You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male, nor female in the way you perceive your surroundings. As bad as this may sound to some, it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, but it might. Either 64% Male 57% Female 43% Neither 18% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

This quiz was blissfully short. I’ve seen ones at quizfarm go hundreds long. I love the “this does not mean xxxx, but it might” complete cop-out.

Hardware evils

I’ve had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]’s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I’ll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn’t start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn’t even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn’t start either. So now I’m left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn’t work, I assume. I don’t really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can’t test the motherboards with another CPU because I don’t have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They’re ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a “repair” install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you’ll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I’m looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It’s got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I’m debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I’ve given [lj user=”ceilingsarecool”] to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn’t really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it’s still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn’t seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

Food has always been a source of contention for me when I am trying to lose weight. I never want to restrict the types of food - I’ve spent a long time working out what I like and dislike. One of the benefits of the Hacker’s Diet isn’t all that concerned with what food you eat, but simply that you get a certain amount of calories, it gives you a lot of choices for dining. The first time I was on it, I used ramen and rice to keep me fed. Those worked well because I was basically broke and the rice filled up the stomach just fine.

There are a lot of diets out there, and it’s easy to try one or the other just to get completely fed up with the lack of diet-allowed food that you actually like to eat. I believe that this is a major reason that most diets fail, and why there are so many of them - after all, Atkins might work great for the people who don’t have a jonesing for a bunch of fries every once in a while. If you’re looking for a diet right now, think about the kinds of foods that you won’t be willing to give up. There are diets out there for every type of favorite food nowadays, just walk down the fitness and health section of your local bookstore. I’m convinced that the final word is going to be a calorie deficiency. After all, what is dieting but controlled starvation?

This time dieting has been slightly different, but not very much. I’ve been trying to buy pre-packaged food more than normal, because it’s easy to find calorie counts for them - right on the box. Lately I’ve been eating some TV-dinner like things, which clock in at about 400 calories a piece. This means that I’m eating 4-5 of them a day, which is like an extra bonus because eating more smaller meals is supposed to help keep the metabolism up. The mass market economy of these meals is amazing - you can easily get 7-8 for $10, making my daily expense very low. They are also not completely horrible for you - most have some vegetables and protein and starch of some sort. There is also a decent variety, so it’s hard to get bored of the same old stuff. I’ve also switched some of the eating out to a more healthy fast food sub place, which has the extra bonus of also being cheaper.

This Week (Nov 24 - Nov 30): Minimum: 334.0 (-1.0) (Nov 29) Maximum: 337.0 (-2.0) (Nov 26) Average: 335.0 (-1.8) (135.0 to goal) Exercise Calories: 3172 on 6 days Average Calories per session: 528.9

This is a picture of me before I started this whole diet watching and exercising regimen. Hopefully I will be able to take regular pictures that can document my progress. This is one thing which I don’t plan on doing very regularly, maybe every two or three months. Pictures have been known to be a great motivator to people on diets - they remind people how they used to look, and more importantly point out how far they have gone so far. Usually the most dramatic change is seen in the picture, even if you don’t see much movement on the scale. The picture is so powerful that it is usually used alongside actual insane weight loss claims in TV commercials. Anyway, this is how I looked when I started this whole thing.

As this week’s entry falls on turkey day, it may be interesting to note something which has been at the back of my mind during these “special” days in which you are urged by almost every sane diet plan to just forget the plan on that day. Many websites say that cheating on your diet may actually be good for you in the long run. While some emphasize the psychological aspects of having a day off, others actually cite scientific reasoning involving a hormone called Leptin. At any rate, the line between cheating and giving your diet a little boost is getting quite a bit blurred. So on this turkey day and days after, don’t feel like you have to work out extra hard just because you’re eating more.

This week I started using a new diet tracking site. This one is more closely in line with the method I used before. It’s Physics Diet, and is basically an online notebook like you would keep if you were on the hacker’s diet. This also calculates some more stuff that would be a little complicated to keep track of yourself, like Total Energy Expended (calories). It also has a nice CSV export which still allows me to give all of you your weekly stats. I’ve continued with the watching of anime while I am exercising, but am supplementing it with some podcasts and some episodes of a BBC show called QI or Quite Interesting. There is a downside to watching QI while exercising: I am laughing so hard sometimes I need to re-concentrate on the exercise so that I don’t fall over. I’m sure it’s not a bad thing for my calories expended in total.

This Week (Nov 17 - Nov 23): Minimum: 335.0 (-0.5) (Nov 22) Maximum: 339.0 (-0.5) (Nov 17) Average: 336.8 (-0.4) (136.8 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2719 on 6 days Average Calories per session: 453.1

Most of my fitness transition plan has been focused on exercise. Get more exercise and eat the same as you did before, and you will lose weight. This has to be true, based simply on physics. Back when I was using the Hacker’s Diet, it worked like a charm. Then it was all about eating less calories, because I wasn’t really keen on doing exercise in my olden days. It worked for a while. Unfortunately I got stressed and stopped countign calories, and weighing every day. I’ve started the weighing again, and maybe I can actually fire up gnuplot again and produce some pretty graphs like the one on the left.

I’ve had an iPod for approximately 5 years now. That puts me a bit ahead of the curve. I still remember seeing the original iPod commercial, and looking literally seconds later for how much it was, and seeing how much I could sell my old player on eBay for. Having been in the mp3 scene for a while at that point, I knew that it would turn everything on it’s head. I got it and replaced my normal player for walking to and from class and listening while coding. Now I have a new iPod video, and it is the chief entertainment while I’m in the exercise room. At first I was just listening to my fairly large music collection. Then I started listening to podcasts again - they are about the right length, and I enjoyed them. Now I’ve harnessed the power of the video iPod to kill two birds with one stone: I’m watching my large collection of Anime at an hour a day. This means about 3 episodes if I skip the openings and endings. I also watch Heroes on Tuesday nights, after I transfer it from the TiVo. The only problem I’m having with this setup is that the screen is small, so I need to hold it fairly close to my face in order to read the subtitles.

Today marks one month on the diet and exercise regimen. I started on the scale at 344 and this week’s average was 337, 7 pounds lighter. I’m going a little slower than my goal of 2 pounds per week, but I seem to be hitting the right buttons at least.

This week (Nov 10 - Nov 16): Minimum: 335.5 (-2.5) (Nov 14) Maximum: 339.5 (-0.5) (Nov 16) Average: 337.2 (-2.05) (137.2 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2563 on 5 days Average Calories per session: 512.16

It’s getting around that time of year when kids start singing little annoying songs and thinking of the toys that they will be getting in slightly more than a month. In my family, when everyone gathered for thanksgiving, the younguns were expected to have a list which could be disseminated throughout the family with everything they wanted. This avoided some of the more cliché gifts such as sweaters and socks. But who’s to say that grownups can’t have a little fun as well?

It’s rather easy to use del.icio.us as a holder for your whole Christmas list. If you find something you want, just add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks with a special tag - I’m using “xmaslist2006”. Using del.icio.us gives you a few advantages over the traditional list:

• A nice URL which you can give to friends, family and anyone else who might want to give you something - mine, for example, is http://del.icio.us/jamuraa/xmaslist2006. It’s very readable and could even be memorable to someone who uses del.icio.us themselves.
• You get to put comments by each item, which may persuade perusers of your list to get a certain item, or point out synergistic items like the Two iPod things you want.
• The list can be updated by yourself, meaning there’s really no deadline for your list to be finished. This also adds a little bit of non-repeatability - if I know that someone else already bought their gift, I can buy something added recently for a better chance of uniqueness.
• You get to keep your list around, letting you get those things you wanted with the plethora of gift cards that you received, buy the things you REALLY wanted yourself, or even carry things over to next year.

Things on the list need not be completely techie - if you’re just looking for a nice sweater, you can add a general page or a representative item with a comment on it. Perhaps include your sizes as well, especially for items which come in a large number of sizes like pants. With any luck, you’ll get just what you want this year.

This is just a short note to remind everyone that the most wonderful woman in the world deserves birthday greetings. She’s still only 4 years, 5 months, and 2 days older than me, and not 5 years older, which she would like you to believe. Despite that, she easily is beautiful enough to be younger than me, and I’m blessed that she can tolerate my ineptitude.

Happy birthday [lj user=”ceilingsarecool”]!