Z425

My birthday is coming up soon so I want to lose a bit of weight before I shave my head. My hair is pretty long now and it camouflages my chub a bit. A shiny top will offer no such protection.

I've gained a few pounds since moving to the new office. Mostly due to stupidity on my part of staying at the office after core hours. Now I stay only for core hours and walk downtown every night to finish up my daily work. Second "mostly" due to having a Q'Doba right next to the office. bah. I'm so over that shit now.

My new thing for the last couple of weeks is to go to the salad bar at Copps and get me a POUND of salad at the salad bar. Previous to that I had been going to Panera for salad training, but I realized I could do better on my own at Copps. For awhile I was a bit shocked to be hungry again 30 minutes after eating my POUND of salad. Adding more cheese was the solution ( as it is for so many difficult problems. )

Since last Wednesday I have been tracking my weight in the morning and it's been at a consistent 185 lbs. That gives me a BMI of 25.8 or something which is technically overweight ( 24.9 is the border). BMI is derived from the 50th percentile I believe so I probably am still under the arbitrary number as I definitely have more muscle on me than the 50th percentile ( amazing as that might sound ).

So my goal is 175 without muscle loss.

My plan is pretty simple. Cut out most of the shit in my diet that has crept back in. Max of 1 Coke a day (WTF0!) . No daily candybar ( WTF1! ). 1 Coffee (WTF2!). More walking.

Let's see the savings!!!

3 coke = 140 calories *3 = 420
1 candybar = 200
1 coffee = 15 calories * 6 sugars * 1 = 90
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710!!

An extra walking trip downtown and back = 120 * 2 = 240
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950!!

That's a pretty big number, so I don't think I am actually going to limit my intake otherwise. I'll just keep it the same as it is now.

(950 calories * 7 days ) / 3500 calories in a pound of fat = 1.9 lbs per week.

1.9 lbs per week is pretty much perfect. So 5 1/4 weeks for 10 lbs.

So I should be able to mostly get there by my birthday. That is as if..

WRITING CRAP ON INTERNET PAPER MEANS ANYTHING.

With the office all the way across town now I "get" to drive all the way across town everyday.

BrianS had a post awhile back about just letting yourself be mad. It's ok and healthy. I had adopted that attitude before (maybe not the healthy part), but after reading his post I let myself go into it deeper.

Holy shit can I get mad. Very impressive. Old and frail people should not get in my way as my pissed off stare of death could cause them to have a heart-attack.

You see.. The entire city of Madison is under construction in summer every year. It is ridiculous. Combine that with the MANY cunts trying to kill themselves on their bikes and MANY asshole pedestrians and the fact that I fucking HATE to drive.. It can kinda upset me.

My under 5 minute leisurely straight shoot to the previous office turns into 15-20 minutes into the office and 20-30 minutes home. Woo fucking woo. I'd say I am in a shitty shitty mood for at least an hour after the first drive and 30 minutes after the second.

Oh yah.. We had to get another car too.. I HATE having 1 car. 2 cars is 3 times worse.

Here's my first test of a Silverlight web app.

http://www.z425.com/silverlight-test/Default.html

It is barebones and boring as can be, but I wanted to play with Silverlight ( C# flavor ) a bit since it is WPF light. I was surprised at how 'light' it actually is. The controls it ships with are just some shapes, a canvas, and a mediaelement. That's as much as I can tell from inside blend at least. Though mediaelement was not even in the control gallery so I added it manually.

Get some binoculars and go look at the moons of Jupiter. They are amazingly easy to see. If freak'n Galileo could do it. So can you!

As of right now ( jul2007 ) Jupiter is the brightest object in the sky other than the moon. You can't miss it.

Also.. Make sure and check it out a few days later and see the moons in totally different spots. They're moons after all.

Sam Harris is totally wrong now..

He said that nobody calls themselves a non-astrologist. Not any more. I've done some soul searching and..

I am a non-astrologist.

Our house came with a basement dehumidifier. The previous owner used it in an attempt to keep his wood supply nice and dry.

Janel had kept turning it on so that the baby clothes stored in containers in the basement would not grow mold or other yucky nastiness. I kept turning it off because I didn't think it was doing anything and I was scared it was going to start on fire or something since it was just running all the damn time.

A few months back I bought a watt meter. I had a couple of uses for it and the dehumidifier was one of them, but I never got around to it.

The other night I thought I was actually going to go to bed early. Sucker. Janel got mad at me for turning it off again and that made me finally remember about the watt meter. So I went and hooked it up..

820 WATTS! Holy shit. That's almost as bad as both our window air conditioners put together.

So my early bedtime hopes were squashed and it was debugging time.

Long story short..

DEHUMIDIFIER FAQ

1. Clean the filter.

So I tried to clean the filter before, but I could not get the thing out. I even tried prying it out. Nothing. Apparently in order to get it out I needed to move the entire unit 2 feet and 180 degrees for no reason. After I did that the filter pulled out with zero pressure. WTF.

Cleaned the filter and bam.. Hey look.. It's actually sucking water out of the air. Pretty fast too. 30 minutes later and I had about 2 cups. This particular unit is pretty beefy at 50 pints and hour which is why it use 820 WATTS. Geez.

The stupid thing still does not turn off on its own, but at least I feel better that it's not going to burn down the house. Though $3 a day is a pretty steep price to pay for a dry basement. There has got to be a better solution.

At vacation I wrote a letter to Lia. I'd been meaning to for a couple of months now, but of course like everything.. I'm kinda slow.

In 2006 I wrote about 1000 words with a pen/pencil. Not kidding. Most of those were my name and address. 2007 might be higher since I did all that heli trading, but it is still pretty low.

Apparently I am no longer capable of writing in a sequential manner. I just can not organize my thoughts that way. Even when writing this small stupid post I have already written another paragraph out of order.

THE PEN FORCES YOU TO WRITE IN ORDER. WTF.

I mean.. Who writes stuff in order?

Anyway. If you think that my writing is terrible here.. OMG. That letter is even worse. Sorry Lia. I tried. Maybe next time I'll type it out and the transcribe it. doh.

btw. I never actually managed to get the letter mailed at at vacation. Of course not. Maybe I'll get it out in the mail today. Doh.

So I've been playing with WPF for about a month now. I'm to the point where I can usually make things do what I want in a reasonable amount of time. WPF really is incredibly impressive with its flexibility. About the only shortcoming of the way it works is to say that it is a bit.. quirky. I'm just going to go ahead and blame that on the way XML works.

So for the first day or so of my vacation I spent doing job stuff. Yeah. I'm dumb. I actually would of continued doing it, but I figured that I be pretty pissed off if next week I went into the office and was told that my PTO would not be removed even if I did work the whole time. So I skirted the issue and just worked on my own stuff. omg.

I'm doing a 2D biped balancing sim and I needed a physics engine. Instead of digging up one of my old ones or start another one from scratch I decided to just get Erin Catto's Box2D up on .NET. Looking around there is a XNA version, but I decided against that. I guess I could of used the .NET version of Bullet, but I didn't. Oh well.

I initially just started porting Box2D to C#. I got as far as switching over the syntax and realized.. What the hell am I doing? I can just recompile it under C++/CLI. 20 minutes later I had a box falling onto another box. Woo. At some point I'll port it over to C# to just be more pure, but this let me get it up pretty fast.

One crazy thing is that while getting this up I was actually using freak'n Blend to place my bodies and joints. I can literally drag them out and position them on my workspace, launch it and boom.. They are physical if they are my UserControls! I even get the fancy WPF anti-aliasing.