Max: Zeroing In

I am fat.

Right now I am about 15 pounds shy of the most I have ever weighed. I lost those 15 pounds over the course of the last two months. I decided to do what I always knew I needed to do. I cut back on calories and started to exercise more. That is what it boils down to - burning more calories than one takes in.

I made two changes to my diet. One, I have started to eat way more fresh fruit and veg than I ever have. This has many advantages. One, fruit and veg are just plain healthy. Two, they are low cal. Third, and most useful, they have a lot of bulk per calorie. That means that instead of eating some miniscule diet bar that doesn't even begin to fill me, I can cram myself full to bursting with carrots, celery, apples, clementines etc while consuming way fewer calories than I used to. The sort of food that used to be the majority of my diet is now the minority. I have cut nothing out. Nothing is forbidden. I still eat the same stuff I did before. I have just increased the fruit and veg and decreased everything else.

The second change been switching to Coke Zero. One of my major vices has been fizzy caffeine, mostly in the form of Coke. Every now and then I have tried to switch to diet soda, unsweetened tea, black coffee and just about anything else to get my caffeine fix. The taste always drove me back to regular Coke. That changed when I discovered Coke Zero. I don't know what makes Coke Zero different from Diet Coke. The list of ingredients seems to be similar, but the taste is way better. It doesn't taste like regular Coke. It tastes more like it is half regular Coke and half Diet Coke. But it is close enough. Given that I used to drink 6 or more cans of Coke a day at 140 calories a can, finding an acceptable calorie-free alternative has been a big help in cutting back on calories.

Of course, I have only lost 15 pounds. Once I lost 40 pounds before giving up. We'll just have to see if I can lose the 150 pounds I still have hanging over my belt.

Jericho: Take a bite of THIS!

The Mac vs. PC wars have raged for years. I'm a way-back Mac fan as you all know - but I removed myself from the wars a while back. They are all just computers, they all have their advantages and draw backs and most of us do not put the awesome computing power on our desktops to anything resembling a real test. You gamers are just insane, might I add, but in a good way!

However, now and then, a product comes around that brings out the Mac Evangelist inside of me. Have a look at this. Yes, that's a QUAD processor, 4 2.5 Ghz G5s. These are still RISC processors - none of that X86 drek - yet. Look deep at the specs - this thing can support 16GB of RAM - that's 16 gigabytes of memory. Remember the days, oh, say, seven years ago when a 6GB hard drive was WOW big? Ha!

For all you Mac haters out there, open your eyes and your wallets. Yes, it's the price of a KIA, but the gamers out there spend that much cash yearly keeping up with the latest video cards. You gamers, imagine running VitualPC (a Microsoft product!) on this Mac and running your games from there! Quad processors, gigabytes of RAM, 228MB of video RAM - yeah! When the gamers of the world start seeing products like this and realizing they can have the best, instead of cobbling together some crap that usually falls apart pretty quick, dealing with the hourly security patches to Windows, the market will change. Before they released Quake III, id software admitted that developing on the Mac was easier than the PC, that's why they released the Quake III beta for the Mac before the PC.

In short, it's pretty - damned pretty. I'll get off my Apple crate and let you all think about this.

Max: Merry Greed Season

My Wishlist is large and mighty. You would be wise to shower me, your future king, with many gifts.

Jericho's Wishlist is a small, sad thing. But it would be kind of you to gift my future court jester.

Max: Seeing Is Disbelieving II

More visual weirdness.

Jericho: Gadgets

In one of our more serious we're-going-to-go-to-the-gym-a-bunch moments, my wife and I decided to buy some MP3 players. This was almost two years ago now. We couldn't afford the outrageously steep prices on the iPods of the day. So, we bought Rio S10s. We paid like $80 each. Compared to the $250 iPod, this was a bargain. The Rio came with 64MB memory, that's like 15 songs, two if they are from Yes. But, the coolest bit on the Rio was the fact that it has an SD Card slot. I smelled the air and foresaw the SD Card blooming in a couple of years. For once, I was actually right! At the time, SD cards were still expensive, a 512MB card was a $200 item, but I knew they would get better.

A while back, Steph and I updated our players with 256MB cards. We paid $45 each. At that point, the iPod Shuffle was hitting the market. At $99 for 512MB, I felt odd paying $45, but, I just couldn't cost justify dumping my investment in my player that still worked. I also sat down to fill my 300+MB of space and had trouble. I spent one afternoon ripping CDs to three different computers. Then, I couldn't make my work PC see my Mac or my PC laptop. So, I ended up dragging a bunch of music to my Mac via a 128MB flash drive. That was slow going. By the time I was done, I was so frustrated that I ended up adding maybe 50MB of music and calling it quits. I never went back and filled up my expansion.

Recently, I have been again desiring a serious MP3 player, and Steph and I have been flirting with going back to the gym that we pay way too much for every month. Not to mention that I would love some music on the bus when the kids go into screech mode, or on the plane with all the travel I have done recently and on our up-coming vacation in Dec. But, I already have an investment, don't I? So, Steph did the smart thing and bought me a 1GB SD card for my birthday. At $75, it's cheaper than a 1GB Shuffle and it has a display. When I think about it, we have spent $200+ on my player and over a $100 for Steph's player. However, the great thing is that we have been looking at cameras with SD slots, we'll be able to recycle our memory - can't do that with an HD based player - yet.

I have been slowly ripping all of my CDs to my machine at work. But, when I tried to hook up my Rio to that PC, it was a no go. They have locked down these machines so tight that even my flash drive is no longer recognized. But, for whatever reason, my USB card reader still works. *Sigh.* So much for consistency. I pulled out the gig card, shoved it in the reader and down loaded about 700 MB of selected groovy goodness. Of course, when I loaded the card back into the player, the player couldn't see the expansion card. *Double Sigh*

At home on the PC laptop, since I am nearly Macintosh free these days, I pulled everything off the card via the reader and erased the card. The Rio documentation recommended formatting the card and the internal memory together. So, I opened iTunes and connected the player with expansion card installed. No joy, iTunes can't see the player at all. I was used to using the player on iTunes on the Mac, Rio made plug-ins that allow iTunes to see it's player on the Mac but not the PC. For the PC, Rio made a separate application for loading up music. *Triple Sigh Mocha with extra whip.*

After an hour of loading iTunes updates, Rio drivers and Rio applications, I finally got the Rio Music Manager software to see the player and the card. I loaded up my music and, Ta Duh, I have 178 songs on my player with room to spare. At three to four minutes a song, I have lots of music. Yeah, it's not as cool as an iPod, but when the 100GB SD cards hit the market, who will be laughing?

As if all of that wasn't enough, Steph and I just bought new phones. When my old Nokia finally hit the skids, I jumped on eBay and bought a Treo 180 for $100. I have long loved Palm Pilots and the Treo 180 was a cool machine - albeit out of date by the time I got one. But, considering new phones were about this price, getting a Treo new in the box for the same price was a bonus. My only complaint was that the battery life was exceptionally short. Having to recharge my phone every couple of days seemed excessive when compared to my Nokia that got charged once a week if it needed it or not.

T-Mobile wasn't terribly compatible with the Treo 180, they put up with anything higher, but not the 180. So, several of the cooler features of the 180 were unusable. After a year of what seemed to be ever shortening battery life, I was fed up. Steph was tired of hearing me bitch as well. I have been wanting a Treo 600 or 650, but those are still out of my range. So, Steph and I went to the T-Mobile store and looked for new phones. When I bought my Treo, Steph was jealous and bought herself a tiny(!) Samsung - she swears she's not a gadget head - Ha! She has loved this phone for quite a while. She really loved the fact that when her car charger fried the thing, T-Mobile's warranty kicked in and she got a refirb replacement! So, we looked at the Samsungs, and we found the t309. Since we are such long standing customers and we have a family plan, we were able to get a much better price on the phones that advertised on the link above.

I am just not used to such a tiny phone, but I am having a blast with it! They added minutes to all of their family plans, so we were actually able to down grade our plan and add WAP service (aka T-Zones) and picture messaging to my phone - all told we are paying about $2 more a month. Not having to charge my phone every other day or losing a call when the battery runs out from half full is wonderful. Look forward to photo blogging and entries from my phone as we go along. You might even see some tests here fairly soon.

I am such a gadget fiend!

Max: Seeing Is Disbelieving

Weird.

Jericho: Dubya! Shut the hell up!

For those of you not paying attention, China has been gearing up for a war with the United States since before the "Fall of the Wall." There are several recent examples of this. China, with it's super economy of 1.3 billion consumers, it's Communist ideals and it's bargain basement Russian military hardware, is the second place runner up for world's largest super power. The US ranks first only because we spend most of our people's taxes on the military.

So, what's China's second biggest thorn in their side, the US being the biggest thorn? Taiwan. Taiwan claims they are a sovereign nation. China claims that Taiwan is a rogue provence. Who's right? I don't have an answer to that. In these matters, might often makes right. Think I'm wrong, look at the US Civil War and then look at this situation.

Either way, if you want to piss off the Chinese, simply mention Taiwan.

So, what does Dubya do? He does this.

Junior? Do me a favor. Shut the fuck up! We don't need a third war! You are already spread too thin. Get our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and then you can go piss in China's pool. They have nukes, they aren't afraid to use them. They have nearly unlimited troops, I don't want to learn to speak mandarin.

Stop now while you are BEHIND!

Max: Happy Birthday And Shit

On this day Jericho crawled into the world. And other shit. But Jericho is the main one.

Max: CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons

Via CNN.com:

"The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement, the Washington Post reported.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents, the paper said Tuesday."

I think you would be hard pressed to find someone in this country who would be opposed to detaining and interrogating al Queda operatives. So what are they hiding? What is it they don't want us to know?