Continue Reading >]]> Well the last two weeks was a success. 8.5 lbs lighter and feeling pretty good. All that and the fact I work super crazy hours shows that anyone can lose some weight even when things are crazy at home. One day I might work 8-5, the next I might work 12AM – 8AM, who knows. I made the best of what my schedule was and came out on top.

So what did I do the last 14 days?

• Ran 5 times.
• Biked 2 times.
• Lifted weights 2 times.
• Walked 2 times.

What did I eat?

• Protein dense foods, steak, chicken.
• Some salads.
• Egg + English muffin for breakfast almost every day. Only 23g carbs.
• Chicken wraps for lunch with spinach, pickles, some mayo.
• Walnuts for snacks.
• Drank lots of water, hardly any milk.
• Dinners usually was protein + veggie combo of some kind,
• Limited beer, except for the bachelor party. I won’t go there though! HA!

And there you have it. My -8.5 lbs in a nutshell. A lot of this will be water weight due to the low carb intake over the course of the 14 days so it will be interesting to see what the difference will be these next two weeks.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

Continue Reading >]]> After working 2 grave yards in a row I finally got some time off. I slept in until around 10:30 and then hung out with my baby daughter Brynn (BooBoo) for an hour or so. Then, I hit the bike. Today I set a hard goal to a nice slow burn. No pulling, no insane climbing, just a nice slow calorie burn. I managed to do 21 miles without exhausting myself, which is very not me because every-time I try to do a calorie burn I end up turning my ride into a full-on training session! Not this time. Goal 1, lose the weight.

One nice thing about working grave yards, I get to bike during the day and not after work. Less traffic, safer and more enjoyable.

So on my way home this afternoon I was riding along when I saw 5 state troopers pulling into the moose lodge parking lot. One county sheriff was already there. The trailer in question had chemical barrels outsides and was covered in “warning, do not enter” signs. LOL. Made for an interesting ending to a fairy uneventful bike ride. Either that or the Moose were treating them to an afternoon lunch.

A farm off Hebron Road in August County Virginia.

Continue Reading >]]> Hopefully this little snippet will help you find out what’s causing your Mac to slow down. Recently I had someone ask on twitter how to find out what is slowing down their Macbook and right away I thought of top and activity monitor. There are a couple ways to do this and doing them both can give you a really good idea what’s causing the slow down.

The first way is the easiest. Open up the Activity Monitoring tool.

Activity Monitor
Open your App finder, Applications, Utilities, then open Activity Monitor. Once you have it open you can sort the columns by CPU and Memory. Look for an App that is taking up lots of CPU. Anything over 15% would be a cause for concern.

The next way isn’t as easy, but can get you starting to use the Terminal program.

TOP
The next option is to open a console terminal and use a command line tool called “top”. This is a standard Unix tool for watching your system processes and memory. You should get almost the same readings as Activity Monitor. Open up a terminal by going to your App finder, Applications, Utilities, then Terminal. Once Terminal is open, type “top” at the prompt and hit enter. Once top opens hit the “o” key and type “cpu” and press enter. This will sort Top by CPU utilization.

Once you find out what Application is causing the slow down you can take action by either un-installing the Application in question or looking for a new version. If it’s a web browser, try uninstalling all the plugins and extensions. For other Applications you should try a fresh re-install of that app.

Continue Reading >]]> Tonight I am working swing shift, midnight-ish to around 8am. Swing shift one night, regular the next and a phone call for support in-between is a normal 48 hour period for me. This how life is as an engineer working on mission critical systems for a major ISP. Some would hate to work my schedule but I look at the good in it. Tonight I have a walk with a co-worker planned as well as my own run later in the morning. How awesome is that.

Yeah, it sucks having a wacked out schedule but if you work at a desk or in a server room or even in a lab on swing, you can probably find time to slip out for a run. Lets also not forget that you don’t have to worry about being all gross around other co-workers like you would during the day!

Welp, that’s my late night post for this week!

Continue Reading >]]> Yesterday I went for a bike ride with the regular Tuesday riders. We normally do a 15 mile route, which with my additional miles from and to home, turns out to be 20 miles for me. We did the Smoky Row route which consists of some decent inclines and a really nice 4 mile pull at the end. We did a special hill twice which pretty much destroyed my legs. Overall it wasn’t that bad. Perhaps the running has helped me on the bike a bit, considering it was only my second real ride this year I thought I’d be left behind for sure.

The fish and salad dinner the wife made after was pretty good as well. Hopefully the weight is dropping. I haven’t check in at least two weeks so we’ll see. I’ll probably do an end of month weigh in.

A picture off Smoky Row Road.

Continue Reading >]]> As you can see, here on my site I have a rotating header graphic. Hit refresh and it will reload a different picture, sometimes. I only have 3 banners I rotate with but they do rotate between the three randomly. I also have it timed to change that banner ever 30 seconds.

Here is how I did it, in case you’re wondering.

First I create 3 banners of the same size and placed them in my theme’s “img” folder. I name them “image-1.jpg”, “image-2.jpg” ( notice the -1.jpg, -2.jpg ). In my case I actually call them jimburnett-1.jpg…

Next, I create a DIV called ‘header’ which is where my pictures will rotate and also where my javascript is located. I put this in my header.php file because this file is used on every page. This is also where menus and logos normally go.

<div id="header">
<script>
function changePic()
{
var i = Math.floor((Math.random()*3)+1);
document.getElementById('header').style.backgroundImage = 'url(/wp-content/themes/thedark/img/jimburnett-' + i + '.jpg)'
}

function runHead()
{
changePic();
//setTimeout("changePic();",10000);
}
</script>
<div />

In my css file I set the height, width and default picture. Once done, I add onLoad=”runHead();” to my <body> tag which is also located in the header.php file. This will run the above Javascript after the page loads.

#header
{
position: relative;
height: 260px;width: 700px;
background: url(./img/jimburnett-1.jpg) no-repeat;
background-color:#000;
}

You may need to change some path, such as the “img” path in the code above to get it to work but if you have a somewhat well designed theme you shouldn’t have any problems getting this going.

As always, shoot me message if you have any problems!

A random picture of my Macbook Pro. You know you want one.

Continue Reading >]]> Posting text to display only on your homepage is easy. Using my website as an example, I display my personal Google microdata only on my front page. This is really easy to do and only takes a few snippets of code. Remember, with WordPress it is possible to do just about anything.

First you’ll want to open up your “index.php” script within your theme. Hopefully the theme you use was developed with simplicity in mind and you can find the “get_header()” function. You can either place the code right after that or anywhere in your index.php file where you want to display your text.

On my blog here at jimburnett.net, I have a <div> tag with an id of “page” that defines my page. I place my front-page text right there. After the header, but the first thing on the page.

Here is what it looks like on my site.

<div id="page" class="is_page">
<?php if (is_home()){ ?>
 Custom HTML, CSS and Text can go here. You can put anything here that you want to show up on the home page of your WordPress blog.
<?php } ?>

.
.
.
.

The key here is the is_home() function. This WordPress function will return a “true” if you are at the home page or a “false” if you are not. This way it only shows when you are really on your homepage.

The <div id=”page” class=”is_page”> may be different in your theme. Some developers call it “content”, others call it “wrapper”. It really depends on how simple of a coder your theme developer is.

As always, reach out to me if you are having problems and I’ll help you out.

Continue Reading >]]> Using Google’s microdata features is a super good way to get more visibility on the search engines. I’ve been working on getting the keyword “Jim Burnett” in the number one spot for a couple of months now. I’ve got the .net and an attorney has the .com. He’s well towards to the bottom of the list now but I still want to get the number one spot. Even though using Google microdata won’t move you up in the ranks, it will make your search results stand out compared to others. Imagine adding a picture and extra links under your Google search results for your keyword. Yep, you can do that!

Check out my Google results below for “Jim Burnett”. Notice the picture and the “More by Jim Burnett” link below? It stands out way more than if I just left it a simple blue link.

So, how do you add microdata you ask? Easy. Visit Google’s “People” microdata page and follow the steps.

I should note, you’ll need a Google+ profile in order to do this. They use this to authorize blogs to your Google+ profile. They then link the information from the two together.

Also note it can take a few days if not weeks for this to all synchronize together.

For WordPress users, I place my microdata for my front page in the index.php file at the top.

Continue Reading >]]> The most recent show I’ve been watching is Star Trek Voyager. Recommend by fellow blogger, Gamer Chick. It’s a fun scifi exploration show much like Stargate Atlantis. They visit all sorts of different works and meet weird aliens all the time. The people on the space ship are all pretty nice, no bad apples, which make it a nice show to watch. There are some ongoing stories and relationships to follow throughout the seasons as well.

You won’t find any cussing in this show and for the most part (besides some violent scenes) it’s family friendly. This is nothing like the trashy reality TV that is on television today so I’d recommend it if you need something fresh and haven’t seen it before.

As for kids, well I’m a fresh dad so I’m still noobish in this area but I’d probably give a minimum age of 10 or 11 on this series.

I really enjoy this show, it’s clean, exciting, enjoyable and family friendly.