body most of my life as hunger but thirst.

During that time as a developer liking to analyze things that I needed tools that would help track different aspects of my life. I created two health tools. There are many tools out on the internet but most didn’t work or give me the information I wanted. The first tool I created helped me make calculate how many calories I burned for my activity level. This BMR calculator has helped me greatly allowing me to know how many calories I burn from all that I do.  This was the first time I worked with Silverlight, this was a good experience for me. I created another tool that helps me calculate in detail how many calories I burn
for my individual activities. The Activity Calorie calculator allows the user to select an activity and intensity level of the previously selected activity.

I know I still have more weight to get off, and other topics to talk about. My goal is to take what I have learned over the last nine months help people become healthier. You will see more posts in the near future stay tuned.

Its interesting to see where I started, and where I am now. A really good friend of mine Travis Dugan invited me to a users group at the time. It was a VB users group the other people in the group where professional developers with experience, and degrees. I just had an interest in programming, and wanted to explore what it was like to write software. At the time I started the group I was a software tester at a company call Design Concepts International. That was where I met Travis and developed the friend ship that we have to this day. With that friend ship and encouragement from him I started to develop my skills at writing applications. I still remember when I would call him with a question he would tell me to look it up, because of his persistence of me learning how to look things up on my own that has turned me into the developer I am today. I developed skills to write test applications for the company I was working for at the time. Things changed at the company I was working for our parent company itron decided to close our offices in Boise. I was encouraged by Travis and other friends to apply for an entry level developer’s job.

The job in question was a posting I saw on the Healthwise website. The job posting was for a manufacturing programmer Analyst 1. I figured what would it hurt if I didn’t get the job I would have at least tried. In February of that year I received a phone call from a Bob Long, and Brian Howard. Bob at the time was VP of technology at Healthwise and Brian was the manager of what would be the manufacturing team. The phone interview went really well to the point of being invited for an in person interview. At the interview I was introduced to people I developed good relationships with over the long years. The room was filled with five people, David Starr, Viki Smith, Brian Howard these are the people I remember the most from the interview. I even remember the question that David asked me. What did I want to be in five years? I told him I wanted to be a seasoned software developer. Well that was ten years ago and I am what I told David I wanted to be. I have been for a while working my way up from that Programmer Analyst 1 all the way up to a Software engineer 3. The progression has been fun I can’t wait to see what happens over the next ten years.

• The goal is not to bend developers to the will of some specific patterns, but to get them to think about their work and what they are doing.  

My goals after finishing chapter one is to use December to work on my synopsis. This will allow me to better plan out the rest of my book and what I want to accomplish in each chapter. We will see with all the distractions we have in our world today it is hard to just sit in front of the pc and just type.

For now I need to concentrate on me. Last fall I put on a LOT of weight. I am just now getting back to a regular schedule for my working out. It is so easy to stop but so hard to start. It is the same with losing weight it is easy to put it on but so hard to take it off.

I can gladly say as of this week the book I started back in high school is making good progress. My goal is to have chapter 1 finished and reviewed and edited for the writers group meeting in November.

Since that time I have finished my English 101 class with an A. This makes me so happy last time I took this class I got a D. This A has really helped me with my confidence. With all the encouragement from my instructor and my writing friend I have become a better writer. I know I have more work in need to do with my writing but that will just take time and practice. I have enjoyed my summer time off it has been nice. I start back to school the week of the 18^th of August. I will be taking English 102 with an excellent teacher from the last year. I will also be taking University 106 this semester for a total of four credits for the semester.

I have officially walked away from my world of warcraft game. I just don’t get why people have to cause so much drama. I can now take the focus that I was putting on it and use that energy on other things.

I am currently working on a plan for my fall semester. Along with taking English 102 and University 106 I plan on using the Aleks website to work on my math skills. I hope to be able to use this fall and spring to improve my math skills. I was told when I went back to work on my CS degree that I would qualify for the higher level classes. This was with the stipulation of my math scores where high enough. Of course my math scores were not high enough. If I can test out of Math 15, Math 25 and Math 108 that would make me very happy. We will just have to see.

I still need to decide what English I want to take in the spring. It is too bad that I can’t take another class with this same teacher I have really enjoyed the way this teacher engages her class. We will just have to see. I see my future is bright just going to struggle through it. 

Well now that I have more free time I can work on my original plan. As of a month ago I am now up to four book idea’s that I want to work on.

During my first semester back to school I relied heavily on my editor writing friend Stefanie. Once I would finish writing a paper I would send it over to her for review. Every paper last semester was reviewed I even got her expert help on the final drafts. I was so happy to see I got out of a total of 100 point 95 points. To get an A in a college class has helped my writing confidence level.

As of today I will be turning in my final new work for my English class. I was lucky to get the same great teacher this semester (Melissa Keith). She has helped me so much with her always positive attitude. She suggests to us to find topics that interest us, because if a topic is not interesting to write about it won’t be interesting to read about. This semester I did something different were before I would use my friend to review my papers. This time I did not seek her advice on the papers. I know that the first draft of the 2 papers I have turned in and the paper I will turn in this afternoon are my own blood sweat and tears. I truly thank my friend for helping me become a better writer. She is not off the hook yet. As I work on the final works for the portfolio I will be working with her on it.

I am really happy with the progress I have made over the last year and a half. I have come a long way but this was not a one man band. If it was not yet again for the support and encouragement from all the people around me I would not be back in school at 33 years old. I am ready for a break this summer but will be back with Melissa this fall for English 102. I also hope to take some time and work on improving my math skills. I do need to take a couple of months off to just chill this working full time and taking a class takes a lot of energy.

Until next time.

I have commenced working on the revising process to polish and prepare both my papers for the portfolio due the 18^th of December. I have made what I feel to be a really good revision to the paper I wrote at the first of the semester. Extending, and flushing out missing details in that were missing or lacking the paper it is now 5 total pages in length. I discovered while revising this paper something very cool. In the paper I talked about Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks. I needed to do a comparison between the two writers. First I talked about how Brooks writing style was write smaller 3 or 4 book series and then start a new series. Where Jordan he was working on the one series. While going into some detail I put in a part about Jordan never finishing his book because of his passing away. In the past I would have just put the detail in and not cared or really knew how it affected my writing. A loud pop occurred as the light bulb came on over my head, in the context where this tidbit of information was placed. I was able to see that it was not relevant to the surrounding writing. Being able to see this huge leap forward in thinking on writing for professional, and for the book I am writing.

Tonight I get to take the other paper that I am going to revise. This one needs much more work it met the minimum requirements of 4 pages, I see I need to do a LOT of work before I will feel confident in the work to turn it back in. Being a reflective paper I know I jumped to a conclusion way to early after talking to my teacher. I now need to reread the paper and do some shuffling to make the paper flow better.

I am so proud, and grateful for all the encouragement that I have gotten from my friends, and family. If it was not for this I would not have gone back to school. I would not be making all the progress with my written communication. I see even now I need work but the more I write and get feedback the better I will get it will just take time.

Thank you all for your encouragement.

The day of this post you know what night it is, I can proudly say I voted. I put my two cents in, and gave my opinion on who I thought we be the best leader. I just hope we get the right person in office to do the job. This is the first election that truly scares me; at least one candidate for president scares the hell out of me. The other candidate would be the lesser of two evils. We will see by the end of the week, if we are going down a very uncertain path or towards the light.

My background and the environment I grew up in, this was therapy for me. I feel that I have moved past my difficult past, I was so excited to get feedback from my fellow students. Thursday afternoon in class we took the time to peer review other papers. Spending most of the class period I reviewed two of my fellow classmate’s papers. This was a new experience for me; I had never in the past read another classmate’s paper to give feedback on. The feedback I received from my fellow classmate’s made me feel so good. I now wait with baited breath to see what my English teacher has to say about my writing. After I finished this writing assignment I was feeling really good about my writing.

I am looking at our next unit of writing coming up in my English class; I have some big apprehensions about this next section. We will be writing an observational essay, writing about my personal history is easy, interviewing or observing a group or a person or a place scares me and I don’t know why. It might be because most of my interests don’t put me in a place where lots of things occur. I like to write software, I like to read for pleasure, I like to write as time allows in the book I am working on. So this next section has me a little on edge, we are to investigate the world around us.

 I hope over the next couple of weeks while we are doing our explorations. I can come up with my own topic that fits my interests that I can observe. We will see, only thing I can do is just hang out and see. Knowing me I am making a mountain out of mole hill, I just want my return to college to be more than successful I want it to be fun and rewarding experience It was not before.