no change

Well, it finally happened.

When I weighed myself on Sunday, I found I had lost no weight.

Now, I could regard this as a bit of a disaster or I could console myself with the fact that I've not put on weight. I'm inclined to do a bit of both.

See, last week was a bit of a tough one. Firstly, it turned out that it was someone at work's birthday, so we went down the pub on Friday. That meant having a big old pub-lunch type meal. Then of course there was Saturday, where we had a three course meal at a restaurant.

Neither of these adequately fit into sensible meal sizes, calories wise, when you're on a diet. Oh, I'm sure that because of my otherwise diet-friendly eating I wasn't in a situation of having too many calories, but the point is there were sufficient calories to bugger up the diet.

Plus, the person whose birthday it was brought in some cake and I had a slice. I mean, technically I could have avoided most of these things, but there are two problems - firstly, it would mean admitting I'm on a diet to my work colleagues, which I'm not fully comfortable with, but also as part of that it'd be a bit rude to say I didn't want any cake or not go to the lunch.

However, there's also a bit of a double whammy here. Last week I was talking about how I'd scared myself a little by not feeling hungry and that I was worried I was taking in too few calories. This sounds daft, but one of the weird things is it can be bad loosing weight too quickly - as I understand it, your heart can be put under quite a strain, for example.

Anyway, the point is that as a result of that I was actually eating slightly more. Not to the extent that I wasn't still on a diet, but enough to take me up to being safely above 1,300 calories. If I'd thought about it properly I'd have not done that, so as to try to compensate a bit for the big meals. But I didn't, so I think that all pretty much explains why I didn't loose any weight.

Certainly I didn't do enough exercise to make up for it either. I mean, I tried on Saturday to arrive early and have a nice long walk around London, but of course on Sunday I was so tired I didn't do any walking at all, so I'm betting those two have cancelled each other out. And of course I'm now in a period where I'm doing less exercise generally.

So yeah, bit of a mixed bag. Part of me is pleased it wasn't as bad as it could have been (I think putting on weight would be a bit of a blow), but the other part of me is a bit annoyed with myself that I didn't think things through and plan the week out properly.

the road

During my lazy, bed-based yesterday I watched my latest DVD rental, which was The Road.

The Road is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who was the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men. And to be frank, it has some quite similar elements, while at the same time being radically different.

One of the things that marked old men as being something a bit different was that it didn't really follow narrative conventions. Not wanting to spoil it, that basically means that the later part of the film doesn't really do what you'd expect it to do.

In a way, the road is a half-way house. There are some parts to it that aren't quite what you'd expect, but others do follow more traditional narrative paths.

Let me go back a bit. The road is at heart a post-apocalyptic road movie. However, what it focuses on is two characters - 'the man' and 'the boy' (they're never named - indeed, nobody is) almost to the exclusion of everything else. So, we never really find out what the apocalypse was, or what caused it and indeed we barely even glimpse what happens.

This of course is in stark contrast to most every other post-apocalyptic film, in that we would normally tend to focus on the spectacle of the disaster itself, rather than what happens afterwards. There is one very notable exception here - the Mad Max films.

The mad max films are pretty much post-disaster (from memory) and they also have strong elements of what you might call unusual narrative. And to be frank, the road does tread a fine line of being on the verge of being similar and simply exploring similar themes.

The biggest difference is that the mad max films are primarily action-oriented, where the road is more of a dark thriller.

I'm skirting around points here a bit, because it's really difficult to avoid spoilers. I don't want to really give away anything about the film, as I think it would rob it of its impact. And it is a film with some serious impact. The performances are remarkable, the presentation is very fitting and the whole thing hangs together very well.

If I was to make one criticism it would be that everything is a bit dark (I mean that in the sense that it's physically dark, rather than dark in tone, although it is quite dark in tone as well). This is obviously deliberate, but it can make things more than a bit difficult to see - I actually ended up turning the brightness up.

But then if that's the extent of my criticism I think you can tell I really quite liked it. Certainly I think I preferred it to no country.

ouch

Yesterday's blog post talked about the main activities of Saturday night. Today's blog post is all about the other stuff.

The first thing to mention is that when I eventually got back on Saturday night (well, Sunday morning, I suppose, technically). The road leading down to where I live was blocked by a police car, one of those pick-up type trucks that Aussies call "yoots" (utility vehicle) and a low-loader.

I waited for a few minutes to see what they were up to, but it was abundantly clear that whatever it was was going to take a while. I therefore parked up on the side of the road and walked the last bit.

On the way down I asked one of the coppers what was going on and he said they'd basically chased the yoot for failing to stop and he was in the back of the police car while they confiscated the car.

What I did was go back home, change, tidy my stuff away, sort my bedroom out a bit and then by the time I'd done that they'd buggered off, so I was able to drive my car down and park it where I usually do. But what that all meant was I didn't get to bed until about 2:30am.

Now luckily it was clock change-over night, so I got some extra time in bed, but it meant that I woke up on Sunday absolutely shattered. I mean, it was bad enough that the time I was getting back anyway, to have that delayed by the best part of an hour didn't really help.

The upshot of this was that I basically spent all of Sunday in bed. Now I'd pretty much anticipated this and hadn't planned on doing much more anyway, but it does always end up feeling like a waste of time. However, saying that I did do a bit more e-baying and put up the auctions I'd planned to.

Also, of course I watched loads of stuff I'd recorded, so in a way that was productive.

Anyway, the real problem I had was that when I went to bed I was suddenly struck by the most ferocious stomach pain. This actually seemed to be a repeat of a bout of stomach pain I had a while back. On that occasion I'd clearly eaten too much and a glass of milk seemed to calm it down, suggesting it was basically heart burn. However, on this occasion I hadn't over-eaten during the day and milk didn't really seem to help.

Of course I had eaten a big meal on Saturday, so maybe it was that. And after a few hours I decided to try massaging my stomach and (huge) gut area. For some reason this seemed to help and rather suddenly the pain went away.

But by this time it must have been something like 3am, so I ended up getting very little sleep and was like a zombie all day.

dinner and a show

So then - war horse on Saturday night. How was it?

Well, truth be told it was okay. If I'm brutally honest I was keener on the (and I'm not sure this is the exact word for it) stagecraft than I was the actual play.

See, the title of the play pretty much tells you what one of the big features of the story is - horses. But, being a play, you couldn't very well rely on having actual horses in the show, not least of all because the horses in the story need to play proper 'parts', rather than just be there.

This was achieved by having puppet horses, which were actually control by three separate performers. If you imagine a classic pantomime horse, with a buy at the front and one in the rear of the costume, and then add someone else to control the head and take the whole thing through the technological equivalent of going from the stone age to the IT age, then that's roughly the idea.

But there's also all sorts of other clever staging things, like a tank and a scene stealing goose. And what I found most remarkable was the fact that even though you could see the people operating these things, it still very much 'worked'. I mean, I wouldn't say it ever got to the stage that you forgot the people were there, but there was enough cleverness and the performance side of things was so strong you were able to suspend just enough disbelief for it to really work.

And the play itself was okay. I'd been told it was a bit sad and weepy and I can kinda see where people were coming from, but I didn't find it that bad. Perhaps it's one of those where if you're expecting it to be really sad then that sort of undermines it, as it were.

As for the rest of the evening that went okay. The idea was we were having dinner before the shows and unfortunately some people were rather late - to the tune of us starting nearly an hour late. That ended up meaning that we basically had the main course and desert in a really compressed fashion, which wasn't ideal. I mean, it was good that they were willing to be quick for us, but it didn't really enhance the dining experience.

But the food was okay and luckily I ended up with the people who I know. as mentioned last week, there were partners and a few people I don't know that well coming along, so there was the distinct possibility of ending up sat amongst people I couldn't talk to.

war horse

This weekend I'm doing something a bit different.

Basically, the company I work for is marking its 20th anniversary this year, so the boss is kindly treating us all to a special treat. Ideas for this treat ere floated early in the year and there were a lot of suggestions from the sublime to the ridiculous. We all then got a vote on what we'd want to do and the winner was.. (drum roll)... a trip to the theatre!

Well, actually, dinner and then a trip to see "a show" up in that there London, but the show in question is a theatrical show, rather than a musical or something like that. In fact, the show is called "War Horse" and is literally about exactly that - a Horse in the first world war.

To be brutally frank the theatre is not my bag. I have enough trouble sitting in the cinema for extended periods of time (my arse goes numb and the combination of my weight and height tends to make the seating generally uncomfortable) so the idea of a three hour trip to the theatre is not necessarily up there at the top of my list. However, I'm guessing it's three hours because there'll be an intermission, so maybe I'll get a chance to have a stretch.

Also, if I'm totally honest the idea of spending quite so long with the people I work with at the weekend also isn't to far up my list. Especially since it was declared to basically be a "bring your partner" type event and I don't got one of those. Plus we've apparently had some drop-outs and some other people have been invited and I don't know them.

Is it normal that I do this, I wonder?

By 'this' I mean pre-list all of the potential negatives and reasons I might not like it. I sometimes wonder if normal people don't look forward to this sort of thing more. I mean, I don't know if it's a reflection of, as I say, the specific point that I don't really want to go to the theatre (if it was something I was keen on I'd have been more than twice before in my life, surely?) or if it's a more general pre-emption of a lack of enjoyment?

Basically, when I went to see my dad the other week he was talking to me about this new treatment he's on. Basically, my dad suffers from depression and he's been on this trial course where they basically try to altar his perceptions.

You see, one of the things with my dad is that he always focuses on the negative. It's actually one of the reasons I don't really enjoy being around him, because anything that comes up he will look at from a pessimistic, cynical or negative point of view. News is one of the worst things - I'll always attempt to change the channel is news comes on the TV, because rather than just watch it, it'll spark some rant or the voicing of some pessimistic viewpoint.

The point being for him, that because everything is always bad it has a reinforcing effect on his negative viewpoint.

And I'm wondering if maybe I do the same thing? I don't think so - my view on things isn't always negative like my dad.

Wow - that became weirdly analytical!

I guess I'll find out if this War Horse thing is any good on Saturday! Who knows, maybe I'll become a West End regular.

2 stone

This week's weigh in revealed I'd lost another 3 pounds.

I was pretty pleased with this as it was a fairly normal week. Or at least, I think it broadly represents what's going to be the norm across the winter.

The new plan is that I pretty much stick to the diet, but the exercise has reduced due to the combined factors of the freezing weather and the dark mornings and evenings. I'm still doing exercise, as mentioned last week, but it's less than it was.

My hope is that the loss of some of the exercise is not a big factor, as the diet is still very much in action. Also, I've done really quite well with my initial target, as I'm now pretty sure I've lost over 2 stone.

Since I didn't start weighing myself until I'd got my new scales and my first weigh in was somewhat dodgy, I'm pretty sure it's more than that, but I'm sticking with 2 stone as I don't think it makes sense to over-count these things.

There's a heck of a long way to go yet, but the main thing is I'm on target. I'm not bullish enough to actually reveal my starting weight, but I will say I'm on course to get my weight below the BMI level that represents morbid obesity by Chrimbo, which is my starting goal. I've also done pretty well in terms of loosing it at a fairly steady rate. It can actually be dangerous and damaging loosing weight too quickly, so I've been wanting to avoid that being an issue too.

And speaking of which, I was looking at what the minimum calorie intakes were, because I actually had a bit of an odd experience last Thursday. Basically, it came evening time and I found I wasn't at all hungry. I almost had to force myself to eat an apple and didn't then have my other bits I normally have in the evening as well.

This slightly worried me as it's not like I'd pigged out during the day, and my research suggests I did go under the minimum recommended intake, which is about 1,300 calories for a man. I therefore decided I would ensure I eat those bits in the evening, even if I don't feel specifically hungry, as such. Plus of course, I need to keep up things like vitamin and fibre intakes.

I guess what this really represents is the fact that my stomach has now shrunk. What happens when you consistently eat too much is that your stomach naturally grows in size. When you think about it this means that you get hungrier quicker and it takes more to fill you up.

But it's a reversible process - by consistently eating less your stomach shrinks down and gets used to those smaller volumes. And that's what's happened in my case.

This is actually what they effectively do when they do those gastric band or gastric bypass type surgeries. They're surgically short-cutting (pun intended) the size reduction process, which therefore means those people avoid the whole feeling ravenously hungry phase that is a big part of why weight loss fails.

the men who stare at goats

Jon Ronson is a particular type of journalist, but for the life of me I can't think of what they're called.

I don't mean that in any nasty sense, it's more that I don't know if there's a word to some it up. 'Gonzo' is about the closest term I can think of.

Basically, in Gonzo journalism, the journalist is generally a part of the actual story themselves. So the story tends to be a very subjective one and the idea is that it's effectively told through that person's experiences, but also, crucially, through what they personally thought about what was going on.

But the point is that doesn't quite sum it up with Ronson, because there's an open-mindedness that isn't really synonymous with Gonzo. Michael Moore's stuff is more in line with the aim of Gonzo (although really, he does polemics). I dunno - it's like a humanist version of Gonzo. A sort of "I actually think you're right/wrong, but I'm genuinely going to let you have your say" approach to the subjects being interviewed.

I mention this because the men who stare at goats is technically a fictional film, but it's based on a non-fiction book with the same name by Jon Ronson. And it's really rather good, except for the end.

In case you don't know, the specific men who did the goat staring where part of the US military's attempt to explore the potential that new age type thinking offered. In other words, it involved attempts at things like remote viewing and invisibility.

Now the point that was emphasised in the film was that this was clearly daft, although the nature of the daftness doesn't really come from the actual psychic powers themselves. The comedy is derived more from the idea that these people seemed to genuinely believe that they could develop these sorts of powers.

I've not actually read the book, but one of the commentaries is by Ronson and he suggests that this wasn't really true. The man who's idea it was had a more pragmatic approach - that by trying to reach these goals, they might be able to develop something that was actually doable.

Also, while the idea of developing psychic soldiers might seem daft from a purely rational point of view, you have to bear in mind that this is going on at the height of the cold war and also in the shadow of Vietnam. Given the mode of thinking that gives rise to policies such as Mutually Assured Destruction, you can kind of see how it becomes a kind of self-reinforcing possibility.

I mean, what if it was possible and they hadn't tried, but the Russians had?

Anyway, the point is that the film is very good - it's very funny and yet at the same time makes some interesting points. I wasn't a particular fan of the end, because for me, it represented a bit of a step too far (I won't spoiler it), but you can see where it's coming from. But apart from that, it's very worth your time watching it.

my achy, breaky legs

I hadn't really intended to bibble on about the grand prix for so long yesterday, but I wrote the blog out and then realised it was quite long, so I thought I'd save the rest until today.

When I write these blogs I do so in Word, before cutting and pasting them into the new post ting on the blog. I do this partly as it allows me to pre-write and edit them (and yet still all those typos get through!), but also because it's easier to judge the length. I like to try to make them about a single A4 page long or just under. I figure much longer than that and they'll take too long to read through.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention was how my shed sorting plan had gone.

It went pretty well.

Well, that was easy.

I kid. The essential plan of action was for me to take all of the boxes out of the shed on Saturday morning. I was then going to spend the rest of Saturday going through them, with the idea that I could finish off sorting them out on Sunday morning and then put them all back in the shed Sunday afternoon.

It didn't entirely work like that, because there were so many boxes I found it difficult to really sort them out in a practical sense. I therefore brought them all into my bed-sit Saturday morning and started sorting, but discovered I needed more room and put half of them out in the corridor that connects me and my landlord (which was the type of reason this seemed a good time to do it, while he's on holiday).

Having done that, I sorted the half of the boxes I had left and then took these back out to the shed (although in a ramshackle way - I left the stacking order until I'd sorted the other boxes) on the Saturday. I then moved the corridor boxes into my bed-sit and sorted those. y that time it was late and I was tired, so I went to bed.

When I got up on Sunday I discovered that Saturday had really been too much and I was really tired and I also had a lot of aching muscles. So, after a slow start, I moved the rest of the boxes back out to the shed and stacked them all up in what I consider to be a reasonable efficient order.

What I've tired to do is compensate for the problems I discovered when I put them out the first time.

Problem 1 was the order the boxes were in. They were pretty random and I'd put a lot of stuff on e-bay, but not in a sensible way - some boxes had e-bay stuff and non-eBay stuff and where buried under other boxes. Problem 2 was that I hadn't kept a record of what was where. And problem 3 was that e-bay stuff had to go in the shed, which was a pain in the arse.

This time I've therefore kept a load of e-bay stuff in the kitchen. I've also numbered the boxes and kept a note of what's in each box. I've also stacked the boxes in what I believe to be a sensible order.

I also have the advantage that I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff, so quite of the boxes are actually half empty, which gives me more room to put other stuff in and also makes them lighter and therefore easier to shift around.

Anyway, the real upshot was that Sunday afternoon I was really tired and so didn't have the energy to do a great deal of e-baying. I put a few on and took photos and weighed things, but I ran out of steam, so there's quite a lot left to do. In a way, that's better as the last time when I had nearly a hundred things on at once was an absolute nightmare, although it did mean I didn't take full advantage of the free listing day.

rain stops play?

So this last weekend it was the South Korean Grand Prix.

Eventually.

You see, it rained and they decided to delay the race. When they eventually got going they set off behind the safety car, but they considered the rain and spray to be so heavy that they stopped the race.

So everyone lined up back on the grid and waited for the rain to ease, which took ages. Then it started to become apparent that unless they got the race under way, there was a severe risk of the sun setting. And F1 cars aren't fitted with headlights. Indeed, most tracks aren't even fitted with street lights, let alone the mega powerful lights they use when they have a proper night race a la Singapore.

That meant they had to start the race and again it got going under the safety car, which they followed around for ages. When proper racing finally got going the race was quite good, but it was apparent that it wasn't really any different to a normal wet race.

Now there were some extenuating circumstances. First off, the circuit was only just finished in the nick of time, which meant the tarmac was really new. And new racing tarmac can be quite slippery anyway, so adding rain may well have made them a bit too cautious.

Secondly, the pit lane entrance was really rather dodgy, with it forcing cars to slow down on the racing line. Add to that that section has concrete walls right next to the circuit (apparently, it's going to become a street circuit, because they're going to build a city around it :/) and you can see they might have wanted to be more cautious because adding spray into the mix might have been a bit dangerous.

But then the problem with that is that racing in the dark without lights is really dangerous and they let the full race length run, despite the fact that it meant they really were in the dark. Sunset was apparently 6:15 local time and the race finished later than that.

So if they were trying to minimise the impact of a wet race for safety, why then let it run full-length into the night? Especially when stopping it after three-quarters distance would still have given everyone full points.

shed processing

Plan for the weekend is to get into the shed and have a good sort through all my boxes.

My landlord has gone away on holiday, so I'm going to use the opportunity to shift stuff around and have a good sort out. Last time I had a look at the small crates I was pretty sure there were several crates worth that I can put on e-bay.

The main thing, though is to go through the big crates as I'm pretty sure I can sell/throw away quite a lot of that stuff as well. I also know there's stuff there that I just chucked in a crate to get it out of the way while my landlord was decorating.

I don't think I'll actually e-bay stuff this weekend, but might do some of the prep work - take photos, weigh things, work out postage, etc. But I'm not going to be overambitious - if I get some of that done it's a bonus. The only aim is to actually sort the boxes out.

I'm pretty much expecting that this will be my last go through of stuff in the shed for a good while. Certainly I'm hoping to repopulate my shelves in a sensible way such that I won't have to go out to the shed to get stuff. Hopefully I might even start watching/reading stuff on those shelves such that I can then e-bay those too.

Anyway, in order to clear the decks for the sort out I've actually been doing some of my weekend chores during the week, since, as mentioned, my landlord hasn't been here, so I wasn't at risk of disturbing him (I've decided I really need a new vacuum cleaner- my current one is falling apart!).

The only possibly fly in the ointment is that it's the Korean Grand Prix this week, which could account for quite a few hours. Also, quite a few good shows have started on TV now that we're properly into the colder months, so I'm hoping I don't get too far behind if I spend all my time sorting through boxes.

I guess on the upside it'll be more in the way of good exercise!

brrr

It really has been cold recently.

Although, surprisingly during the day it's mostly been sunny and when you're in the sun quite warm. I mean, last Sunday it was sufficiently sunny and therefore warm for me to spend the bulk of the day washing the car.

At this time of year I'd expect to have to wrap up really warm and use rubber gloves to keep my hands dry (and so warm) while washing the car, but it wasn't actually necessary. To be fair I wasn't exactly wearing shorts and as the afternoon went on the temperature did suddenly decline, putting paid to my notion of polishing the car as well.

But then in the evenings I've been having to turn the radiators on and up and when I wake up it's really cold. I even broke out the vests this week, although to be fair, the heating at work has always been rubbish, so that's probably not all that good an indicator.

What makes this change in weather more scary is that I've heard predictions that the temperature will actually plunge lower than it did last year - possibly as low as minus 20! That could prove very costly for me from a heating bill point of view.

At the time I hadn't heard these forecasts of doom, but over the last few months I've actually been trying to build up my credit on my electricity meter. This was partly because of all the e-baying - I figured it was a sensible use of some of the money, as the thought of being in a situation of running out is not one I relish.

However, I made a bit of an odd discovery, in that the meter thing will only allow £249 of credit. I was quite a bit below this, but was trying to put another £75, which would have taken it over this limit and it was refusing to take it. This promoted some scrambling around trying to make sure the money had really gone on the key (it's a weird key meter thing), before I eventually called their helpline and discovered the limit.

According to the bloke I therefore need to wait until there's enough room before I can try again, but that'll be a while. I'm hoping (assuming I haven't lost that £75) that the amount I've got will pretty much see me through the winter. If it doesn't, it should just be a matter of one extra top-up, rather than the situation I've had in previous winters where I'm constantly afraid of running out.

I'm also hoping that if it does get cold again we don't get the monumental snow we had last year. I've always been a fan of snow, and fundamentally 'snow days' off of work aren't bad things, but the way the country's transport infrastructure properly collapsed last year was pretty scary.

It wasn't much fun struggling into work with the roads in the state they were.

gangs of new york

In the commentary for Gangs of New York, the director - Martin Scorsese - describes the film as an opera.

What he means by that is it's a heightened reality, as opposed to real reality. In other words, it's exaggerated, amped up to make broader points that hold truth, rather than showing us the truth.

I can see exactly where he's coming from, but I'm not entirely sure if I really liked the end result.

Part of the problem is that the film is very long and quite a few bits of it feel a little unnecessary. They feels like they could easily have been compressed or even removed, and the end product wouldn't really miss them.

Unfortunately, one of the elements that's really the most responsible for this is the romantic thread. The romance feels the least well developed - and the least necessary - thread of the story.

The problem there is that without it this would be a rather woman free zone, which from a traditional point of view is a risky road to tread. Films can work without romance, but it's often cynically observed that it helps with the female box office to have a romantic element.

And I guess that's my real problem with it - it does feel like a bit of an odd on to try to please that demographic, rather than something that's fundamental to the story. I mean, it's woven in in such a way that key plot elements result, but to be frank you could quite easily have achieved them in other ways.

Anyway, the thing that does work is the thing that Scorsese mainly intended - the film works as a sort of large, overblown allegory to convey things like the breakdown of society, honour, bigotry, oppression and man's inhumanity to man. Sometimes it does this with almost comic book violence, other times with genuine humour.

But it does this with an interestingly subtle and clever touch. For example, just about everyone in the film has moments of real unpleasantness, but equally they mostly have really touching moments. In other words, they're surprisingly complex characters given the overblown, stylistic nature of the film in general.

And yet sometimes it can feel a little like pastiche. So, for example, this part of New York is portrayed as almost being on the verge of descending into total lawless-anarchy, and yet at the same time you've got upper-class people wandering about the streets. If it was that dangerous and anarchic, they'd avoid the place wouldn't they?

So yeah, I have rather mixed feelings if I'm honest - on some levels the film works very well, but on others it doesn't work so well, especially given its long running length.

okay, now I'm confused

When I weighed myself on Sunday morning I discovered that I've apparently lost 5 pounds.

And I haven't a clue how.

You see, last week, while I wouldn't exactly describe it as a disastrous week, I did stray from my proper regime. By that I mean that, now that it's turned cold and the nights (and mornings) are drawing in, I just wasn't able to summon the mental fortitude to go for my morning walk or to walk in the evenings.

Don't get me wrong - I still went for a walk at lunchtime, even increasing the length of that walk, but a quick look at the old pedometer shows this wasn't enough and meant my step count dropped. I also still walked at the weekend, though even there I didn't manage to break past the 10,000 steps where I have on some previous weekends.

Also, I had a bit of cock-up with bread, so ended up having to eat an extra loaf. When you remember that it's the eating of too much bread that I thought was the reason I wasn't loosing weight before, you can understand why I didn't think it was a good week. If you add in the fact that I chose to consume said bread via French toast, you can see why loosing 5 pounds has mystified me.

I mean, the previous week I walked miles and miles, but slipped with the diet and had therefore assumed the two cancelled each other out (I lost 1 pound). This last week I didn't do as much exercise and slipped a little with my diet and yet lost loads (5 pounds).

I was tying to think that maybe there's a delayed effect from the exercise from the previous week, but then where does that leave the junk food eating I did - shouldn't I have gained weight?

The ray of hope possibly comes from the weather, in that now it's turned proper cold I'm burning more calories by way of just trying to keep warm. Certainly when I was out walking on Sunday morning it was really apparent how cold it was - I was wearing a hooded jumper with the hood up and my heavier coat and didn't really warm up until about half way.

So I dunno. On the one hand I'm pleased at the loss, but I'm not sure how it's happened. Which you may wonder why I'm bothered, but the thing is I need to loose so much weight that it would be good to work out exactly what process works best, because that will allow me to repeat it.

holiday pics

So I lied - there's one more post on my holiday, but this one is just a bunch of pics, and everyone likes pics.

First off, just to note that there were smudges on my camera lens, which is why there's the consistent dark spot. Mine is not an SLR, so because it was really bright and sunny, I couldn't really tell there was a problem on the little LCD screen my camera has.

holiday final post

Last post on the holiday, I promise.

My other goal was doing lots of walking, and this I most definitely achieved. I had set the goal of hitting 10,000 steps for every day and I managed this by both doing short walks early in the morning and also going for some really long walks later in the day.

Generally, these walks were around the environs of a small town called Tiverton. I had thought about walking along the toe path of the Grand Western Canal, which runs through Tiverton, but I wasn't sure how much the car park was and instead I also walked along Woolacombe bay beach.

The weather for this part of the holiday was perfect - lovely blue skies and a warm sun, but not too hot and with some nice breezes. The walk along Woolacombe Bay was particularly enjoyable, although about half way back I realised I had probably bitten of a bit much for a single walk and struggled a bit.

Perhaps if I'd had a proper rest half way it would have been better. Still, I got some photos I quite like.

Anyway, this was the good part.

But it's unfortunately counter-balanced by a bad part.

The bad part was that at the end of the week I slipped somewhat in terms of my diet. I don't actually think I went totally bonkers, but I did eat several junk food meals - burgers and fries, etc. Now to be fair I was doing this and still basically not eating like I used to, but I was pretty sure that I'd managed to cancel out any real good I'd done in terms of walking.

What I think didn't help was that I'd pre-ordered these breakfast packs they do and these turned out to be too big, but also not appropriate to do half-and-half with lunch. As I discovered with my diet, part of the secret for me is to have a big, sandwich based lunch. This basically allows me to have 1 reasonable meal and then a very light, snacky dinner.

But the problem was I couldn't divide the breakfast up in a satisfactory way to achieve this, which meant I had to buy other stuff to make lunch into a proper meal and once that seal of temptation had broken it escalated into proper bad eating. Although if I'm honest I had actually promised myself 1 junk meal at the very end of the holiday if I did do a lot of walking and I think I did the classic "well, let's have it today instead" and then kept having it instead of just having one, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, despite my fears, when I got back I weighed myself and it actually turned out that, across the two weeks I had a net loss of 1 pound. Which is good, but when you consider I ate poorly at my dads and then slipped a bit at the end of the week, it leaves me a little disappointed as to how much I could have lost if I'd not been so weak willed.

Still, now that I'm back there don't appear to be any lingering cravings for junk, and I've been back to the same diet.

the hurt locker

I had the chance to watch hurt locker before I went on holiday.

I must say I was quite impressed. In case you don't know, Hurt Locker won the best film Oscar and I'm afraid I'm one of those people who tends to automatically look for the negative when I watch a film that has such an accolade.

And if I'm honest there are some negatives here, mainly in the accuracy stakes. Basically, the film follows a bomb disposal squad during their rotation in the most recent Iraqi conflict. It isn't entirely clear what the time is in relation to the declared 'victory', but the impression I got was that it was after, but not long after.

So, in other words the film is after what would be the toppling of Saddam and into the early part of the occupation by US forces. The idea then is because the film follows a bomb disposal squad, they're incredibly busy, because the insurgents are at their maximum and so they're planting lots of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices or roadside bombs).

A problem then is that the activities of the city's occupants don't really reflect that freshness of conflict. The people don't seem like they're worried about the imminent threat of conflict where the soldiers seem much more twitchy. So, for example, the markets are thriving and people seem content to generally hang out and go about their daily business, which tends to suggest it's a long time after the conflict proper.

Another problem is the way the bomb disposal team operates. Firstly, they seem very poorly manned - there's only three of them - and they also seemed to operate in rather unsecured situations.

By that I mean that civilians weren't being properly kept away and any other army support seemed to be either stand-offish or actively unhelpful. For example, there's one point where they're sent in to undertake a sort of forensic examination of a bomb attack, but the thing is the bomb seems to have literally gone off minutes before.

First off, I'm not sure they'd be required to do that sort of examination anyway, but I would be amazed if they'd do it so soon after the explosion. Especially since it's the middle of the night and there doesn't appear to be any other soldiers about. What if there was a sniper or a secondary bomb?

And yet despite those things, the film really does work.

I think the reason is that it's not trying to be accurate, but is instead trying to convey things like mood and the affects combat has on soldiers.

One area where it particularly succeeds is in showing you how confusing and haphazard the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied is. You really feel of isolation and culture clashes.

The effects on the soldiers is slightly less successful, because of the focus on a bomb squad. Now if you think about it, the dangerous, maverick actions of the squad leader would be picked up very quickly and result in him being removed or taken away. Maybe this sort of stuff wouldn't be picked up if he were an ordinary grunt, but in the bombsquad, he would be identified and weeded out before he even got that far.

But as I say, if you ignore the idea of accuracy and simply take the specifics as a convenient way of portraying some more general points then the film works very well.

more about my hols

So yesterday I talked about my computing woes at my dad's, what about the rest of it?

Well, mixed bag, really.

I mentioned a while back about my diet that I was hoping my dad would notice I'd lost weight. Well, he didn't spontaneously mention it, but on the Sunday we went out to give the dog a quick walk (if the computer stuff hadn't been so horrible I'd hoped we would go out on a proper walk) and I basically asked him directly if he'd noticed.

His reply was yes, but not in an instantaneous way, more that he'd been left wondering if I had. For example, he said it was fairly noticeable "from behind" (whatever that means) and in my face (which is one of the places I've noticed myself). Also, he'd noticed I was eating smaller meals and avoiding deserts.

One of the big things that annoys me about my dad is that he is really crap at empathy. By that I mean, if he wants to discuss something with you he'll approach it in much the same way the bull of legend might interact with a china shop. Which is to say he's about as subtle as a house brick through a plate glass window.

And of course, my weight is one of the things he occasionally tries to "talk to me" ("at me" would probably be more accurate) about. And yet whenever I visit him he feeds me these giant meals that have enough calories in to feed a small nation.

And of course I instantly regretted mentioning anything because he saw that as the ideal opportunity to start "advising" (that is, trying to force stuff on) me. So, for example, he tried saying something about snacks and lettuce. I cut both of these off quite abruptly, but they really get tot eh heart of what annoys me about him.

I mean, I've lost something in the order of one and a half stone across a couple f months and haven't collapsed or made myself ill or anything, so I clearly know what I'm doing and yet he feels the need (nay, the right) to start telling me what and how I should be doing what I've already been doing quite successfully, thank you very much.

Sorry, got a bit carried away there.

For the second part of the holiday I stayed in a Travelodge and, as discussed beforehand, I had two basic aims:

1. Watch loads of anime; and
2. Do lots of walking.

So did I succeed?

Well there's an old adage that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and that proved very true here.

Number 1 failed because I'd made a critical error before my holiday. Basically, a while back the sound stopped working on my laptop and I only remembered this literally the night before I left.

The laptop had vista on it and has proven to be something of a problem child. Only now I've got copies Windows 7, so I decided to install that and it totally cured the sound problem (yet another huge tick in Windows 7's good books). However, the majority of anime I was taking is region 1 and I generally use a program called DVD Region Free to get around this.

However, the old version I had didn't seem to work with windows 7 (it really is very old) and so I installed a newer trial version. This works fine, but it turns out that being a trial version it will only let you watch 15 minutes before closing what you're watching down and prompting you to buy it.

Watching stuff in 15 minute chunks proved to be beyond annoying, so I abandoned the anime in favour of watching some regular TV box sets I'd also taken with me (I will by the program, but it didn't seem safe using the free wifi to do it). I got through 3 sets:

• The final season of Lost;
• Season 3 of 30Rockp;
• Season 1 of Breaking Bad.

All of which I'm sure I'll review or talk about later, but still, it meant no anime, but I did still do a good chunk of watching stuff.

And that's a big post again, so more later.

the return

So I'm back from my holiday.

It was a really good break and I have to confess I wish it had been longer. I also really wish I'd been able to take it all as a holiday, rather than have all the bollocks associated with my room being (partially) redecorated and the shed-based antics.

The holiday itself started with a weekend trip to my Dad's. I'd bought a new monitor for him and so stuff for him to do backups and in theory those are two very simple things, but in practice they turned out to be horrible.

First off, the monitor resolution wasn't available in the graphics card drivers thing, which was bizarre. I therefore decided to download a new set of drivers and install them. That worked okay, except I tried to be too clever. This too-cleverness took the form of trying to uninstall the old drivers first, and unfortunately I uninstalled the LAN and audio drivers by accident.

How I did this I don't know - all I can think is because they were both made by ATI, I clicked on the wrong thing in the list, but I was sure I clicked on the graphics drivers. Anyway, no panic, right? I could just reinstall them from disk.

Except it didn't work - the LAN drivers seemed to install, but the machine couldn't connect to the internet. This took ages with me faffing around, even to the extent of me getting my laptop out the car and testing the connection (it was fine) and downloading a new set of drivers. Those didn't work either.

Anyway, overnight I actually remembered that I'd had the same problem before with this machine and when I uninstalled the drivers and manually installed them, rather than relying on the automatic thing, it worked fine. I guess the automatic installer must put them in the wrong place or something?

Anyway, all that faffing took hours, which did nothing to help my Dad's PC-phobia, but eventually the monitor was installed.

The next task was the back-up and we ran into even more problems. Basically, I'd bought him an external hard drive and a new DVD-burner. The idea was that he can use both to make absolutely sure he doesn't accidentally delete stuff.

Only he'd managed to pre-empt my caution by fucking up massively and deleting almost all of the photos from his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix earlier in the year. He'd even removed them from his camera's memory card, even though he had plenty of room left on it.

Well done that man.

Anyway, there were some left, so I thought I'd show him the quick and easy process of using the HDD to back-up. Only it kept failing. Some of the photos wouldn't transfer across and what's more it was totally random - it wasn't the biggest ones or all the ones from one folder or anything like that.

So that took even more hours of head scratching and searching the web to try and diagnose the problem.

In the end I got so frustrated I switched from my Dad's account to my own and tried to transfer the files. Guess what - absolutely no problems and they all transferred over in about 5 minutes.

So basically he's probably installed something that's causing the problem, but what it is I don't know.

And then there was the DVD burner. We had to buy some burner software at PC world, so I also took the opportunity to show him file recovery software and also card readers as he's indicated he wants to buy separate cards for trips and I had to try and explain how different cameras take different cards.

Anyway, that's when he dropped a bit of a bombshell that it's probably a bit inappropriate for me to discuss here. The basic upshot was that me running the file recovery software wasn't going to be an option, so I left it with him. To be frank, my experience of these things is that they take ages anyway, so I'm not sure I would have wanted to do it anyway.

So yeah, what should have been some nice simple jobs took bloody age and weren't much fun.

And I've gone on a hell of a long time already, so more later.

hobilay

So today will almost certainly be my last blog entry for a good couple of weeks, as I'm going on holiday.

The plan is basically that tomorrow and Friday morning I'm going to do some room re-arrangement for when I'm away. While I'm gone my landlord will do the final bit of the decorating, so I'm going to more the furniture around and put some more stuff out in the shed so it's out of the way for him.

I'll also probably stick a bunch of stuff in the kitchen and in the bathroom as he won't be touching them. Well, as I understand it he won't be touching them - knowing how his plans change at the drop of hat anything could happen.

I'll also pack, which will be more complicated that you might imagine. See, my holiday proper is in two parts. The first bit I'm spending with my dad. It's his birthday and I've not really seen him much this year, so I'll be staying with him for a few days.

The second part of the holiday I'm basically booked into a hotel and I'm going to do two things - walk and watch DVDs. The first is pretty obvious - I can use the opportunity of not working to go on some reasonable sized walks and hopefully I won't lapse with the diet, so I'm kinda hoping to return a good few pounds lighter than I went.

The second part is to have a great big push of watching anime and other DVDs so that, upon my return, I can whack most, if not all of them on e-bay.

I then return home and there's the weekend and the Monday for me to catch up on all the domestic stuff before I'm back to work. I'm unsure at this stage whether I'll have the energy to re-arrange my room when I get back. I'm guessing probably not and I'll basically wait until the following weekend before I really start back with the sorting out.

There is also another potential problem there in that we'll be well into Autumn and the weather could start to play a big factor. My big fear is that we have another super-damp and cold autumn and winter and I get lazy and don't sell the stuff I need to. This is a fear because then there's a good chance of it getting wet and then going mouldy. And cold and damp is also not kind to electrical components, of which there are quite a few in the boxes currently out in the shed.

But anyway - I'll see you on the other side.

harry potter and the half blood prince

I have to confess, I wasn't a particularly big fan of the last couple of harry potter films.

I liked the first couple, when they were (for want of a better phrase) "kid-focused", but the last couple were in some sort of weird half-way house between being kids films and something a bit more grown up. Also, there seemed to be something akin to "plot extension" going on.

By that, I mean that it felt like we were being drip-fed stuff at too slow a rate. So where the first couple of films had only small elements of the "Voldermort" stuff and that worked fine, because the focus was on Harry being a kid and learning magic, by the later films the tendency to only give us very small bits of information was becoming rather annoying.

Especially since what was happening as the main plots wasn't actually all that interesting. And to some extent that's also true in the half-blood prince. I mean, given the whole thing is called the half-blood prince, you'd think it would be a central point to the film. But it isn't - it's quite a small part.

However, this time, there's the first stirring of romantic feelings among Harry and his friends and that really helps to lift the films. Now that there are more interesting inter-personal relationships, there's more of a feel of reality and a grounding in character than in the last couple of films.

It feels like we've emerged from a sort of not-quite children, not-quite teenage wilderness.

And to help out further, this film really starts to tell us stuff about the bad guy, Voldermort. Where previously he was a fairly non-descript shadowy figure, we finally start to get some proper information on his background and past.

Also, tonally, the film feels darker and more desperate than the previous films. You really get a sense that Voldermort's return-proper is inevitable - that the bad guys now have the momentum and the eternally hinted at show-down is finally coming.

The only thing I'd again say is that the film is really very long. I understand that most of the books are pretty long and I'm sure that even this is trimmed down from them, but it does become a bit of a bum-acher when you're breezing past the two hour mark.

a bit much?

So the latest moment of truth was upon my this last Sunday for my final official weigh-in before my holiday.

And the news is almost scarily good, as I've apparently lost 6 pounds.

If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure what to make of that, because that's a lot of weight to shed in just a single week. I'm partly of the opinion that it's due to rounding errors - perhaps last week I lost, say, 1.4 pounds, which would only show up as 1 pound and then this week it's more like 5 pounds, but due to rounding on the scale it makes it look like 6 pounds.

But even then, 5 pounds is quite a bit to drop in one week. I mean, where last week I was unsurprised due to a bad week and this week I was pretty certain it was good week, there didn't seem to be that much difference between them.

Sure I did do a bit more walking, and I didn't have any blip days where I ate a bit much, but we're not talking miles and miles extra and it's not like last week I ate pie and chips every night.

But maybe I should calm down a bit. As I understand it it's actually not good for your heart to loose weight very rapidly. And I don't want to be one of those people who loose loads of weight suddenly and then have all this flabby extra skin.

And I have to confess that the whole walking thing is becoming a bit difficult. I've pretty much managed to keep going at the weekends. And even when I've had off days in terms of steps it's been because I've been shifting boxes around, which counts as quite good exercise is my opinion.

But now that the nights (or, more accurately, the mornings) are drawing in I'm finding the morning walks a real struggle. It's one thing to get up at 6:30am on a summer morning and go for a stroll in a t-shirt and shorts, it's quite another to get up on a dark, dingy and sometimes damp morning and trudge around togged up in tracky bottoms and a jumper with a coat and hat because it's so cold.

It doesn't help that I turn my heating off over night to save money, so first thing in the morning it's super-snuggly and warm under my nice thick duvet (I packed away the thin summer duvet and broke out the thick winter one a few weeks back) and freezing out from under it.

And again we come back to the real issue here - I need to go for a walk when I get back from work. I mean, if the evening walk was of a decent length, I might even be able to abandon my morning walk and still keep the steps at a reasonable level. But that has implications in terms of loosing the time I use to relax and watch telly or play games.

Plus, the way I've been dieting is that I've almost done away with the meal of dinner. I mean, I do still eat something in the evening, but it's ages since I had what you would recognise as a meal proper.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not bemoaning the loss of the food (I've been rather amazed actually that I'm not actually having any problems), but I am slightly worried that if I go for a long walk I'll return ravenous and it'll cause the diet to slip.

mustaine

Over the last few weeks I've been reading "Mustaine," which, rather predictably, is the autobiography of one David Mustaine, lead singer of my favourite band, Megadeth.

The book was pretty good. It's certainly very readable and you get a good insight into Mustaine's life. What I would say, though, is that it feels very trimmed down. Of course, this is true of all biographies, because you have to hack stuff away simply in order to avoid a multi-volume overload.

The problem is more that because Dave has had such an eventful life, this means quite a bit of stuff that's skimmed over is still pretty interesting. I mean, for a lot of people that warrant biographies you can skip past big chunks of their life where they didn't do the bit that was interesting about them.

However, Dave had a fairly unique - and not particularly fun - childhood that informs quite a lot of what came after, so you can't skip that. Then he was a homeless drug dealer, which is not something you can skip. Then he broke into the music world when he was becoming an adult and you can't skip that. And then you have Megadeth, with its constantly changing line-ups and massive success, the rivalry with Metallica, his drug use and abuse, his wife and kids, his finding God, the trouble his big mouth has gotten him into, the injury of his arm...

And it's not like he's now retired, or even like his career has hit the skids, so something has to give. In this case the 'give' takes the form of a skimming past stuff once you get out of the first years of Megadeth. So the earlier years have the most detail and then there are choice highlights from the later years.

It works quite well, and everything in there is entertaining and interesting, but you do sometimes feel a bit like you want to know more. In particular, touring and his process of writing songs are given very short shrift. Which is okay as I'm sure those things would only be of interest to fans, rather than the ordinary public, but if you're looking for details on what all the songs are about, you'll find meagre pickings (as I understand it, there was actually talk of doing a separate book on the songs, so this might be part of why they're not really covered).

What also feels a little short-changed is some of the well known feuds. In particular, Kerry King and Pantera are both mentioned, but almost more in passing than "here's what happened" detail. I can kinda understand that as most of these have been healed or fizzled out, so they may not seem important now and it wouldn't be fair if the book was entirely Dave banging on about old grudges.

But what about the big one? The Metallica thing.

Well, it's clear from the book what Dave's perspective on the whole thing was and is. He's certainly not changed his tune in that he feels hard done by, although he acknowledges several times that he was "a handful."

The main impression I got was that it's difficult to see how it could have worked any other way. I mean, a lot of the book is about how he was a chronic drug abuser and alcoholic and when he did drink he was an angry and dangerous drunk. And it took him several decades before he even came close to sorting all that out.

I mean, if Megadeth wasn't entirely his band and instead he'd been in other collaborative bands (which is what Metallica in the early days was) then you get the distinct impression he'd have been kicked out of those bands too. But since Megadeth was his, you get the situation where he's constantly firing people in a similar fashion to how he was kicked out.

Now to be fair there is a distinct difference - most of the people he fired were more like 'hired guns' than people who'd really been an integral part of Megadeth's song writing. And they all went for pretty reasonable reasons, although it's interesting he admits he's not very good at firing people.

But the point is more that okay, he was hard done by, they didn't fire him in a good way, and in his eyes he should have been the guitar player in the biggest band in the world, and yet that was a hell of a long time ago and Metallica have written an awful lot of albums that got them much more success than those early songs did.

system building pt2

God, I'd completely forgotten what a pain it is to re-install a system.

Specifically I'm talking about re-installing XP on my old machine. My original plan (can't remember if I discussed it) was to use this machine as a file server and to watch TV on, but that hit a bit of a snag. Well, there have been a few snags, actually.

I mentioned before about how I had to change my plans for cases. My new case, which is all clever and stuff ended up with my old machine bits in because the GFX for my new rig was too big to fit. Well, something I also thought about doing was dusting off my old acrylic case and using that for my file-server machine.

However, couple of problems. First off, it turns out this old case id damaged, but also it's old so it's using 8cm fans. New cases tend to use 12cm fans, which are bigger, so they can shift he same amount of air but run slower and therefore are quieter. So the problem is acrylic case is broken and also very old. Also, it's got loads of blue lights in it.

I had forgotten Id' originally built this machine with the idea of using it as a sort of "show off" modding case, so when I had transferred all the gubbins (which took hours) and fired it up I was blinded by all the fan-lights and stuff. So the upshot is I need yet another case.

Especially since my plan of using this as a file server can't be implemented. Basically, I bought two new copies of windows 7 - one 32bit and one 64bit. The 32bit was for my old rig and the 64 for my new rig. But what I didn't know was that a 32bit system can only support about 3.5gb of RAM in total (i.e. including the video RMA). But what I also didn't know was that all core2 duo processors are 64bit compatible.

So essentially I've bought a useless version of windows 7. Except, I though, maybe I could run it on my old normal machine and by another 64bit copy. But this time before simply leaping into it, I tried testing out my hardware and software with windows 7.

Generally speaking I was hugely impressed. I was rather afraid that windows 7 would have horrible compatibility problems, but in reality it run nearly everything - even my old copy of Office 2000 and Photoshop 7! But the important bit is the 'nearly', because there is no driver for my A3 scanner.

And my A3 scanner is critical to the whole deal, which meant another change of plan. So, I installed the 32bit Windows 7 on my old games rig and will be using that as the file and print server and TV machine. Which really is a bit of a waste, but I have to keep using my old normal machine so that I can still use my scanner.

But I've decided to upgrade it to Windows XP. see, the old machine used Windows 2000, but my copy of XP of course is now not needed for my games machine, so I'm installing it from fresh. And it's taking ages.

See, the machine of course is slow compared o the newer ones, but also, Windows XP isn't the quickest installing thing anyway. I'd been thorough impressed by how quick it was to set Windows 7 up, but SP has taken me days.

I guess a part of that, though, is that windows 7 is relatively new, so it doesn't have as many patches. XP, being old, has literally hundreds of patches to download. But also, a lot of them take a long time to install compared to the windows 7 ones.

But also, the update process for Windows 7 seems much more comprehensive. I mean, it had lots of hardware patches and stuff where XP's doesn't. A great example of this is the printer - for XP I had to go on a mission to find a driver, but with Windows 7, the driver was there for download from the windows update site, which it found and installed automatically, so it was a piece of piss.

But yeah, it's never easy tweaking and upgrading, and now I've the added expense of buying another new case. And I should really get a better PSU too...

weight for it

Well, I'd lost another pound when I weighed myself this last weekend.

I have to confess I'm a little disappointed with that, but also not entirely surprised. See, having now established that to get an at least vaguely accurate reading from my pedometer I need to put it in my breast pocket, I've had something of a shock about my walking. Previously I thought I was doing okay, but the pedo has revealed that I must actually have been falling some way short.

I therefore decided I was going to try getting up even earlier and going for a longish walk first thing, rather than the shortish stroll I've been doing. This did not work well.

The real problem is my totally weird behaviour when it comes to going to work. I mean, I don't officially start work until 9am, but I generally get to work at about 8am. And I honestly don't really know why.

Part of it may be that I'm a bit of a morning person. I like being up before everyone else. One of the things I like about my morning walk is that most of the rest of the world (as it were) is still sleeping.

Part of it is traffic. The route I use to work involves a roundabout that causes a lot of delay. Generally speaking, during term time, if I get there after about 7:45 it will add at least 15 minutes to my journey time. Now considering my journey to work is about 30 minutes on a morning, you can see how that's nor much fun.

Also, I have a particular loathing for sitting in traffic jams. I will actively seek out and use alternative routes even if they are much longer if it means I can avoid sitting in a jam. Even if the extent that the extra time taken on the alternate route might outweigh the time spent in the jam.

It's because it feels like utterly wasted time.

Another part of it is that it's part of my campaign to get RED to shift to flexible working. Id' love to be able to go home at 5 instead of 5:30. Or to save up and toddle home at 3:30 on a Friday. Or even take an extra day off.

But I don't think these really explain it. I think the real explanation is that I established the time I get up when I last worked at dstl (where they do have flexi) and I have simply stuck with it ever since. In other words, it's a routine I've now established and for me that's difficult to alter.

So when I started on the whole walking thing, I started getting up at 6:30, rather than my usual 6:45. The idea was that this would let me go for a 15 minute walk and still maintain the same basic schedule in the morning. And it worked well, but then I discovered the fact that my pedo readings were way off, so I started thinking about how I could squeeze in extra walking.

And the answer I came up with was to get up at 6:15 and go for a longer walk - to do my Saturday and Sunday walk. That way I'd easily bump up the mileage. Only there's a big problem - I just can't get up at 6:15 and go for a long walk like that. It's a real struggle, so all I end up doing is the same short walk and then getting into work even earlier!

Of course, I know the real answer. The real answer is to add an extra walk to when I get home. Problem there has been that all this fannying around with boxes and decorating my room and e-bay rubbish has meant that I'd just not had the time to do that.

I guess after my holiday when all will hopefully be sorted I can do a more sensible, planned routine and do the walk after work.

Anyway, last week I struggled to get even my minimum amount of walking in. I've been making so many trips to the post office to post e-bay stuff and spending the evenings parcelling it all up that I couldn't really do as much walking as I'd have hoped, despite the whole attempt at getting up even earlier.

It also didn't help that I wasn't quite as strict with the diet as I had been. I mean, I didn't completely fall off the proverbial wagon, but there were certainly a couple of days of non-plan eating.

I could blame this all on the horrible disruption I've been experiencing as part of the room redecorating sage, but the truth is I should be working around that.

new PC

I've been building a new PC.

Well, no, that's not quite the entire story. I have been building a new PC, but I've also been rationalising my existing PCs.

I currently have 5 PCs in various states of working order and of various performance levels. I also have several of the (now famous) plastic crates worth of "PC gubbins" out in the shed.

The idea is to eventually end up with 3 computers.

The first will be a dedicated gaming rig, which is the new computer I'm building. This is a really powerful machine, the juicy bits of which are a quad-core, 2.8ghz core i7 chip, 8gb of RAM (using 4*2gb sticks to take advantage of hyper threading), a Velociraptor 2 drive, which spins at 10,000RPM and is SATA 2 (couldn't afford one of the SATA 3 ones), and a 5970 ATI card, which has, I believe, 2gb of RAM and a dual-core processor with a clock speed of 1ghz, which, when you think about it, is like having what was a reasonably good computer from a few years ago sat inside my computer :/.

It's also going to be running windows 7 64bit and should basically be able to cope with anything the gaming world can throw at it for a good few years to come.

The second machine is what I'm currently using as my games machine. The idea is that I'll upgrade this to windows 7 32 bit and will use it as my regular, run of the mill machine. However, I'll also be able to play older games on it using the windows 7 XP mode thing. I'm also updating it to have two relatively cheap ATI cards running in cross-fire (more an experiment than a necessity, if I'm honest) and am bumping up the RAM.

The third machine will be what I'm currently using as my regular machine, but will essentially become a file server with my printer on it and also a whole bunch of hard-drives for storing stuff and doing back-up, etc. I'm also going to put this machine next to my TV, so I can watch stuff on it (really, my new TV is more like a monitor). I'm upgrading this machine with some more RAM too as it was cheap, but also, crucially, a Blu-Ray drive, so I should be able to watch Blu-Ray stuff (well, if I ever buy a Blu-Ray disk that is :/).

Everything else I'll put on e-bay and then, since most of it is so old and won't sell, I'll take it all down the recycling place.

It's been ages since I last built a machine and stuff has moved on quite a bit, but some things stay the same. The main thing that stayed the same is the fact that I made some gigantic cock-ups.

The main cock-up this time was with the power supply. When I was putting the system together, I started out with my absolute dream system, which cost a small fortune, and then stepped things back to a more affordable level. However, I think I must have gotten rather mixed up with the case and power supply.

Basically, the case I bought has a power supply that's recommended for it and initially I was buying the pair. But I think at some point I decided to look for cheaper alternatives, and managed to confuse myself that I'd changed the case, so I picked a different power supply.

Except I hadn't changed the case, and the case has an odd design in that the power supply is at the bottom, so you need rather long cables and the supply I bought fell short. Now, this wouldn't be such a problem, because my other supply has super long cables, but the new PSU is also not sufficiently powerful to run both the cross-fire graphics cards if I swap them over.

So, in other words, I've had to buy the first PSU I picked as well :/.

My existing games machine case is actually an over-sized one and it was originally my intention to put the new gubbins in there. However, when the new case turned up, it was a really nice case with some neat features, so I tried to put it in there. But, as well as the unusual design, I also found that the graphics card just wouldn't fit.

Now to be fair, that's not really the fault of the case, because the card is an absolute monster. I was actually quite shocked at the size of the card when it turned up. It's actually longer than the motherboard is wide. In fact, it's almost as big as the motherboard is tall!

Which kinda backs up what I was saying at the beginning about the graphics card being like a mini-computer.

an end in sight?

In theory, today is going to be the last day my landlord need to get into my flat to do decorating.

Well, no, that's not true - today is the last day before I go on holiday and he does the final phase. The final phase, as I understand it (though stuff seems to change constantly) will be to paint the newly installed wallpaper, wash the carpet and wash the curtains.

He had planned to paint the ceiling, but instead he's washed that. Also, there was mention of touching up wallpaper that's above the dado rail (the new stuff is going in below the rail) and repainting the skirting and window ledges (the gloss paint bits, as opposed to the emulsion on the wallpaper). However, I haven't a clue whether he's still going to be doing those.

As mentioned, everything seems to change every time I ask him about it. Originally, he wasn't going to do the new wallpapering until I was gone, for example, but that's what he's supposed to be doing today. What he's been doing was stripping the wallpaper in preparation for this and that was done in bits over a few days.

The entire wallpapering he reckons he can do in one day, because his mate is going to help him. That seems like a very generous mate to me, and I'm basically expecting to go back tonight and find it half done. I think they're being over-ambitious.

What does strike me mainly though is firstly why are they painting the wallpaper? This seems daft to me, but I must confess I know almost nothing about decorating.

But I'm also struck that, if a mate was available and my landlord's wife chipped in they didn't need to do all this pre-emptive bollocks (and make my life horrible) at all. I mean, when I'm gone they can move the furniture for easy access and then you're talking 1 day for stripping and cleaning, 2 days for wallpapering, (or 1 is help available) 1 day for painting (if that - if you don't bother with the gloss stuff, which is fine, then it seems more like half a day to me) and then maybe 2 days for carpet cleaning (do half of it, let it dry, move furniture, do rest, let it dry).

So that's 6 days effort if you're doing it on your own, probably only 4 if you can get someone to help. I'm going to be away for 7 days, so it all fits in.

And even if you do the stripping and cleaning beforehand to give yourself a bigger comfort margin, then you could do that in the last week before I go. I mean, they won't get access to my room until the 2nd of October, so that means I've now got a further two weeks of completely disrupted living because he's done this crap so early.

Which is, I might add, on top of the last week of the same disruption and a good couple of weeks before that pissing about with the boxes, shed and e-bay.

It all just smacks of rubbish organisation. Especially when you consider my landlord is retired, so has loads of free time on his hands.

e-bay madness

Balls.

This is one of the problems with doing loads of e-bay auctions - you make mistakes.

A simple example of this is that when I uploaded the auctions I made a couple of errors with the photos, accidentally forgetting to change the photo from the previous auction. This is no great shakes as it's easily fixed, but the other error I've made is a big problem as it's cost me a fortune (well, relative to the amount I got from the auctions).

Basically, I've sent a parcel containing multiple items to the wring person.

I also sent them their correct item, so at least I didn't swap them over, but it means all sorts of problems. First off the real winner won't be happy, second I'm reliant on the person I sent them to being honest and third I'm basically going to have to pay to deliver it multiple times (or cancel the payments made by the actual winner if the recipient doesn't play ball).

And because we're talking multiple items, we're also talking big weight and therefore big cost for postage.

So, "balls!" it is.

black hawk down

Well, this weeks film rental was Black Hawk Down.

Usually I watch the film at the weekend, but as discussed earlier in the week I was horribly busy moving shit about this last weekend. I therefore watched the film on Tuesday night.

I noticed there were several commentaries, but given the two and a quarter hour running time, I didn't have the chance to watch these at all. I also have to admit that I was engaged in some e-bay "parceling up" while watching the film, so perhaps wasn't giving it my full attention.

I mention this as a possible excuse for the fact that I wasn't actually hugely keen on the film.

The problem I had was it didn't really seem to gel together properly. The bit that worked was the combat - it felt real, visceral, chaotic and brutal. The bit that didn't work so well was the - I dunno - characters?

There seemed to be lots of cheesy elements. For example, the young soldier who had run out of bullets and is surrounded by a blood-thirsty mob, who takes out a picture of his young wife and small child. Then when the mob attacks him he tries to hold onto the picture, but it gets pulled out if hands.

I dunno - it just felt a bit corny. The problem of course is that this is a story based on real events (well, it's adapted from a book based on real events) and the guy actually survived, so one would assume this is a fairly realistic depiction of what happened. You never know, though - it could just as easily be pure Hollywood invention.

And to be fair there is a note of truth to it anyway. You would expect someone of his age to have a young family and if he loves them, it's hardly surprising for him to be carrying a picture of them with him and for that to be what he thinks about as he's about to die. I dunno - I think my problem with it was that there was a bit too much of that sort of thing.

What didn't help was that the whole thing was told entirely from the American's point of view. All wars when you get down to it are messy, but civil wars are often the nastiest and that's what the Americans are in the middle of, but it's never really explained why all of the local Somalia's seem to want to kill the Americans.

I know boy soldiers are a part of quite a few conflicts around the world, but here we also had what seemed to be ordinary civilian women picking up guns of the fallen and shooting at the Americans. You can understand the warlord's men wanting to kill them, because he's who they're after, but why there's this general animosity is never explained.

Indeed, the Somali are depicting in a very one dimensional way generally. There's a blurb at the beginning giving some idea of the circumstances, but detail on their side is totally absent. We also get hardly any of the characterisation that's given to the Americans.

There's also a weird note of triumph at the end when people get out.

I'm not saying it's painted as a victory, but this was an operation that went horribly and disastrously wrong, but the end of the film doesn't truly feel like that. I dunno - it almost ends too soon, and the end blurb doesn't quite capture the "this was a terrible cock-up" feel.

£5 you say?

No, five pounds, my good man. Five lots of sixteen ounces. Five of your very best "el-bees" (lb's).

Which odd introductory paragraph is meant to tell you that the big upside of all this physical labour I've been engaging in to keep my landlord happy, is that I appear to be burning fat at a rapid rate of knots.

Let me summarise - this weeks weight loss was a huge 5 pounds, and the increase over previous weeks must mainly be due to the lugging around of boxes.

I think it's also probably due to the fact that last week I made another cut in my caloric intake (dinner has now virtually ceased to exist for me) and also didn't stop walking. Now to be honest, I did trim back on the walking, because of how tired the box-moving has made me, but I didn't stop.

Well, actually, I did stop. On Friday I wanted to do two things. First off, I wanted to rest so that the blisters I'd gotten would have time to heal properly (this sounds like I'm some arctic explorer and my feet were falling off, but it's not like that at all). But secondly, I wanted to see what would happen to the step count if I put the pedometer in my breast pocket, rather than my trouser pocket.

See, for the last few weeks I haven't really been increasing the amount of walking I do, yet my step counter seems to have gone bonkers. And Friday confirmed that this is clearly because when kept in my trouser pocket, the pedometer massively over-counts. I'm guessing this is due to the knocking about it receives, but from now on it's living in my breast pocket as much as possible.

I also didn't walk on Saturday and Sunday. Well, I mean I didn't go for a walk. I did lots of walking, most of it carrying heavy things, so I wasn't too bothered by not doing a proper walk, but the point is that this week I've been back walking again.

So, although I doubt I'll have another 5lb drop any time soon, hopefully it'll keep going in the right direction.

Oh, and I should say that I have theoretically lost a full stone. Unfortunately this stat does depend on that very first reading I took being accurate, which I'm almost certain it wasn't, but even excluding that I've definitely lost more than half a stone, which is pretty good going.

And I also realised that this last weekend marked the four week anniversary of me starting on my diet and exercise plan (wow, that sounds more scientific that "not eating all the pies and not sitting on my fat arse all day").

Still a very long way to go, though.

it still hasn't ended

So yes, the second problem my landlord hit me with.

Despite the months of notice I'd given, "their decorator" had booked a holiday for the exact same week I was away. I still don't get what they meant by "their decorator" but either way I offered to take the week before instead. Only they couldn't do that week either because they were apparently going away for two days.

Which made me even more confused. I mean, apparently their decorator wasn't going to be away that week, but he also wouldn't be able to do the work because they would be away for two days. Given how small my room is (and we're just talking the bed/living room here) it seems bizarre he couldn't do it in the available time.

Anyway, the upshot of this seemed to be that they would have to do it themselves during the week I was away, but because it would be too big a job they would a) have to scale back on it and b) have to do the prep work before I went.

I didn't really mind a, but b poxed me up for multiple reasons.

First off, I'd have to do all sorts of furniture moving so that John could get access to the walls on various days, but also the secret of the bed would inevitably be revealed.

The secret of the bed is that I'd destroyed it. To be fair, it was a really cheap bed, but also, the real problem was of course my huge bulk. For years I've been propping the underside of the bed up using piles of magazines (it's become what I do with all those Japanese magazine I buy!) and there's no way I could loose enough weight for the un-propped bed to support me in that sort of timescale.

Plus of course it gave me somewhere to put the magazines. So now I needed to move all the boxes with magazines into the workshop all in one go as well, and then switch to using my fold-out settee bed thing and tell my landlord to get rid of the old bed.

And that's what I had to do this last weekend - I spent all day Saturday moving furniture around, cleaning the mess I discovered underneath and moving crates and crates of (heavy) magazines into the shed.

What makes this all even worse is that my computer table where I have my computers is a total nightmare. I actually have several machines from where I've upgraded over the years and (pack-rat tendencies kicking in again) I've never disposed of the old ones, but there's also all the peripherals like the printer and scanner and speakers and monitor, etc, etc, there too.

So I've now got a kitchen full of cables and crap while I wait for my landlord to do the bit next to the computer. I requested he do it first, but given how long it took him to empty the shed, Christ knows when he'll get done.

And even when he is done, if I put it all back I'll then have to move it all again before I go on holiday so he can do the actual decorating.

But then there's another factor - the shed is likely to get quite cold and damp over the winter, so if I'm going to sell my stuff I need to do it now. And that means torturous hours of taking photos, prepping and uploading e-bay auctions, then parcelling stuff up before finally lugging it all down to the post office and standing there blowing my entire lunch hour getting the stuff sent.

Now I've posted before about how tedious and rubbish e-baying is, but the scale has now become bonkers. Last Sunday I had more than 40 auctions end while I spent literally all day posting more than 70 more. Now not all things sell, but (and I've actually been kinda impressed by this) nearly 60 of those 70-odd did sell.

To put that in perspective, normally I sell around 20-25 things in one go. And I never have big amounts across multiple weeks. I mean, maybe I'd sell 30 items across 3 weeks if some of them didn't sell and had to be re-listed. I've more than doubled that in two weeks, and all while I've been doing all the other crap too.

So, given how my muscles are still aching and we're nowhere near an end point, you can see why I'm moaning.

when will it end?

I'm a bit sick of this now.

I'm pretty sure I've discussed most of this before, but the difference now is that I'm thoroughly bored of it all.

Basically, a while back, my landlord asked me if he could get into my place at some point to decorate. This would obviously need to happen while I was away, to avoid me having to sleep in a room of stinky fumes.

Okay, it took me a while, but I arranged a holiday for the end of September/beginning of October when I could pop down and visit my Dad (his birthday is early October) and also have a few days off. I informed my landlord of this well in advance - months and months ago, in fact.

But there was an attendant issue - I have so much stuff that was packed into so many boxes, my room was basically like some sort of warehouse. So, my landlord also wanted me to move all the stuff up into the attic.

This meant I was faced with the Herculean job of having to sort through all the boxes and decided to either keep, throw away or sell everything. My preference of course was to sell as much of the stuff as I could. That way I would earn a bit of money back and also it would alleviate the pack-rat tendencies I have which were a big part of why I'd accumulated all the stuff in the first place. If it's going to a good home (or even a bad one), I'd be able to let go much easier than if it was just going into the bin.

I therefore hatched a plan. I would go through all the cardboard boxes, deciding what to chuck away and also repacking everything into plastic stacking crates. I'd also be careful to make sure that 'keepers' got put together and 'sellers' got put together. Once complete, these would be lifted up into the attic and from there I could sell stuff at my leisure.

I had several months to do this before I went on holiday and my landlord would redecorate while I was away.

A perfect plan and phase 1 went well - I sorted through it all, repacked it, chucked quite a lot of stuff and put some of it in the attic and was awaiting my landlord's help in putting more of it up. Only that didn't happen.

Instead, I got called in for a chat where they dropped a bit of a bombshell.

First off - and most importantly - was that my stuff represented a "fire hazard" and therefore couldn't be kept in my room or go in the attic. Instead, it would need putting in the "workshop" (actually a big shed). A space would be cleared for me, but, given the fire hazard status, I would have to move it all right away.

But this also meant that accessing individual boxes would become very complicated. The attic meant relatively good accessibility to all the boxes, but in the shed those at the back would be difficult to get at. So that meant I had to resort it all to maximise convenience. Also, because people could look in the shed, I'd need to cover stuff up so it couldn't really be seen.

So I got ready for the big move, but then had to wait ages while my landlord failed to clear the space. I was therefore completely in limbo, where I could have been using the time productively.

This meant that instead of the couple of boxes a day I'd hoped to do over, say, a week, I had to move all the boxes in a single day. But also, because the boxes had taken up so much room, I'd had to rearrange the furniture in my room to make space.

And this is where we get into the other problem my landlord hit me with.

Actually, having typed all this out, it's way too long, so I'm going to break it into two - more tomorrow.

furniture remover

This weekend I need to further the thing with sorting out and boxes and stuff.

I'd have done it last weekend if I wasn't so tired, but the next phase is re-arranging the furniture to take advantage of the space I've gained through moving the boxes into the shed. This weekend is an ideal time to do it, because it's a scheduled cleaning weekend anyway, so when I move the furniture I can have a bit of a clean and it's just a more complex routine, if you will.

I've been wearing short-sleeved shirts for most of this week, even though the weather doesn't really justify it. I think it's something of a last hurrah to summer before I pack the shirts away again and get out the long sleeve shirts. And who knows, this time next year, I may have lost so much weight that the shirts look silly on me and I have to get some more.

I'm getting way ahead of myself, obviously, but I'm slightly worried about that aspect. It's not going to stop me, but because I am so big I am worried I'm going to have to buy a lot of clothes to match the slimming process.

There's also a Grand Prix this weekend, although I believe it's the Italian, which is Monza. Monza's often a bit of a dull. It's a very high speed circuit and doesn't have very many corners, which makes it difficult to overtake. In order to control the speed a bit they've also put chicanes in over the years and chicanes also kill overtaking.

Still, this year has been so good that even some of the usually dull races have been interesting, so you never know.

my name was earl

Over the last week, as part of my efforts to watch stuff I've got on DVD, I've been watching My Name is Earl episodes.

I really liked the first season of Earl and the second season is okay. The whole long-term arc of Joy stealing the truck didn't quite work, but it was still firmly focused on the list.

However, season three seems to be where it all went a bit wonky. The first part of season three takes place in prison, and it's really hard for Earl to really cross a lot of things off his list when he's in prison. I also seem to recall, though I've not go that far with the DVDs that later on he ends up in the comma, and if it's hard to cross stuff off when you're in prison, it's almost impossible when you're in a coma.

And that's where it went wrong, I think - Earl is about the list, not being in prison and comma dreams. I can kinda understand it, because when you have a list to tick off that tends to set a finite length to your series. The problem of course is that the show was cancelled after the fourth series, so rather than have a plan of "we'll finish the list by the end of this season" and wrapping it up nicely, it ends without ending.

Maybe I'll warm to it a bit more this second time around.

Also, I forgot to mention yesterday about the diet side of my slimming programme.

What I've been trying to do is stay below an absolute limit of 2,000 calories a day. In practice, I'm generally a couple of hundred below that in terms of counting. I'm also pretty sure that I'm over-counting, so perhaps I'm somewhere down around 1,600 calories a day on a good day or around 1,800 on a 'bad' day.

I'm actually deliberately over-counting, partly in order to be safe, but also because if I think I've hit 1,800 then that acts as a good break. An example of the over counting is that I count my daily yoghurt (very good for digestion - everyone should eat yoghurt, but you don't need to bother with those fancy pseudoscience yoghurts, good old fashioned normal yoghurt is where it's at) as 150 calories, where a labelling inspection suggests that, depending on variety, it's actually around 113-121.

This over counting/rounding up also has the advantage of making the maths a lot easier. It's a lot easier to add things up if everything is 150, 250 or 600 calories, etc.

Also, I've discovered a bit of a weird phenomenon now that I've reintroduced bread to my lunch. Basically, when it gets to evening I'm virtually not hungry. I often just have an apple, my juice (I'm fining it's really tough hitting the five a day thing on the diet) and my yoghurt and that's basically it. I tend to spread these out rather than having them all in one go, but generally I won't get peckish until just before bed and it's odd, but I quite like going to bed on an empty stomach now.

It's all a bit odd really - when I kicked this off, I was really struggling with a rumbling belly making me feel bad and occupying all of my attention, but now I almost quite like a bit of hunger. It almost makes the food taste better.

The only thing I am still struggling with is that I enjoy having a really full belly. To me, feeling stuffed after a meal has always been a part of enjoying a meal and that's the hardest thing to resist. I don't think I've ever in my whole life left an empty plate (assuming I like the food) and I know that's what normal people do - have leftovers because they're full. Well, I've never full enough to do that.