Category: Uncategorized

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy National Coming Out Day.

I came out to my family 16 years ago. While I haven’t always felt safe or comfortable with other people knowing who I am things have gotten better over the years. I felt alone in church, at school, in work but felt like the world was changing.

The last few years have been harder. There has been a lot of the ugly side of people come out and anger towards those who are ‘different.’ I still feel like there is a long way to go before people will be comfortable in my city. I fly my pride flag even with some members of the city having their flags stolen.

I am grateful for the progress made for gay rights over the years. I long for the day I meet someone to marry. I look forward to days when the world, country and even my city progress towards a more equal and loving community. It will get better.

I’m so excited for the fall but am dreading winter. In Utah, the weather is starting to turn cold. It gives me the excuse to start cooking soup, wearing hoodies, lighting candles and drinking warm tea before bed.

The Little Book of Hygge is a fantastic book from Meik Wiking. I read it quite a few times last year and am just starting it again this year as the weather turns. If you are looking for a great book to help you find happiness when everything seems dark and cold, this is the book for you. Let me know how you stay postive and happy as we move into winter.

The last few weeks have been busy.  I’ve had a mud race and a ragnar relay on the weekends.  Because I have been so busy and had long races on weekends, I haven’t worried about meeting my daily goals.  I figured my weekends would make up for my week.  I am up 2 lbs.

This week was Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.  I have not attended one of these but would like to in the future.  The event starts off with the Keynote.  I think Apple has found that more and more non-developers watch the conference and they have made the event more entertaining as time has gone on.  In the keynote, they gave a few short demonstrations of the new iOS, watchOS and OS X.  I am excited about the new watchOS, I may decide to try my hand at writing an app in swift since apple will now offer native app support.  I am interested to see how iOS 9 will know when I am in the bedroom, the kitchen, the exercise room etc. as it did in the demo.  I have seen rumors floating around the internet that the new apple tv will be like the base station for homekit and homekit enabled devices will all be hooked into that.  I am assuming that this is true and that siri will be able to turn on home kit devices based on that information.  With the watch demo, they had siri change turn the lights on in the kitchen.  I know some work arounds through ITTT that will allow this functionality, but not anything apple specific.  I am excited for the updates to Safari  on OS X like tab pinning and volume control right in the browser.  I like the side by side functionality of windows as well.  I thought microsoft had a great idea with that and am glad to see it come to a mac with a few upgrades like resizing of the windows automatically and the new windows management abilities.  I look forward to the updates and am sure more announcements will be made before the fall iphone launch.

I have been out of town but will be back Monday to get going again on the apple watch challenge.

Yesterday was a really busy day.  I had some things to get caught up on yesterday morning before heading into work.  Work was super busy and I wasn’t able to sneak away and go for a run on my lunch break.  After work, I met my family and celebrated my brother’s birthday.  I didn’t get home till after 9 and still hadn’t completed the green circle for the day.  I am so glad for the circles because they force me to do it.  I am a great procrastinator and have lots of great projects and goals that I put off.  Having to complete all 3 circles every day helps me stay on track.  I went to my basement and jumped on the treadmill last night.  The green circle helped keep me on track tonight towards my fitness goals where, in the past, I would have easily justified it by saying I would go to the gym tomorrow.  I look at Apple’s design for the Apple watch activity app with the 3 circle fitness system specifically to make you complete the rings before ending each day as both intuitive and obnoxious.  To me, it has bugged me since I got the Apple watch if I didn’t complete all rings each day.  I now have a few rings recorded in my Activity App on my iPhone from before the challenge that show as incomplete, and they will always show as incomplete.  I  feel like this card could be updated to include Apple Watch Activity App:

Pain is temporary.  Incomplete rings will always show in the activity app.

There is nothing I can do now to fix the circles I have missed, but I can make sure to work harder so that it doesn’t happen again in the future.