February 2006 Archives

[It's official. I suck at this whole "blog" thing. The genesis for this entry is exactly one year old. It's been rolling around in my head since I was in Maui. It's a big topic, and one that's very important to me, so I wanted to be sure that I captured it. Invariably, that meant I'd put it off. -ed.]

For some time, I've been yearning to produce/get "something more" out of the pictures I take. A year ago, I started down the path toward figuring out what that really meant.

[ed. This should have been posted on Thursday, but werk eight my brane.]

@colin_clive(it's alive . . . It's Alive . . . IT'S ALIVE!)

A few months ago I procured two 3Ware hardware RAID cards. One for slackers (a nice SATA unit, with caching & acceleration), and one for myself (an older, lower-end unit, but probably adequate for my needs). My intention was to use mine to build a fileserver on which to store backups (primarily of my photos, but also of other important data to which I want semi-convenient, networked access).

As I was thinking about doing this, it occurred to me that I'd never named a machine "Sarnath." This is surprising, since as names go, it hits a trifecta: it is a city that is both mythical and destroyed (either one would be adequate for Slackers' Network inclusion) AND it exists(-ed) in the Dreamlands (my own personal subset of the Slackers' Network scheme)

For all of those reasons, it seemed the obvious choice for the new machine. And yet, I decided that I should not tempt fate that way, (the name of the story is "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," after all!) Naming my shiny new Athalon64 fileserver "sarnath" would be hubris: basically asking for it to be struck by lightning. (Technically, flooded and dragged to the deep by lizard-men, but that's not really likely in Northern California! Though I suppose swallowed up by an earthquake would be close enough...)

So, when I finally got around to ordering the other parts, I rejected "Sarnath" in favor of "Kiran[*]." Little did I know that the fate had already been sealed.

40.2 lbs lost.

My next goal is the next lower bracket of Points™®©. That's only slightly more than a pound further from here.

My next goal is going to allow me less food. Somehow this doesn't seem right.

Actually, my next real goal is to fit comfortably into the 36" waist pants I got for Xmas. I could get them on in Dec, but they were just outside the comfortable range.

UPDATE: Pants basically fit and are comfortable -- almost. They're pleated, and the pleats don't lie flat, so I'm not quite there yet. But I'm definitely closer.

First, the frustration: I've been trapped in the mid 220's (anywhere from a pound (-and a half) to a very small fraction thereof shy of 40 lbs. lost) for a while now. (Yes, I don't care if you can do the arithmetic). Well, I guess I shouldn't say "trapped." I'm still watching what I eat, but I don't generally journal what I eat for more than a few days at a time. And I've proven to myself on more than one occasion that I need to write it down. The devil's in the details, and knowing how much freedom I have left for the day often colors my options for dinner. Plus, I've completely given up trying to plan my day in advance. If I don't track, I eat still better than I used to, but I don't necessarily eat well enough to continue losing.

Yet, for some reason, I can't seem to get back into the habit. I've also stopped drinking water, stopped taking a vitamin, getting my vegetables, etc. I think part of my problem is that I did "well enough" for a while without following every little guideline, or even most of them (I know some of the female WW folks are casting dirty looks my way right now. I'm sorry that evolution is stacked in my favor (or, at least, against yours), that it's hard for me to get back the excitement of the first few months. Tracking EVERYTHING I ate, copiously drinking 48 fl.oz. of water, etc. This is something I need to come to terms with, or I'm going to be "trapped" here a while more.

The observation is something on the flipside. It should serve as a motivator, but hasn't as of yet. I had what the WW-folks would call a "non-scale victory" (or something like that, I don't feel like looking up their terminology). I went to see Chiara this weekend in Vancouver (she flew straight there from Atlanta between 2 business trips). On the way there I had a middle seat on a 2hr flight. This caused me quite a bit of consternation, but I knew I could survive a 2 hour flight.

When the time came, I was pleasantly surprised. I won't say I was comfortable, but I was quite a bit more comfortable than I've been on trips past when I was stuck in the middle. It occurred to me after I deplaned that a good portion of that change was probably due to the 5" I've removed from my waistline. That made me feel good.

If you can see this, feel special

Nothing to see here. We are a hedge.

I have a new favorite sandwich. It may not qualify as a perfect sandwich, but it has many of those elements, nonetheless.