Monthly Archives: March 2007

Paint it Black

Wow, I am wiped out… Very tired, very sore. Serves me right for crashing out on the couch yesterday without a blanket and being too lazy to look for one in the middle of the night when it got cold… I need do something more productive than reading email.

I don't particularly trust the numbers, but according to the body fat machine at the gym (which is accurate from test to test, so I think it can at least be compared to itself, but who knows how close it gets objectively), I was at 26% body fat in September. A month or two ago I was at 12%, which is about the time that I started to worry that I was losing far too much weight (and I was dropping into the 150s, which is disturbingly small for me). Anyway, I thought I'd managed to put on fat over the last couple weeks because I'd got myself up to about 170, but now I'm down to 8% body fat. I don't really know if that's right, because I don't think I look like 8% body fat in the mirror, but either way, there's continuing fat loss (and muscle gain to compensate)… I felt rather down about it most of the day, because when we went up to do the test I was actually kind of looking forward to 15% or so, which is where I thought it was. I know objectively that I'm fitter than I have been since probably age sixteen, and there's nothing wrong with low body fat, but I really wish I could put on more weight, because I'm also smaller than I have been since, oh, fourteen or something. Outside of anything else, I don't like being told “you look thin”, even if it's a compliment, because it makes me feel out of place or out of alignment with my body. I guess it all comes back to body modification themes for me, but I feel like I've just dropped my weight to underneath what I perceive myself as weighing. I don't know if that will change if I stay this weight (since most of my life I've been 220-260).

Other than that and along the same lines, I have a theory that I'm not gaining weight as quickly as is possible because I'm not pushing myself hard enough (although I have no idea why I'm dropping fat)… One of the things about having chronic pain (and I'm sure most other physically/mentally taxing conditions as well) is that because of how hard you crash if you actually manage to chew through all your reserves (leaving you with nothing to fight the constant pain, so you pretty much just shut down), you spend your life training yourself to avoid running on empty… and I believe that manifests itself not by consciously saying “OK, stop now or you won't have the energy to swim back to the surface”, but by subconsciously screaming “you can not do this, abort, abort, abort! as a protective measure. I don't know if that's accurate or not… but it's the metaphor I'm going with right now as I try and figure out how to push myself as hard as I know I can. Anyway, I'm rambling and those are some serious run-on sentences.

Other than that, black is the new white.

There are two more identical canvasses to prime in the same way. I know I said I was taking a break from painting, but I can't work on the car until summer (or at least until I find a new space) because my idiotic garage vents into the house rather than the outdoors, so if I do graffiti tests in the garage, it stinks up the house for the rest of the day, so I definitely don't want to be doing fiberglassing and so on down there until I can leave the door open for the day.

Christlike (the video, not the entry)

OK, I have to stay fully conscious for at least two more hours. I went to the garbage dump and emptied all the junk that's been banging around the back of the truck for the last few weeks. I stopped by the old swimming hole while I was down there… Still a bit of ice, we should really go swimming while the last vestiges of winter are still around.

Other than that, I've showed this to a couple people. I don't know what movie it's from or whether the descriptions in YouTube are accurate or not, but everyone has said “send me the link”, so here it is. If you're one of those people, just click the video and the link will open in a new video. Well, enjoy the Palestinian Matrix or whatever this is…

[edit: thanks to Kim for letting me know it's Yadon ilaheyya]

Anyway… Probably more fun to watch than most hezbollywood/pallywood-tagged clips? If anyone knows what this is from send me a message please.

The doctor is (still) in!

There's been some requests to have the old Dr. BME shirt (one of the few BBQ shirts to make it into permanent rotation) brought back into print… Anyway, I've been doodling (somewhat Emilio. If you like it, let let the folks with the cool printshop know (or if you don't like it, let me know if you have any advice on making it better).

Little computer, big computer

The (very simple) control code is written for the project below, but I have to write a DLL wrapper before it totally works because I'm using a non-standard compiler that Phidgets doesn't support out of the box. I think I may have done a bit too much running around yesterday, because I'm pretty wiped out today and probably won't work on this more today because (a) it's not gonna pay any bills and (b) I can't concentrate on it anyway.

We're putting a new machine in here in the next couple of days; a box built around an Intel Core 2 Quad chip, so I'm pretty excited to see how well my applications run on it. I'm doing very large database builds that require me to process tons of data at once, and most of my applications are written to support multiple CPUs, so I think it should be very nice to have a raw power machine here for those tasks.

Hahaha! Brilliant!

So I was talking to Ed a few minutes ago and among other things we talked about the DNS fiasco that took various BME sites offline… He mentioned that he was surprised and pleased to see that “Mini IAM” was still up and running. I was like, “what's mini IAM?” and he reminded me that it was a temporary system that had been put up during one of IAM's longer downtime. He also mentioned that Bizzach had also logged in and updated their page as well — they were the only two with quick-witted enough long term memory to give it a try!

Unfortunately I had to take the login system offline because of a security issue so I can't link it right now. It's a really simple issue so I'll fix it and put it back online shortly, but I did take a snapshot of their pages (and yes, Bizzach, you win the award) before I turned it off.