Mike’s World

Every year for work, we perform a disaster recovery validation, which allows us to validate our processes and procedures and verify we are able to bring up the critical computer resources in a disaster environment, should our main data center become unavailable. This test is done in a remote physicality in Philadelphia, so it gives us a chance to get out and travel as well.

In past years, I have been the main driver for the test for our team, so previous years this was a very stressful time for me. This year I decided to take a back seat, and let others in the team have more of an involvement in the process. I found that for both prep time and during the exercise, this made things much less stressful for me. In past years, I was very stressed for weeks before the exercise, and until a week after the exercise ended, then I would wind down. This year because I handed off many more of the components to the test, I was more of a participant than anything, and this made things much easier on me, I found I was much more relaxed this year versus previous years.

This year we got out on Tuesday June 20th, with the test starting Wednesday June 21st and running through Sunday June 25th. One thing I hate is that every year, the test seems to fall on the same weekend as the ham radio field day, which is something else I would like to participate in. Tuesday we had dinner at The Capital Grille, which was a very nice. I was very impressed with the scotch selection they had.

Wednesday morning we had to switch hotels. We had been scheduled to stay in the Residence Inn Philadelphia Center City but due to rooms being full, we spent the first night in the Sheraton Suites Philadelphia Airport. After the hotel room switch, it was off to Sungard to start the test. First for us is to get the environment handed over from the sungard tech’s, and get the backup and recovery environment put together. After that, we then do our server recoveries off of tape and disk, and then the end users do testing. All very boring stuff. This year I did not take over the environment build like I have done past years, I more went with the flow of things.

I worked the day shift for the most part, and was able to find time to go out and walk every day, which was very nice. I have found getting out and unwinding helps me quite a bit. I saw quite a bit of downtown Philly, just walking around, both during the daytime and at night. I also ate halfway decently, which makes these recovery tests bearable. In past years, food has been an issue (getting lunch on time, etc) but this year that was not a problem.

In the end, we had some issues which pushed us to the end of the window for our recovery, but that happens every year, so I am use to it at this point. It is a matter of timing things so I got time to spend time relaxing a bit between shifts I had to work, because I knew I would not have a chance to have much time to unwind at the end of the test. The week went by very quickly, and I was exhausted after things had wound up. I was asleep in my bed within a hour of getting back home from Philadelphia.

Well, its time to “come out” with what my life has been about since last June or so. It is kind of hard for me, as I am not a very open person, but I think I am ready.

All of my adult life, and a good chunk of my childhood, I have been overweight on a extreme level. I remember being for the most part normal during my early childhood, up to 6th grade or so. By high school I was well in to my 200’s, climbing up to past 300 as I left high school and then past 400 around the year 2000 or so. My high point was about 490 around April of 2005.

It had always been hard to move around, and I have lived with it for so long with it, I just got use to it. Everything in my day to day living was unhealthy. I would eat McDonald’s twice a week, have 2 or 3 servings at every meal. It was not all that uncommon for me to down a entire box of cereal in one sitting. This is just how I lived my life. I would sit around all day long, watching TV, not moving around, at all. I would get winded climbing a set of stairs, or just walking around. Simply looking at a piece of furniture would cause me to break it, sometimes a very embarrassing experience.

That was then, this is now. Starting June of 2005 (well. June 26th, 2005 to be exact) I started taking drastic steps to correct my weight problem. In April of 2005 when I was getting close to 500, I did start to eat better, but I was not trying all that hard, I would just have a salad or something every so often. From April to my “diet plan start date” of 2005-06-26 I had gone from approx 493lbs to 472lbs.

Starting at the end of June, I started tracking what I eat, and started to reduce my calorie intake, and getting exercise when I could. At this point it was still very hard for me to move around, but for the first time I had a good amount of motivation to get going. I had initially thought about loosing weight, with the goal of being a normal weight by the time I was 25. Well, my 25th birthday came and went, and I did not do anything about the problem. I then had the age of 30 in the back of my mind (I am 28 now). I was expecting that to come and go, just as 25 did, as I had not thought seriously about taking the steps in my life needed to loose the weight.

This all changed in June, I saw reasons to start changing my lifestyle, almost like my eyes had opened up to see the light. I do not feel like going in to details (heh, only I get to view those blog entries :-) but I realized that a good reason to stay healthy is not only for yourself, but the people around you. I kind of saw that if I want to be happy with life on a long term basis, I had to make changes to my life before I become a old man or I die. In a nutshell, thats it. I started to slowly decrease my calorie intake, so I can start loosing weight with the plan of working my way to very aggressive goals.

My aggressive progress put me at a loss of 7-10lbs a week. I had drastically reduced my calorie intake, and I had started getting more and more exercise. Now, if you can imagine, the more weight you move around, the more calories you burn moving that weight. This made exercise very effective. I admit as I went through this, I went a bit overboard
at times, but I managed to survive. I managed this by putting myself on a very controlled diet. I watched everything I ate, making sure every calorie counted. This allowed me to have a minimal calorie diet, while still getting for the most part the nutrition and energy I needed. This with drinking water and getting exercise every single day allowed me to loose weight the weight I wanted to.

So, how did I do? On 2006-06-26 I was down to 202lbs. A loss of 270lbs over a year. I am now working on the hardest part of this while thing, maintaining the weight loss. My overall goal is to “live a normal lifestyle”, whatever that means. It has been a long road, but I am happy overall with the changes I have made. I feel good, and it is great being able to move around again.

Well, there is the history, now its time to keep this silly blog updated again.