toosigma

After a holiday weekend of excess, I've decided that it's definitely time to get back in shape and lose some weight. Since my last few attempts to gain momentum in weight-loss have failed, I've decided to start making my efforts more public and to (hopefully) improve my accountability. The plan is to blog and twitter my progress in various 30-day project goals, starting today.

Currently, I'm hovering right around 240, so I'm looking to drop 40 pounds to a goal weight of 200. This morning, I restarted the Hacker's Diet - a relatively simplistic diet plan based only on eating less and exercising more. I'm starting at Rung 16 of the Lifetime Ladder with the medium-term goal of reaching Rung 30 by August 1st. This morning's effort felt pretty good, but I usually find that the first day back on an exercise routine is easier than the next few days. The first 30-day trial is focused on exercise, but I'm also planning to twitter all of my meals, with an eye to reducing my reliance on fast food and pizza. Since trying to change multiple habits simultaneously is more prone to failure, I'm not going to hold myself to a strict diet regimen until the second 30-day trial.

If you're at all interested, you can follow my progress here and on twitter - and if you see me slipping, please give me as much harassment as you like.

My primary Windows machine, which had happily been running Windows 2000 for nearly 5 years, finally gave up the ghost about two weeks ago. While sad at the loss, I had been contemplating an upgrade for some time, so I broke down and bought the new hardware. Given that I still need at least one Windows box on my network, and that my preferred Win OS was nearly 8 years old, I splurged and bought a copy of Vista Home Premium. I've been reading plenty of articles that while Vista may be slow, it still works and most of the major bugs have been worked out since the release over a year ago. I figured that I needed to take the step forward, since Windows isn't going away anytime soon, and I need at least some familiarity with it for my job.

All the parts arrived on Monday, and I had everything assembled and ready to install. I plug in the Vista install disc, and leave it to run overnight. After waking up, I find Vista is installed, and waiting for final configuration info - which I enter, and then start the OS. Everything runs fine for about five minutes, before the system mysteriously reboots. Figuring it was just some patch or driver install, I log back in, and about two minutes in, I get a lovely BSD, followed by a reboot. After getting back in, the troubleshooter tells me there's an unrecoverable hardware error with either the CPU, RAM, Power Supply, or the Motherboard. I've gotten the occasional bad part before, so I take it at face value, and start testing the various components. Three days later, after running the most stringent testing programs running for over 16 hours each, I've discovered no errors, no reboots. Of course, my testing utilities all run off Linux kernels, so I'm reasonably certain there isn't a problem with the hardware.

Still, every time I boot into Vista, I get IRQ conflicts, random graphics errors, and the repeated BSDs that Windows seems so fond of. I'm almost ready to break down and install Windows 2000 - since it served me so well for so many years - I actually managed to achieve a maximum uptime of 74 days. Of course, the video card manufacturers seem to have decided that Win2k is no longer viable, and have stopped writing drivers for that OS. If I do go that route, I'll probably have to drop $40-$150 on a older video card, or I could finally take the Windows XP plunge I've managed to avoid for so many years, also at a cost of $130+.

Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of Microsoft at this moment.

The Chatty DM just posted an excellent article that sums up a lot of what I've been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to express about D&D 4th Edition.