A week of eating differently

If you had told me, oh, three weeks ago that I was going to wake up every morning and cook breakfast I would have told you that you were nuts. But that’s what I did.

On February 25th I decided to make some dietary changes. Not “go on a diet,” which I believe to be a fool’s game, but to change the way I eat and see if that made me feel any better. My changes:

  1. Cook breakfast every morning, with protein being a significant source.
  2. Eat more protein throughout the day.
  3. Drastically reduce carbohydrate intake.

Now, strictly speaking I didn’t go “low-carb,” I just brought carbs down to a more reasonable level. The results were almost immediate:

  1. Greater energy
  2. Less stress
  3. Significantly less hunger
  4. Significantly less depression
  5. As a result of the above, far better concentration.

Many more things seem possible now that I am less oppressed by existential ennui.

The next step, I think, is to keep a food journal — keep track of what I eat and how it makes me feel afterwards.

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Diet and exercise do work (if you have different goals).

In my last post I said that diet and exercise don’t work.

I have tried both diet and exercise. Then I don’t get any of the benefits of the exercise. I’m hungry constantly, more than I am on the diet alone, distracted by the hunger, stressed because I can’t work, and generally down on myself for having such a hard time with it. Eventually I quit both, which of course means that it doesn’t work because I’m not able to keep doing it.

I haven’t tried that particular strategy very often, by the way. Making every waking moment miserable is not a hobby I care to cultivate.

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Posted in Food | 4 Comments

Fat Loss: Too Many Wrong Strategies

In the wake of Kevin Smith’s big fat snit-fit over Southwest Airline’s “customer of size” policy we’re reminded that first, obesity is a serious and widespread problem and second, no one really knows what to do about it.

Well, there are a lot of people who think they know, but you know what? I’m not getting any skinnier and neither is anyone else around me.

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Posted in Food | 29 Comments

Why apps in the browser are a bad idea (for a whole industry)

Not small web applications, obviously, but things like spreadsheets, word processors, or any custom-built mission-critical core-business application you might be running. Here’s
Why You Can’t Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands
, which explains why some businesses are finding it so difficult to upgrade to modern browsers. “Our custom web-based software won’t run in modern browsers” features rather highly on the list.

Once upon a time, companies could run very old, outdated, obsolete systems and affect no one except themselves and their customers.  Now when they hang on to these systems, not only are they hobbling the entire web development / design industry, they’re also keeping live computers on the internet with well-known and well-exploited security holes.

Here’s a statistic I’d like to see: how many zombies on the Internet are running IE 6? I bet it’s a lot.

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Understand your crazy coworkers: crosstrain

Mike Kus at Think Vitamin gives five reasons why designers should code. A designer colleague of mine has a different opinion. “Technology does not dictate design,” he says.

First, think of what a technical person hears. They hear that you don’t care about how anything you are doing works, and that sounds like crazy talk. After all, that’s where developers spend ninety percent of their time—caring about technical considerations is their job and responsibility. And anyway, isn’t the history of art also the history of technology? Technology has enabled art since the first human-like being placed his hand against a wall and spit pigment around it.

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Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

The insidious influence of Flash games

The Sprout, while playing a matching game by himself:

“No, not quite right, try again,”

“No, not quite right, try again.”

“Yay! You did it! Woo!”

I wonder if, when they record the audio tracks at PBSKids, it ever occurs to the voice actors that they’ll be used as a model for talking by two-year-olds.

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Buying sherry, a play in one act.

Kroger Wine Guy: Do you need any help?

Me: I am looking for a sweet sherry.

KWG: Haha! Ha! Ha! That is a redundancy! All sherries are sweet.

Me: …

KWG: Even dry sherries are sweet!

Me: …

KWG: Of course, this one here is the sweetest.

Me: Thank you.

And people wonder why I prefer to buy things without talking to anyone.

Posted in Diary | 2 Comments

The iPad enables creativity

There are lots of reasons not to want an iPad. It doesn’t have a camera. It doesn’t have multitasking. It’s “just” a large iPod Touch. I can understand these, although I think the latter argument shows a considerable lack of imagination.

And then there are those who say the iPad is a moral travesty that will destroy computing for ever and ever.

Wait. What?

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1980s: The Arrogance of Apple

Test Drive a Macintosh.

After waiting weeks—or months, when you’re young there’s very little difference—for his turn to “Test Drive a Macintosh” my father just bought the damn thing. Everything else we’d ever owned had a command prompt. We watched the demos together as a family. We ducked the first time we ejected a disk, since there was no door on the drive. And this is true: the first night I had feverish dreams about building folder hierarchies. I was ten.

Back then what we heard from folks was that the Mac wasn’t a real computer. It was overpriced, impossible to modify, difficult to program. Real programmers used DOS (Linux wasn’t available until I graduated from high school). We demonstrated MacPaint to one of my uncles and he sneered at it; he knew how to draw a circle on the screen using BASIC.

No, the Mac wasn’t computing, it was just moving pictures around. And Mac people weren’t real computer users, they were people too stupid and lazy to learn how to use a real machine.

When I hear people talk about the arrogance and ego of Apple users, that’s what I think about.

It’s also what I’ve been thinking since the iPad announcement. More on that later.

The “Test Drive” ad above was found—along with a scary amount of other archived Apple ephemera—at The Mac Mothership.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment

Better Democrats, Please

A coworker noticed his paycheck was a few dollars short this month. And yes, more taxes are being withheld than they were a couple of months ago. When Obama took office, he provided a “tax cut” to a large swath of the population, but he did it by changing tax withholding rules, which meant everyone got a few dollars more in their paycheck. Most of us maybe got enough to pay for an extra movie ticket—two if you’re paid monthly. Raise your hand if you noticed.

Thought so.

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Posted in Politics | 1 Comment
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