I’m a loser

Today I reached a goal I set out for on New Year’s Day. My own internal resolution for the new year was to lose some weight. My pants were fitting tight after a holiday season fulls of sweets and big meals.
I committed to the simple goal of weighing what it said on my driver’s license. It says 165 pounds on the license. Stepping on the scale on New Year’s Day I found myself at 192.1 pounds. It seemed daunting at the time.
After 66 days of dieting, this is what I saw this morning:


I feel quite happy to achieve this goal. I don’t have a six pack stomach and my ribs don’t show, but my clothes are loose and my belts are too big.
To lose the weight I went on the Atkins diet. The science behind it makes sense and the results are obvious. I was very strict about staying on the plan and staying focused. I didn’t do any serious exercise besides push-ups and sit-ups before showering in the morning.

As you can see, I lost 27.1 pounds in 66 days at a steady downward trend with no big variation. IMHO, the Atkins diet does work well if you stick to it and don’t cheat. One benefit you don’t hear about is the fact that the afternoon blahs or the typical food coma people can get after lunch goes away. With your blood sugar at a roughly constant level, you feel alert during the day.
Props to Michele for putting up with the endless cooking of meat and general support while I was doing the Atkins. If she had been against it, I wouldn’t have been able to get through it.
I will say that strictly eating on the Atkins diet is hard. I’m sick of meat & cheese. I miss bread and fruit and pasta. You cannot live long term on Atkins and enjoy eating. There are a plethora of ‘low carb’ foods hitting the market and most of them are crap. Either they are horrible tasting or full of sugar alcohols with a big laxative effect.
At this point, the challenge is to transition to a balanced diet, more like the Zone Diet, where the point is to have a balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat at every meal and stay away from tons of processed foods. I’m a sucker for pasta, cookies, and sweets, so I need to maintain some discipline.
My advice to anyone considering using the Atkins diet:
1) Don’t cheat. Stay on the diet strictly. If you break the fat burning cycle, you are wasting your time.
2) Cook food in advance, have a few meals ready in the fridge.
3) Avoid the excessive eating of the lo carb sweets (sugar alcohols) they have a formidable laxative effect.
4) Make sure your family is OK with your plans.
5) Set a goal and measure your progress.
With my trip to SXSW less than 6 days away, I’m glad I’ll be able to eat somewhat normal there. Woot!

On a lighter note

This week has been a blur. Much happens, little gets blogged. Catch up time.
Sonny at bionicjive.org has few kick ass layouts. I like the ‘The Revolution’ skin.
Two great games are coming out in the next few weeks. Both Battlefield Vietnam and Unreal Tournament 2004 look to be absolutely kick ass.
I’m moving Michele to a Typepad blog. Until I get the DNS stuff resolved, you can see the scarymommy here. Michele says Typepad is kick ass.
Martin’s got a kick ass post about gay marriage.
Special Hawaiian Edition Spam. Kick ass good food.
Finally, it look’s like Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk til Dawn) is making a film based on John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Kick ass!!! I told you all it would make a good movie.

I lost a friend today

Today a friend of mine for almost 20 years crossed the line.
He’s been going through some hard times with a broken heart, career struggles, and loneliness in a new city. I’ve tried to talk to him and cheer him up, but he sinks deeper and deeper into depression and anger.
Today he lashed out at my wife. Somehow, she’s the cause of his troubles in his mind.
That crosses the line. You lash out at me, and I can take it and be ready to dish it right back. All’s fair in disagreements between friends. Friendships have their ups and downs. But when you attempt to hurt and threaten my family, I will not stand for it. At all.
I wish my friend good luck in finding his way out of his troubles and hope he gets the help he so desperately needs. It’s sad to see things go this way, but it’s his choice to do the things he’s done. I can’t tell him what to do, but he has to deal with the consequences of his actions.
It’s a good thing I have many friends to turn to in times like this. 🙂

Google Juice must be denied

As many of you know, the blogosphere has been under assault from comment spammers. The comment spammers are not directing their spam at you, they are directing it at Google. If a spammer can get their URL into your blog, they are trying to get Google to think that their URL is important.
Getting Google to think your site is important to getting high search placement and is refererred to in some circles as Google Juice. That’s why you see lots of comment spam for things like gambling or viagra. The spammers want their sites to show up as high as possible when someone searches for it.
As a defense against this, the most recent version of Movable Type, the blog software I use, has changed to deny the Google Juice. If you look at a post with comments and put your mouse over the link to a commentor, you don’t see their URL anymore, you see a redirection link. This link prevents the comment spammer from getting what they so desperately want, the Google Juice.
The problem is that many people like to mouse over link and see the URL before going there. I know I do.
So I made a little change. If you look at a list of comments, you will see the URL next to the commentors link in a non-hyperlinked form between brackets. That way, you, a human being, can see the URL, but Googlebot doesn’t see it as a meaningful link.
The code change was simple. In the Comment Listing Template I changed this section:

To this:

Note that all I had to add was at the right spot.
It appears to have worked like a charm. YMMV.

A friend has a virus

Today I got home from work, open my email and a couple inbound virus warning popped up. One of the virus laden emails was strange.


Yes, that looks like Michele sent me a virus. But it didn’t come from her. It came from someone that has both my email address and Michele’s in their address book.
That narrows down the list of possibilities quite a bit to close friends and family. So, friends and family, if you read this and you aren’t running anti-virus software, I think you should.
Everyone should be running anti-virus software, this means YOU!

Hobgoblins

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
– H.L. Mencken

I stumbled across this quote today and felt it applied to many things.
Personally, I refuse to fear hobgoblins.

Touching the Void

Last night I went out to see Touching the Void with Brad. The film is the story of two climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who took on a mountain in the Andes. During the descent, Joe breaks his leg and the two are faced with getting down the mountain.
I won’t go into the details, but the harrowing tale of survival is truly amazing. This isn’t a good novel or interesting screenplay, this is real. This really happened to two men.
You should go see this movie. I won’t spoil anything, but since the two climbers are interviewed in the film, you know they both survive. But the story of how they survive is astounding.

Prince

Last night I was about to head off to bed but decided to check the Tivo to see if the latest Daily Show was there. I flipped around the channel guide and saw the Tavis Smiley Show. I was a bit suprised since I only know Tavis from his NPR radio program that I listen to in the evenings on occasion. Tavis is insightful, direct, and fun with his guests. And man does he get the guests. Everyone from athletes, to presidential candidates, to musicians.
On the TV show I saw that he was interviewing Prince. Now, I love me some Prince. His music was core to my younger years and holds special place in my heart. More recently his strangeness with that symbol and religion had made me think he’d gone off the deep end.


I eager watched the show. Amazingly, Prince is now a 40-something, articulate and interesting musician. The discussion between Tavis & Prince was great and showed that Prince isn’t such a nutcase that many may seem to think. Tavis even showed a clip from Barbershop where they mocked him and Prince laughed at it. I was impressed that he came across as a mature, intelligent artist rather than a Hollywood nutcase.
He did an acoustic version of a song with Wendy, and then Tavis premiered Prince’s new video, Musicology. His music isn’t the same as the old, but the new video was pretty good.
When the new album comes out, I’m buying.

Media Happiness

A couple days a ago I moved the media server into the living room. I took out the stereo and CD player and replaced it with this:


Michele wanted this setup. From here, she can play any of the music on the speakers and even rip new CDs as we buy them. We can also get to the music from any of the other computers. I should be getting a smaller and more aesthetically pleasing keyboard and mouse. Eventually the server will move inside the cabinet and we might get an LCD monitor. Hopefully the sub-woofer will find a place on the floor.
Next I want the Dlink Wireless Media Player to stream video to the TV off of any computer in the house.
In other news, check out the 1000 Fighting Styles of Donald Rumsfeld.