iP3K

So far this has been a really intriguing experiment. I’ve definately kept my part of the bargain to cut down on portions and avoid fried foods. I’ll confess that I’ve succumbed to temptation about 3 times over the course of the past two weeks. Also I haven’t been able to find the time to do the needed exercice to improve my cardio, so as you can expect there hasn’t been any significant weight loss. I’ve also significantly increased the number of fruits and vegetables that get in my diet. So until there is any kind of change I won’t really post anything new on my personal challenge.

So a week has gone by and I’ve experimented various ways to loose some wait. This first phase was all about nutrition, cut down on portions, fats and anything junk food related. I can’t say I have a perfect score, but at least I can count in one hand all the incidents in witch I have failed.

• A can of Pepsi x2
• A piece of cake with frosting
• A donught with filling
• Bacardi Breezer x3

The rest of the time I’ve been drinking blended peaches (it’s the season!), eating some salad with dressing, got Jell-O as an alternative snack (instead of chips!). This morning I weighted in a 250 pounds, but I have a definite sense that over the week I’ve been improving greatly on what I eat, I’ll keep on with the challenge and bet on a healthier diet. This week I shall introduce physical exercise. Stay tuned! (Yes videos will return).

My challenge is still on going, I guess I can’t find the time to put a blog post every day, but I still keep track of what is going on. Here’s on quick run down of Day 2 and the morning of Day 3. On Sunday I’ve decided to eat as usual but only cut down on the size of my portions. As of today I weighted in at 251 pounds! I know, I know it’s not a significant number but if it had gone up it would of been a total disaster.

As of this morning I’ve had a banana and a V8 for breakfast, I’ll probably eat outside the house for lunch but I will have to make sure it’s healthy.

First day. No work out but I did get to break a sweat at work. Those following me on Twitter have the information on my ups and downs. As the day went by, I avoided two detrimental nutrients from my alimentation.

I usually like my cereals sweet, but good old regular Corn Flakes are still quite good without sugar added. At lunch I’ve decided to skip the regular trios and ditch the fries and soft drink, instead a simple double hamburger with a “diet” green iced tea.  It was still delicious, but for someone used to drive on a high level of calories I was hungry 5 hours later.

So I end this first day with two pieces of chicken, rice with peas, a Pepsi and a piece of cake. So you see that this last meal of the day is pretty much a disaster diet wise, but considering that I’ve cut the portions I don’t think it’s a complete fail.

I weighted in this morning (before breakfast) at an embarrassing 254 pounds, and to think women are offended if asked about their weight. But tomorrow morning will tell if that first day of efforts will start showing right away or not. I imagine it will require a few days before I can notice a change.

The sound isn’t great I know. You might will have to crank up the volume (ALL THE WAY!) a bit but here is the low-down. Starting tomorrow September 6th 2008, I will challenge myself to loose 50 pounds and I’ve given myself 60 days to do it. This means I have to loose an average of 0.83 pounds EVERYDAY to achieve this goal. It is definetly over ambitious but even if I achieve only half of that it will be a personnal success. I will try to blog about it everyday to keep you updated on what I’m going through and how my lifestyle needs to change to loose weight.

My current plan is to workout twice a week, avoid fried foods and soft drinks. If you have any advice please leave them in the comments below. Some cheering up would be nice too. Haters = downers = pessimistic loosers (please get lost in the woods).

Here is the in-audible video – but my head keeps bouncing!

I haven’t posted about myself or about my work situation in ages. Mostly because I don’t believe it to be that interesting or note worthy. When I started this blog I saw it as an online diary that could keep track of my different impressions of what ever happens in the world. Lately I’ve been focusing on reviewing a bunch of stuff but not really for the sake of pouring my heart out. Mostly trying to drive traffic to the blog. Hoping to make a few pennies. I’m a die hard optimist most of the time and if I have the blues I can dismiss it after good night sleep… Right now I feel there is some foreshadowing coming from the 40s crisis that men tend to have (when they reach their 40s). Questioning my career choices and decisions, trying to make a living, valuing your qualities and proving yourself shouldn’t take such a toll on me. But they do… and it down right sucks. One day your in a perfect spot, not really thinking ahead or what tomorrow may hold. You believe in destiny, and somehow God has a plan for you, a way to be meaningful… until the day you realize you might have to wait longer than expected. You’re starting to loose confidence in your ability to keep your head above the water. You think you’re skilled but there is always that other one that beats you to the punch. You can’t be number one, and you sure can’t be in the top 10 either. I’ll be 22 next month and I get the feeling I’ve wasted so much time not doing the right things so far. Realizing this now might be a blessing or a curse who knows… Eat, sleep, play is not that different from Commute, work, sleep. For now I’m longing for the latter option.

A few months ago, the news broke out on Ars Technica that a Bell Sympatico employs traffic shaping to control the flow of traffic on the Internet. They claim that it is only in use during peak hours, and call it “Traffic Management”. I have always tried to stay clear of the tiresome Net Neutrality debate hoping Canada would be spared from this cancer. As with all good things they often come to an end way to early!

I’ve noticed the first effects around mid-December and it seemed to affect mostly BitTorrent traffic. Basicly, as soon as it turns 6PM, the upload and download speeds of BitTorrent is capped at 30kb/s up and 30kb/s down, making the downloading of large files unpractical. However, the purpose of such measure does not really prevent the bandwidth to being used, because it’s still available, at the same time as they apply bandwidth caps in their peak hours, I’m still able to download shows from revision3 at around 500+kb/s.

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Last week my laptop was happily refusing to boot into Windows Vista because it has been deactivated due to some troubleshooting I had to do. To keep it short, I had compressed the main drive in witch Vista was installed and could not boot. I then had to use an old Vista pre-release DVD to restore the boot loader, however not using the same disk as for the install might of proven itself to be a big mistake.

Nevertheless, I was not ready to move back to Windows XP and decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu on my laptop. I have been testing the various versions of Ubuntu since version 4.10 and I thank the Lord that they have made so many progress in the past few years. Everything works smoothly, all my hardware was detected and even my on-board wireless card was flagged as using proprietary drivers (still worked fine). The Ubuntu install CD lets you run a live version of the OS directly from the CD and gives you the option to install the OS on the hard drive.

I love the nice graphical effects you can add using Compiz, by now you must of seen a video of this on YouTube, with a spinning cube, rain or windows spinning around. Most of these are distractors from the main purpose that is stability and ease of use.

None of this is new really, I know how OpenOffice works but in order to be productive I’ll have to forget about those nice improvements Microsoft Office 2007 provided. It will be a bumpy ride, but I am to think that for a laptop on which I will not do any serious gaming there is no reason why Linux cannot take it’s rightful place as an alternate OS.