Category: general

Quick note: the previous post finally published this morning! Yee-HAW. Now, you can all pretend that you were able to read it last night, when I wrote it ;P

My diet is going okay. DietPower is giving me more calories than I feel I deserve…but I haven’t been exercising much, so maybe DietPower thinks it has to allow for my total caloric intake (if I were exercising, the exercise would earn me some extra calories, leaving DietPower free to lower my allowance to balance). At any rate, on Sunday night we had Hardee’s for dinner, which miraculously fit into my calorie limit…but Monday morning when I checked my weight I was a pound heavier ;_; So I tried to be better yesterday, and that, according to this morning’s measuring, brought my weight back down to the “lost 6 pounds” point I was at previously.

My “projected weight” in DietPower keeps going down, which is a good sign that I’m on the right track…right now it’s still well over my goal weight, but as time passes and DietPower gets accustomed to my eating habits it should be able to make a more accurate prediction. And, hopefully, if I do my part, I will be at my goal weight by this time next year!

I’m not actually sure if my goal weight is the correct weight for me or not. When I was 10-20 pounds heavier than my goal weight, back in the teenage years, I thought I was fat. Looking at old pictures now, I don’t think that was the case at all. After my hospital stay in 1997-98, AJ hugged me, and then said, “You’re thin.” Due to chemo-induced vomiting and lack of appetite, I’d shrunk down to about 10-15 pounds over my goal weight. (I gained a lot back as I started regaining my health, though.) When I did Atkins in 1999-2000, I got down to approximately 25 pounds over my goal weight, and that seemed to be fine; I looked pretty good, if pictures are to be believed.

So when I get around that point, maybe I’ll be better able to judge. I do know that I’m not interested in being a stick figure. I’d like to stay soft and curvy rather than angular and bony–and if I can keep my breasts, that would be a big plus :> (I know someone who lost a lot of weight due to bellydance, and her breasts seem to have stayed the same size–whoopie!)

I strained my back yesterday at work. Robert finally caved in and rented another office. We got some furniture and other items from a recently-closed bakery, and everything was just sort of thrown into the new room. I rearranged the furniture, then, with the help of my coworkers, moved stuff off the old, rickety metal shelving we were using and into the spacious closet in the new office. We ended up keeping one set of shelves and putting it in the closet, but Don can have the other set back.

We moved a lot of stuff, including an industrial paper cutter that has been the bane of my existence ever since Robert brought it to the office and left it in the middle of the floor. (I wrestled it into the printer table later that same day, and there it has stayed since, unused due to a rusted blade. It was a complete waste of space. But hey–it was free!) Wanda and I carried the thing carefully into the new office and put it on the extra desk.

There are three desks in there: a large executive style desk, which will be Robert’s; a slightly smaller standard desk with drawers; and a tiny little workstation-style desk. None of them have hutches, so there’s ample workspace. Robert’s desk was arranged towards the rear of the office, facing the door. As this was a good place for it, I only made a minor adjustment, then pivoted the desk with drawers into parallel along the front wall of the room–rather reminiscent of how Robert and my desks were in the original office, back before we got all the extra stuff. The little workstation matches Robert’s desk, and it actually shoves up underneath the lip of the executive nicely, so I put it there, towards the wall. It serves as extra workspace for Robert, the person who’ll sit at the front desk, or both.

We also got a new (to us) file cabinet, which fits perfectly behind the closet door. From Robert’s desk, looking towards the office door, the closet is to the right. The door swings open towards the back wall of the office. I was able to slip the file cabinet in between the closet and the back wall. You can’t see the filing cabinet from the office door when the closet is open.

Organizing all the stuff from the shelves was a chore, but Tammy, Wanda, Audrey and I got it done. Tammy also did something that may get her into trouble–she went through Robert’s stuff and actually threw some things away. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole.

The rest of his things–the stuff that was scattered all over the floor, anyway–were dragged into the new office and piled behind his desk. The stuff inside and on top of his current desk was left there, so he’ll be able to work when he gets back (we’re not sure if the Internet is activated in the new office yet).

Oh, did I mention that Robert is out of town until Tuesday? Because really, this sort of crazy office arranging never gets done when he’s around. He always finds something else for everyone to do ;D

I wonder what his reaction will be…

So there was a lot of shoving furniture around and heavy lifting, and later on last night I realized my back was in a world of hurt ;P It’s feeling a bit better this morning after a nice hot shower, which is good.

I got up at 5 instead of 6 today, and wouldn’t you know, I feel so relaxed. I should definitely resume my old schedule.

In more health news, I started taking estrogen and progesterone yesterday. I’ll be taking the estrogen continually, and the progesterone for 10 days. After 10 days, when I stop the progesterone, I should have a period. This is “hormone therapy”.

I’ll go through six menstrual cycles–six months of therapy–to see if my body will start ovulating on its own. The therapy is like a kickstart to the ovaries. If I have any irregular bleeding during the six months, that could mean I’ve already started doing things on my own, at which point I’ll tell the doctor and probably stop hormones. If, after the six months, I don’t continue having regular periods, we’ll do another six months of therapy. So we’re looking at what could be as short as a few months to as long as a year and a half before we really know anything.

There is a marginal, slight, virtually nonexistent chance of getting pregnant while on hormone therapy. I wish the doctor hadn’t told me that :>

It’s like something out of a cartoon! Remember that episode (of Freakazoid!?) with the supervillain (Guitierrez? The Internet tells me nossing!) in low-security prison, with waiters, drinks, cell phones, and a huge golf course? Drug smugglers in the Phillippines are living the dream.

Support our troops! Yes, support our troops, and their Constitutional right to have public sex at the Alamo.

I recently watched an episode of Africa on PBS that told of a tribe living in what seemed to be an oasis; they had a very interesting cooperative relationship with a family of crocodiles living in the water. The village shaman/butcher would feed the crocodiles, and in return, the crocodiles didn’t attack the humans. Interestingly, while they were well-fed and reproduced regularly, the crocodiles’ population stayed stable. It was really kind of neat.

In Australia, however, where symbiosis of man and nature isn’t quite as complete, crocodiles must endure the occasional inevitable granny attacks.

Ah, if only this kid had remembered what Smokey the Bear used to say. (I’m sure there was something about spark arresters in one of those educational films…)

And there you have it.

I’m in the mood to search for Freakazoid! episodes on the Internet now :D

[I’ve been trying to put this post up for almost 40 minutes now. I don’t know why Blogger’s having so many problems lately, but it’s really starting to get on my nerves. Oh well, whenever it publishes, it publishes. ;P]

May as well add this one, since I can’t seem to actually publish this post. Ron Jeremy was goatse’d! And it’s not really all that spectacular! But I guess it’s funny.

“I’m on top of the world right now, because everyone’s going to know that I can shove more than three burgers in my mouth!”

Yes, Ezra, we’re all very proud.

This was the first I’d heard of the National Institute for Japanese Language, which at first blush I assumed to be similar to L’Academie Francaise. It appears, though, that rather than purifying for purification’s sake, NIJL seeks understandability across age groups. So, borrowings that cannot be understood by senior citizens are purged from the official language used in government publications, broadcasts, etc. (I’m not sure how far this purging is enforced.)

However, this purge seems to be only one of NIJL’s many functions. Primarily, they seem to be linguists!

The things they’ve done sound remarkably like things I’m interested in studying. Look at that table of contents! Wow!

I randomly picked this summary as an example (II.2.6. Japanese Homonymy and Its Problems, 1961):

It is said that there are many homonyms obstructing communication in modern Japanese. The degree and characteristics of the obstruction are not uniform, however, the purposes of this study were to determine the real degree to which the semantic ambiguity of homonyms occurs, to analyze the factors working to distinguish homonyms, and to see what problems are encountered in the promotion of communication.

There is considerable ambiguity in some homonyms and not in others. We therefore classified homonyms first, laying down the following criteria: (1) sociological differences, (2) grammatical differences, (3) idiomatic or non-idiomatic, (4) differences in tones, (5) productivity, and (6) frequency.

Besides these characteristics of homonyms themselves, the discrimination of homonyms is influenced by the users’ knowledge. On this point we made an experiment using students of high schools and universities. We found that all homonyms can be discriminated to some extent either by characteristics of the words themselves (for example, part of speech, idiomatic usage, productivity, word-construction, etc.), by phase differences, or by context. It was also made clear that few homonyms except homonymic synonyms have no clue of discrimination. It was also established that the problems of homonyms greatly depend upon the readers’ age and experience.

I’m going to save this pdf and start reading it. This is fascinating. I sort of doubt that the full works are available in English, but I’m definitely going to look into it.

Did you know that there are two ways to determine who will be the next President without looking at poll numbers? Yes! It’s true!

First, you can watch the Washington Redskins play against the Green Bay Packers this Halloween.

Second, you can check how many Halloween masks of each candidate were sold.

These methods are time-proven and highly scientific. Plus, they’re absolutely realistic, as they don’t bother with third party candidates at all.

Caveat: There’s no word yet on how advertising for the Halloween masks will have an effect on the outcome (especially since there is a “cast your vote! buy a mask!” link on the page). Due to that inconsistency, I put more faith in the Redskins game as a predictor.

In 2000, I voted for libertarian candidate Harry Browne (look at how many presidential candidates there were in 2000!) because I liked what he had to say. Nowadays, I find myself liking Michael Badnarik, for the most part, but I’m afraid to vote for him because then a candidate I really don’t want in office might be elected. The main reason that this is a legitimate concern is not because there’s precedent, but because nobody knows or cares about a so-called “third party” candidate. Recent events at the Presidential Debate in St. Louis give us a clue as to why.

These candidates aren’t trivial, but they are treated that way by the press and by the structures that currently exist for electing a president. Here‘s a good (if brief) article from PBS on the subject.

Because I feel that this is totally stupid, I’m going to copy what a Xanga user named Mellifluous posted to her blog this morning.

On October 8th at 9PM, two third party candidates were arrested for attempting to enter the Washington University complex holding the second presidential debate. The candidates, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party, chose civil disobedience to fight the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Over half of Americans believe third party candidates should be included, yet politicians continue to funnel public funds into the bi-partisan Commission. S.W.A.T. teams were used to deny the will of the American people while mainstream media ignored this historic event, a shameless suppression of political diversity.

Americans deserve to know about the unjust takeover of our political process. I posted this to take matters into my own hands. If you believe that real democracy thrives on diverse political voices and that it’s time to use alternative methods to support these voices, post this in your Xanga, profile, or Livejournal, or e-mail it to those who care.

5 [Japanese] arrested for auctioning pirated anime online

It would appear that Dragon Ball is much more popular than Doraemon. I don’t think Goku has a train, though…

Thanks to Nate for the title quote, referring to the following ZOMG headline from Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough.

U.S. nuke city to correct Einstein misspelling

In the UK, they use plural verb inflection when talking about groups, e.g., “Nato have come to a resolution” instead of “NATO has come to a resolution”. Think about that, and then you’ll see how I was interpreting that headline.

And then you’ll get Nate’s joke!

The weird devices on the walls of women’s bathroom stalls in Japan have been around at least since March of 2003, and I believe I saw some in 2001, but Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough has only recently picked up on it.

I kept setting it off by accident in the bathroom of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. What’s making that canned flushing noise? I’d wonder, frantically twisting around. Finally I spotted the motion sensor, right next to my left arm. Even after finding it I couldn’t help but set it off, so I gave up and let it keep making noise.

At the time, I had no idea what its use was, and I kept wondering if I was messing something up. It was only later that the thought occurred to me that it might be there for privacy.

I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t decided “What the hell, I can’t keep going under my limit” and eaten four spoonfuls of…vanilla icing ;P

I’ve lost 2.5 pounds so far on this diet lifestyle change. That’s not really amazing; you typically lose 10 pounds the first week of any change to your diet. It’s what happens after that that’s critical. I’m still happy to see the numbers go down, though.

My back has been killing me again lately. I guess the pain comes and goes. For awhile there I was feeling fine. Oh well.

I got my voter registration card in the mail yesterday. Whee.

“Thank God nothing happened to the victim,” Dearmas told the TV station. “We are very fortunate for that.”

“But things could have been much worse,” he added, possibly considering the awesome power of the Dark Side.

This article (thanks, Shade) is just full of horrible jokes.

Tipsters are urged to call the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, and maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi as well.

Yeah, what’s Obi-Wan going to do about it? Keel over?

…but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to steal the original poster’s thunder (whoever it was who made this brilliant picture).

In any case, I can’t find a good link to it, so I’m going to archive it here, for use in thwapping bad spellers.

ROUGE LEADER!

This should be obvious to anyone who’s read my journal for any length of time.

But things keep happening to make me feel unimportant.

It’s only logical that a person would be more interested in a love interest than in a friend. Love interests are far more exciting.

But I’m still jealous as all hell.

I started back at level 1-1 to try and build up a bunch of lives to use in 13-1. This plan was working pretty nicely until around level 8 or so…then I started dying. By the time I made it to level 12, I was down to the same number of lives I would have normally had if I’d just started playing on 12-1. :P I lost those quickly, and now I have the option of either starting over, or just trying to beat my way through 12 and hope I can somehow pass 13-1. I’ve been doing the latter, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful. I barely make it through 12-1!

The only thing I can think of that has psyched me out about this, and that fits the timing, is the fact that my coworker, who took up Zuma recently, has already beaten 13-1. Now I go into it with the opinion that since I’ve been playing level 12 for months, I should be able to beat it easily. And that’s just not the case.

My shots have been sloppy, and I think my tactics are distracted. I think it must be because I feel like I’m in a game of catch-up.

I tried not to let it concern me when she told me she’d beaten the game. I congratulated her, and I seriously didn’t think I was letting myself fall into jealousy. But I’ve been sucking at the game ever since…so that’s probably all it is.

It’s pretty ridiculous to be crippled like this over a game.

DietPower nagged me this morning because I only had 1138 calories yesterday. (1138!) I would have eaten more, but I couldn’t have breakfast due to some labs that had to be taken after work. So I didn’t eat anything until around 11 or 12, which is when I had some rigatoni leftovers. After that, I sat around drinking water until, bored, I took a nap. And after that, I went to Mari’s, and we went for that hour-long walk that burned (apparently) 315 calories. Finally I made it home and marinated some salmon, jury-rigged a pan to broil them in (I put aluminum foil over a rack that is evidently supposed to be used for a roast, and placed it in a 9×13 pan), and steamed some brown rice.

That really was all I ate yesterday. So biiiiiiiiiiiii da, DietPower.

I’m looking forward to seeing the numbers when this program has enough data to make a meaningful projection. I’m also wondering what’s up with my metabolism. I really have no idea what “metabolic rate” means (it’s 2418, from the current data). According to DietPower’s website, it’s

The rate at which your body burns calories. The faster your metabolism, the more you must eat to maintain your weight.

2418 seems like a big number, but I have nothing to compare it to.

Anyway, I don’t want to get into the habit of undereating. That will lead to burnout, I’m sure. If I’m not hungry, I won’t eat, but I was ravenous this morning when I couldn’t have breakfast. So, I’m going to have breakfast now.