Hello?

Is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me.

Oh, Good For You, Christian Bale. Good. For. You.

Ever since Christian Bale went batshit crazy on the set, I like to be obnoxious with my wife and drop the "Oh, good for you!" line as much as possible.  I keep saying I want to use it for her text tone, but I can never find a clean copy of that stupid thing!  Every "Good for you" drop/tone/ringtone I've found has either been on a soundboard and you can't download it, or it's in Flash (same problem.)

Luckily, I found a clean, MP3 version of the Christian Bale rant today online (link added for your convenience.)  Through the powers of Audacity (a bad ass bit of shareware, if I do say so myself) I extracted that magical bit and made it into an iPhone formatted tone (M4R.)  For those of you that play with other phones, I've did an MP3 version too.

Enjoy, mofos!

Christian Bale "Oh Good for you!" iPhone ringtone

Christian Bale "Oh Good for you!" Mp3 format

P.S--don't be scared of the littleretard.com URL--that's mine.  I couldn't pass up an awesome domain like that when it was suggested by the registrar a few years ago.  I use it for a picture blog (www.littleretard.com/blog) but it's not updated often.

Giggity

Obviously, I've been a fat mofo for quite a while. This blog is the bastard stepchild of a blog I started back in July 2005 to document my fight against my fatty fatty two-by-four nature. A fight that continues, my fine friends.

I hit my highest weight EVER in December 2010 (or the highest recorded weight, that is--it doesn't count if it's not documented) when I entered a weight loss competition with some of my coworkers. Sadly, I lost (blame it on the fact that we started in December; blame it on the fact that I was in New Orleans constantly the eight weeks we tracked our shit; blame it on the rain, yeah yeah; blame it on the ah ah ah ah alcohol baby).

I lost a WHOPPING 10.5 pounds. Boo. Hiss.

Fast forward to June 2010...my coworker (now my boss) decided she needed some motivation to shed a few pounds before her trip to Italy, so she kicked off a Biggest Loser Part Deux in the office. Eight weeks. Eight contestants. $800 on the line. (I'm a shitty story teller, so I'll just blurt out the fact that I handily won that bitch).

Imagine my surprise when I weighed LESS at the start of this comp than I did at the END of the last? By almost 10 pounds. W00T! I have no idea how it happened, as I wasn't really dieting. I slacked off a LOT since then (for a few reasons that I'll get into in a sec), but now that the holidays are over, I'm back to being a diet and exercise Nazi as of 1/3/2011. I'm down about 5 pounds since then and I think I'm off to a good start.

You want in? You know you do...here are some of the tools that I've been using. They seem to work for me:

• Myfitnesspal.com--I started using this site because they had a decent iPhone app (and yes, I'm back to the iPhone--the 3GS is like a bajillionty times better than Android) that made tracking my food super easy. I've sadly discovered that unless I'm crazy ass OCD about tracking what I eat (and talking about it incessently with Laurie), I start to drift off into picking up breakfast tacos on the way to work; eating double bacon cheeseburgers at lunch; "snacking" on a McDouble AND a fucking McChicken on the way home BEFORE dinner YOU SAD FAT MOTHER FUCKER. In the few months I've used it, they iPhone app has been updated to be even more user friendly. I've tried a couple of other apps (like Sparkpeople) but they are as slow as a stoned turtle fucking.
• Runkeeper (iPhone app)--I had planned on running a few days a week to build up to a 5K, but then I not only pulled my right hamstring (Octoberish?), I pulled the left a few weeks later and THEN did something to my left Achilles Tendon (or possibly fractured my left heel bone--can't say for sure, because I still haven't gone to the doctor, but I'm leaning towards a strained AT). while using a mother fucking jump rope of all things Runkeeper is the fucking bomb for tracking that shit, with integrated GPS that feeds into a map. What I like about Runkeeper is that you can also use it to track bike routes too.
• Muscleandstrength.com--Great website to learn about fitness and nutrition (but take everything you read with a grain of salt, especially in the forms). Lots of example videos, which is helpful when you're trying a new split and you have no fucking idea what a Pec Dec Fly is.
• ExRx.net--another great site to with tons of exercise examples.
• Digital Kitchen Scale--get one. You need it. Seriously.
• Jack3d--The label calls it a "pre-exercise CNS-Carnosine-ATP Augmentor". It's a pre-exercise supplement with creatine (rebuild muscles faster) that increases nitric oxide levels (pumping up your muscles) and doubles as an energy drink (much like crack or meth--the shit is potent, yo).
• Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard Whey Protein (Rocky Road flavor)--I am so mother fucking tired of this flavor. Ugh. I'm getting strawberry next time. Whey protein is a must if you're going to do any strength training. Drink a shake within 30 minutes of completing your workout--again, helps the muscles rebuild faster. I stick with whey only right now since I'm trying to lose weight, but there are other types of proteins out there that are digested more slowly that I'll add when I get into some type of maintenance mode.

I fucked around after August (and the injuries in October screwed up my fitness shit for a couple of months) and gained a few pounds back. Since June 1, I'm down 30 pounds...starting with my 12/2010 weight, I'm down 49 pounds.

I'm still a fat mofo, but not as bad as I was (and not as MUCH as I thought). The trainer at our work gym did a body fat caliper test on me in November and based on that, I'm actually at the tail end of the "normal" range with 22% body fat.. My pants beg to differ, but I'll take what I can get.

Bleeding Me

Why am I such a technology whore? I fucking LOVE it. Computers, TVs, Blu-ray players, handheld devices, shit with wires, shit with LEDs, 802.11G & N & Wimax & LTE, air cooled with fins, heatsinks cooled with flourescent liquids, liquid crystal displays. If it's got the juice running in it, I WANT IT ALL.

Consequently, I gots lots of bills that are generated as a result of my love of the integrated circuit.

I was reading an article in Gizmodo over the three-day weekend (The Subscription War: You're Bleeding to Death) and was interested in seeing how my stuff stacked up to the "norm"

Holy shit.

Some of these are annual fees that I'm showing amortized over twelve months (Flickr, domain names, Xbox live, magazines). Sweet baby Jesus, I'm spending over $5,500 a year on subscription entertainment services. This doesn't count the cash I spend on music (a few hundred a year?), spur of the moment PPV movies/Blockbuster runs, trips to the movie theaters (again, a few hundred a year--a trip for a family of four to a flick is not an inexpensive proposition).

What can I do to stop the bleeding? My biggest monthly expense is Verizon Fios, which has my land line phone (and unlimited long distance), my Internet (20 Mbps symmetrical), & my TV service (a brazillian channels, including HBO/Cinemax/Showtime/TMC/Starz/Encore/etc).

My first step is seeing what I can live without from Verizon:

1a) Land line phone

The only time I personally use the home phone is when I'm passing it over to my wife or kids when I get stuck answering the phone. (Quick aside: why the fuck do I have to answer the phone? It's never for me, yet 75% of the time, I'm the one that has to get my fat ass out of my chair and grab it off the wall). All my friends call me on my cell. Most of the time, my wife uses HER cell. We could lose the land line and drop $50 off the bill.

My biggest hurdle is that my alarm monitoring is done over the land line. I could change that to cellular monitoring OR switch to a VoIP service (like Vonage) and do a bit of wiring magic to have it feed into the whole house through the existing wires.

1b) Decrease my Internet service speed to a slower bandwidth. The 20Mbps service currently runs me $61 a month after my "bundled discount"

1c) Kill some of the extraneous channels. Do I REALLY need 73 premium movie channels (NOT counting the HD channels)? I pay an extra $29.99 a month for those.

Apparently I DO need all those channels and I need a FASTER Internet service and I'm too lazy to do a five minute wiring job because instead of killing my services, I signed up for MORE when I hit Verizon's website yesterday. Under a two year contract. Sigh.

Here's what I have now. Same phone service, I now have a 35Mbps symmetrical Internet service, and a new channel package that has an EXTRA movie channel (EpixHD).

But I saved $18 a month by signing up for it! And I got 3 months of free movie channels! I got more for less! Yes! Fuck!

Alright, let's try something else.

Cellphones: $130 a month. I can't shave anything off of that. The $130 a month is for my G1 (including text & data), Laurie's phone (including texts), & Evan's phone. This bill will only INCREASE. Sometime in the next couple of months, I'm putting Laurie onto some type of smartphone (most likely moving her over to AT&T for an iPhone [$80+ a month]). Evan is getting to the point where he's texting his friends (need to add a texting plan for HIM). I'm sure Chloe will soon want a phone. Ok, scratch that one.

Netflix: $17 a month. Actually that one just went up to $17 a month from $9 because I changed to the two-disk a month plan with Blu-ray (can't watch NORMAL dvds now that I have a Blu-ray player. Posh. The intent is to stop getting shit from Redbox & Blockbuster. This will save me money. I swear.

Tivo: $17 (it's slightly less than that, more like $15 with taxes). In THEORY I could lose the tivo and replace it with a DVR from Verizon, but it's the same price and I like the functionality of the Tivo. I could actually roll my own DVR and use XBMC, but I'd have cough up the cash upfront to build a HTPC. I'd lose my On Demand stuff in the bedroom, but gain Netflix streaming, Hulu, website streaming, etc. Hmmm, that sounds fun. That's a big "maybe" sometime soon.

Xbox Live: $5 (that's slightly higher because I forgot to add Evan's account). Have to have this for Netflix streaming on my big screen and killing zombies with my friends over the Internet.

Flickr: $2 ($24.95/year). Easiest way to share pics with friends & family; easiest triple backup of my pictures (which are also backed up on my ipod and my online backup set). Nope, can't do it.

Domain names: $2 ($20 a year). $10 a year X 2 for my email domain & Laurie's too. This may increase when my free service on my photography blog dies next year. I like that domain name too much to get rid of it (http://www.littleretard.com/blog), so this will probably triple next year.

Online backup: $5. Shut your mouth. This $5 a month is the only thing that stands between my balls and Laurie's scissors if our PC ever dies. Can you imagine how much stuff a teacher keeps on her home PC? She'd have to start from scratch at the end of a three month summer break and that ain't happening.

Kid's games: $5. Webkinz are to Chloe what computers are to me. That's all I gots to say about that.

Audible.com: $15. I pay $15 a month for one audiobook per month (on top of the free ones I download from the library). This $15 assures my sanity in the 45 minute to 1 hour commute ONE WAY from Sachse to downtown Dallas. This $15 also assures the life of many individuals who share 75 Central with me. Without me being entertained by my books, I would cut a bitch every day. NOTE: This was a trade off from my "old" entertainment of Sirius.

Magazines: $10. This may be a somewhat conservative estimate. Laurie gets People, Soap Opera Digest, & US Weekly (which needs to be renewed). I get D Magazine & Wired, but I never pay more than $10 a year for mine. You want to tell Laurie she can't get her gossip? Me neither.

Newspaper: $29. Are you fucking kidding me, DMN? $29 a month for the fucking paper? I've tried to kill this, but Laurie is a newspaper fiend. I wish she'd get with the times and get her news off the Internet like I do, but whatchugonnado?

Man, I'm thoroughly fucked. I'm not willing to part with any of this. In fact, it's only going to go up.

Next Topic: The box full of surveillance equipment in my garage that I want to install on my house and why my wife won't let me.

Harder Than Chinese Arithmetic

So last night was yet another reminder of how big of a stubborn dumbass I am.

It's 8:30pm and Evan comes into the living room with tears of frustration welling in his eyes. He's been working on a make-up quiz for TWO HOURS. And he's still on problem one.

Evan's a pretty sharp kid (he took the SATs last month and scored in the 40th percentile of graduating seniors--what, what) and is in AP math. It's a quiz on similar triangles and all of the background info was covered when he was out of school due to the dreaded pig flu. But, he has a intuitive grasp of things, so his blind flailing into figuring this shit out was pretty much the same as mine. But he got stuck because he didn't know that proportions were the key to figure out the size of the bigger triangle.

Basically, here's the problem:

Triangle VTC ~ Triangle VWY



How big is line WY?

WTF? I don't think I EVER had math like this. The most advanced math class I had was high school geometry 20 years ago. Granted, I'm sure I was high the whole time, but I don't remember ever doing this type of shit. But, I do remember the Pythagorean Theorem (one of the few things college era THC & years of alcohol abuse haven't scrubbed from my dying brain, so here's how I attacked the problem.

1) If the two triangles are similar, then if I can figure out the size of the small one, I can back into the big one.

2) I have the length of two sides of a triangle. Using a2+b2=c2, I should be able to get the length of the third.

So I start my dumbassery with

(40*40)+(25*25)=(c*c)

1600+625=c2

C2=2,225

Squareroot of 2,225 is 41.169905, round that bitch down to 41.2.

OK. If these triangles are similar, than I can use what I have to figure out the rest. If I divide line VZ by the total length VY, that will give me it's proportion to the whole line! (38.4615%). Once I have that, I can divide line segment VT (47.2) by that figure to get the rest of line TW (75.39). Add those together and that's the hypotenuse of triangle VWY. I can THEN do the following:

a2+104 squared=122.6 squared.
a2+10,816=15,030.8
15030.8-10816=a2
4214.8=a2
get the square root and voila, the answer is that line segment WY is 64.9.

Yay, me...I'm so smart!

Yeah, right. Here's why I'm dumb:

It took 30 minutes to get to that solution. It aggravated the shit out of me because I wasn't feeling good about the process. It was TOO long and involved and the fractional answer was leaving a bad taste in my mouth (TWSS).

Google failed me when searching for hints on how to do this shit last night (but for some reason EVERY link I could find today was perfect), but I epic failed by not remembering that Evan could view his math book online.

I should have figured that there's a much simpler way to do this. There's no way the 7th grade math teacher would have them doing this if it required a calculator (which you'd need to get the square roots).

We move on to problem two, which is the old "You're 5 feet tall and have a 12 foot shadow. The flagpole's shadow is 32 feet tall. How tall is the flagpole" question.

Shit. We should have started there first, because once I googled that and took a look, we hit pay dirt. Pay dirt that takes literally 30 seconds to solve the problem.

Here's how using the first example:

1) Setup a ratio equation using the known numbers
40/104 (the length of VZ [your shadow] over the length of VY [the flagpole shadow]) is equal to 25/x (the length of TZ [your height] over WY [flagpole height]). From there, it's basic cross multiplication to get the answer.

40 25
--- = -----
104 x

40x=2600

40x = 2600
---- ------
40 40

x=65

Sigh.

So, if Google fails you and brings you here, that's how you do it. Here are some really good Math sites I found today (when Google decided to allow me the privilege of seeing them) that are even better. I'm sure the folks that wrote them aren't retards like me.

http://www.mathopenref.com/similartriangles.html
http://www.aaamath.com/rat-prop-crossx.htm

---

Be happy that I totally fucked that shit up, because it gave me a reason to actually post something to this wasteland of a blog. It's been over TEN fucking years since my first posting in my "online diary" back in the 20th century. My, how time flies. But even though it's 2010, the cars STILL don't. I want my money back, bitch.

Things are going great for me. I still dig my job. I just had my 14th anniversary with Laurie. Evan turns 13 in a couple of months (jesus) and Chloe just turned 9. Still live in the same house. Still drive the same automobile. I went to New Orleans a bajillion times last year. Went to FL for vacation. Went to Vegas in October. Was GOING to go to NY last month, but airfare skyrocketed and I couldn't afford it. I'm still bald and still fat.

Ha...now that we've moved on to me, I've lost interest in writing. How droll.

I'm sure I'll be posting more in the near future, as I'm about to embark on a historic nine trillionth diet at the beginning of February (once I get checked out by my ass loving doctor). It will be EPIC.

I Need Your Money, Bitches!

I'm stealing the text below from my buddy Lance because that mother fucker is leading our team in donations. We're up to $1500, but we want to bring in a shitload more. Help me, mother fuckers!

-----------------------------------------

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to cancers that affect men. I'm doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation. The funds raised go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LIVESTRONG).

What many people don't know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged 18-35. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved.

To make a donation, you can either:

* Click this link http://us.movember.com/mospace/355596/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
* Write a check payable to 'Movember Foundation', referencing my Registration Number 355596 and mailing it to: Movember Foundation, PO Box 2726, Venice, CA 90294-2726.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund:

* The LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance program which has the goal of improving survival rates and quality of life for young adults with cancer between the ages of 15 and 40.
* Research initiatives to further understand the biology of adolescent and young adult cancers.

For more details on how the funds raised from previous campaigns have been used and the impact Movember is having please go to http://us.movember.com/mospace/355596/

Laaazzzzyyyy

I was going to post something new, but I'm so fucking lazy I can't even motivate myself to do it. How is it that I had multiple posts on the same day for so long back in the days of "Diary of a Fatman"?

Maybe it's all the time I wasted on the boards and on Twitter. I blow my humor load in 140 characters or less (much like my literal load in 120 seconds or less).

Maybe I'll write something tonight. Laurie is out of town for three days. I'll try to fit something in between the violent bouts of masturbation.

Tata.