May 2004 Archives

Well, it's time for a weight loss update since my cholesterol results four months ago. I am now down to 149 pounds, and have been since May 1. That's 61 pounds shed. And 8 inches off my waist: 38 down to 30. I'll just let some pictures speak for themselves:

The picture on the left was taken September 22, 2002 at about 210 pounds. The picture on the right was taken May 18, 2004 at 149 pounds. I started my diet in February, 2003. Yes, I cut my hair, too.

The picture on the left was taken February 28, 2003 at 206 pounds. I had already lost 4 pounds by that point. The picture on the right was taken May 18, 2004.

Here's one final picture wearing my old 38 inch waist jeans:

Everyone always asks which diet I've been on, and the answer I give is "eat less, exercise more". That sounds cliché, but it's true. I am not on, and never was on, a big-name diet. I don't know why, but I'm extra proud of that. I don't want to preach my routine, as everyone is different and it may not work for you, but I want to describe it anyway. The basic principle I've been following stems from reduced caloric intake. It takes 3,500 calories to burn 1 pound of fat. It's really only healthy to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week. So, to lose 1 pound of fat per week, you need a 500 calorie deficit per day (i.e. you need to burn 500 more calories than you consume). Rather than do that all by diet, I've been trying do half by diet and half by exercise.

Of course to have a 250 calorie diet deficit, you need to know how many calories you burn to maintain your weight. I got a little help here. When I originally started dieting, I used eDiets to get me going since I really had no idea how to change my diet. They put me on a well balanced, low fat diet of 1,800 to 1,900 calories per day, which pegged me at 2,200 calories to maintain my weight. That's just sorta the average, and you may need to tweak those numbers. But I'm an average sort of guy, so I stuck with 1,800 to 1,900 calories. Those calories are split among 3 meals and a 200 calorie snack, which leaves about 530 to 550 calories per meal. I have not really used eDiets for the last 6 months or so, but I've been following the same caloric intake guidelines with excellent results.

As far as exercise goes, I started out just lifting weights, 3 times per week on my Bow Flex. Weight lifting not only burns calories, but it increases muscle mass, which will increase your quiescent calorie burn. The more muscle you have, the more calories you need to fuel it. I wish I had done body fat measuremeants, but it's clear from the pictures of my body that I've gained some muscle mass. Just doing weight training was working well, but by the end of last summer, I was not seeing the results I wanted. I figured that weight training itself does not burn a whole lot of calories, and it takes a lot of time to put on muscle. Plus, I wasn't in any better shape. Even though I had lost about 20 pounds, I would still be woefully out of breath after running just two blocks.

I decided to add a cardio routine back in September, 2003. Of course, being the lazy person that I am, I wanted to pick an activity that would burn the most calories in as short a time as possible. At the top of this list is running, swimming, and biking, all burning about 500 calories per hour. So a half hour of activity would perfectly give me my 250 calorie deficit. Swimming would not be an option, since I didn't want to join a gym. Biking just seemed like too much hassle. To run, you basically just have to put on some shoes and step out the door. And running seems to be a better workout for your lungs and heart. So even though I have despised running since childhood, I decided to start running last September. Of course, you can't just step out the door and run for a half hour after being sedentary for 15 years. I wrote up a whole entry back in January describing my running journey. And since January, I've run an 8k and a 5k, and I'm planning on running a few other 5k's this summer. I'm up to 3 miles per day, 3 times per week for my training which takes me somewhere between 27 and 30 minutes depending on how hard I run.

So that's it. I hope this may provide encouragement for those also wanting to lose weight. I can tell you first hand that the hard work will absolutely be worth it.

I saw Super Size Me this evening, and I heartily recommend it: 9.5/10. The topic has been rather dear to me this past year. It's really more about obesity in American, rather than just slamming McDonald's. Oh, it has it's share of McD's bashing, and fast food in general, but it really tries to raise awareness. I think it points more of the blame more at individuals and their own personal choices. No one forces you to eat like crap. Though, there are definitely things we, as a society, can do better, like ban fast food from school menus and require physical education in schools. I know I always hated PE, though, so maybe they need to change their approach a bit.

As usual, I have to plug the Center for Science in the Public Interest for their work in this area. They constantly put out good information and lobby for some decent legislation.

Salon does a low carb taste test. Their conclusion: "We've determined that low-carb food tastes worse than low-fat food." It's worth reading the comments just for the humor value: "That shit is nasty! There's butter and cream, and it's still bad!"

A couple more key bindings on top of the others:

        "^k"="deleteToEndOfLine:";
        "^_"="undo:";

I've also received a beta of uControl that works on OS X 10.3.3.

A Flash rendition of Kubrick's The Shining!

In a previous entry, I compared the Iraq war to The Crusades. Maybe Nicholas Von Hoffman says it better when he compares it to missionaries. Not that that makes me feel any more comfortable.

I first saw the ability to give OS X Emacs key bindings on gnufoo.org. It looks as if they got this completely from an Apple document. Now these are all great and dandy, but for some reason Control-A and Control-E do not go to the beginning and end of line, respectively. By default, they go to the beginning and end of a paragraph. These two key bindings, along with Control-N and Control-P, are so burned into my memory that I subconsciously use them all the time. If I didn't figure out how to get them working, it would constantly drive me mad. I don't think it's physically possible for me to unlearn this behavior. Sure enough, it was just a matter of adding the following two lines to the DefaultKeyBindings.dict:

        "^e"="moveToEndOfLine:";
        "^a"="moveToBeginningOfLine:";

And now I am a very happy man, indeed!

While I haven't played with it too much, it's nice to know that you can even setup ESC to be a prefix character, as in the second example in the Apple document.

Now if only I could get uControl working on OS X 10.3.3 to turn Caps Lock into Control, I will be in Emacs heaven. uControl 1.4.3 doesn't work, even though it says it should. The installer quits saying it cannot install itself on OS X 10.3.3. Ah well, I'm sure this will be fixed in due time. If I get motivated enough, I may even try to hack the code.

Even though I've used Macs since the System 7 days, and I've had an iMac at home for the last 1 1/2 years, I never really got into AppleScript. It just always seemed to daunting and hard to grasp. Well, I finally took the plunge and decided to learn it since there were some things in Mail that I kept repeating over and over again that were driving me crazy. The Apple documention for AppleScript is really not all that helpful, which is probably why I never really grasped it. I picked up a copy of the O'Reilly AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, and it was a worthwhile purchase. I have to say that my last few O'Reilly purchases have been disappointments, but this is one solid book. It answered all the questions I was having as I tried to write what amounted to a really simple script. Now that I'm no longer scared of AppleScript, I suspect I'll find many other uses for it.

Since my new PowerBook comes with Bluetooth, I decided to get a new Bluetooth enabled phone. And, boy, I'm glad I did. I got a Sony Ericsson T616. The best part about it is using iSync to synchronize my address book with my phone. And it's got a nice feature where you can pick a group of addresses to synchronize, rather than the whole thing. There are many phone numbers I just don't need to carry in my phone, and they just get in the way when browsing.

Bluetooth does have some other really nifty features. The jury is still out as to whether these are useful in the long run, though. The first cool feature is the integration with Address Book. If you click on the little Bluetooth icon in Address Book, it links up to your phone. This allows you to send SMS messages and dial your phone right from Address Book. Also, incoming SMS messages and phone calls will pop up a dialog box that allow you to, say, sending the call to voice mail. The one drawback that makes this almost useless, though, is that Address Book does not pop itself up to the front when this all happens. So if your using Mail, for example, the dialog boxes get popped underneath the Mail window. That's just so dumb, I can't even begin to think why a developer would do this. Address Book should bring itself to the front and bounce it's icon. I mean, an incoming phone call is an important event that needs to be taken care of in a timely manner, so it should try to get my attention at all costs! Finally, it would be nice to dial any phone number, not just one from the address book. A nice service would be to, say, dial the phone number in the cut buffer. Then you could take a phone number right from Yahoo! yellow pages and dial it.

The second cool Bluetooth feature is transfering files to and from the phone. Transfering from the phone is nice since the phone has a built-in camera. Now, I don't plan to use this camera that much, since I think cameras in phones are really pointless. Maybe I'm missing something, though, since just about every phone has one these days. In any case, it's possible to transfer the photos to the laptop over Bluetooth after taking a picture. And transfering files to the phone is nice in the case of ring tones. This phone can incredibly play any MIDI file directly as a ring tone. So you have like 3 billion ring tones to chose from. After browsing the net and finding some good MIDI songs, it's a piece of cake to send it to the phone over Bluetooth.

The final cool feature of Bluetooth is the abilitiy to act as a modem. Because the phone supports GPRS (a data link over GSM), the Mac can use Bluetooth to connect to the GPRS data stream over PPP. So I could be sitting on the train with my phone in my pocket and reading my email. Granted GPRS is a bit slow, but I could see it being useful in a pinch. This was, unfortunately, a little tricky to get setup. There's a magic phone number that you have to dial to enable PPP on the phone or something like that. I gather this phone number is specific to the phone, so it would be nice if the T616 manual would have mentioned this somewhere. I found the answer somewhere on Google Groups.

So with all these cool features, I suspect I'll only really use the address book syncing on a regular basis. The other features are just sorta nifty toys right now. The real test is to see if I'm using them in a couple months.

Last week, I received my new 15" PowerBook. I got it all maxed out with faster hard drive, more video memory, and 4x DVD burner. After playing with it for a week, this thing totally rocks. My previous laptop was an IBM Thinkpad running Red Hat Linux. Suffice to say, there really is no comparison between the two. The physical feel of the PowerBook is much more solid. It's compact and well designed. It's the little things like the LED on the power cable to let you know if your battery is charging that show Apple really paid attention to the details.

OS X 10.3, a.k.a Panther is great. There are not a whole lot of major improvements over Jaguar, but lots of little ones. Mail is nicer with its threading and seems much faster. Address Book is nicer with the way it merges imported vCards rather than duplicating them. The new Finder just feels slicker. Exposé is not just eye candy. Then there's everything else that "just works" as compared to Linux: dual monitor support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DVDs, power management. Overall, it's just a much more polished feel than Linux. And I really don't see desktop Linux approaching OS X any time soon, unfortunately.

So this is it. I have an iMac at home and now a PowerBook for work. I officially no longer use Linux on the desktop. I can't say I'm all that broken hearted. I still use Linux for my server, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. But it's for real. OS X is simply the best Unix desktop out there. Period.