BlueHackers @ Open Source Developers’ Conference 2014

This year, OSDC’s first afternoon plenary will be a specific BlueHackers related topic: Stress and Anxiety, presented by Neville Starick – an experienced Brisbane based counsellor.

We’ll also have our traditional BlueHackers “BoF” (birds-of-a-feather) session in the evening, usually featuring some general information, as well as the opportunity for safe lightning talks. Some people talk, some people don’t. That’s all fine.

The Open Source Developers’ Conference 2014 is being held at the beautiful Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, 4-7 November. It features a fine program, and if you use this magic link you get a special ticket price, but the regular registration is only around $300 anyhow, $180 for students! This includes all lunches and the conference dinner. Fabulous value.

Quitting cigarettes

Why is it having mental illness and smoking go hand in hand. I’m looking closer to getting a foot in the door with my dream job doing something I love. I also plan to quit smoking again with my fiance and two friends. It’s not going to be easy but I went seven months not smoking. I really don’t enjoy it and it costs too much. That and every cigarette takes eight minutes off my life. I’ll keep you readers of bluehackers posted about the job. I’m excited..

More exercise and happiness

So I managed to last one hour the.other say doing boxing related exercises. After I had cooled down I felt great. Those endorphins are so good for me. I want more but I’m not good at wanting to exercise..

Losing weight

Today I officially have begun trying to lose weight. Medications and poor lifestyle choices have put me at very.high risk of diabetes. I also have high cholesterol. Not good. I did 30 minutes of intense boxing exercise. Thanks Ben S. He’s my best man for my wedding and a friend for roughly 8 years.

7 Things You Shouldn

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/17/things-not-to-say-to-some_n_4781182.html

If you’ve ever suffered from severe anxiety, you’re probably overly familiar with the control it can have over your life. And you’re not alone — it affects a sizeable percentage of the population.

Learning more about anxiety and stress can be really helpful.

Anxiety Attack felt like Heart Attack :-(

I had my first anxiety attack the other day. My lady was off picking a wedding dress. I was looking after our son whom was asleep and it just came on. I got our neighbour who luckily was home that day in his garage working on his cars. It felt like a heart attack. It stopped me from moving my right shoulder properly. I guess now I know I need help, more than a psychiatrist can help with (as they only prescribe medication if you did not know already). I’m looking into a Physiologist. I pay for private health with an awesome company called ahm. I don’t ever want to return to needing to go into hospital though. This will be a short post, but never discredit anyone who says they suffer anxiety as it’s a serious thing that causes actual physical pain. It wasn’t until the GP gave me the all clear I felt better again. Oh, and now I wear glasses as I’m short sighted from many years of looking at computer screens.

Follow up

I have a mental illness. From consuming weed for those years. I have major depression & anxiety. I also get paranoid about germs/what people think of me/my health. I think sometimes I make things worse for myself. The best thing that has ever happened is meeting my lovely Becci. She definitely has taken my unwell self and made me well. I had long quit the weed. But recovering from heavy usage takes the brain a while. Years in fact. I have been in and out of work. Fired for having a mental illness (CBA) and more recently as in last year my mother doused herself in gasoline and set herself alight. I haven’t walked easy street. But I try to keep my head up and wits about me. I have a family to care for an my grandparents who helped raise me quite a bit. Well a lot.

A bit about “jlg”

I’m 29, Male from Sunny Brisbane (sunny at the moment). I was born in Adelaide, SA, Australia in a hospital called Modbury hospital. It’s still there. I have one son. I also have a daughter who by law I am not legally allowed to see as I am not on the birth certificate but I’m 99.99 percent sure I’m her father. Her name for the record is Annabel. I’m unsure of spelling. Our son (mine and Bec’s) is being raised with so much love and care and I only wish the same for my daughter. I should mention I’m no street thug or criminal. I actually have no criminal record. I survive on $500AUD a fortnight currently as of right this moment. Which is not much for a overweight male. I don’t really have any vices per say but I don’t use computers so frequently at my age of 29 I have short sighted vision. I should mention I don’t have diabetes.

My story is a common one I think? Man meets woman (Steve Cullen) my bio dad. Has sex, finds out has baby and does runner. I have to this day never met my bio dad. I have seen a photo when I was younger. He was some bald dude. I don’t think much of  him and I actually don’t speak much of him. My mother was awesome and she still is, albeit after her last suicide attempt. I will get to this later. I should mention I was a heavy smoker of cannabis from 2003 to 2007.  I attended a place called HUMBUG. Ironically it was a friend I made called Daniel who got me into marijuna. He would write code, I’d hack computers. We kind of worked as a team. Because the trust was set by us consuming so much (I will call it weed). I’m not proud of my drug usage but little did I know my Mum was a heavy user of other “drugs”. She was also in the army. For roughly 6 years she taught Army service men and women about english/maths etc. As she was a UniSA educated teacher. I on the other hand am self taught. From a young age I was somewhat unwillingly writing phish attacks but for chat websites. I would call these fake logins via HTML. I did this all roughly during High School. I admit freely that the school network was a joke. That doesn’t mean I abused it. I just made sure I couldn’t use their computers by inputting ASCII characters alt+256 the invisible char into the login screen I was using. It was Novell and it would not log in if you entered this char quickly without teacher looking then you’d get moved say to a girl you liked and flirt with her…. :-o)

For the sake of keeping things realistic and true I was actually very frigid. I dated some real nice girls I just couldn’t even get any courage to do anything more than sitting near them. That obviously changed in my final few years. I have always been anti-authority because I actually had 0 parent supervision for most of my teens. I would sit infront of my IBM Aptiva listening to god awful rap music I won’t mention online. I would sit reading RFCs, reading how to write HTML then thinking outside the box and doing what’s now called XSS (aka cross site scripting). Yahoo was one I did, obviously I have never been the type of guy to go hey here’s my handle and here I am LEA track me down. I prefer doing these things without an identity I always have, always will. I am a free lance individual. Whilst I sympathize with various well known hacktivists. I do not go out of my way to engage them.

I think this is enough for now…I will update soon. It’s 10.37pm I know not that late but all this writing has exhausted me. More later.

About your breakfast

We know that eating well (good nutritional balance) and at the right times is good for your mental as well as your physical health.

There’s some new research out on breakfast. The article I spotted (Breakfast no longer ‘most important meal of the day’ | SBS) goes a bit popular and funny on it, so I’ll phrase it independently in an attempt to get the real information out.

One of the researchers makes the point that skipping breakfast is not the same as deferring. So consider the reason, are you going to eat properly a bit later, or are you not eating at all?

When you do have breakfast, note that really most cereals contain an atrocious amount of sugar (and other carbs) that you can’t realistically burn off even with a hard day’s work. And from my own personal observation, there’s often way too much salt in there also. Check out Kellogg’s Cornflakes for a neat example of way-too-much-salt.

Basically, the research comes back to the fact that just eating is not the point, it’s what you eat that actually really does matter.

What do you have for breakfast, and at what point/time in your day?

Adverse Childhood Exprience (ACE) questionnaire | acestoohigh.com

NOTE: the links referred to in this post may contain triggers. Make sure you have appropriate support available.

http://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/

There are 10 types of childhood trauma measured in the ACE Study, personal as well as ones related to other family members. Once you have your score, there are many useful insights later in the article.

The origin of this study was actually in an obesity clinic.

because we're not just geeks – we're humans.