Backups with a My Book drive.

A while back I purchased a 1tb external hard drive. The My Book from Western Digital was a great buy, even at Best Buy who had it on sale for a little over $60. If I had the extra money, I would have bought more! So I had to settle on one. Anyway, I forgot one thing about these external hard drives. They are always Fat32. So if I wanted to do backups I had to use Western Digitals lousy backup software instead of my own Backup Exec software. Reason being is Fat32 only supports files sizes up to 4 gb in size. If I want to have files more than 4gb on My Book, I have to convert the drive to NTFS. Which is a fairly painless operations. The only headaches I have had with Windows drive conversion is when there is an application or two accessing the drive or if there are any bit level errors. So here is how I did it.

There are three steps to this process, steps 2 and 3 are all done from the command line.

1. Verify there are no open files or programs from the drive you want to convert.

2. Run a Check disk (chkdsk /f) to verify/fix if there are any bad sectors or any issues with the drive.

3. Run Convert (convert DRIVELETTER: /fs:NTFS). This converts the drive into the file system of choice. Since I'm a windows junky, NTFS it is.

Now, I can backup to my hearts content, with the software of my choice. :)

- Draok Out

*MP* My house is broken into again!!

Can things get any fucking worse!?

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A Bit of Frustration

Physically I have been feeling pretty good lately. Still tired, and will probably continue to feel that way until I get my sleep study done. Regardless, I have been feeling pretty good and have noticed how I feel after I eat certain foods that I used to eat enmass. The other day, I was in a crunch for time and had to get my calorie intake up and so I stopped by The Feed Store for soup and a sandwich. I had the Wisconsin Cheese soup and hero sandwich. Needless to say I felt like crap after I ate it. The quality of food I eat definitely has an effect on how I feel. The healthier to the food, the better I feel throughout the day. This is a good thing. :)

So with all the changes I have made in my nutrition, and the exercise I have lost 5 lbs in one week. I found this out in my first weigh in last night. I was really excited until I got the bad news. 3.5 lbs of the 5 lbs I lost was MUSCLE LOSS. My excitement turned to disappointment in the blink of an eye. How the hell did I lose muscle, and not fat!? My trainer told me not to worry about the first weigh in. We will get a better picture as we get more weigh ins and we see a trend in my weight loss. Right now at a glance, it appears its my lack of calorie intake. I'm supposed to have over 4k calories per day. I'm getting no where near that right now. I'm at least getting over 2k easy every day, but my carbs and protein intake is still low. Mostly my protein, which most likely is the culprit. Well see how things go by next week's weigh in.

Last Week

To say last week was stressful, would be an understatement. I had hoped to have gotten everything ready for Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday but things didn't pan out the way I had hoped. Everything is pretty much ready with the help of Goroxx, you rock man!, I need to get my situation at home worked out.

With all the changes in my life, the fitness and nutrition changes, greatly reduced gaming time, I have changed A LOT in my life. Little did I know that my life would be changing even more drastically. Pretty much flipping my life completely upside down. Last week after my weekly D&D sessions, I went home, had a late snack, and passed out on the couch. Next thing I know, I'm being aroused from my deep sleep by Kat (My wife). She frantically tells me someone was in her room. I looked around, and everything was clear. Let me point out that I have a long history of light sleeping, and anyone who's ever been in our house knows our floors are noisy to walk on. Old hardwood floors do that. So that sort of thing has always woke me up in the past so Kat and I wrote it off as a freakish vivid dream on her part. Kat was thoroughly freaked by the whole thing, and rightly so. It was an overly realistic dream right?

Thursday morning, I noticed my bank check card, and my FitClub membership card missing. With my change in schedule, working out, etc I have been exhausted and thoughts of Kat's dream and my missing card was just coincidence. When I'm exhausted, I tend to lose things. Later that day I decided to just cancel the card, and get a new one. I couldn't shake the thought that someone may have actually came into our house and snagged those items.

Friday rolls around and Kat is still freaked about the "dream" and so am I to be honest. That afternoon I do my usually checks of my bank accounts, and find a fairly large charge on my account. Someone actually bought a $500+ item at Walmart WITH MY CARD. What Kat and I had written off as a very vivid dream could have been real. We still wasn't officially sure.

So on Saturday, we decide it's time to get another dog. Our last dog Allie, was a huge part of our family and always woke us up when someone was near the house. I guess we got used to that luxury and didn't let go of it when we should have. It hit us hard when we had to put her down last year. Our new boxer pup has already made his way into our lives and is now entrenched quite well. I also stopped off at the bank to discuss the rogue transaction on my account and come to find out the guy charged close to $800 in total. Then back at home while Kat and I are enjoying the company of our new family member, Kat goes to look for her camera. The one I bought her for her birthday and her most valued possession is now missing. Gone. No where to be found, and then the realization that someone was actually in the house officially sets in.

I haven't had much sleep due to Kat's worrying and her wigging out every time I get up to use the restroom or grabbing a drink in the middle of the night. Which is my usual routine as I don't sleep well anyway. I don't blame her a bit. I failed in my responsibility to protect her, and our home. I reassure Kat that if someone is in the house, and especially while I'm awake, god better save them, because I'll put the bastard in the morgue.

Crazy Schedule or Lack of Routine

I have heard of people who get addicted to their routine. Some actually become borderline obsessive compulsive about it and freak out when they fall off. I’m pretty sure if I had continued a few more years on the schedule that I have had for, say the last 10 years or so. I would be that bad as well. With all the changes in my life this past two weeks, I have drastically changed my routine and I am finding it very difficult to stay focused and keep track of time because of it. My attention deficit disorder is getting unreasonable, and so I’m going to have to do something about it sooner than later. I am seeing in my daily work that I am having a very hard time focusing on the task at hand, and my mind wanders something awful. This is going to start impacting my job performance.

I will say that my change in diet has actually been helping me. I don’t feel as tired all the time, I seem to have a bit more of a hop in my step and I can actually walk up the stairs to my 4^th floor office without puking up a lung now. I did change my diet drastically and really it isn’t that bad. I’m now eating four times a day, maybe a fifth depending on how many calories I had throughout the day. The food is good, and it’s giving me plenty of carbs for energy without massively overdoing it like I have in the past. The cool thing is I’m not going through ANY hunger pains.

I may have mentioned this before, but it’s clear that my calorie intake was not where it was supposed to be before I started this quest. I was in major starvation mode, not eating enough calories throughout the day, then binging during lunch and dinner. So everything that I was eating was going straight to my stomach and ass. Worse of all, is I have burned through so much muscle that everything I had gained with I was in my early twenties, is now gone. At that time I had spent an enormous amount of time sculpting my body and I blew it. Now not only do I get to start over, I have to loose all this fat too.

I’ll be weighing myself this Friday, let’s hope the math that I have learned reflects in my actual weight loss.

Photo of the Body Bugg

I meant to send this with the blog post.

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I've Been Bugged!

Today I got set up with my body bugg. This thing is wicked cool! Check this out..This thing monitors heart flux, accelerometer, galvanic skin response, and skin temperature. All of this data is stored in the device until I connect it to a usb port on my computer. The data gets uploaded to a website and is annalyzed to display lots of data about my physical well being. If your interested in reading more about this item check out www.bodybugg.com.

Next week I start my training classes. Just as I thought the two nights I would get stuck with are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Not that I'm complaining, I knew that it would effect my raid nights if I were still playing wow. I was right lol.

It doesn't appear that my diet is going to be too tough. I'm still getting to eat the foods I like just not as much and spread out to 6 meals a day. When I first heard that my jaw dropped to the floor. "Six meals a day!? Are they on crack!?" Actually no they aren't. I'll be eating less and small portions throughout the day. I do however have to cut out the fastfood and high sodium foods. I'm eating way too much of it as it is.

Here are my current stats
Current Weight: 357 lbs
Current Body Fat: 44.1%
Current Lean Body Mass: 199.56 lbs

I'll post my goals as I work them out with the trainer. All I know right now is that I need to get below 19% body fat which I assume is around 156 lbs. I don't want to be THAT small so if I can bulk up some decent muscle mass I should look pretty good at around 180 but we'll see how things go.

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