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I’ve noticed something interesting recently, and got me thinking about it. A few months ago, I started hitting the gym again, lifting weights, and running, about 3 times per week. Within the time period, I noticed that I was more motivated to achieve and accomplish goals, took care of what I ate, and in general had more focus and energy in my daily activities.

Then of course I found out that my wife was pregnant, so my workout schedule was a bit messed up since she couldn’t go with me. The last 2 weeks, I stopped working out and interestingly enough, lost concentration easily when at work or doing things, ate all the junk I could find and didn’t have that energy I had those weeks when I was hitting the gym.

Which brings me to an interesting conclusion, that a healthy lifestyle equals a better life in general. I think that one of the reasons is the fact that you’re pushing yourself when you lift weights and run for half an hour or so, which in turn conscious or not trains your mind to not give up easily. After that, in daily activities, the mind becomes trained to not wander around when doing something and actually gives more energy and focus to finish the task at hand.

Well, that’s my theory anyway. I’ve gone back to the gym yesterday and hope to continue my schedule, as it keeps me healthy and motivated to get fit. Anybody have the same experience?

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Just playing around with Google Earth, and found it really cool. I managed to zoom in to my condo with relative ease, and managed to place a ‘placemark’ for easy finding.

It’s amazing what technology can do these days.

Technorati tags:
Google Earth

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I’ve decided to study towards CompTIA’s Project+ certification. The main reason being that in my current workplace, project management skills is a huge must if trying to climb up the ladder. I also considered the fact that project management skills would be in demand wherever I go. The more I look at project management, the more I like the fact that it helps prevent failures up front and increases the chance of successfully completing a project. I’ve found that project management will be very helpful in the various things I do, be it at work or in life.

There are a couple of reasons I chose Project+:
1. It’s an entry to mid level PM certification, unlike PMI’s Project Management Professional which is more targeted towards seasoned PM’s.
2. PMI’s entry level cert, called the Certified Associate in Project Management, was a consideration, but since it required re-certification every few years and paid training hours, I decided to go with Project+, which require no re-certification and no training hours.
3. My company provided online training material, and Project+’s material (2003) was more up to date than PMI’s material (PMBOK 2000 vs PMBOK 2003)

Of course, once I get this, the more long term goal will still be to get the PMP certification. My target is to spend about 1 or 2 months doing intensive learning (1 or 2 hours a day), and sign up for the certification test around August / September tentatively.

Technorati tags:
Project+, PMP, CAPM, CompTIA, PMI.

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Man, it’s a hassle to give a car to someone in Ontario…

The car that we’re currently using actually belonged to my wife’s brother, but he’s gone to Indonesia for good now, and the car is used by us. We’re in the process of trying to transfer the car ownership to be under my wife’s name and register the insurance under my name, since it could cut the insurance costs by almost half.

Now the problem is that the ministry of transportation doesn’t allow gifts/transfer of vehicles between siblings. Parents, grand parents, kids, grand children are ok, but not between brother and sister. So, the solution is to think of this as a sale, meaning we have to pay the taxes on such a sale. And even then, it cannot be sold for $1; it must be sold at book value.

So, in the process of trying to do this, I read the rules for selling a car, and it requires a safety certificate and emission test. Guess what? A safety certificate and emission test combined cost almost 200 bucks. Add that to the tax we have to pay, and it’s a couple grand down the drain, just to transfer the name of a vehicle from my wife’s brother to her.

Can you imagine this funny scenario? We’re driving the car for the last few months, and just to make a name change on ownership, we have to pay a couple thousand dollars to the government? *sigh*, lots of spending the next few days… just to save on insurance. Can’t wait for the days of teleportation

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Well, I managed to play around and get this site design up and running. Anybody care to critique it ?
I can’t seem to get the left navigation items to left – justify for some reason, if anybody knows how to do it, please let me know.

Update: Got it working

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For those who don’t know, my wife is currently pregnant with our 2nd child. She’s about 8 weeks along, and really going through some tough bouts with nausea. On Monday morning, she had some bleeding and went to check it out with the doctor. The doctor said to have lots of rest and try to relax, because it happens sometime. She was fine that evening, and yesterday.

Well, this morning, I was at work, and my wife called me, saying that she’s got some spotting (bleeding), and that it was continuous, and she also had shoulder pains since a few days ago. I rushed home from work and took her to a doctor, who then proceeded to tell her to get an ultrasound. We feared an Ectopic pregnancy due to those symptoms.

About 3 pm this afternoon, after the ultrasound, it turned out that the baby is fine, and the bleeding was probably due to the placenta trying to attach itself to the uterus (? .. correct me if I’m wrong here, not a MD ). Whew, that was a huge relief, and we’re so thankful that the child is ok.

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Well, I’ve been playing around with Photoshop for a few days, and have come up with a simple design (it’s probably the best I could do at my very basic skill level :). Here’s a screenshot of it, please let me know what you think, any comments are welcome.

The hard part is trying to integrate it to Nucleus. I’m still a bit lost with the relation between skins, templates, and the include files, but hopefully I can get this done within the next week or so.

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Thank God for a beautiful weekend. As we drove out to Marineland on Saturday, it looked like it was going to rain quite a bit, but it turned out to be a nice day for a stroll in a park. It was a bit hot and humid in the afternoon hours, but quite bearable. The annoying part was that our camera ran out of batteries :(, so I didn’t get any pictures at all. I used a friend’s camera to get some shots though, will probably ask for some of them from her.

The Beluga whales are quite interesting, they seem to play for photographs. Everytime someone calls out to them or tries to take pictures, they seem to strike some ‘poses’ for us, which was quite cute and interesting, and they make lots of funny ‘babylike’ noises too. There were a lot of Beluga’s as oppossed to 3 of the killer whales.

But it’s quite awe inspiring to look at these creatures up close and personal, especially through the underwater viewing area where you get to see the actual size pass by you right in front of your nose.

Overall, it was a fun activity; my son had a lot of fun, taking the chance to skip his naptime. But once we left at about 5, within a minute he was fast asleep in his car seat (record time! + miracle ), and at night he just slept without waking up in the middle of the night at all. Maybe we should do this kind of trip every week just so he sleeps

Technorati tags: Marineland

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Yippee… we’re going with some friends to Marineland tomorrow. Hoping to see some big fish jump around in water and splash people

Not sure if we’ll spend the night yet, as hotel prices are quite expensive for this weekend.

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It’s been an interesting week, and it seems that I’ve accomplished some things this week.
Here’s some of the highlights:
- Take 2 project management online courses offerred by where I work
- Learned quite a bit about Nucleus skins & themes
- Learned a bit of Photoshop
- Designed a simple site for a friend of mine

I guess the most important thing is that I’m not procrastinating as much as I used to, due to the 2 week breakthrough pilot. Whenever I have the urge to do nothing, I make up my mind and push myself to accomplish something, and it’s kinda refreshing because now I find that I have motivation to keep moving along.

Next week’s target:
- Complete some more project management online courses
- Get to know Photoshop even better so I can improve my design skills (my current skills are horrific, and that’s partly why I’m a developer and not a designer )
- Try to come up with a design / logo for this blog

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