Wii Fit – Day One

I have had my Wii Fit since August and have been using it off and on, but I am tired of being fat. I know that if I take it seriously that I can use the Wii Fit and the games that I have and games that I may get to get in shape.

But I need to make it public and I need to document it so that I can push myself each and every day.

Last night I got on to just check in and play a few games since I hadn’t been on for weeks since I’ve had a nasty cold — or at least that’s the current excuse. And I was back up to 218.7. That is really gross. I had made it down to 211 in August when I was really using either my Wii Fit or my mother’s Wii Fit regularly and making it a daily part of my life.

This morning I got up and I weigh 218. I set up to do the Relax, Warm Up and Shoulders and Back Wii Fit Plus Training Plus routines and worked for 19 minutes. It wasn’t very much, but it is a start.

The next part I have to watch is my diet — my problem is cokes and snacking. I am horrible about drinking cokes all day long. Yesterday I had one 20 ounce coke and three 16 ounce bottles of water. Very much an improvement over my normal day.

Well, enough for today. We’ll see how I do for more exercise through today and what I do tomorrow morning.

See you tomorrow… Susan

Tales From Inside – Day 1

My daughter is in prison. She’s been in prison since June 2008. But really she’s been in jail or rehab or prison since 2006. Boy, it’s amazing how long it’s been when you try to figure it out. She is due home next year, hopefully by April. I am so ready to have her home.

Now, she has finally grown up, or at least she seems to have. You never really know until she is out in the real world facing real challenges and overcomes them.

In July I suggested that she start a blog about life in prison. I thought that would be so cool. I have found it really interesting what they put them through and thought other people might too. And when she got a comment, I could print it out, mail it to her, and then have her mail back an answer, which I could type back into the blog.

She really liked the idea, but not only for her sake but also for the idea it might help others. People that might read the blog and realize they don’t want to go there.

Last night while I was talking to a friend on the phone I realized that it would also be helpful to see my perspective. It has not been the easiest time having your daughter on drugs, have police at your door, her getting arrested, the times in court, the times in jail, rehab, times back in jail, and now in prison.

And now I’m raising my granddaughter.  I love her dearly, but Crystal is supposed to be raising her, I’m supposed to be spoiling her. You know?

Anyway, I’ll write more tomorrow.

Google Analytics

I just watched a video in the 30DC on Google Analytics and I am really impressed.  Google makes it easy to add a feature to your website or blog to track your visitors, how they got to you, and how long they stayed.

To get started go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign in using a Google sign-in or sign up.

Set up a new Website profile and Google will give you the code to copy on each page that you want to have analyzed. Then copy the code to your HTML code inside of the body tag. There is a Check Status button on the Google Analytics page that will confirm if you did it correctly.

Once complete, Google Analytics will start tracking the traffic to your website.

Available reports include how many visits during the time period, where the visitors are from, how they got to the website, what search terms they used to get to the website, how long they were on the website, and how they navigated through your website.

My good mood is mine and I have to protect it

Lately I’ve been reading and learning a lot and from a lot of different sources I’ve been getting the point that our mood is our choice. Matter of fact, from Simpleology I got our mood, our personality, and our attitude is our choice.

And I really agree. So, if I want to have a good mood, and a good attitude, what is the best way to do that? Do I just decide and magically that’s it? Can I suddenly be cheerful all the time? Well, no, not me. But, I can do my best.

And, I can refuse to let others interfere with my efforts. First by refusing to let others get me down. And better still, by refusing to be around people that habitually affect my mood and attitude in a negative fashion. What a concept.

I have friends that I really love. But, boy, are they depressing. They have such a hard life, or at least that is ALL they want to tell you about. And, they are so depressed, and that comes out over and over AND over again in conversations. And, yes, I HAVE felt guilty in the past not listening to them so they had someone to hear them, but, you know, that meant that I had some of that come into my space. And I don’t have to do that anymore.

I have been working a lot with a younger woman lately and helping her set goals and create a plan to move toward it. Yesterday she said she was looking around at the people she knew and realized that she was looking for people with ambition, with goals, with a need to grow to be better people. And really, most of the people she knew and hung around with, just went from weekend to weekend, Friday to Friday, mostly depressed. It was a real eye opener to her and to me.

So I am going to have a good mood and a good attitude and I will do what I must to protect it.

Dreamweaver CS4 – One reason to really love it

Dreamweaver CS4 is one beautiful piece of software. And I am really, really geek enough to love it. I spent a little while today with my new staff person going over Dreamweaver and teaching her about HTML and me about the new features of CS4.

One thing that I really get excited about is that in Code view, you can collapse a tag. So, let’s say you have a Table tag that goes on and on and you’d like to see more of the page, you can click on the start Table tag and click to collapse it. Then everything from the beginning Table tag to the ending Table tag is shrunk up into a small little line and looks like:

<TABLE …

Isn’t that just too cool?

I have Cold Fusion web pages where code can go on and on and on. Now, I can click on the beginning CFIF tag and tell it to collapse it and Poof, it collapses. I am just beside myself.

As a note, the Collapse command is found in the Code view on the Coding Toolbar to the left of the Code window.

My second favorite thing so far is how easy it is to switch between their preset views. Up on the menu bar at the far right there is a drop-down next to the Search box that lets you switch from Designer view, to Coder view, to Classic view, to a cool one called Dual Screen aimed at people with two monitors that want to use both for Dreamweaver.

Ah, well, enough drooling for today. I have to go pick up my granddaughter. Happy thoughts!

Twittering, okay, I know, tweeting

I haven’t been twittering much lately. I find myself wondering what to say. I always have lots to say when it comes to a blog, or a conversation, but tweeting, that seems so hard.

Why, I don’t know, it’s just such a small amount of words and yet I don’t want to say, hey guys, I’m working, I’m playing solitaire, I’m putting my granddaughter to bed. Everyone else I follow seems to have good tweets, ones that really have useful info.

And, me, nada. Oh, well. I guess at some point I will get better at it. I guess I have to practice at it like I am practicing at blogging.

I was talking to my friend Andrea and told her this was my practice blog, and she laughed. She had never heard of such a thing. But, really, I know I want blogs on business ideas, and I want to write and have them be useful, but I really needed to get in the habit of writing a blog post every single day, and so, listening to ProBlogger, I started a practice blog.

I think it has been going well. Not telling anyone about it, not making any effort to let anyone know about it, and definitely not spreading any news about it, and I have received one comment one a tip I put in. That was really cool. I know I will really enjoy when I do get going on a blog I advertise and get more comments. I got such a kick when I got a single comment. It made my day. Ah, I am such an easy person.

So, off to work. And I will work to practice my tweeting just as I have practiced my blogging.

Homeschooling versus Public Schools

My granddaughter is going to be going into Kindergarten next year (2010). But this is when we have to think about where she will be going.

I have a hard time with the public school system if the children are not average. I really believe that the public schools are fine as long as the children fit the average mold, but if they are much below or much above average then they can really be out of the loop.

I have a neighbor where her son is autistic, but teachable autistic. So he is not at the level that I worked with as a teenager where my the child doesn’t know anyone and is completely in another world. Brandon does connect and after being home and homeschooled for a year, he is finally started to read a little at 11. That is a major improvement. But since he was a special needs student, he was really not getting everything he needed at school.

On the other end, my granddaughter is at the high end of the scale. Her verbal skills are amazing and she is starting to read now. When she gets to kindergarten she will already be reading well, and that’s what they should know by the end of kindergarten. As she goes into Pre-Kindergarten she knows most of what she should know at the end of the this year already. What does that do to a child other than bore them out of their mind?

If you have an amazing teacher, they can challenge a child that is advanced in the class, but since the schools are so worried about teaching for the tests and making sure that everyone passes at the end of the year, the advanced students are quite often used as “helpers” rather than challenged to get even farther ahead.

I am not willing to have that happen to Destiny. I allowed that to happen to my daughter and it did not prepare her for harder programs at all. She never had to study or work in elementary or middle school and when she entered a really hard program in high school, she was totally unprepared.

Homeschooling allows a child to go at the speed they can. As long as there is an adult that can work with them, and as long as you get them involved in lots of social activities, homeschooling is truly a great way to encourage learning for those that do not fit the mold in public school life.

I have been going back and forth on a really high-end private school or homeschooling, but truly I know that Destiny would learn so much more at home. The only question would be would she get a lot of socialization, could we get her involved in a lot of activities?

So, my thoughts today are going back and forth, and we still have a year left to decide.

My BHAG

A BHAG is a Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – one that cannot be accomplished alone. I really and truly like that. As I’ve said before, I truly love reading Early To Rise.  In the issue from July 24th, Yanik Silver was talking about ways to recover from, or avoid, burnout. One of his suggestions was to select a BHAG and just by doing so, you will find yourself moving forward and encourages everyone to grow.

I really like the idea, and it got me to thinking. Right now my business is myself and one other person who is really just learning about computers and the web. I like being small and being picky about who I work with as clients and as staff, but I really want to change the world. So, my first draft of my BHAG would include:

1. To motivate, inspire, and help 100 people that are on work release, probation, and/or with records to learn what they can do to work with the web to build web sites, help others, and find jobs.

2. To give hope, teach goal setting, and dream building skills to the same 100 people.

3. To give back to our community $1,000,000.00 through our donations.

Yes, that is a good first draft of my BHAG and I find myself really excited with the possibilities.

MS Access NZ versus SQL Server IsNull

One of the reasons you test for a Null value is that Null is not the same as nothing. Null is the absence of knowledge, not zero. The way I explain it is that if we were comparing the amount of money in my pocket to the amount of money in your pocket, we are comparing Nulls.  You might know how much money is in your pocket, but I do not, so there is no way to know which is greater. So if we were building an If statement that said If the money in my pocket is greater than the money in your pocket, do one thing and otherwise, do something else, the null value would stop us. But with the Nz and IsNull functions from Access and SQL Server, we can convert a Null value to a set value, usually zero or a zero-length string “”.

In MS Access the Nz function is used to test for a Null possibility in a field or variable and replace it with a known value. It works as though you had said, If the value were not Null, use the field, and if null, use the answer given.

If the field we are looking at it [curShippingCost] and we know it can sometimes be blank (or Null), we can change it to zero when it is Null in Access by surrounding it by the Nz function like this:

Nz([curShippingCost],0)

Now, if we use the [curShippingCost] in a formula it is not going to stop the formula because of a Null value but rather insert a zero if it is Null.

To do the same thing in SQL Server we use the IsNull function. It is the same format and just substitues IsNull for Nz.

IsNull([curShippingCost],0)

Both functions are extremely useful and I use them regularly.

Printing a Portion of an Email in Outlook 2007

One of my clients recently asked how to print a portion of an email in Outlook 2007. It took a little bit of searching but I discovered that if you open the email — actually double-click and open it in a separate window instead of viewing it inside of Outlook — on the Ribbon at the top there is an option under Actions called Other Actions. When you click on Other Actions, there is a choice to View in Browser. Once you view the email in a browser, you can highlight the section you want to print and print the selection.

As a note, you will not see View in Browser unless you have Service Pack 2. You can check what version you have by going to Help, About in Outlook.

It seems like a lot of steps, but it can save a LOT of paper if you just want to print a small section of an email and it is really quick once you get used to it.