11.5kgs in 12 weeks is good weight loss. about 1kg per week is the general, rule-of-thumb good rate to lose. Any quicker than that and you’re losing lean body tissue too.

I have a bike but recently I’ve taken to running. I’m going to the Couch to 5K programme which progresses you to running over 9 weeks. I’ve always wanted to be able to run but I was always scared of it. Now I’m able to run for longer each week and I am noticing an improvement in my fitness. I recover from bursts of physical activity a lot quicker now!

I remember the day I looked over at the mirror in Hype in the mall and I just looked like shit. Double chin, stomach poking out with the classic late-20s pot belly, man-boobs poking at my shirt. I had to look away. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen myself as I actually looked in the years leading up to it, but I did that time. Not too long after that, my car blew up, my girlfriend broke up with me, my band broke up, one of my friends died and my job turned to hell. I felt like shit, in every way.

I was doing more exercise, and getting a lot fitter, but I wasn’t really losing weight. I did a lot of experiments to see what did more for my performance (I decided to focus on that, rather than fat loss as I’d decided fitness was a more respectable goal). Alcohol intake, sleep, food, exercise levels, all of them were variables, and eventually I discovered that I could continue to eat less and less with no effect on my performance. I still had the energy required to do all my riding, swimming and gym work whilst continually cutting back food.

And dear god did the kilos shed. I lost 11.5kg in 12 weeks. I’ve had to go through this whole thing again now since January when I discovered I looked like shit from putting on an extra 6kg.

It’s just so simple; eat less, exercise more. Oh, and buy a bike

I can also understand not using an application to track spending. I’ve never used a PC app to track spending before either, but Balance is just awesome for that. It’s on your phone which on your person all the time so it’s a lot easier to track what you spend. It’s an easy habit to learn whereas trying to record everything you spend every night when you get home is a lot harder and is bound to result in missing spending.

The purpose of the app I’m writing isn’t so much to track your day to day spending. It’s supposed to tell you how much you can spend. No matter how often you’re paid this application will let you decided how often you give yourself an allowance.

The ideal situation is you enter all the recurring bills you think you’ll be paying in the year then all you have to do is check the app every week (or month or day etc) to see how much you have to spend.

I don’t take offence if people don’t see the value in it. The project is more to help me learn how to write applications for .Net while scratching an itch.

These days, not so much. I tend to pay all my rent/insurance/bills/etc at the start of the month the instant I get paid so as to not leave myself in too much trouble. It kind of works because there’s less “SURPRISE! Buttsecks” opportunities at the end. And the leftover tends to be enough to account for electricity or registration, which is the only bill less frequent than my pay.

I’ve never been able to successfully use a program to track spending in this way because ultimately it requires me to maintain it – if it were hooked into my netbank somehow, that’d be useful, as I tend to pay more with EFTPOS instead of having cash on me. Eventually (read: in less than two weeks) I get out of sync and it’s all over.

Oh well.

But then maybe wedding photography isn’t for you – there’s certainly a good number of photographers out there that stick to portraits, family shots, landscapes, etc. Only you can decide that.

Either way, the photos I’ve seen of yours are pretty awesome, so hang in there

It should always be up to the parents.

My biggest piece of advice to first-time expecting mothers is:
“you will be bombarded with advice from EVERYWHERE (friends, family, doctors, random strangers on the street), but at the end of the day: what makes sense TO YOU makes sense FOR YOU”

iPhone > iTunes > Macbook > Apple Bumper sticker on car

I love Apple. I used Windows for 15+ years until now. I don’t know how I lived without a Mac.

I want to write my own theme for WordPress so there is still the opportunity to mess about with coding

Oh … and I’m writing a simple website for my photography business so that’ll be some flex, html and php funness