Not sure what I want to do with these posts yet.  For now I’ll leave you with just the picture.

I’ve been reading Planet Debian and noticed David Watson, Michal Čihař and Evgeni Golov are all doing a thing called Project 52. I’ve been trying to get myself to do something like 365 project for a while now, but I have failed every time I tried to start. Well, one picture a week seems a bit more reasonable to me, so I’m throwing in as well. Here’s the first two weeks of pictures.  I took them on the weeks I was supposed to, but I just haven’t gotten around to posting on the blog yet.

Week 1

Week 2

I’ll be posting every week.  Should be fun.

It hasn’t been a whole month since the last update, but I am going to try to make these updates when I finish a column just to make it easier for me to remember, and so that there is less clutter in my weight log book.

Since the last time that I updated on this, the year has ticked over.  Usually, there is nothing that is worse for a diet than the holidays.  There are is a lot of food around, and in the office there are lots of candy, cookies and chocolate which are sent around from other companies or brought in from home.  It’s pretty difficult to maintain in these circumstances.  As a bonus, usually you’re on the road for the holidays, making it more difficult to exercise or go to the gym.   I was strong throughout this time, and only had a breakdown a couple of times.  When I did end up eating some sweets or having a bunch of free food, I was careful to keep the calories counted, and either extend my workout or just eat less (which was the more common option, and easier).   As a result, I didn’t make any major backslides.   I also gave me free reign when I was off the reservation so to speak, which made me just enjoy the holidays instead of having to worry about how many calories were in the cookies or the turkey that I was noshing on.

I’ve still been frequenting the Loseit reddit group, and profiding some advice and encouragement when I feel like I can contribute. Sometimes there are progress pics on there, and I was thinking of adding my own after a year of diet and exercise. Usually I am not too thrilled about the posts that have those in them though. Sometimes there are people who are only trying to lose a few pounds - a guy at 160 or girl at 140 or something, and it is a little annoying to think that they are literally half my weight and they are still not happy with themselves. I’m slightly worried that I will get to my goal weight and just be unhappy with myself still, and continue down. There’s no real problem with being lighter than I am and still unhappy, losing half of myself is a multi-year goal. However, there are also the people there that are my weight or more and it increases my feeling of camaraderie there.

This update’s 30 day graph looks better than the last few updates by far.  I’m getting closer to the one pound per week goal that I want to be at for a minimum.   I am guessing that counting my calories with myfitnesspal is making the biggest difference, because I can’t kid myself about the calories that are in the food that I end up eating.  I’m happy with the amount of green on the chart, but still dismayed at the red lines.  I have the excuse of the holidays this month, but it would be nice to have a whole month of green.

Here’s my whole year of weight loss.  The final weight on December 31 was 296lbs, making me 44 pounds lighter at the end of the year than at the beginning.  I’m pretty happy with that progress, and want to have another year with that speed or better.    This graph looks great to me though, I would be just as happy if next year’s graph looked the same.

Here’s this year’s budding graph.  Progress looks pretty good so far.  As new years resolutions go, I’m not really making one for the weight.  It should be a lifestyle change and not just for the new year anyway.  I am switching up the exercise for 2011 - I’ve been thinking about weights for a while, and I’ve decided that I want to work on getting a little more strong while I lose the weight this year.  I think it will also be better for two reasons.  The first is obviously that I will get stronger.  The second is that I will be exercising off less calories on the days that I am doing weight lifting.   I’ve noticed lately that I work off about 700 calories at a time, and that basically amounts to a whole meal’s worth of calories.  This means that I am really eating more than I should, and if I am going to do less cardio in the future, I will need to get used to eating less.    Hopefully I will just be less hungry too.

Are you making any weight loss goals for 2011?

About a month ago, I was happy to hear from Google that they were finally going to release their Netbook OS, Chrome OS.  They held a press conference to announce it, and invited people to sign up to be lucky and receive a laptop which would be loaded with Chrome OS to try out.  I thought that was a pretty awesome deal, so I jumped at the first chance I heard of it, filled out the form with my information, and basically thought that I was still too late, until I got a package that I wasn’t expecting from FedEx, and I opened it up to find this:

That’s right, whatever magic process that they used to pick the people who were getting these laptops picked me.  I was pretty stoked about it, and went about setting it up and playing with it for a few hours right after I got the box.   After a couple of days of playing with it, I went back to using my normal laptop for almost all of the things I used my laptop for before, and the Cr-48 is used for guests and is sitting waiting for some movement on a project.

There are plenty of reviews on other sites about the laptop, but I thought I should write about it anyway, since it’s a neat thing that happened to me and that is ostensibly what this blog is for anyway.  Also, my sister played with it while she was in town and gave me some feedback.

Let’s start with the things that I viewed as positive.  The OS is basically only a browser, which means that you can do anything you want to on the web about 10 seconds out of the starting gate.  I didn’t have any trouble connecting to my wireless AP.  The keyboard is one of the modern keyboards that you would get on a MacBook or one of the Apple Keyboards that I really enjoy.  Lots of people are talking about the keyboard missing a CAPS LOCK key, which I was happy about, because I’ve replaced that key with a Control on every OS and keyboard that I get my hands on.   Really, it’s overdue for being replaced with something useful anyway.  I don’t know that the default replacement of “new tab” is a great replacement because it might be even more jarring to be typing along and hit the key and suddenly be typing in a search bar instead of the field that you were composing your email or comment reply or something in.    Another nice touch is that the keycaps have lowercase letters on them instead of the upppercase ones.

The rest of the hardware is a bit sparse.  I don’t really know what CPU is in it, but there’s a SD card slot, one USB slot, and the charger plug.  Next to the plug is a little light that is green or amber based on the charging status of the battery.   The included battery lasts a long time, even when surfing on wifi I got about six hours out of a full battery, and the battery came half-charged just like a Li-Ion battery should, so I didn’t even have to plug it in until late into the first night.

The screen itself is just gorgeous.  I want to remove it and put it in my main laptop, because it is matte and bright and I never have any issues reading on it.  I am now convinced that I want a matte screen for all of the laptops I have from now on, because there are no glare issues at all, and from what I can tell, colors are still just as bright and colorful as on my normal laptop.  I also discovered that it has a light sensor right of the camera, which means that if you’re in a darker room, it will automatically turn down the brightness of the LCD so that it’s not super bright, or if you go into a lighter room, it turns it up so that the screen stays about the same brightness compared to the surrounding environment.  I thought that it was a nice touch - I was worried that the camera was on all the time in order to do this for a while, so I covered up just the camera but that didn’t do anything - the sensor is in the black section around the camera just to the right when you’re looking from the front.

It’s not all roses though.  This being a beta test, I am willing to let some things go, but as many others have noted, the touchpad is possibly the most horrible mouse replacement known to man.   After changing some settings, it is passable but still not as good as the fairly basic one that is available on any laptop.  The whole touchpad is a button, which would be fine with me, except if you try to use it like a normal touchpad, then you want to click in the lower left corner, and if you do this, then you move the pointer before you click. This means a lot of misclicks.    The way that I ended up fixing it is turning off the tap to click, and pressing on the pad with the “active” finger then I want to click.  It works okay, but the middle click is still tricky because you need to press two fingers down.  I just avoid middle clicking on the Cr-48.

The CPU is the other hardware problem. It’s not really beefy, and while it keeps up normally, I have some pretty heavy browser use.  Just as an example, right now I have 17 tabs open, and it’s not uncommon for me to have more than 30 tabs waiting to be read when I am going through my RSS feeds.   After about 15 tabs in Chrome OS, there is a noticable lag switching the tabs, and anything with some javascript use will be lagging a bit.  This is mostly due to the CPU I am sure.

In terms of software, I decided to try something that should be supported by a Cloud OS: uploading my photos from a SD card that was in my camera to Flickr or Picasa.  Unfortunately I discovered rather quickly that while the SD card mounts automatically, you have to trick the browser into letting you use it.  The normal file browser, for uploading photos for example, is replaced by a temporary area which is on the hard drive.  The browser is a little flaky though, so sometimes I could get the real OS file open browser up.   I ended uploading a bunch of pictures to Flickr, but I couldn’t get access to the SD card when I was going to upload to Picasa.  You definitely need to be able to access that memory card if you want to be able to have a Cloud OS.  I hope that some upgrades of the OS in the near future might handle this differently.  It also doesn’t work that well when you are at an open access wifi spot that requires an agreement clickthrough.  You need to login as a guest, then clickthrough the agreement, then log back out so that you can access your normal profile.  It doesn’t take that long, but it is a couple extra steps.

It’s about the perfect loaner laptop for a guest though.  I gave it to my sister for use while she was visiting, and she didn’t have any issues logging into her google account from the start, and playing with Facebook, updating her status, and messing with some book reading site that she was signing up for.  It was javascript-heavy and the pages lagged when there were 100+ books on a page and she was doing something, but I didn’t look too much into it.  She echoed my concerns about the touchpad, and was pretty insistent on making sure that I actually note all of these things so that I could post them and maybe Google would pay attention.   Honestly everything that I’ve said on here was said before somewhere else.

Overall, I would say that it is a usable netbook, and most people would have no problems getting on the internet.  I use it when I’m too lazy to go to the other room when I’ve left the laptop somewhere else and I’m watching TV, so I can check into miso or tweet about something.  I want to cannibalize the screen, because it’s damn nice, but otherwise it’s a fine netbook. It does have a 5.2GHz 802.11n client on it though, which made it the first 5.2GHz device in my household and tested out that band on the router (it worked fine). One of my projects for this year will be to use this laptop in some of my research, so it will be interesting to see what some of the subjects will think about it when they try to use it.

Let’s restart these, shall we?  Today it’s kind of boring though.

This image is the second in a row that is just tangentially related to history. The source image is in color of course, and it has been put into black and white to make it look like it’s from.. about 30,000 BC here.  It’s of some random tree in a jungle somewhere, honestly the original is a lot easier to see what it is.

Because we’re talking about prehistory here, the producers were probably trying to refer to prehistoric ferns or plantlife.  Paleobotany is the study of plant remains in fossils.  I remember finding some of these in parks when I was a child - they seem to be some of the most common type of fossil laying around when you’re on a school fieldtrip.  It would be pretty easy to find some of these ferns around my neck of the woods right during the lava from the last scene. Of course these fossils are pretty important to figuring out that evolution actually happens, since it takes thousands of years in the best cases.

This month I have gotten back on track in terms of actual metrics.  Keeping on track is making a difference.  Last month I was trying to find a community to keep me motivated and to share my experiences with, and I think that I might have found something similar, I’ve started following the people in the loseit reddit group.  There are a lot of people there who are also trying to lose weight for good, and while there are a lot of before and after pics, there are also a lot of people who are seeking advice about dieting and exercise, without focusing too much on the exercise and with just some sensible advice for dieting.  Along with that there are some other nifty things like a spreadsheet tracking the weight loss of everyone.  I think it has been a good thing so far.

There are a couple of changes that I’ve made in my diet the last month.  First, I’ve started counting my calories more closely, owing mostly to the fact that I carry my Android phone with me all the time, and I have signed up with the myfitnesspal app.  We’re getting very close to the proverbial eat watch which is postulated by The Hacker’s Diet.   I put all of my exercise and food into the application, estimating when necessary, and it gives me a number of calories over or under the target.  Based on that, I can tell whether I can eat a snack at night or not.  I use the estimates from the treadmill, which is where most of my exercise is coming from nowadays.   The second more recent change is to cut out all of the soda that I’ve had.  This change was more recent, but I think it has caused the change that you’ll see in the last couple days.  I’ve switched to coffee for my caffeine intake, but I only really have one large cup a day.  I think that the reduction of sodium from my diet might make a big difference.

According to the graphs, I’m accelerating my weight loss.  Weekly loss is the highest over any 30 day period since I’ve started blogging here.  After the basically zero progress for the last two updates, it’s really encouraging.   I also think that I am solidly below the 300 pound mark now.  Also the precipitous drop at the end of this month is also great, but of course I don’t expect to keep the rate of >1lb per day up.

This month also looks really good on the yearly graph.  And the weekly loss over the year is up as well of course.  Reading a lot into both of the graphs, you can kindof see a weekly repeating raise over the trend line.  It’s probably one of my days off.

Exercise hasn’t been too bad - I’m still doing almost all of my workouts on the treadmill.  For entertainment, I’ve started watching the UK Top Gear, as well as watching the US Top Gear as it comes out.  The UK version is much more entertaining.   I’ve increased the intensity of the workouts recently by raising the incline to 8.  I don’t know what 8 means, but it’s a lot more difficult in the hill sections of the workout.    Diana and I have also started with classes on dancing from the Arthur Murray school.  It’s been really fun to do, as well as being some good exercise while practicing and during the lessons.  I’ve been a bit worried about my sweat issues while doing the lessons, but I have some handkerchiefs now that will help me keep the wetness to a minimum.

Goals for this month are to make sure that I keep sure I don’t have any diet soda for a while, and also keep tracking all of my calories.  If I can keep up that, I believe that I will stay on the slow, steady progress.  Hopefully I’ll have more good news in my 2010 roundup which will probably come sometime early in January where I will be mostly looking forward.

It’s time for yet another update on my progress in losing a bunch of pounds off my hulking frame.   This month I have been frustrated at the progress just like last month.  I have been seeking some motivation in the form of a community for a while now.  I’ve looked at SparkPeople and Traineo as well as places like dailyburn and dailymile.  They were all places which were useful for recording what types of exercise I did and following along a bit more.  Some of the later ones like dailyburn and dailymile are more like “twitter for exercise”, which were better but not very good because I don’t know anyone local who is exercising, and also I am usually exercising alone.

Sometimes I wonder why I exercise alone.  My usual excuse is that I don’t know anyone who exercises in the same way that I do.  Actually I fear that it’s because I’m not as good as others at exercise.  I’m a quite large guy, so that means that it doesn’t take as much to get my heart rate into the fat burning, or aerobic range.  Usually just a brisk walk will get me into it, although I’ve been told that I walk at faster than most (usually 4 miles an hour).  Sometimes I wonder if I had an exercise buddy, if I would do better.   The problem now is that I have worked into my exercise a number of solitary activities. like listening to podcasts and watching television or anime.  Even if I had a partner to do exercise with, I feel like I would just be exercising alongside them, not really as a group activity.

Anyway, let’s look at the progress over the last month, shall we?

This month I really got into the stagnation as you can see.  In the last month I’ve actually GAINED almost a quarter of a pound on average.  It looks like a rollercoaster but it felt like a bad time every time I was weighing myself.   Part of me wants to let myelf off for this month, because during a good part of it, I was on vacation and totally skipping my exercise, but it means that even if I just give up on exercise and stop watching my diet as closely as I am, then I am going to be gaining all of the weight back.  I was hoping that at some point, my body would adjust to the changes and I would naturally want to eat fewer calories.  I’m not going to be happy if I can’t make some permanent progress.

The yearly graph looks better, but it now looks much worse at the end of course.  More red at the end means that I should work even more at my exercise.  This month I’m going to keep track of my calories as well, trying to maintain the calories in / out deficit that has worked well for me in the past.   I really want to go below that elusive 300 mark.  Seeing the first digit of the scale change would be a big motivator for me.

I’m also thinking of switching up some of my exercise for the winter months, because of course I won’t be able to work outside anymore.  There is a exercise room in my complex, which I used when I was exercising and it was raining outside or when there was something that prevented me from exercising until it was some ungodly hour and didn’t want to go outside.   I don’t want to exercise in the snow, although it might be a bit of fun.  Maybe I’ll try it once or twice.  Does anyone else exercise in the winter?  What gear would I actually need?