stay in the shallow end

So on October 12, I hit one hundred and fifty pounds. I stuck with the reduced caloric intake for one week for good measure, and then did my last check in and switched to weight maintenance. I can now consume 2046 calories per day, which after the last few months feels absolutely gluttonous to me.

I started my plan on June 20 and ended on October 19, which puts me at thirty five pounds of weight loss in exactly four months. Here’s a chart:

The very end of June and beginning of October are clipped, but you get the idea. I’m most amazed at how linear it is. Maybe with more data points there would have been more plateaus and drops.

I think the most important long term gain I’ve made is the knowledge of what foods are good for me and what foods aren’t. For the most part foods are about as healthy as you think they are, but a few of the exceptions are more than enough to tip the balance. In my case, one of the biggest problems was juice. I used to drink two to three cups of orange juice a day. That’s about 276 calories per day, which works out to 2.37 pounds of weight gain per month. Now if I want orange juice, I eat an orange. It requires much more effort, so I only have one when I really want one, and it’s also filling.

Ugh.. too sleepy.. I’ll finish this post later.

These two kids were in front of me in line at Lowes. You can’t tell so much by the picture, but they looked to be seventeen at most.

They bought a plastic funnel, about three feet of flexible clear plastic tubing, and some epoxy. It was so awesomely hilarious that I couldn’t stop laughing.

After those picture posts I thought I’d give a new digital camera a whirl to see if it would stick. On the first day I scored this awesome picture of Blackjack.

Still can’t decide if the camera is a keeper or not. I’ll give it a few more days.

Just signed up for the vigil to honor our fallen soldiers. Here is the email I received:

This week, the number of American soldiers lost while serving in Iraq reached over 2000. While thousands of families have made the ultimate sacrifice, thousands more send their children and loved ones off to a war that seems to have no end in sight.

Today, Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 6:30 p.m. we will gather at vigils to remember and honor our fallen soldiers and ask, “How many more?”

Thousands of us will solemnly gather together and acknowledge the sacrifices made by over 2000 American men and women in Iraq and their families and speak out against the war.

You can sign up for the Vigil for 2000 Killed in Iraq at:
http://political.moveon.org/event/iraqvigils/6530

It’s at 6:30 PM today at Albemarle County Office Building at the corner of McIntire Road and Preston Avenue. Here’s a link to get directions from Google Maps

Taste of C-Ville was officially one of the most pathetic public events I’ve ever attended. It was cosmically pathetic. Let’s walk you through my experience:

We arrive at around 3:00, and pay $10 to get in. We’re given 5 slips of paper that have a $1 printed on either end. I assumed that each half was a dollar, and everything here was either $2 or $4, so no need to print up individual dollars. Of course, I was completely wrong, and it turns out that each slip was $1, and there was a $5 admission fee. I’ll admit that the misunderstanding was completely my fault, but that doesn’t change my first issue: At the minimum cost of entry, ten dollars buys you five dollars worth of food. I ended up getting some sesame noodles with chicken from HotCakes. That took four of my “Taste Bucks”. Isaah and I pooled our stray bucks and purchased a chocolate toffee bar, which cost two dollars. So for ten dollars, I got a small pile of noodles, a few chunks of chicken, and a half chocolate toffee bar. Lame. Lame. Lame.

My second issue is with the prices of the food itself. For an event that is supposed to allow us to sample local cuisine, $2/$4 is really expensive. I’d much rather have seen the portion sizes halved and priced at $1/$2. It’s called Taste of C-ville, not Meals of C-ville.

My third issue is the poor variety of local restaurants. Many local places that should’ve been there weren’t, and chains like Mellow Mushroom and Ben & Jerry’s don’t belong. Where was Continental Divide’s Red Hot Blues, Ludwig’s Schnitzelhouse’s Bratwurst, El Tepeyac’s Carnitas, Christian’s Gourmet Pizzas… Revolutionary Soup, Mas, and Bang! all would have been ideal for this type of showcase, and yet they weren’t there. I get the feeling that it was pitched to vendors as a place to sell food rather than an opportunity to market to more customers, but this is just speculation on my part.

My last issue isn’t easily quantifiable, but the whole affair felt very cheap. I’m OK with local bands and the cooking presentations are a great idea in my opinion. We arrived there between two sets, though, and somebody got on the mic to let us know that somebody would like to sing for us while the next band was setting up. At that point it went from live music to karaoke, and I could feel my impression of the event drop immediately.

I really wanted to enjoy Taste of C-ville, and I hope that they can get things worked out to make it a success next year. Here are my suggestions, as misguided or uninformed as they may be:

• Move the event to the summer, and have the Pavilion be a rain location. I think setting up in the lot where the Farmer’s Market is would be great. It would have a much more “festival” feel rather than “tent sale”.

• More vendors. Do whatever it takes to get more vendors. In it’s first year, it should’ve been ridiculously cheap to become a vendor. $200 is hard to justify when there’s no way to know what the turnout will be like. It would have been well worth the $4000 loss in revenue to have twice the number of vendors there. If C-ville were to have a “Taste of C-ville” edition profiling each of the vendors, I’m sure that would increase the number of vendors as well as generate public interest in the event.

• More advance notice. I’ve only seen a few signs posted for the event. A food festival seems like it would be a perfect fit for Charlottesville and if properly advertised could easily generate a Fridays After Five level turnout. The lack of vendors and advertising makes me think that the idea to have Taste of C-ville happened pretty late in the game.

• Drop the admission fee. Only sell Taste Bucks, and when vendor’s cash them in, take a cut, maybe twenty cents on the dollar. I don’t know if they were already taking a taste of the Taste Bucks, but if they weren’t, I’d think this would be a much more equitable way for them to collect from the vendors rather than the booth fee. Vendors that derive more benefit pay more for their space.

• I know some portion of the event went to the American Heart Association, but they never specify a percentage or an amount, which always makes me suspicious. I wouldn’t have minded the $5 admission fee if every penny was going to the AHA.

Oh well, hopefully next year (if there is a next year) will be better. In the meantime, I think I’ll put together my own Tastes of C-ville list. Coming soon…

Yesterday, I took two of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. The first is the pen cap below, and the second was this total discovery channel moment in my back doorway. This hornet got caught in the web and was frantically struggling while the spider was running around it wrapping it up. It lasted for a long time until the hornet finally died.

It made me miss the SLR I used to have. Getting my little PowerShot to want to focus on insects and not the doorframe was a pain in the ass.

It’s amazing how chewable Bic Round Stic pens are. The pen shown here was brand new before my one hour class today.

Bic Round Stics were my weapon of choice in high school for non math related writing. They were cheap, which given my propensity for losing things, was the primary decision making factor. The chewability was just a bonus. I gnawed my way through many a pen, producing frankenpens far more grotesque than the one shown above. Usually I would gnaw the cap until there was nothing left but shredded plastic and then move on to the back of the pen. My insatiable urges for bic chewing led to two amusing incidents in high school.

The first was freshman year in World History. I had already worked my way through the cap and was chewing on the back of the pen. The pen tasted kind of funny, but I didn’t realize that the pen had exploded in my mouth for quite awhile. I gnawed, felt something on my lip, wiped it, and saw the ink on my hand. At that point, my mouth and teeth were black, I had smears on my lips and face, and the pen was dripping all over my desk. I had to interrupt the teacher’s lecture and explain why I had to go to the bathroom. On the plus side, I got to chew gum the rest of the day to help get rid of the ink.

I don’t remember when the second one happened, but it was the only time I’d thought that I had a serious pen chewing compulsion and that I should probably do something about it. If you look at the cap above, you’ll notice that the rim of the cap is tapered to an edge, a result of me grinding the end down between my teeth. Anyway, at end of one of my classes, I was packing up my stuff and putting my pen away by pushing it into the cap which I held between my front teeth. Well, I pushed too hard, it slipped between my teeth, and I ended up stabbing myself in the back of the throat with the aforementioned sharp edge of the pen cap. It was pretty painful, but I was far more concerned with the blood filling up my mouth and dripping down my throat. I was in the bathroom for a few minutes spitting the blood out and continued to do so throughout the day… not fun.

In hindsight, rather than purchasing pens to accommodate my bad habits, I should have purchased pens that would force me to adopt better habits. Perhaps I’ll do that now. I’ve always wanted a Fisher Space Pen.

…this is a very welcome change

My FreeBSD box that hosts my mail, web, and other stuff had exceeded three hundred days of uptime (time without a reboot for the non-geeks). Last night the power went out longer than my UPS could keep it alive, and I’m back to zero. I took the opportunity to upgrade it to 5.4, but I’m still sad about it.

It was really refreshing to read this article where movie industry executives are finally admitting that ticket sales being down has less to do with piracy and more to do with the fact that movies these days are considerably suckier than usual.

I used to go to the movies much more frequently than I do now. Part of it happened with the move to Charlottesville, and the fact that the movie theaters here are so craptacular. I get depressed every time I go to one. It just sucks to sit through a movie on a small screen (for a movie theater), poor sound quality, and having my feet cemented to the floor by spilled soda and candy.

I thought about it more recently, and I realized a lot of my decreased movie watching has to do with the quality of television these days. IMHO, we’re in a golden age of television. Shows beyond soap operas are finally moving to more serial plot lines rather than episodic ones. Six Feet Under and 24 both play out like season long movies… if you just watch one of their episodes, you won’t get anything out of it.

It was easy for movies to compete when their budgets dwarfed television, and they got all the top actors, while television actors remained fairly anonymous. That’s all changed now, with actors like Kiefer Sutherland moving to television and doing the best work of their careers by far.

And at best (or worst), a movie can be 200 minutes long. One season of television gives nearly 1100 minutes to work with. It’s much more difficult for a movie writer to be able to develop characters to the extent that we now see in television shows.

The big question is why it took so long to happen. I’m guessing that it took awhile for a network to give a show a movie sized budget and demand corresponding production values. I think we can thank HBO with The Sopranos for that.

I guess I’ll close this post with a list of my favorite shows from the last few years:

• 24
• Arrested Development
• Battlestar Galactica
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I am still catching up on)
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Da Ali G Show
• Deadwood
• Lost
• Six Feet Under
• The Sopranos
• Veronica Mars
• The Wire

So half my list is HBO. If there were a way to subscribe only to HBO, I’d save so much money…