Today's weight = 178lb (woo...)
Today is also arms day at the gym.. Marco didn't get to slack off today because for arm's day there are no "rods only" exercise like he had for chest day last Sunday. haha He was dog-tired afterward.. :) I am too.. for all the time (one/two months?) that I've slacked off.. I am soooo paying for it now. Never mind.. all for a good cause.

Weight loss update

Today's weight = 178lb (woohoo).
I am also trying to eat less during dinner, saving the food for lunch the next day. That seems like a good idea. Also, trying to eat fruits now.. even though that gums up my throat (allergic to sugar?!)

Today's weight = 180lb (doh...)
well, the Great Wall of China wasn't built in one day. At least the workout yesterday gave me the good sign of a good workout -- very sore chest and shoulder muscles.. Good good.

I'll remember to update the graph tonight.

Graph posted

Ok, I've made a new page on my website that will show my body-weight graph. I'll try to remember to update it daily.

batik-squiggle vs. Adobe-SVG

I got sick of Adobe-SVG and got batik-squiggle working. The latter worked like a charm -- and turns out the SVG terminal for gnuplot is fine and dandy.. whew. Think I'll try to figure out why the adobe viewer fucked up so badly on the rendering of my simple, simple graph.

Dream phone

The other day I saw the Handspring Treo 600 and I fell in love with it. Nice and small, this time the design is actually sane (the Treo 300 and 270 both have flip covers.. doh! and wide-ass! DOH DOH!) There are one or two reviews of the phone online [Wall Street Journal], [PC Magazine], and [TreoCentral]. Now I just need to see if there are any places in Seattle that sells it at a store so I can grab it while on my trip there.

Gnuplot and my weight-loss plan

Alright.. so I dug up my old gnuplot scripts from my thesis work and started a plot of weight versus time (days). After staring at the script I wrote to plot the research data, I realized I've forgotten a lot of the stuff about gnuplot so I had to refer to the manual a bit. I also found a wiki dedicated to gnuplot at gnuplot wiki.

I thought it might be a good time to try SVG, especially cool for a graph that I can resize nicely! Turns out there is an "output plugin" for gnuplot that I can use to get my plot in SVG format. That's alright, no problem. However, I think on linux there is a little problem getting a decent viewer for SVG files. Interestingly, there are some nice folks working on SVG display capabilities for the Mozilla browser. However, it seems that while the SVG code is in the Mozilla CVS it's not turned on in the trunk Mozilla/Mozilla-firebird. Doh. I don't want to recompile mine on my linux box. :( Anyways, this page lists a lot of other available SVG viewer implementations out there. I am using Adobe's right now, but can't say I am too impressed with it as a plug-in for Firebird. Out of that list, I am most eagerly awaiting KSVG, which will be part of KDE 3.2, supposedly scheduled for a December 2003 release. How cool is that?! :) Also cool is Squiggle, the SVG browser that is part of the Batik package -- only thing is that I need java on my linux box.

Weight-loss graph?!

Now that I am on this plan, perhaps it's instructive (and perhaps motivational, in a negative way) to see the progress (or lack of it) on some kind of chart. Perhaps I'll exercise my skills in gnuplot and use it to draw a graph.. I wonder if I should also document the exercises I've done too, just to attempt a pseudo-scientific correlation between (lack of) exercise and (lack of) progress..

Weight-loss plan, Day 2

This morning's weight: 179lb (fuck....)
No matter. Today I will go to the gym with Macro, my friend who wants to go to the gym to try and lose some weight too. Good.. Finally I found someone who actually wants to get on the treadmill (or stairmaster, or elliptical x-country skiing machine) with me ha ha.. Gay guy (my brother) doesn't want to because he's fit and all.

Funny.. Last night's 30 minutes on the treadmill gave me a stiff and sore back.. I wonder why.

Exercise

Huff! I convinced myself to go onto the treadmill in my basement and I ran/jogged for 30 minutes. Treadmilling is not so bad after my visits to my physiotherapist -- she makes me go on the treadmill for 15 minutes every visit as warmup. I must say her insistance has paid off -- I relearned how to run fairly quickly and I think it allowed me to be able to do a lot of things quicker...

Anways I am now dog-tired, but a nice runner's high has settled in. One feels warm, fuzzy, joyful. It's all good.. I think I'll do it again tomorrow.

Yummy Gravlax

So I finished the last of my gravlax today. It's great. I am quite pleasantly surprised that it kept so well. It's been more than a week! I think I'll make some more of it next week, with some improvements:

- use Atlantic salmon this time (I mean, why the hell did I get Pacific salmon last time?!)
- use the proper amounts of salt (ha ha ha)
- try using regular table salt (iodized.. etc) see if that makes a difference, because Brittany sea salt is saltier, pound or pound.
- get some allspice this time, for completeness

Anyways, it's not like making this yourself is that much cheaper. Getting a pound of fresh Atlantic salmon is about $10 CAD. The salt and spices, for the amount used, comes to about $1. However, once it's done, one can enjoy it for a few days.. Or, a few people can enjoy it for a meal! :) Not bad. Curing foods kick ass. Next time I'll try curing the salmon with honey.

Weight Loss plan!

Hmm.. So after reading the report of my sleep study, my family doctor says I need to lose some weight -- he thinks that being overweight makes it harder to get a good night's sleep, since having a fat neck might cause all the problems with me not getting enough air and hence leads to all these trouble during sleep.

"So fine," I asked, "how much weight to I have to lose?"
"10 pounds", Dr Law quipped.
"Oh.. 10 pounds." I mumbled. "What is my optimal weight anyways?"
"Your BMI is on the high side.. Let's see.. I think you should be at 165lb, so for you," he gives me the once-over, "a minimum of 10 pounds."

Hmm.. So 165lb it is. I think my best yet is 155lb, but let's not set such a high goal yet. I wish to go to 165lb and keep it there first, because that will give my a BMI of 25, the upper-bound of the "optimal weight" catagory. So here, I tell you all. I'll try to get to 165lb in 2 months.

What I'll do is post my weight that I will measure every morning. To be a bit scientific.. I'll attempt to be consistant, and measure the weight after my morning crap, but before the morning shower.

Today: 180lb (fuck....)

Taste of Spain

Wednesday night Otto, Vivian, Maggie, Derek, and I went to this place called Taste of Spain. This is on the corner of Yonge and Elmwood, very close to the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, and steps from the North York Center subway station. If you go there, know that they have 5 or 6 customer parking spots behind the store, the enterance being on Elmwood. Otherwise, there are parking meters all along Elmwood, so don't worry.

Apparently on Tuesdays, there are live music performances; but since this was Wednesday, we missed it.

We had ourselves a '97 vintage wine, (which we promptly forgot its name. doh) and that was quite good. We started with a goat cheese appetizer, which I thought was quite good. However, for $8 that sure was a small plate :) That's ok, especially since only Vivian and I really enjoyed it, we get lots of pieces of it.

Then came the main dishes. We decided to each get a main course and then split a seafood Paella between all of us. I had the seafood cassarol, which actually tasted very good. Vivian and Derek had Rabbit confit. For some reason though, Vivian got all the dark meat (which was yummy) and Derek got all the white meat (he says it tasted like chicken breast and was quite dry.) I guess he didn't like it much, because much of it was left. Maggie had the duck confit, and that must have been yummier, cus Derek dug into it like he was Hungry Man himself. Poor Otto. He had the salmon puff -- when it came we all kinda thought it was small.. and Otto claimed that he didn't taste fish at all.

Then the paella came.. and boy it was a large dish. Clams, mussles, and prawns are delightfully arranged on the pan on top of the rice. Man this is not paella for two! I kinda like it -- it's comfort food in some ways, but the others didn't like it. Vivian says she had better at the same restaurant, but she comes on weekends usually so perhaps the restaurant had an off-day. In all, I think it was fine, but for the price we had to pay, not the best I've had.

Gravlax

So I decided to try a no-cook recipe for "gravlax", which is a kind of preserved (cured) salmon. This is a Scandinavian dish.. According to a web site, apparently in the days before refrigeration, Swedes used to bury cured salmon in the ground to preserve it through the long winter; hence the name gravlax -- "salmon from the grave".

Its not hard to make really -- as I said this is a no-cook recipe. All you need is to cure the salmon with a mixure of salt, sugar, white peper, corriander seeds, and dill.. While I read my Le Cordon Bleu recipe book, there are ther recipes online like this one and this one. I just tried it, and I think I get the hang of it, but I over-salted it. :)

I got gnome-blog working!

Ha. So I was looking for some other blogs to use, but then I came up to this thing called gnome-blog.. it's kinda simple, but I guess I don't need to use the webpage to post.. dunno.. maybe it's not that different. :)

This past Thanksgiving weekend Tyatt and I went to Montreal for some SEAsian shopping and some fine dinning. It was kinda fun :)