“Home” Category

In 2003, while I was working my first web development job at Sharp Innovations, I met someone named Bob McMullen. He taught me several things, mostly PHP/mySQL related, but he also opened my eyes to the S.E.T.I project. That’s when I first learned about distributed computing.

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I have been staring at my blog too many months and it’s time to get it back. It was fun to write in, but then trying figure out where it was going to end up got unruly.

For the curious, no, there is not a scrap of an eBook for my ecommerce course. I’ve been too busy working to ever sit down and write, but today is changing all that.

The new plan is to use BrianShoff.com as the wildcard blog. Whatever I notice, want to comment on, share, whatever, it’ll be here. Of course, it’ll have the Shoffy twist that makes it oh so enjoyable right?

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I’m on a home movie digitization kick. I’ve just finished converting 3 very aged VHS movies to DVD for Cassandra’s family. Now I’m in the midst of doing the same for my own family’s footage (but there is a lot more to do).

They’re hilarious… if you don’t get motion sick!

One thing I found that I have to share is a video I helped make during my sophomore year of college. To fulfill a health requirement, I took “Alcohol Awareness”. Though I don’t remember the details of our assignment, my group made a video detailing the life of an alcoholic.

I played the alcoholic.

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Spring cleaning in January? You bet!

Since Mother Nature in Pennsylvania can’t seem to figure out what season she wants to be, I’ve decided to take advantage of her indecision and reorganize my life. But it’s not going to be easy… I haven’t done this for years! Just look at my garage (to the left).

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Cassandra, or as I affectionately call her, “Bella” is blogging. It’s just one more thing that demonstrates why we should be together. She, like me, has strong opinions about various topics and I look forward to seeing what she does with her site www.SoSaysBella.com

I hope she doesn’t say anything bad about me.

Well, it finally happened. Not only are all my friends engaged or getting married, but now my brother has joined the party. This Christmas, his girlfriend since college, found a little extra from Santa under the mistletoe. Her long awaited engagement ring! Now it looks like Nicole Luciano is about to become Nicole Benedict. She’s a great girl and is a more than welcome addition to the family. Hope the same can be said by her family for my brother.
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Thanks to my RN fiancé, I learned that there are 3 different duration levels when it comes to exercising that relate directly to your fitness goals:

• 30 Minutes

  Exercising for 30 minutes a day helps burn calories that you wouldn’t normally use throughout the day. In other words, 30 minutes of exercise a day, though helpful, is in most cases a wash. For those of us who want to lose weight… the bar is set a bit higher.

• 60 Minutes

  If you spend 60 minutes a day exercising, this not only burns excess calories, but helps prevent weight gain. But as you might notice, I said, “prevent” weight gain, not lose weight.

• 90 Minutes

  Finally! By exercising 90 minutes a day, you start losing weight.

If you’ve ever seen Bowflex commercials on TV, you’ll hear that for “As little as 30 minutes a day you can be in the best shape of your life.” This is potentially true. Weight training, in my opinion, is far superior to aerobic exercise. However, I don’t think the people in those commercials only spend 30 minutes a day training. I have a feeling they do a wee bit more…;-)

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To prepare for another battle in my home improvement war, I went through the clothes in my closet. My intent was to find a ton of clothes I would never wear and donate them to good will. That didn’t work out… sorry good will.

My mother used to always yell at me because I would only wear a small percentage of the clothes I owned. As I went through the clothes in my closet, I could hear her saying, “See, this is nice, why haven’t you worn this?” If she reads this she’ll die laughing, but she was right. Why haven’t I been wearing all of my clothes?

So, now I’m excited to start sporting my new wardrobe. Well, it’s new to me anyway.

It’s great because it didn’t cost a dime! I just had to look around.