If you do decide to try to lose the weight, I recommend The Hacker's Diet (google it). Worked well for me with minor revisions: lost 25 pounds in a few months and have kept it off.
Oy, yeah, the idea of "eat watch" has been floating around my personal memepool, though it never seemed like a great idea.
I should read that though and see if i think I can apply it.
A few random thoughts on that diet, actually:
One is, the "eat watch" seemed like a dumb idea because I wasn't longing for the order of something telling me when to eat and when to stop eating... but I can see some of where he's going with the basic idea as I read some other articles about the diet... the idea of the human being body being a machine, but not in as simple a way as one might first hope (mostly in terms of not having 100% insight into its current status) is an appealing one.
Yeah, and there's also a basic simplicity to it: eat fewer calories, lose weight. No limitations on types of foods or emphasis on "good carbs" or avoiding "high glycemic" foods or whatever. (Though you do quickly learn to substitute low-calorie filling foods for high-calorie non-filling ones.) I also like the geekiness of the daily tracking in Excel using a weighted moving average (though I found the weighting needed to be modified to do a good job of tracking).
Uhoh, I'd definately be using the Palm app, how mad off was the weighting?
In thinking about it and it's basic but hardcore calorie counting method... how the hell am I gonna know the calorie counts for stuff from the office build's caf and from Ksenia's family?
It's pretty easy to figure out cafeteria calories by finding a good web site with calorie counts of common prepared and packaged foods (e.g., a slice of regular cheese pizza is 300-400 calories). Ksenia's family, you'll have to think more in terms of ingredients.
As for the weighting, I think it is set up to give 10% weight to the most recent measurement, and I found a number more like 30% to be more useful. Otherwise, the trend figure seems to lag too far behind the actual weights.
Those Russian ingredients scare me sometimes! She tries to explain that it's "good fat" kind of stuff, but it all seems pretty damn rich and creamy to me.
if it's so rich-n-creamy, why is she such a stick? and how do *i* do that?
Well, she doesn't cook that often, or as much as she'd like.
I wish I had the kind of dilemmas that you do about technology. Not necessarily about the technology, itself, but it must be nice to have that kind of money.
As for the whole diet thing, a diet with lots of beans can probably help. Plenty of nutrients, vitamins, minerals with good complicated carbs. That gas thing can probably get to be an issue, but there's ways around it and the body eventually gets used to it. Also upping the fruit/vegetable intake can help a lot, too. Indian food can be real good for dieting, I feel, too. . .very filling, tasty and I've heard just switching to that kind of diet can do a lot for losing weight.
I don't have THAT that much money. And I probably shouldn't spend the way that I do. But what the hell, you only go around once, and I do love me some gadgets.
So much could be said about spending the one life acquiring gadgets. . .but I don't have the fullest picture of Kirk's life. . .and you probably do end up "doing good" in the world more than me, especially with the Salvation Army stuff you do that I won't say it. =D
Not that I do "enough good" but the gadgets aren't an end for the most part, but a mean to other goals. Mostly involving communication via the Internet, these days.
How much "power" does it take to communicate with the Internet? I've got a computer that I bought three years ago that works fine.
I don't have a computer that lets me draw on the screen. I have a Palm that sort of does that but in a crappy way. And drawing on the screen might let get me to do more doodles on my website.
But yes, the justification is weak relative to the cost which is why I haven't acted on this. And I upgraded a PC I didn't "need" to a little while back, but at least then I got to give the old one to someone who's putting it to as good use.
No worries. I'm just doing some "ontological terrorism." =D