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Archive for the ‘weight loss’ Category

Ways to optimize your ASP.NET applications

February 2nd, 2009

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently optimizing our ASP.NET application to help improve performance.  After spending time analyzing the code and the database for inefficiencies, it was clear that something needed to be done to minimize the data (reduce the request size) that was being delivered to each user for each page request.

After lots of reading and testing, I ended up reducing the size of most of our page requests by as much as 95% in some instances. In the next few posts I will go over, in detail, how you can use the following steps to optimize your ASP.NET (and non-ASP.NET) web applications with only a little bit of work:

  • Enabling and configuring HTTP compression in IIS6
  • Enabling content expiration for static content (graphics, css files, JavaScript files, etc) in IIS6
  • Changing your application to store ViewState in the session rather than in each page
  • Configuring Telerik’s Radcontrols to work as efficiently as possible

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Posted in .net, mac, programming, weight loss, windows

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Weight loss diary – Week 4 (+/-0 lbs)

December 23rd, 2008

Week 4: 187 lbs

Not much to report here for Week 4.  It’s Christmas, I’m still not 100% health wise, I’m not worried about it this week.

I’ll probably do my best to avoid junk/fried food this week, so hopefully I can avoid packing any weight on.

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Posted in weight loss

Weight loss diary – Week 3 (+2 lbs)

December 18th, 2008

Week 3: 187 lbs

This week has been horrible.  I’ve been sick and I haven’t even considered going to the gym.  The only thing that actually seemed appealing was going to the steam room and sitting in there for 10 minutes to clear my congested head.  But, that’s not worth all the other nonsense involved with going to the gym, so it ain’t gonna happen.

My eating habits have been a bit off this week.  Stupid CDW, where we buy computer hardware at work, sent us a 50 gallon drum of holiday cookies.  And for a while they were in our main IT area, which was bad news.  I got them oved into the main kitchen area where they’ve been quickly disappearing.  Unfortunately it hasn’t been quick enough because I’ve been grabbing a few here and there.

As far as me being sick goes, I’m the last one in the house to come down with something.  All of the kids had some kind of stomach bugs two weeks ago and Adam and Avery both transitioned into having ear infections.  Poor Adam had a double ear infection and it was rated a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 by the nurse at the doctor’s office on Monday.  Man, that paired up with the fact that he’s got 4 of his first teeth all in a race to see which one(s) will make it out first.  Needless to say, I shouldn’t be complaining about my sore throat, headace and congestion.  It could be worse!

With Christmas next week and next week being a short week, I’m sure I’ll shoot back up to the weight where I started.  It’s going to be hard to keep weight off when I can’t go to the gym and we’re bouncing back and forth between people’s houses eating holiday dinner.  I guess I’ll have to try, and at a minimum stick to my no fried foods rule.  That should at least help, somewhat.

On a sad note, we had to put our dog Kenna down on Monday.  I won’t go into it much here, Jen did a great job on our family blog.

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Posted in family, weight loss

Weight loss diary – Week 2 (-5 lbs)

December 9th, 2008

Week 2: 185 lbs

As mentioned previous in my State of My Fat Ass Address, I am trying to lose some weight.  Week 1 started off pretty well with me going to the gym Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before work.  I ate pretty good for most of the week and just couldn’t make it to the gym Friday.

It’s Tuesday of week 2 and I haven’t made it to the gym yet.  I was going to try to go this morning but ended up working (from home) later than I had anticipated so I didn’t get into bed until almost 11pm.  And with going to bed that late, it’s just not worth waking up at 5am to head to the gym.  I’ll push myself to go tomorrow and Thursday, and maybe Friday too.

Stupid or not, part of what I’m not looking forward to is listening to the music that’s already on my iPod.  I need to get on the desktop at home and re-load a bunch of stuff that I can listen to at the gym.  Also, going with no music (and no, I don’t consider the crap they play over the speakers through the whole gym music) is not an option.  I just get too bored exercising with no music.

Cutting out junky food hasn’t been too hard.  My key things are going to be avoiding fried food and just pure junk (candy, cookies, cakes, ice cream, etc).  I know that just by doing those I can easily get myself down below 180lbs.  The hard part will be cutting down (or ideally out) beer.  If I could actually pull the trigger and cut out beer/alcohol completely I’d easily drop weight.  And, as a result, I’m sure I’d be more motivated to get to the gym.  Ah, if it were only that easy.

Baby steps I guess, baby steps.

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Posted in weight loss

State of My Fat Ass Address

December 3rd, 2008

Week 1: 190 lbs

I hate to admit it but I have been going without disability insurance for some time now (well, actually I’ve never had it).  Seeing as how I’m the only one working and with benefits for my family I finally got off my lazy ass and put the wheels in motion to get some disability insurance.  Actually, to be honest, I actually inquired and started to put the wheels in motion back in February 2008, they just didn’t roll very far.  So finally in October I contacted the same disability company again and asked for them to renew my quote and adjust a few things.

I took about a month and a half to two months from start to finish from the paperwork phase to the approval phase.  Last week (a few days before my birthday) I got some paperwork from the insurance company.  I assumed it was the final paperwork that I needed to review, sign and send back.  What it turned out being were the test results for my blood work, which they send out as a formality and “for my records.”  The strange thing was how many things fell into the abnormal or high column (I forget the exact working at the moment).  Aparantly my cholesterol is pretty high (total was like 250 or 254).  I guess from what I’ve seen from my research that over 200 total is in the “high” category.

I’ve never really had any problems with cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc.  I guess the past few months of not going to the gym and eating like total crap have really caught up with me.  I haven’t yet gotten the final paperwork from the insurance company based on these results, but I’m assuming that these “risk factors” will probably make the rate they quoted me slightly higher.  I guess I’ll now need to decide if I go and get re-tested in a few weeks or just pay the higher rate, hoping that I can get re-assed and lowered later when I’m in better health.

My previous excuse for the exercising at least has been that I’ve been working a ton of hours lately (~65).  I used to go during lunch on work days which was a nice break in the day.  Now I’ve been working through lunch and not leaving myself any time to exercise.  Starting this week I’ve decided that I need to stop making excuses and to get my ass up an hour earlier during the week to get to the gym.

As stated at the start of the post, my weight at the start of this week was 190 lbs.  My ultimate goal would be to get down to 170, but I don’t think that’s realistic.  I’d be happy with 175.  We’ll see how it goes.  Not only am I going to get back into the gym habit but I’m going to cut out fried food and really watch what I eat.  The biggest problem for me will be trying to cut out beer.  I may just have to work out a little more/harder to make up for that vice.  I guess we’ll see how things go!

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Posted in general, weight loss