Diet update – Oct 06 2008

Today morning my weight was 182.4 pounds which comes to approximately 82.7 Kgs. This means that I lost something between 6 to 8 pounds in the first two days (i didnt measure my weight before starting the diet but I think it was something between 188 – 190 pounds which was the case when I last weighed myself). This rate of reduction is excellent from what I have read and it certainly gives me some motivation to continue the diet. The going is tough and the sugar craving is very high but I hope things will get better in the days to come.

Yesterday morning I had 2 eggs and a sausage for brunch. In the evening I had 2 chicken pieces and for dinner I fried some shrimp. I snacked on beef jerky in between meals as well. I drank 3 caffeine free diet cokes and ate a couple of packets of Splenda to satisfy my sugar craving.

I played badminton on saturday and volleyball on sunday so I am guessing that it helped in burning some fat.

I haven’t decided what my target weight should be. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself. When the cravings get high, I console myself with the fact that I can quit any time that I want, but by having a target weight it would feel like a failure if I quit before that. I am just going to keep going as far as I can.

The hardest part would be keeping the weight off after I start eating carbohydrates again. I don’t have a plan sketched out for that, but most probably I would start exercising more.

Lean & Mean

It has been a while since I wrote anything here, I guess I am having a blogger’s block. Today I made a significant decision and I thought I should write about it, partly to keep my resolution and partly to break the writing block.

I have been gaining weight steadily in the past two years and I am beginning to get a bit concerned about it. I had bought a lot of clothes when I came to US but I cant wear any of them now because my waist size increased from 32 to 34. So I have decided to shed a few pounds and start feeling good about myself. A nice side effect would be I would be able to use some of my old clothes :) . I am just hoping all this would happen, but you never know unless you try it. So guess what, starting today I am going on a low-carb diet. I have done this once before with good results although I quit after a week unable to withstand the sugar craving. I lost something between 4 and 6 Kgs in that period. That experience gives me a lot of confidence now and I hope to do better this time, not necessarily in terms of quick weight reduction but in terms of getting better long term benefits ( I gained back the original weight within a month last time). One advantage that I have compared to previous time is that in US you have better access to food which is carbohydrate free. I really suffered that week in Bangalore while I was on diet because I couldn’t get enough protein & fat only food to keep me from going hungry. Going on a diet, in general, is pretty tough because the fact that you cant eat certain types of food makes you crave for exactly that. A significant factor for success is your ability to keep your mind off the diet, something that I couldn’t do last time. I hope to do something in the coming days – something that will keep me busy and keep my mind of the food craving. Maybe I will blog more or study something new or start a pet project.

Today I ate 4 eggs and some beef jerky for brunch. In the evening I ate some baked chicken as a snack. I am planning some sausages for dinner. There is a lightheaded feeling, but otherwise everything is going good. I don’t have a weighing scale at home so I don’t know my exact weight before starting the diet, but last time I weighed myself it was something between 188 and 190 pounds (around 85-86 Kg). Tomorrow I plan to buy a scale so that I can keep track of the weight during the diet period.

Wish me luck dudes and dudettes, and stay tuned for the diet results :-)

My Immortal Home

My latest sun is sinking fast
My race is nearly run
My longest trials now are past
My triumph has begun

I’ve almost gained my heavenly home
My spirit loudly sings
The holy ones, behold they come
I hear the noise of wings

Oh come angel band
Come and around me stand
Bear me away on your snow white wings
To my immortal home
Bear me away on your snow white wings
To my immortal home

- Angel band by Stanley brothers

Joel Spolsky in Seattle

Here are some pictures which I took when Joel Spolsky came to Seattle as part of his FogBugz Tour. He has written about the presentation in this blog entry.

Joel Spolsky in Seattle 1

Joel Spolsky in Seattle 2

Joel Spolsky in Seattle 3

It was a great presentation by Spolsky, who with his characteristic humor entertained the audience with lots of pokes at Microsoft. The presentation was well received by the 200 odd people who gathered. The croissant was tasty too :D .

Comments are back

While moving from my blog on WordPress, I thought that I had lost all the comments. But actually it was a problem with my theme. I loved the old newspaper theme (Breaking News 1.0) but sadly I will have to move to another theme. I might try to fix the theme on my own but being as lazy as I am, it is very possible that fixing it would remain a distant dream :-D

After I changed the theme, the old comments are back where they should be (under the respective posts, in case you are wondering :-D )

Now that I have shared the good news, all of my faithful readers may rest their worries and enjoy the weekend :P

Moving my blog again

I moved my blog. Again.

I love wordpress but hosting it on my own server gives me more control in trying out a lot more themes and plugins. Then there is the lure of putting Google Ads (and an early retirement). Soon I would be cashing in on the big traffic I get on this blog. On a good day I get as many as 8 visits. No kidding.

While moving the blog I lost all the comments, which is sad, but other than that it was a smooth transition. I had tried Movable Type as an option but I decided I like WordPress more. I wanted to try Typo but had no idea how to proceed. Ok, ok… you needn’t tell me I am a dumbo. I know.

Now if you excuse me I need to look up places to visit on my early retirement.

All the roadrunning

bday7.jpg

As of this 27th June, I completed 29 years of a mysterious journey called life. It kinda makes me nervous as I think about it. It is not that I am getting old, but the total lack of a worthwhile achievement so far makes me diffident. It makes me wonder whether my dreams in my younger days of becoming a successful adult has all been just a flight of fancy.

A million miles our vagabond heels
Clocked up beneath the clouds
They’re counting down to show time
When we do it for real with the crowds
Air miles are owing
But they don’t come for free
And they don’t give you any for pain

But if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

Actually things are not that bad, Binil sent me an invaluable birthday gift.

“I am what I am because of who we all are”

I am writing this blog in Firefox running on Ubuntu loaded into a VMware installation. I am surprised at the ease of installation and everything worked well right out of the box – the way Windows used to be (before Vista). I always installed Linux in a separate hard drive partition (without a virtual machine) . If I could manage to get the partitioning right (without deleting my windows partitions) I would consider myself lucky. Once I boot into Linux I would be usually at sea. It wont be usually more than an hour before I reboot into Windows. Ok, ok I am a loser. After a few days or months, the Linux inspiration would come again (usually after reading Slashdot) but I would be too lazy to restart my machine to boot into Linux. I keep postponing my Linux learning program and then one fine morning I would delete the Linux partition after a few months and regain that space as a FAT32/NTFS partition.

With VMware and Ubunto all this changed. Everything worked fine. I am browsing the internet without having to type in Regular Expression-like crpytic commands to configure the network settings. I just opened up Firefox and start browsing away. I am glad I tried this option. I highly recommend the Windows geeks to try Ubuntu on VMware.

P.S. The title of this blog is a rough translation of Ubuntu.

One year in USA

Last week I completed my first year of stay in US. This has been the longest period I stayed away from home. Before this, the longest period I stayed away from home was the 9 months when I went to Odessa to study medicine. Although both these periods have been emotionally taxing for me, I am doing much better here than my stay in Odessa.

I have become much more independent than I was before. I have learned to do things on my own but it was mainly because there weren’t anybody to do them for me. It was a tough experience but it makes you stronger mentally and emotionally. I am not claiming that I can survive anything now, but I think I can do much better than I did any time before. I am doing a bit of exercise to keep my health from deteriorating the way it was. Sometimes I get to play badminton and tennis. I am finding some time to see some movies which were in the waiting list for many years. I am reading more books. I have learned to cook a few dishes. I have learned to negotiate without being cheap. I have learned to be stern without being rude. I also learned to brag about myself in my blog.

It was a tough year, but I am glad for the lessons learned (and the money earned ;-) ).

Great Expectations

I am back into the reading groove. I am really completing the books that I start reading and that is something that hasn’t happened much in the recent past. I was always a voracious reader. A small mountain of Balarama and Poompatta was my best friend when I was a kid. I had read all the Tintin adventures and most of Asterix & Obelix comics by the time I was 10 years old. Hundreds of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Famous Five, Secret Seven books were devoured with a passion not shown for anything else. I had read the Illiad and Odyssey before my classmates even knew they existed. In college I shifted to Sidney Sheldon, Frederick Forsythe and Jeffrey Archer. While struggling with my engineering studies I got interested in computers and programming and slowly I moved towards technical books. This caused a slight change in my reading habit – I started to quit reading books in midway. Since tech books are usually dense and would require a good amount of concentration and effort to read the reading process would be slow. By the time I read a few chapters I would grow interested in an another book. So I would leave this one and move to another. I remember having read somewhere that the habit of browsing the internet a lot tend to shorten your attention span and ability to concentrate. This could be true since we are always moving from one webpage to another and from one window to another (ALT + TAB). The page has to be really interesting to us to make us stay there for more an a few seconds. Whatever the reason, I found my reading habit disappointing – I was never reading a book to completion. The Tipping Point was the first book which I read fully after a long period. Recently I have started reading fiction again which has brought back the tendency to finish the book. I am carefully limiting my fiction reading to a few carefully chosen titles (due to lack of time) and I am planning to write reviews of the book I read (both fiction and non-fiction). I have already written a couple of reviews (here and here) but I intend to do this more frequently. I just wrote the first review (Running From Scissors) but I thought I would write about writing reviews first before actually posting the review to give my dedicated blog readers (yes, all 3 of them) a little context.

You can see a list of books I am currently reading here. All the reviews would be under the “Book-Review” tag.