Well week #1 is done and gone. It wasn’t the week of power-change I might have hoped for, but I got some of the kinks in my plan worked out so I’m now all the better positioned for Week 2.

I learned in Week 1 that as far as “The-Diet” is concerned, weekends are really hard for me. I undid alot of progress I made over the week once the weekend hit. Without the routine of a work day I tend to snack more and get off schedule … which leads to even more snacking. It’s clear that I have to be much more diligent about the weekends from now on.

I also learned that my “plan” had a little too much “faith” mixed in. So this week, I’m going to try and shore up some more ‘rules’ about how the eating and exercise is supposed to go throughout the week (and especially on the weekends).

My numbers moved in the right direction this week, but I can’t help wonder how awesome they would have been if I hadn’t messed up the weekend so fully. Hopefully I can make even better progress in Week 2.

I’m glad to see that some folks listed on Colin’s Diet page are still going and I’m following them via their RSS feeds. I don’t think the list of participants there is up to date, however, so if you’re just starting be sure to check out Technorait and the flickr pool / discussion group for possible new and continuing participants. Cheryl has signed on in her quest to make healthy changes in her life through yoga, and Doug has signed on in his goal to “become less repulsive“.

Ok enough stalling … here’s the numbers at the end of week 1:

Update: I’ve renumbered the weeks to start with zero rather than one 1. This way “week X” numbers are reporting the results for that week, rather than the starting numbers for that week … this just makes more sense to me.

Last weekend I had a lot of Fun. I got a very generous invite from Heath (aka The Batman Geek) and his wife, Glenna, to come and visit them in Cincinnati OH. Heath, Glenna and I met at The Winnies recently in Hollywood (and I’d met Heath once before that). We had such fun before, I couldn’t wait to see them again, so I packed up the Prius with cameras and the trusty MacBook Pro and set off for The Land of The Batman Geek.

It was great to get to see the sites of Cincy with them and just hang out. In many ways Cincinnati reminded me of Chicago, it was really cool. Thankfully this trip was just before “The-Diet” started, as we had a great (and huge) meal at BD’s Mongolian BBQ with Heath and Glenna’s friends (who were also great folks).

Heath and I talked video of course, and we all played the Wii some too. During one of our videoblogger geek sessions, I managed to repair my Mac and reclaim its 5GB of lost disk space! WOO HOO!

Although, I’ve got about 100 projects going on and don’t have much time for anything else ( well … ok it’s more like 10 projects, but it feels like 100) the trip to Cincinnati has inspired me and given me some ideas for vlogs I really need to do in the near future (if for no other reason than to push the crap I posted at the end of NaVloPoMo off my main page ).

Huge thanks to Heath and Glenna for their hospitality and the great fun!

So, as I mentioned in my previous post I was clicking around the interwebs and discovered a website that got me inspired. Inspired to cut the crap and get back in shape; to start eating right, and generally being more healthy.

Some of you video bloggers out there may know, or know of, Colin Devroe from viddler. If you follow his blog, you may also know that he some time ago started “The Diet” which was really just a goal to start eating and living healthy along with an agreement between friends to blog their progress and be held accountable.

As it turns out, his idea really took off and people from all over started to join in with him and his friends in this self-organized blog-roll-oriented support group.

People all over started posting their weekly updates, tagging them appropriately, subscribing to each others feeds, joining the flickr group, etc etc etc.

As I surfed through this distributed group and saw the results these folks were seeing, I found it all really inspiring and I loved the way a group had formed up a sort of distributed social network using blogs, tags, technorati, rss feeds, flickr, etc to document/support/inspire/accomplish their mutual goals.

Through all the times I’ve tried to come up with some way to keep motivated and be accountable, I’ve always stopped short of publishing such efforts to my blog. I’m not sure why I was so reluctant to do so … I mean I post videos of myself here - it’s not like I’m fooling anyone. Maybe what I’ve needed was this sort of public accountability and public support … possible humiliation.

Now I’m not real excited about the idea of publishing for the world in cold hard numbers just how out of shape I am (and don’t expect any official before pictures) but I am eager to get back in shape, and I’m willing to risk publishing my missteps if it means someone out there is going to call me on it.

So if you are interested why not come along for the ride? Pick a goal or a series of goals, publish your updates on your blog or in the flickr group, and we’ll all follow along with each others progress to stay inspired and offer support.

Regardless as to if you participate yourself - if you plan on reading the content here please feel free to call me out if you notice I’m slacking in this in anyway … that’s why I’m doing this so publicly on the website. Of course also feel free to offer whatever support or encouraging words you feel inspired to provide as well.

I’ll be posting weekly updates, and may create a special page/view here at DavidMeade.com for the topic. So without further ado here are the horrible depressing and gut wrenching starting numbers:

Update: I’ve renumbered the weeks to start with zero rather than one 1. This way “week X” numbers are reporting the results for that week, rather than the starting numbers for that week … this just makes more sense to me.

It’s been a while since my last post so I thought I should update everyone on whats going on around here, what I’ve been up to, and some things I’m considering for DavidMeade.com

Firstly, let me explain how I got derailed in the Semanal project. At the last hours of week two, I made a mistake … I decided to install Windows via bootcamp on my Mac. Long story short: it didn’t work. But, not only did it not work, my Mac wouldn’t even boot up to its own MacOS anymore!! I fought with this over the course of the next week or so with no success until finally I called for help and Verdi kindly gave me a tip which seemed to snap my mac out of it and got me back to the MacOS again. So I could boot to MacOS again … but now I had (have) a 5GB partition on my mac that is neither mac nor PC … just useless space. I tried over part of the following week to fix it all up but couldn’t … so I reluctantly decided I should just give up.

Kinda pissed off at the whole Mac thing I decided to go back to the PC for video editing for a while. As I started to get back into the swing of things in Windows I realized that for some reason my external FW800 RAID drive wasn’t showing up in Windows anymore! (This is the drive I store all my video stuff on).

This was devastating. I store everything on that drive. I mean when you want to save something where else do you put it but the external FW800 RAID drive?! I had to get this back. I troubleshooted it for God-only-knows-how-long … different ports, different FW cards, different cables, different computers … the bottom line: the drive was dead. I lost everything on it.

So now I’d suffered a failure of both my Mac and my PC … and lost my storage drive in the process.

Besides not wanting to go out and buy another RAID drive ($$), I just didn’t have the heart to continue fighting with technology or try to repopulate all my media files somehow … so I just stopped doing anything that would remind me of all the work I had to do in this regard … which included videoblogging.

I’ll get back to it soon enough … but that’s why I haven’t been posting.

I have however been doing other things to keep my videoblogging-karma rating up. For example, I released a quick wordpress plug-in that the Semanal.org folks needed done. There’s even talk of an impromptu trip to visit another fellow videoblogger Heath Parks (aka The Batman Geek).

In other news, I was clicking around the interwebs today came across an interesting idea which may or may not inspire more text based blogs from me in the future … but its got the wheels spinning so stay tuned.