文字馬鹿: A fool of words

Dear EA Sports active Team,

I have recently purchased your fine product, but have a few concerns I wish to raise with you.

Firstly, despite your strong insistence, and in fact obstinate refusal to proceed without it, a nunchuck accessory is not required to navigate your user interface menu.

Secondly, given the nature of your target audience, shipping a thigh-wrapping strap with a device for making it shorter, and nothing to make it longer, seems a surprising oversight. In case it is not clear, your target audience for a video games console-based exercise assistance program is people who both need exercise assistance, own a video games console, and feel that there is a sufficient level of overlap between these two ideas to spend money on such a program. Many such people will have thighs which exceed your apparent circumference estimations, particularly the upper thigh where you suggest this device is best placed.

Thirdly, it is a breach of Section 53 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 to indicate that your product is "Fitness made Fun and Easy" or to use the phrase "fun, easy-to-learn exercises" when your product holds these two ideas as antonyms. I realise I have not yet fully explored your product, and in fact there may be exercises in your product that match both terms, but surely it would be appropriate to use "and/or" in place of "and", or possibly ensure that the exercises that are both fun and easy-to-learn are in the first day's routine.

Fourthly, for a product that purports to encourage good health, it is a concern that your female trainer appear to smile somewhat more frequently and widely than is healthy. Whether this effect is caused by botox, abuse of medicinal substances or simply because she is attempting to reinforce the "fun" aspect of the program by appearing to enjoy herself, it is rather offputting.

Speaking of offputting, my fifth point relates to the representation of myself during many of the gym-style (as opposed to track or game style) activities. The trainer in the Picture-in-Picture window is facing me, as is correct. However, the representation of myself is also facing me, and then undertakes actions with the incorrect arm. If I am told to lift my right arm, and the image of me lifts my left arm, that is confusing. If there were some indication of a mirror being involved, that would alleviate the confusion somewhat, although that indication would probably be hampered by the appearance of a large, lightly wooded grassland behind me, making the existence of a mirror somewhat jarring.

Ante-penultimately, the suggestion in the front of the manual that the player register this game online in order to access cheat codes seems rather out of place in an exercise game, where cheating should probably be discouraged more than it already should be. This issue is somewhat alleviated by the fact that the manual does not appear to contain the required registration code, so access to these cheat codes appears to be impossible.

Penultimately, and this should probably be passed on to any of your VO-script-writing colleagues who may be tempted to similar behaviour, it is inappropriate to describe the player as "owning" anything that is not either chattel or property, unless the target audience exclusively consists of 12-year old male citizens of the United States of America or her conquered territories.

Despite the above comments, I am quite pleased with your product over all, and after a period of time sufficient to ensure that this pleasure is not simply the result of exercise-induced lightheadedness, I will not hesitate to recommend it to my friends who fall within the target market. Although my list of friends is rather limited, the broad appeal of the Wii gaming platform and the broadness of many of my friends means that I feel this recommendation will be of some benefit.

Yours sincerely,
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, Exhausted.

PS. If you were intending to pronounce "pwned", that leading descender attached to the initial o similarly attaches a bilabial stop to the front of the initial rounded lower middle vowel, unless you are intending to sound like a 12-year old male citizen of the United States of America or her conquered territories.

So, yeah. I bought EA Sports active for the Wii, and foolishly decided, despite my raging cold, to start with the "high intensity" workout. About 10 minutes in I thought my head was going to explode, but it appears to have not done so, and I was able to finish the workout. Mind you, that's largely because they don't actually tell you about the "skip current exercise" button during the workout, but rely on you to wander into the help menu on the front screen.

Despite my above comments, I think it's actually a good thing, assuming I can keep it up. The resistance band however, I'm not hugely fond of. I'd rather have free weights, if they'd tell me the amount of weight I should be carrying for the relevant exercise.

Apart from that, I spent the day downloading Old Time Radio shows: Abbott and Costello [another set], Sherlock Holmes [another set, part 1] [another set, part 2] [another site], Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Candy Matson, Yukon 2-8209, You Bet Your Life and Mindwebs. I've downloaded or queued all the above, so if you want to avoid a several-gigabyte download, feel free to poke me into putting them onto a USB stick for you if you're 'round my place.

This should ensure I have sufficient mp3s to not get bored when I start taking long walks for exercise reasons. Of course, it'd prolly be healthier to walk with someone who can both ignore my whinging of physical discomfort in good humour and whom on with I can carry a conversation for a half hour to an hour, but I don't have anyone who intersects those two groups, who I feel up to tapping for such a plan.

Oh, and my friends aren't actually broad. Many of them are broads, but that's a much harder pun to work into a sentence, without offending them. Not that many of the broads I know are easily offended. ^_^

Often my weekends start out with grandiose plans of what I might try and get done.

This weekend (and the preceding evenings I guess) saw me produce a Wine patch I was only playing with out of interest but which turns out to affect Warhammer Online, although I didn't know it until after I implemented the patch, and a WIne patch I've been meaning to prototype for a while using XInput 2 to fix a long-standing Wine bug which also affects Warhammer Online.

I also got back to watching Life On Mars, although I've only managed one episode and a bit. It's pretty damned good.

I also decided to make gyoza, as I have fond, alcohol-supported memories of the last time I made them.

I managed to lazy my cooking even more than usual. I'm using a recipe I picked up last time I made them off a site called The Food Palate by Deborah Rodrigo, whom Google has since informed me is from Sydney but both that site and her personal blog appear to have fallen off the Internet, sadly. However, I distilled (with the help of Kirky at work) the ingredients down to this:

Ginger, chives, chili flakes, coriander, garlic, sesame seed oil, soy sauce for dumplings, and gyoza skins

Adding half a kilo of lean pork mince, and about a half-hour, you get:

30 gyoza, freezer-bound

So not as bad as the ugly cake I made recently, but still not spectacular. And unlike the cake, I don't yet know if these turn out to be poison or not.

I expect that they'll be delicious, and not even slightly poisonous. And unlike my cake, I'm not going to try to share them with anyone. ^_^

It could be worse, at least I seem to have not managed to poison my housemate's lizards, Prime and Grimlock, whom I've been feeding while he's away this weekend. I'm not sure how I could get "put grasshoppers into the box" wrong, but I don't think I did. I think they're pretty neat names for lizards, reflecting Mick's inner geek, and his outer geek, although Prime seems to be larger than Grimlock which is to the best of my knowledge the wrong way 'round.

I was going to try and leverage in a rant about characters in children's books with alliterative names at this point, and observe that one of my favorite authors as a young child, Richard Scarry happened to avoid that, but upon actually looking him up, I realise the characters whose names I'd forgotten quite often had alliterative names. The characters I remembered still had non-alliterative names, so it's not as bad as some authors I can't be bothered remembering, but I'll chalk that one up as being disappointed by a childhood memory.

A less disappointing childhood memory turns out to be Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I read the series when I was quite young, and I'm only re-reading the first one at the moment, but it reminds me how good a writer he is, and why I loved his books so much as a child. Also because he's alphabetically early on the shelves. I don't know why I seem to do that. I think when I'm picking a new series, I start at the beginning and go until I've chosen one. So that favours the alphabetically early.

I've managed to get a whole bunch of reading done recently, which is good. Sadly, Borders now wants me to pay $7 on a $14 book to order it in from overseas, and it turns out most of the series I'm following keenly enough to actually order books are on that list, so I may end up having to do an Amazon order. Which is annoying, because I'm also looking for some DS games: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations appears to be discontinued in Australia and the US, and Impossible Mission never seems to have been released here at all. Along with wanting Race on DVD, I have a fair bit of overseas shopping to do, and the local financial climate is not exactly conducive to that. -_-

Anyway, the above is my documentation supporting why I should not be left alone for days at a time. ^_^

Spent too much time home alone this long weekend... So I made cake.

Ugly cake

The bowl cleaning was delicious, so I'm sure it'll taste good. Experience suggests no one else wants to eat my baking (on the grounds it's usually ugly, and I probably don't strike people as someone whose infrequent cooking is of a particularly edible standard) so I expect I'll get it all to myself over the week.

I'd like to suggest this is an allegory for my love life, but I'm not sure that I'm using the word allegory correctly there.

I also stocked up on the ingredients for fudge (family recipie, bears little resemblance to actual fudge) which is much harder to produce ugly.

If anyone cares to leave a comment as to how big a "dessert spoon" is, that'd be most appreciated. I got 10g from the dessert spoons in my drawers, but I'm not totally sure it was enough, and I'd previously suspected (until I tried my new kitchen scales this evening) that it was 20g. Then again, I believe a tablespoon was 25g, and Calorie King informed me ealier today that it's about 8g.

Oh yeah, I finally bought kitchen scales. And some more video games. Looking for "Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations" but I can only find the first two games and the fourth (of which I have the second and fourth already). Reportedly was released in Australia in 2007, but only hit Europe in 2008 due to a ratings blockage.

My mother pointed me at CalorieKing Australia which is a web site for helping with weight loss.

I'll be using this to track my food intake and what little exercise I do. I'm quite hopeful, given its large-looking food database. So far there's not much I've had to add (the kangaroo meat I've been eating the main thing missing, and their Home Brand range seems rather small. In the latter case, I'm picking the things I believe are the branded equivalents.

I'll see how it goes, anyway. One of my weight-loss complaints was that it was all too hard to manage. This site has a menu-suggesting thing, and has an option to exclude all dairy items, so once I'm organised a bit and have gotten through the stuff in my cupboard, I might see how the suggested meals turn out.

It also lets you input nutritional targets and such, and provides some defaults, so I can get a good idea of my fat and protein intake (keeping them down) and my calcium intake (keeping it up). I was disappointed to see that the goat's cheese I get doesn't have a calcium value on the packet or the site, and it also about half my daily fat intake. So I'll be drinking more of the chocolate VitaSoy drink, which turns out to be a healthier way of getting my 1g of calcium a day. (That's a whole litre. I'll have to start taking it to work again. Horrors! ^_^)

The only issue I have with it so far is that I have to add a food to my daily record to see its statistics. So when trying to work out what to have for dinner tonight, I had to keep throwing combinations at it until something came up that balance out well. That's mainly because I had a pretty awful lunch though. ^_^

The site has a built-in blog system, but I don't see an option to just auto-publish my meals. I'd like to do that... I'm not sure why.

Edit: Carefully hidden away in the account options, my meal diary is now online.

Edit: That's not how you spell CalorieKing

I'm out of juice

In other news... Finally upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.3 and Spam Karma 2.2r3. Also decided to celebrate with a new theme, blog.txt. It's OK so far, apart from the title sizing... Dunno if I'll stick with it yet.

The actual content of this post is twofold... I used CurlFtpFS (A FUSE-based filesystem) to update the site. I chose CurlFtpFS over Fuseftp because the latter consistently failed to handle vimdiff. ^_^

Happily, on Debian, it was easy to set up. m-a a-i fuse gave me the fuse kernel modules, and then grabbing the CurlFtpFS Debian package.

The main disadvantage is that you can't see the FUSE-mounted share from my windows box over Samba... This may just be a permissions thing, as I can follow symlinks across filesystem mounts OK, although I didn't used to be able to.

The other fold is that I finally started my exercise regime. Tonight, about a half-hour on Stepmania, for 14 three-foot songs and a four-foot song. I'm working alphabetically through the list of songs at three-feet, and then my last set of the three for the night is whatever I feel like. And tonight I was in a Bubble Bobble, そばかす and WITCH DOCTOR mood.

Most frustrating song of the night was Beyblade 2000 - Off the Chains, the BPM seemed to be tuned to the rappers, not the actual beats. On the other hand, most frustrating in a good way was Cowboy Bebop - Tank [Para Para mix], 307BPM of surprise steps. Fun. ^_^

Final good news, the author of the Top 10 posts plugins noticed my updates. I was linked from a blog that shows up in the Wordpress Dashboard. ^_^

Meh, a few other things going on, I should be able to blog about them later this week. >_<

Edit: Back to Ocadia. Also, I bought juice. ^_^

Good

Light in Dark Corners: My Dad wrote this, and it's really really good. I've enjoyed it immensely, and highly recommend it. ^_^

Bad

Syriana: The movie was actually really good, but I felt bad after seeing it. It's a sad and scary world we live in, and that's over here on the easy side of it.

Educational

The AppleCare Protection Plan turns out to be good for keeping my laptop running.Since putting this into place, my laptop's not once dropped dead from overheating... I actually suspect if I'd configured the power settings properly this wouldn't be neccessary.

That's actually the display box. We're an Apple reseller of some kind at CBIT, but due to lack of a front counter while the construction work happens out the back, all the display boxes are in my offfice...

Oh, the pain... I'm sitting here working on this entry at home, and the damn thing overheats. >_< I prolly should add a temperature sensor output of some kind to my desktop... Or at least bring the AppleCare Protection Plan home with me...

At least, I've a belly full of dairy-free pizza. Good on Dominos for publishing their list of allergens. ^_^

Edit: I forgot to give this post a clever title... I think this one's fitting. ^_^

Hmm, time to resurrect an old posting format...

Good

The Internet -- automatically routing around damage such as a DMCA from Apple.

Bad

Storyline patents -- Everytime I think the world has dug itself to rock-bottom, someone hits me on the back of the head with a shovel.

Educational

Kotodama, a video game research prototype for teaching Japanese to anime fans -- Now this is where I'd like to be taking my university education... I wonder where the project's going, and how I can get onboard... And of course, this led me to Julius, a speech-recognition system that I wish I had time to play with.

Thanks to Hellblazer via Slashdot for the heads-up on the patent.

Slashdot is prolly also the viaduct via which I got the Kotodama link, as well as a reminder about the Linux-based GP2X portable gaming doodad, and AnoNet, like FreeNet but built from VPN and SSH tunnels which leave you in control of your own machine's actions. I guess the difference is that on AnoNet, if someone does work out who you are and they seize your equipment, you don't have the I didn't know that was on there defense you get from FreeNet. There's also the issue that, if you do something heinous enough, such that international authorities can co-operate on it, then you can be tracked down.

One of the things AnoNet's Wikipedia entry suggests would be a good thing to protect on AnoNet is bnetd, the Battle.net Server that Blizzard Entertainment had shutdown in the US. Mind you, even on the regular Internet finding bnetd source was as easy as following the link from the bnetd Wikipedia entry, once again demonstrating how the Internet routes around damage. ^_^

Meh. There's another weekend spent doing very little. And for a change, this didn't involve me spending any time either playing video games, or on IRC.

I took a troll through Planet Linux Australia (and also remembered to submit my blog there again...) and came up with the following links, for your eddification and mine:

• Rusty's blog entry on the talloc talk at LCA06: I guess I'm not the only one who thought the graphing code was cool... Sadly, the shell script 401s...
• Flowing from Rusty's blog, Van Jaconbson's TCP speedup stuff will be appearing in Linux this year. ^_^
• Back to Planet LA, and being broke, an entry regarding OpenSkills, the Linux Australia jobs mailling list and the Linux Australia Jobs database was highly relevent. In the spirit of timewasting, I haven't actually followed these up yet, but I will...
• Jonathan Oxer picked up an unfortunate piece of juxtaposition. Of course, if this was on paper a copyeditor prolly would have spotted it.
• Horms apparently was also impressed by Mark Shuttleworth's LCA06 keynote, and pulled up something he wrote in 2005 regarding Multilingual Desktops.
• I wish my blogs attracted this level of response...
• Tiny tiny tiny video projectors: Oh, I want one of these. Yet again I wish I was a computer hardware engineer... Almost
• The RIAA claims that everytime you apply fair-use to copy your legally purchased music into another format, Domokun eats an iPod: A disappointing but predictable claim, but it did provide a good opportunity to link the Domokun iPod cover. ^_^
• It seems while I was otherwise distracted, people have hacked OSx86 to work on commodity X86 hardware. Apple's given the main OSx86 community site a cease-and-desist DMCA notice of some kind to not link to the site I linked to two links ago... O_O
• And a dumb-math-trick of sheer brilliance. I really should build up a collection of these things somewhere. If only I could find the damn "1 = 2" proof again...

So what else have I been doing? Well, I played with Google Maps until I identifed my current home, and the CBIT offices, although the latter's photo is slightly old now, as there's a sort of overhang thing over the entrance now.

I finished Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison. Happily, the next book in the series is due out in June... Although lord knows how long it'll take to get here. I also this week finished The Shining City by Kate Forsyth. Sequel also due mid-year, and she's Australian so I am more hopeful of seeing it before next summer... I prolly should go to one of those 'enter my books' sites and record for posterity just how many books I've spent my rent-money on.

Speaking of rent-money, I'm at the broke end of the week, so went last night and spent $32 on food until Wednesday. This covered four pot-noodles, five microwave paster dinners, and five bottles of Caffiene-Free Diet Coke. Also some lollies, to cover sugar-cravings. Mind you, I haven't eaten yet today... Hmm, I'd better do that soon.

Of course, you can't waste a weekend if you have no plans. And this weekend, I was supposed to finish the new CBIT Internet Customer Administration interface... It's neat, and AJAXified (using the very neat xajax PHP-based setup) and the only thing I did on this this weekend was fix a problem I was having with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. I couldn't do this at work, because I'm developing under Linux on my PowerBook.

OK, I guess that's not all I did. I spent a few hours screwing with wine, trying trying get IE6 going under Win2K-mode (partly for the AJAX stuff, partly so I could run QuickBooks). I've gotten IE6 installed, but it seems to barf when making the AJAX calls, not to mention needing to be Ctrl-C'd when presenting a username/password box.

In the end, I grabbed the IEs 4 Linux script, which installed IE6 in it's own WINEPREFIX, like a charm. I'm well pleased with it. ^_^

I'm also gonna grab Opera to test the site against. Happily, not only do they have an Apt repository, they've also got a public beta program which includes Linux-PPC support. ^_^ This is really how commercial, closed-source software should be addressing the Linux community.

Also, Opera for Nintendo DS. I mean, like, wow.

Also wow, ABC's podcasts. I wonder if they'll do video podcasting soon? Not that I'm watching or listening to any podcasts, but...

I also wasted a few hours this weekend watching the latest episodes of TV shows from the US. Thinking about it, I watch: Battlestar Galactica, Boston Legal and House MD. I also watch Dr Who and Tripping The Rift when it's on... I know that Apple now sells TV episodes over their iPod store, and so I feel like I should be paying something to watch these shows, but I dunno what they're charging. I'd happily pay 50c per episode. I dunno if I'd pay more than that, though. Maybe if I had a better viewing setup, or planned on keeping the files and watching them again...

I also watched the Casanova BBC Miniseries last weekend. It was really really really good. ^_^ I was kinda iffy about the Heath Ledger movie, but Margaret and David thought it was leave-your-brain-at-the-door funny, and I'm now willing to give it a burl.

Hmm. I wish I was a large software corporation, so I could go try and do what Loki failed to do, but instead of buying the license and selling the game, I'd contract to the publishing houses to port the game for them, kind of like how many Mac-ported games seem to be done. I _really_ want to play GuildWars, but it doesn't yet work in wine, and don't want to reboot to Windows to do so. I _might_ give a burl to this partial success report for GuldWars on Wine...

And fun as Battle for Wesnoth is, I'm awful at it.

Saw "The Legend of Zorro" tonight with Bek and Sean. It was... interesting. A few fairly good fight scenes, with some nonsense in between to bulk out the movie. Bek and Sean commented that the movie could have done with some cutting, although really it was obvious that it had already had a fair bit of scissor-work taken to it. Particularly when one character says to another "As you said, 'You never see the one you love, you only see what you wish to see'" or words to that effect. Either I dozed off, or they cut the scene where the character in question actually says that. Maybe the actors decided the script was too long and coherent, and decided to adlib a bit. Who knows? It'll prolly be put back for the DVD, mind you. Then again, they _could_ decide to explore this particular editing path further on the DVD...

Anyway, various interesting swordfights and similar. Apparently Catherine Zeta Jones learnt that one-inch punch from Kill Bill Vol. 2...

Previews of Aeon Flux (it looks cool, it had better be cool, or there'll be much crying and gnashing of teeth), Just Friends (Depressing, given my history... >_<) and Casanova (Looks amusing, but I'd rather watch the BBC miniseries I think. I'm sorry I missed it on the ABC late last year... I don't suppose anyone taped it?)

In other news, I got to the interview stage for the JET program. I'm not sure why they sent the notice to my mother's house, but there it is. Interview sometime in February, they're gonna call.

I got a phonecall from Melbourne yesterday afternoon... If that was JET, I'm confused as to why they called from Melbourne. If that's someone reading this, call again. I got no voice mail and my phone's phonebook didn't recognise the number. ^_^

I have to get the international roaming activated for my phone, on that topic. I'd die without a mobile in New Zealand. I'll prolly die when I see the phone bill. History suggests I make long phonecalls back to Canberra whenever I travel. On the plus side, calling me costs me 26c flat rate, so I'm as contactable as alays.

I'm all excited about the New Zealand trip. I've got all the accomodation worked out now, staying in Kiwi's Nest about three blocks from the university on the Friday and Saturday night, and at the university for the rest of the trip. I am also worried what CBIT will do without me, as the promised webadmin interface is not ready. Maybe I'll have a nice productive programming day tomorrow? The fact that I'm working on my blog at 1am suggests not...

On a side note, I think I've discovered Smilex... I can eat any one of sardines, tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion, curry powder, chillis, and noodles, but combine then together into a dish, the name of which escapes me (It looks like red sludge with noodles mixed in) and I have an upset stomach the next day. A friend pointed out that he's allergic to tomatoes, so I wonder if I am too... They're c

Woke up, futzed around with the blog software a bit, had a piano lesson (I've started on When The Saints Go Marching In ^_^) and went home to eat lunch. Nor a particularly good lunch, either. Jam iced buns.

Futzed around on the computer more, preparing FreeRADIUS packages for upload, since I forgot to test them with lintian when I created them, but that's not a huge issue since my sponsors both got back to me and said they're busy until next week.

Went out to find food, taped two episodes of Rosemary and Thyme, and returned to find Shane had returned from his coast trip, and I wasn't expecting him back until Sunday. Given I only found out about the trip on Thursday, and found out he was going on Friday, this lack of information shouldn't have surprised me. ^_^ No one asked if I wanted to go though. >_<

Idled around on IRC for a while, got into a discussion of copyright and source, which ranged from Finland's Lay Judge system, through to some direct personal abuse against me, something along the lines of (caps as per writer) "STOP THINKING LIKE A CALCULATOR AND FUCKING THINK FOR YOURSELF". This lead to my first /ignore in many many years of Internet, and I guess I mainly did it to see what it was like. Since that person seemed to have ignored the rest of the conversation in terms of direction, intent, and atmosphere, I think it petered off a bit after that.

Still, I'm looking forward to next weekend's IRC debate between the various Debian Project Leader candidates, lots of fun issues that've come up, and plenty of different approaches to them.

Since I had the big gap in this blog from mid-January, I still haven't written anything about my Queensland trip, or... well, nothing else I did comes to mind. I bought World Of Warcraft a few weeks ago, but only had time to play it for a week so far. Apart from that, boring boring boring. If I could make time for something interesting, I'd blog about it. ^_^

Oh yeah, and I signed myself up as an AmazonJP affiliate, so I can put links to products there and if you click them, I get a percentage towards a gift voucher. ^_^ So if and when I talk about things from AmazonJP, I'll put links. I've added a link to PGSM Vol.12 yesterday where I mentioned collecting it from DHL as a test.

An apple
A nectarine
Yaki chicken bento w/Mung Bean from Mirimar's Delight
Two prawn ball skewers, two octopus ball skewers and six gyoza
600ml Diet Coke. (Yeah, I know. I haven't had any since Thursday though)
A plum
A kiwifruit
Miniwheats + puffed amaranth w/ soy milk. (This seems to have given me hiccups)
A banana
Raspberry swirl soy icecream
Four pieces of toast w/honey
Glass of cordial (weak. This stuff's pretty strong. Diet Apple/Raspberry flavour. I don't think I'll buy any more after I finish this one)

(Today doesn't actually count, I start as of tomorrow. ^_^)
Six rosemary and garlic sausages
A Plum
An apple
The sweet potato and baby leaf thing. (Not very nice. >_<)

This month's fad diet: The Great Australian Diet: The Atkins Alternative by Dr John Tickell.

It seems to be rougly based on the idea that Okinawan people seem to live longer and healthier, and then goes off into some kind of whackiness about eating lots of plant foods. Anyway, I'm gonna give it a shot.

The basic idea is that you eat a little bit of fifteen different types of plant foods every day, and every meal should be two-thirds or more plant foods. Having been weighing up vegetarianism as a way to make myself eat more vegetables anyway, why not? He reckons you only need meat every three days or so.

He has this scale, "HI" for Human Interference, which is based on the idea that the less adulterated the food between germination and consumption, the better.

It also involves 100 minutes a week of walking.

Since I plan to start tomorrow, I went down to the supermarket today and bought the following:

• Sweet Potato and Baby Leaf w/ Fetta. (Prolly gonna chuck the fetta, will eventually migrate to buying a lettuce, a sweet potato and some balsamic vinegar, but one step at a time.)
• Multi-grain bread. (I don't know enough about bread to know if this is better or worse HI than wholemeal, but I figure it is)
• Soy margaine (for jacket potatoes)
• Farm eggs (I've been buying the woolworths ones until now, but it turns out their cage eggs. >_<)
• Soy yogurts
• Hi-Cal+ Soy Milk
• Some continental sausages (Gotta have some meat)
• An avocado
• Potatoes
• Kiwifruit
• Plums
• Nectarines
• Oranges
• Apples
• Bananas

That's 11 plant things + the one remaining coleslaw in my fridge (cabbage + carrot) and some frozen vegetables (Three things, hopefully two that don't overlap) means I can do the 15 thing without having to slice/dice and otherwise prepare. ^_^

Friday 15th October 2004
I slept in, so breakfast was a piece of caramel slice and 300ml Diet coke from Joe's cafe.
Lunch was jumbo Kingsley's chips, breast fillet burger with chilli sauce, gravy sub and two croquettes + 600ml Diet Coke
Dinner was some lamb steaks or something
Saturday 16th October 2004
Lunch, I have no idea... The steaks from Friday may have been here instead
Dinner was Pizza and booze. ^_^
Sunday 17th October 2004
Again, no idea.
Monday 18th October 2004
Breakfast was Laksa w/out noodles
Dinner.. Forgotten again
Tuesday 19th October 2004
Breakfast was two subs from Subway
Dinner was Opporto's and Sunkist and Diet Coke. (Also saw Donnie Darko Director's Cut. That was good. ^_^)
Wednesday 20th October 2004
Breakfast was subs from the airport servo.
Dinner was Sizzle Bento. ^_^
Thursday 21st October 2004
Breakfast was subs frmo airport servo again
Dinner was two subs from Subway. Diet Coke a hoi hoi today.

Very late brunch: Combo Large from Sizzle Bento + random sushitrain stuff + Raspberry Crush from Boost Juice + Wheatgrass shot.

Saw Dr Turtle today, got my vital statistics measured:
134kg, 41 BMI.
133cm Waist
133cm Hips

Dinner: Another of those blocks of chocolate... Yeah, I know. But I'm out of food that I can be bothered cooking.

Breakfast tomorrow is courtesy of Joeseph Maatouk, and lunch will be in Civic or Braddon, and dinner... I dunno, but going shopping tomorrow night, so there'll be food a hoihoi. ^_^

Tuesday was Servo hero sandwiches for breakfast, macdonalds for lunch, and calamari rings for dinner.
Wednesday was Laksa for breakfast, and sausages for dinner.
Yeah, I know. I got busy. >_<

Breakfast: Little steak things on the barbecue

Lunch: Kingsley's Breast Fillet Burger w/ chilli sauce and a gravy sub and three croquettes and a 600ml diet coke.

Also had a Raspberry Crush and Wheatgrass shot from Boost Juice.

Dinner: Chicken Medallions in the gorilla. ^_^
500g of Calamari rings w/ light Tartae sauce
half a block of chocolate. (Cadbury Old Gold w/peppermint chips)

Breakfast/Lunch: Seafood basket from Red Fish + Chicken Fillet Burger w/Chilli sauce + Gravy Sub from Kingsleys, and 300ml Diet Coke
Dinner: 6 Woolworth's Chicken Kebabs. (I have no idea what flavour) and some frozen veggies. Also some cans of Lift, and some Diet Coke dregs.
Dessert: Block of mint-slice chocolate, more diet coke. ^_^

Breakfast: Jumbo chips + gravy from Kingsley's + 600ml Diet Coke. (Technically lunchtime. I slept in and the barbecue was out of gas)
Dinner: Kingsley's fillet burger with chilli sauce and gravy + gravy sub. More diet coke. ^_^

Breakfast: Four little steak things. Can't remember what meat. Barbecued.
1.25l diet coke over the day
Lunch: Laksa w/vegetables instead of noodles, roti and spring rolls a hoi hoi + 600ml Diet Coke
Dinner: McChicken, McChilliBurger and BigMac, without cheest. Bag of skittles and 750ml water.