Lifting Heavy Weights

This past weekend Heather and I picked up a bunch of weight plates to start lifting weights in the basement.

I’ve always wanted that lean runners body, but sooner or later I just had to face the facts that my legs are just too short and thick to really do well in that sport.  However I will continue to train with running since I’m signed up for a few races this year, but going forward I’m going to be putting a bigger focus on lifting really heavy stuff.

The over all plan is to find a weight that I can lift to about 10 reps and build a circuit around the weights and bars that I have available.

It’s been a while since I have done any weight lifting, so it’s interesting to see how quickly the heart rate picks up in comparison to a jog around the block.

I’m going to try to put in at least a 15 minute workout each day.  Not a lot, but should be enough to see results.

For the last month or so pressure has been growing to kick the iPhone app business up a notch.  More and more I’m finding myself running into a fundamental wall where I just don’t have the time or the skills necessary to do all the work required.  I need a team.

Specifically the graphic and art demands of creating apps is quickly getting more than I have the skill to implement and be happy with the final product.  And with ideas for 100+ apps  there is more drawing, photoshop, and animation work than I can feasibly handle.

So more and more I’m thinking seriously about trying to hire someone or outsource all this work.  I’m thinking about business acquisitions to acquire code assets and developers, and looking to make JV deals and find marketing partnerships.

It’s all new territory.

Things have been building up ever since Christmas and when we decided to signup for Netflix.  It’s so easy to sit down at the TV in the evening while eating supper to catch a show and then suddenly find myself several hours later having watched 5 episodes and be ready for bed.

Starting tomorrow I’m going to be trying something new.  5am wakeup and focused effort on completing projects and writing code before heading in to the office.  it was inspired by this post that I saw on hacker news.

Productivity has been waning and my to do list has been getting longer and longer.  So I need to start getting things back on track.  There are countless iPhone app ideas that I want to get to but just haven’t found the time to build yet and it’s starting to stress me out.

New home office layout.  Still needs some paint and thinking about building a wall mounted desk.

After a very enjoyable late onset for winter it finally came on hard hitting lows of nearly -40.

-40 is cold.  Very cold.

Waiting for the train is torture.  It’s as if the engineers of Calgary’s train system forgot that it gets cold here and failed to design things accordingly.  Doors seem to break, electrical connections short circuit and as a result trains that should be running every 5 minutes don’t come for 30.  Those 30 minute delays while standing outside in -35 is pretty cruel.

At least the snow stays light, crisp and dry though. A very warm coat, scarf, hat and mitts will do their job.

2 years ago I started a project to learn a web development framework called django by creating a blog platform in it and moving my personal blog over to that new platform.

Now 2 years later I have decided to migrate back to WordPress.

Why?

The biggest reason is that my custom solution was too difficult to use especially regarding uploading images and doing stuff on the go.

With WordPress it is easy to post images and posts from my phone or iPad.  There are numerous ways that I can tweak the look and feel of my site and all that should hopefully result in more frequent posting of content.

This blog contains quite a lot of my personal history.  There are now 1106 posts covering a decade of my life.  I am pretty proud of the accomplishments that have been documented on this site.

The back end for my iPhone Apps has become quite a nice little system now. I’m actually pretty proud of it. I have seen similar systems valued at $10K

The latest few features rounds out the marketing stuff to help cross promote my apps with a custom ad server, and push notifications.

I have started adding features to consolidate the reporting from disparate services by pulling in and charting adMob revenues. The next few features are going to be getting and storing rank data so I can see how the apps are doing, then I’ll work on scraping out the financial reports from Apple.

I’m trying to decide if it is worth letting other people use this platform for their app businesses. But I don’t want too many people on my hosted system since I need it to stay flexible for my future apps. I’m sure there is a viable business model in here somewhere.

2012 is going to be an epic year. I know that already.

Last years resolutions were all hit.
I launched my business, got in shape, and ran a half marathon.

Having ran the half marathon in the summer I subsequently got back out of shape.

In 2012 I have the following goals:
1. Create more iPhone and iPad apps to grow my businesses
2. start running again 3-4 times per week and score a personal best in a 10K and 5K race.
3. Go on a nice vacation