Green Slacks

Yesterday I wanted to wear a pair of green pants, I actually own two pairs of pants this particular shade of green and made of similar material, I actually can't tell them apart for some reason, one fits decent, and the other can't be buttoned, yesterday I attempted to put on the small pair on accident, they almost fit. Soon I'll be able to wear everything in my closet.

Yesterday's weight was 172.2 pounds with 19.5 percent fat, and 55 percent body water.


  • Burger King Egg and cheese croissant
  • Orange Juice
  • Sleeve of Keebler Cookies
  • Water
  • Two Thomas' English muffins with margarine and grape jelly
  • More bottled water

Today's weigh-in came to 170.8 pounds with 19% fat and 55.5% water.

Food so far:

  • Burger King egg & cheese muffin
  • Orange Juice
  • Barilla Mezze Penne with tomato and basil sauce.
  • Apple Sauce 
  • Bottled Water
  • Kacey Green
    This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

    Fake food

    Monday I found out the ingredients of the ''eggs" at Subway and McDonald’s for their breakfast sandwiches via a post by David DiSalvo on Forbes.

    "Consider the egg. Simple, delicious, and incredibly easy to prepare. And yet, if you peruse the nutritional listings of America's favorite fast food restaurants, quite a different picture of the egg emerges -- and it's anything but simple. I took a look at the published ingredient lists for six fast food mainstays that sell"

    This just underscores the importance of knowing what is in your food, the mega corporations do not your best interest in mind, their responsibilities are to maximize profits for their shareholders and to obey the applicable local laws to where they operate.

    Now I have a little extra incentive not to hit the snooze button or three extra times in the morning. If I am running late, the plan is now to hit Burger King for my egg sandwich fix, or McDonald’s for their oatmeal. I’d rather not pay what McDonald’s charges for oatmeal, two of those and I can get a box of Quaker, I don’t even know how much the organic stuff costs, but it can’t be too far off from the Quaker.

    Yesterday saw a slight reduction in weight, to 173.4 pounds. Body fat measured in at 19 percent body fat. Total body water was 55.5 percent.

    Food: Organic oatmeal, bottled water, Taco Bell Taco Locos x3 add tomatoes, sub beans for meat, Large slice of red velvet cake, small Pepsi. Dinner was Whole grain pasta with marinara, filtered water.

    Today's workout consisted of 1 set speed-jacks, 3 sets of lunges, 3 sets of pushups, 3 sets side-bridge per side.

    Today's weigh-in: 172.2 pounds with 18 percent body fat. 56 percent total body water.

    Today's food: 2 to 3 handfuls of French fry wedges, filtered water, 3 slices of Pizza Hut thin crust Pineapple pizza, 3 slices of their Hershey’s desert (not that great and very sticky, plus it had a bit of the oily taste from regular breadsticks), tall glass of Coke, bottled water.

    Kacey Green



    People in general are resistant to change, but they seem to take it to the next level sometimes here in the Southeast. Alternative fueled vehicles, hybrids, and now electric and range-extended electric vehicles don’t seem to get a fair shake here.

    People seem to have some sort of idea in their heads about how things work and they don’t care to be informed further than what they think they are. Like my Volt people assume it’s slow, that it consumes monstrous amounts of electricity, that it can explode into a fiery ball of flames or that it works something like the Toyota Prius. Thankfully people try to keep an open mind when seeing the vehicle in the flesh.

    Hybrids are slow

    My Volt turns into a hybrid when it runs out of charge; it is an electric vehicle the other 93% of the time I’ve owned it. It can do 101 miles per hour in EV mode with no gasoline assistance; until it burns all of the charge (I’m curious how long it can maintain top speed on EV only). The car has more torque than many V6 sedans (273 lb.-ft., the power to get you up to speed) and a similar amount of horsepower (149 horsepower, the power to keep you going) to a 4 cylinder engine. My vehicle hasn’t lost a stoplight to speed limit heat yet (closed course do not attempt). Something I enjoy doing when leaving a stoplight is to leave everyone behind by three or more car-lengths, and the people around here don’t know how to conservatively take off from a stoplight, if you aren’t doing 30mph in one car-length you get all kinds of dirty looks. I prefer to take off at 2 mph per second until I get to the speed limit when I’m driving for fuel economy, people whip around me like I’d just cut them off when I drive like this.

    You’re just trading a gas bill for an electric bill

    The vehicle has a 16 KWh battery but it only exposes 9.7-10.2 of that for you to use. At 110 volt charging there are more charging losses due to the thinner cables and the increased amount of time the battery heating or cooling system runs vs. the 240 volt charging. This equates to 8-10 hours on 110v for a full charge vs. ~4 on 220v. At the rates I’m charged for electricity it’s about $1.02 per charge (and I don’t often drain the battery upon arriving home) at the rates they pay at work it’s about 75¢ to 80¢ for a full charge, again I don’t often have a completely drained battery, but it can get pretty close. My commute is 42 miles each way. I was spending $200 a month in gas before I got this car, now fuel is under $40 a month.

    That car is dangerous

    This is usually based on an unrealistic test conducted on the vehicle in the lab, about three weeks after a severe crash with a completely full battery (my battery starts dropping the minute I leave my driveway) a test vehicle caught fire in the scrapyard. This is similar to doing the same thing with a gasoline powered car and leaving the tank full after a severe crash. Both cars have approved methods to drain their fuel. The possibility of this rare situation happening was eliminated with a fix from General Motors and verified by the same agency that found the possibility. The two fires involving Volts in garages were ruled by their fire marshals to not be the cars or their charging equipment. One of those two cases involved a home-built electric car in addition to the Volt but it was ruled out too.

    I know how a hybrid works

    What’s your point? The Volt doesn’t operate as a hybrid until the battery runs below the usable threshold (EPA ~35 miles, for me ~50 miles) then it operates similar to the Prius. It doesn’t often operate in a mode comparable to the Honda hybrids or GM’s belt assisted hybrids, or GM’s E-assist system. The converted plug-in Prius vehicles and the official Toyota-built Plug-in Prius operate much like the original vehicle, in-fact if you dab the accelerator too hard or go too fast the vehicle will start the engine, and the rated range is only 15 miles. The scenarios where the Volt will start the engine when the battery isn’t empty are: 

    1. When it’s really cold out, below 25 degrees Fahrenheit (and only briefly)
    2. When you haven’t used the engine in 6 weeks
    3. When the fuel in the tank is older than 1 year
    4. When the user has selected mountain mode and driven past the new shortened threshold for calling the battery empty
    5. Finally if you open the hood while the vehicle is energized and not in service mode

    People tend to see a car and compare it to the only two reference points they have, how much gas their car burns (usually in the 25mpg range) or how much their house air conditioner uses (when they set it to arctic and it runs constantly, this actually is kind of accurate but it's more like doing this for just 1 hour, the vehicle can only hold so much of either type of fuel, electricity or gasoline)

    Kacey Green


    New fitness goal

    This morning’s weigh-in returned 174.0 pounds with 18.5% body fat and 55.5% total body water. I think the goal of getting to 150 before getting serious will be pretty much useless the way I’m going about things now. As much as I loved and miss my grandpa, I don’t want his gut, so the new goal will be to lose that and then re-evaluate. I’m curious how low the body fat can get without becoming a gym rat, as you can see my “workouts” are under 15min each so far, the last time I did this routine the longest was 25 minutes and that was just trying to get all the movements correct, the following two workouts (these come in threes before moving on to the next) were 15 or so minutes. I know 11% will produce some nice looking abs and amateur body builders try to keep to 8 or 9%, the number 5% stands out but I don’t remember what group has that fat target. As a vegetarian this should be an easy enough endeavor, but I love junk food and breads, I do need to cut most other processed foods that don’t fit the description of bread or multivitamin tablets.

    Food and Exercise log

    Breakfast: McDonald’s Egg & Cheese bagel with small orange juice

    Lunch: Pasta and sauce, bottled water, cinnamon apple sauce, chocolate chip granola bar

    This morning’s workout:

    • 3 sets speed jacks
    • 3 sets push-ups
    • 3 wall sits
    • 3 sets bird-dog

    Kacey Green


    Like Spock, Alone time, and food & workout journal

    Like Spock

    A good way to think of me is like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, my emotions are there below the surface and very strong, but I often refuse to acknowledge or show them, many times it's because I can't describe them or perhaps I feel I'll be ridiculed or thought weak. Unfortunately, unlike Spock there is no cool death-grip and a much shorter short-term memory. Like Spock I value logic, truth, and enlightenment over the touchy feely stuff, particularly when someone’s gut feeling is wrong and nor even close. That isn’t to say I don’t appreciate or have feelings, but the other concepts of logic and truth are easier to grok.

    Just like Spock, I am at my best when I embrace both my social/emotional and my logical sides. It seems this will be a life journey, especially since I went from being extremely shy to working with the public, albeit in small groups at a time. Progress is being made integrating my logical, analytical self with the side that wants to jump with joy, or weep sorrowfully. My sense of humor taps both sides already, I love a good joke, but many involving social situations aren’t funny to me and I need someone to explain these jokes to me sometimes.

    Alone time

    After a day "socializing" I do need alone time to regenerate (oh snap, this is like Spock's meditating) and recover. I process much of what I see of other people’s interactions, and how to react social situations using my analytical brain. My social brain skates trough life like a super spoiled kid, or a kid dropped on its head with its favorite sibling or a close friend covering for all its little mistakes.

    Just like a real naïve kid, my social brain sometimes really screws things up when its champion (the sibling or understanding friend, aka my logical brain) has their back turned for a moment. An example is how I have learned most questions where a female asks me about her looks are loaded, I cannot tell which situations warrant a particular answer, and which are traps. I don’t know when to say or not to say, “oh that looks good,” and “you don't look fat”, so my default is not to answer and try to change the subject to more familiar turf.

    Obviously social brain tried to answer these queries once or twice while logical brain was preoccupied with something else or logical didn't correctly flag the questions for deeper review. So now logical brain sounds the klaxon in these situations making me lock-up like a rusty mechanism, this prevents one type of harm while making me look very goofy rather than taking the time to re-analyze the situation for what type of answer is required.

    Why the alone time? Logical brain uses more energy. If a typical person sits around doing math equations for hours straight, they will want to relax by vegging or socializing. Remember anytime I am socializing, I'm running figures and stats through my analytical brain, and if I was already doing mentally exhausting work, hanging out with more than one or two close friends pushes me past capacity, making me more error prone or agitated. This is the same as if a typical person is pushed just a bit too far on those same equations, they get angry and short with people, they make more mistakes on the task, and if pushed far enough, they don't socialize either, naptime.

     Wait, did I just describe a stereotypical geek? Yep, Aspies are often driven to fields like research, engineering, computer science, architecture, music, etc., though they are individuals just as varied as typical people, but it seems easier to see Aspies in these areas than others.

     Background tidbit

    I didn't fit in with the normal kids and I was not truly special-ed, I was both gifted and in need of remedial organizational skills. In middle school, the teachers and my parents agreed it was best I just type everything rather than deal with the hand written stuff. You can see how much more I write with a keyboard, even the virtual keyboard on a phone.

    Oh my!, this was supposed to be a quick note on the phone so I didn't forget what I ate; I'll polish the rough edges and post this.

    Workout and food journal

    Yesterday’s other foods 4/13

    • Snack: Sleeve of Smarties like at any party or found in a piñata.
    • Dinner: Mexican restaurant: bean burrito, cheese enchilada, beans, rice, 2 glasses of coke with restaurant typical amount of ice. Vegetarian item E, at Yucatan in Sumter.

    Today’s foods and workout 4/14


    • 3 sets Speed Jacks
    • 3 sets Pushups
    • 3 Wall Sits
    • 3 sets bird-dog

    172.8 pounds with 19.5% fat and 55% total body water

    Breakfast: Cocoa - two sleeves of Swiss Miss

    Lunch: Bottle water, Japanese vegetables, and rice plate (Osaka in Sumter) can of coke

    Dinner: Three pretzels with dipping sauce, 1.75 cokes with restaurant amount of ice both today's and yesterday’s cokes were in the standard coke and restaurant co-branded plastic glasses (plastic)

    Maureen and I saw “Mirror Mirror”, I enjoyed it but it felt like the story dragged in a few places and it had a good amount of funny bits.


    Pami, John Robert, Gabby & I saw the new 3 Stooges movie, it was pretty funny, it probably would have been even better for someone who remembers any of the original program.

    Today's "foods" were all processed junk food, this morning's weigh-in: 173.0 pounds, 19.5% fat, 55% total body water.

    Kacey Green


    Testing Windows Storage Spaces

    Continuing my testing of Windows 8 Storage Spaces, I'm running a test server with Windows Server 8 Beta, after reading the post on the Building Windows 8 blog I thought it might be useful to test.

    This isn't by any means thorough, it suits the way I'll need to use the feature on a production server once the OS RTMs. I threw in a 3TB drive and 2 160GBdrives, and all was fine for a while. I was using the Parity setting, at this point that mode is incredibly slow compared to the two or three way mirrors and the simple volumes as well. Once any drive in the pool is full the system gets incredibly unstable, adding drives to the pool doesn't fix the problem, rotating in a drive is also not an option yet, once I added in a pair of 500gb drives the system got marginally more stable, for a few minutes.

    My solution is to delete the volumes and shares and use matched drives until the next public build comes out.

    Food Log

    No workout today, it's a rest day.

    Breakfast was "Moms Best"Apple oatmeal

    Lunch was a foot-long egg & cheese on honey oat with spinach, salt & pepper, and olive oil, toasted, from Subway. Two chocolate chip cookies and a medium Coke with a splash of Minute Maid light lemonade.

    Updates with dinner and snacks will be posted later today. (Actually posted in the next post)

    Kacey Green


    Leftie Aspie working out while writing in his journal and keeping a food log

    Some Aspie traits

    People with Asperger’s Syndrome are occasionally called Aspies (Ahs pees), I’d long thought my intense reaction to ice cubes touching my teeth to be indicative of sensitive teeth, but while studying Asperger’s something that came up from time to time was intense reactions to or inability to cope with certain textures or sensations (or visual or auditory sensations). I think my aversion to ice cubes is due to this, that and the vibration of the cord of hair clippers on the left or right of my lower back. Bright light transitions, like oncoming headlights, or any high beams pointed at me or my mirrors just irritate me.

    Coping with the clippers cord on my back took some time, I’ve always been ticklish, but this sensation was unbearable, what I found allowed my barber or my dad to be able to effectively cut my hair was gripping my throat quite firmly with my left hand, that sensation would distract the urge to jump out of the chair just enough to get the haircut. My dad eventually learned to try and avoid letting the cord touch me while the clippers were running. It never occurred to me to tell him not to let that happen, it seemed silly and unnecessary, and I couldn’t come up with the words to describe what I wanted (not to happen). Today this sensation still drives me batty but what I do now is cross both arms so I can squeeze both biceps with the opposing hands, again the left gets the stronger grip, the seatback of the barber’s chair’s with me as an adult makes this an incredibly brief experience, the barstool dad used and the kiddie seat in the barbershop exposed my back to the vibrations of cord of the running clippers for nearly the entire time.


    Why the left hand? I don’t know, I’m a lefty turned ambidextrous, I use my left hand only to write, hold a fork, eat one handed while driving, as the primary hand in a two handed catch, poking things (like a touch screen), and occasionally to operate a pair of ambidextrous scissors. I use the right hand for everything else including operating ambidextrous scissors. When confronted with a right favored tool like all the computer mice I grew up with things curved such that they only work in the right hand I’ve adapted to feeling that’s right or normal. I’d probably be a lefty mouse user if the old Microsoft mice didn’t have that ridiculous lower curve on them, I occasionally mouse with my left hand now though, usually this will happen when I’ve filled my right hand (food or a book etc.) or when using a mouse on someone else’s computer that they’ve configured in lefty mode, or just set on that side of the desk.


    I’ve kept journals (the diary type) before but like many Aspies I can fall into some deep depressions occasionally and these got really dark so I stopped. The very first one was abandoned because it was in an actual paper journal, and I’m not a hand written person, thanks to my poor and labored penmanship. (Stupid computer converted my British spelling of Laboured to US style.) There’s another common Aspie trait, we often pronounce or spell words the way we remember first encountering. Dr. Tony Attwood explains this is why many British and Australian Aspies speak with an American accent despite the rest of their family speaking with a local accent.

    I do adopt a local accent to better fit in, and it does shift very quickly when I travel, I currently have a mild southern accent but I often get remarks asking where I’m from because it must not be very good. The person asking always says no it sounds southern just not local to where we happen to be. I drop it as quickly as I can when I can take on a northern or western accent as those are how I prefer to pronounce my words, but it takes a few days for the dialect to shift. I really enjoy British and Australian accents and phrases, I’ve never had the opportunity to see how those come out for me to see if they’d stick around for a bit when I finish traveling. This isn’t done to be fake or even on purpose; it’s something I don’t even realize I’m doing until someone points it out. (There’s another tangent for you :) )


    I have been hovering between 152-181 lbs.; bodyweight, 150.5 and 184 were both touched for a day each. My daily exercise preference has been to basically try to match calories burned to calories eaten; obviously more of the former is preferred. This morning I picked up a workout routine that I tried back in 2009, I came across it while putting some clothes up from winter (go figure that it’d be 38 degrees F this morning after hitting 90 earlier this month).

    This trainer believes long workouts will never get done by normal people, and that loads of cardio are for girls and that you get resistant to it like a bad drug needing more and more to achieve the same effect.

    So the scale this morning read 170.6 with 19% body fat and 55.5% body water content, which is good, it has been 171-174 and 18-22% fat, for the past two or so months, body water content is always 55.x-58%. I think the extremely stable water percentage is due to the fact that I weigh right out of the shower, but this really doesn’t concern me drinking fluids is not a problem, 170.x pounds has been seen occasionally.

    This morning’s routine consisted of three sets of speed-jacks, the wall sit x3, and three sets of the bird dog. This worked up a mild sweat even though the air had a slight chill this morning. (The air inside as the air handler was idled thanks to the mild evening temperature.)

    Food Log (updated throughout the day)

    Today I was late leaving the house so I couldn’t have my bowl of oatmeal at home, and it was too late to make it at work without feeling like I was taking advantage of the situation. So I had an egg & cheese bagel at McDonald’s, reminding me why I always order this item without the “breakfast sauce”, that and once again setting me to wondering why they have such a hard time not burning the bagel. The bagel was washed down with a medium orange juice.

    Lunch was Vegan Hot & Sour ramen with Cookies & Cream Ice cream (I’m a veggie not a vegan [yet anyway]) One bottle of water.

    Update 18:09: Snacked on a chocolate chip granola bar

    Update 20:11: Taco Bell Taco Locos - sub beans for the beef, add tomatoes (i'm not a fan of sour cream particularly not on these tacos, with the waythey gob it on), Small Pepsi, and another chocolate chip granola bar, organic with dark chocolate this time.

    Kacey Green

    Origin of Tangent

    I was diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder) as a child; I think today all of these are classified as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). A pair of my mentors in high school (perhaps it was Junior High, my family was military and we moved quite a bit), Rich Phillips and Hunter Matheson, noticed that I’d often take a conversation to places that were only thinly related to the existing conversational thread, sometimes he could see why I veered off in a certain direction, and sometimes only I could follow the connections.

    It was really more of a loving jab as many nicknames are, not meant to cause harm, more of an inside joke with them and myself. They also used it as a bit of a code word when in the company of someone who didn’t know how I operate, “*cough* TANGENT *cough*”, as a prompt to watch my conversational threads.

    I do want to thank you two for taking time out of your day several times a week to help me process things and to talk shop. Go figure that a kid with a special interest in computers would take a liking to a pair of network engineers huh?

    Kacey Green

    Loving Lampposts

    I watched the documentary "Loving Lampposts" today, I felt that it was well done and it showed a mix of high and low functioning adults and children on the Autism spectrum, it also questioned the use of those labels. They showed a fair argument from the anti-vaccine crowd and explained where they are coming from without calling them crazy, it also explains quite clearly that the main piece of documentation these people use other than their own personal experiences (study samples not controlled and way too small) has been refuted and many of the authors of that paper have retracted it.

    They touched on some Autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s Syndrome and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified).

    They also did a great job questioning the intense dread the public has about people on the Autism Spectrum, the media has successfully married the word Autism to some of the more extreme cases of classic Autism, characterized it as an epidemic and made people feel fearful they've done something wrong if they end up having a child on the spectrum.

    I think that I may be on the spectrum, I've been studying the disorder since early this year, and the descriptions of Asperger’s syndrome fit me like a glove. Obviously I'm not some creepy movie character that exhibits every possible symptom at the same time, some don't seem to apply to me at all (or at least not anymore now that I'm older). I think I'll go and see a specialist about a diagnosis this year, I spent up my whole childhood and early young adult life knowing I was different and not knowing why, having a label for this thing won't change anything but it will give me peace of mind, and light up a bit of a roadmap of what kind of coping strategies might help me lead a more fulfilled life.

    My studies have already highlighted several of my strengths and weaknesses, I've begun to capitalize on the strengths and use strategies I learned growing up and that were pointed out during the studying to help minimize the negative effects or to better explain to someone just how I process specific stimuli. Even if I don't meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis, there's no denying I've got enough of a touch of this that some of these resources and strategies apply to me directly.

    These people aren’t broken, I’m not broken, we’re different, and having different thought processes may allow us to come up with solutions that nobody has brought fourth yet.

    The documentary is on Hulu at the moment.

    Kacey Green