Linux

Here we are having the most amazing ramen at our favorite ramen place Oozakura! Emma's happy even though she can't have ramen.That's her Halloween outfit she has on too. She loves her Mummy! I've been just flat out exhausted this week and not gotten up the energy to blog in a while, but today I'm feeling a little better.


Today's post is going to be a quick tech blog comparing Windows and Linux. I've been playing with Windows 8 for the past couple of months, and while I hated being on Windows, it did work, though not well. I've now switched back to Linux Mint 13 with the cinnamon interface and I have to say, it's nice. So many things I missed out on!!
Let's start with the interface -- the "Metro" interface is a nightmare to use on a desktop. It will work great on tablets, but on a desktop, I don't want to have to hunt down and find the icon I want in pages after pages of tiles:

It looks nice and colorful, but... a little difficult to use. Also I get confused between Windows programs and apps from the Windows app store.. they behave differently, programs open in a window and apps go full screen. The built in PDF reader was especially bad. Let's see what mint looks like:

Looks familiar right? I thought so.
Let's continue.. What do I have out of the box? Full office support, I have Thunderbird (my favorite email), Firefox, VLC media player, Banshee music player (I prefer rhythmbox) and pidgin IM. What does Windows have? All of their windows apps for  these which require you to have a app store account etc etc... and no Office, that's a separate purchase. I mentioned PDF reader above, Mint comes with documentviewer which reads not just PDF but almost every text file I've met.

My notes:
My system is a beast, I have 32gb ram and a good 2.5GB of video cards. On Windows, it wants to set aside 32gb on my hard disk for paging but the hard disk only has 120gb total space!! On Linux, obviously, you can set your own space fairly easily, and it doesn't have to be on the same disk.

I have 3 monitors, and I found that if I was streaming netflix or xbmc on the TV and did something fullscreen on another one, on windows the playback would stop whereas on Linux it continues without a care in the world.

I have a DLNA media server in my living room which I use to stream to my other devices, in Linux, not only can I browse it via DLNA (Windows could do it too) but I can actually mount it like a local drive and load the files into a playlist. (Windows couldn't do that)

Finally, I was also experimenting with Office 365 consumer preview. It was actually nice, and I preferred it to Libre office (it has more "polish") but the ribbon drives me crazy!!

So, in summary, use Linux! It's free, as in beer! And it works really well... at least for me. So many things just .. work, or work better.

See you space cowboys!

Porkchops!

Last night after eating these decently sized succulent pork chops and saw-mill gravy, I weighed 103.3 kg.. This morning I weigh 101.9... where did the 1.4 kg go? I didn't have any b.m. and just guessing, but I think my liquid input was even with liquid output... It's a mystery!

Diet Don'ts

Cake and Sweets all you can eat for 980 yen... seriously? I puked after lunch.. I started to get "high" feeling and my stomach started to hurt and I started craving salty food. Rieko's stomach hurt for a few days. I'm still a whopping 102 kilo! :( Today I just did a quick jog before it started raining, 2k in 10 min... this tubby can still move when he tries!! I'm also getting stronger on my benchpress, last week I dropped a dumbbell on my chest and then a few days later I wasn't able to finish a set, but yesterday I did 3x5 and 1x8 so the day after tomorrow I should be up to 5x5 ... I hope.. so maybe 1 or 2 more weeks and I'll clear the 100kg mark! I'm also starting to incorporate burn-out days and jogging days, so maybe if a miracle happens I'll start trimming down as I finish my goal of clearing the 100kg mark!! So, this year, I'll have done 2 exercise goals, run a marathon and bench my body-weight and/or clear 100kg.

Anyway, I hope y'all are better at resisting temptation than I am!

See you space cowboys.

Drive

There are so many things to post about .. I don't know where to begin.

Why don't I just do something nice and boring about something that came to me today during the course of a meeting.

TPTB at my company were discussing our mid-year interviews and asking if the managers underlings have drive. Not if they are doing their jobs well, not if they need to learn anything or need training or if there are any parts in the chain of command which are breaking down. No, they ask, are they still motivated? Are they looking to the future? Of course they are! They've only been working here for a year, they still have the fresh out of college new degree smell! What worker with half a brain who wants to keep their job would tell their boss they don't have any motivation or any desire to work more? Also, what manager puts so much emphasis on this aspect to ignore any other facets. For me, I'd ask, are they learning? Can they learn? Do they apply themselves to the tasks at hand and learn from them?  It's like Yoda "There is no try, only do" -- I wouldn't want someone to say "Boy, look at Pike, granted he can't do anything, but boy is he motivated!" Yes, having drive, and being motivated is important, but for the most part, you also need to do something with it!!


So.. after such a boring wall of text, let's look at a picture!!

Maybe tomorrow I'll show you what not to do when you want to lose weight!

10 years

10 years ago today I met my wife! Amazing how quickly time flies! I've now known her for 1/3rd of my life! So for dinner today I made a 1 pot meal I saw on 30-min with Rachael Ray -- something called a cassale or something like that.. basically a meat soup with a salad on the side. It was pretty good! We got some sparkling wine by "Carl Jung" that's a de-alcoholized sparkling wine .. not sparkling grape juice... whatever the difference is.

This week.. Emma is just not taking a bath ... she just suddenly cries! Dunno why, but she's just not liking the bath! I wash her with the shower head and soap her and rinse and then .. suddenly it's cry time. I don't even get her in the bath sometimes before she starts crying! I hope she gets over it soon! She used to love the bath.

Manly Quiche

*GASP!* I almost forgot to post today!!

No baby photos... she's been bad! Well she hasn't, but she was a cry baby in the bath tonight. It was a rough day! I mean.. how would you like it if you got bundled up, put in a backpack, carried across town to be forced to drink a vaccine and get two shots and then get dragged back to be thrown into a tub of hot water? Yeah.. you wouldn't be so happy either! Actually she was pretty good when I came home and she cried before getting in the bath not when she got in the water.

So tired today!!  I didn't work out like I thought I would since I had to go to the office today.

Anyway.. about the quiche! They are manly mini quiches... I just chopped up some veggies and a jalapeno and grilled some sausage and mixed it into the egg, poured it into the little silicon cupcake wrappers and baked it at 200 for 20 min. So tasty!! I wanna do some with bacon wrapped around it.

Ok ok... here's some fan service!

Cicadian Rhythms

Lately, I've been feeling like my clock hasn't been right. I've been feeling sleepy in the afternoon and getting an energy boost around 11 or 11:30 pm... which isn't so great since I try to get up around 4:30. So I've been skipping on blogging. Sorry!! I'll try to get back in a good rhythm and not be so sporadic with my posts.

Tonight taking a bath with Emma, I told her my Cinderella story and she cried when I got to the "punch line" ... I know it was purely coincidental but she had good timing.  Here goes:

Once Upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there was a beautiful young lady who lived with her step-mother and three older step sisters (her father passed away under suspicious causes but in this age, they had no forensic science). She must have been a red-head because her step-sisters and step-mother made her do all the household chores and forced her to sleep in a small room just big enough to have a fireplace (she was rather aptly named Cinderella) One day, the king decided to have a ball and invite all of the eligible women in the kingdom to attend so he could find a woman for his hopeless bachelor son to marry in order to continue his lineage. The step-sisters and even the step-mother (having spent all of her late husband's money)  were very excited and kept Cinderella busy all day doing their hair and make-up and squeezing them into their beautiful expensive dresses (this is where all the money went) and left for the ball in hopes of finding a rich husband. When they had all left, Cinderella sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat the leftover soup when suddenly the room was filled with sparkling lights which coalesced into a fairy. "Cinderella, I am your fairy godmother and I am here to give you a beautiful gown and carriage so you can go to the ball," she said. "Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," Cinderella screamed and threw a shoe at the fairy. "Leave me alone! I just want one night of peace!" she said, because she was extremely tired and didn't want to go to the ball in the first place. The prince, who just so happened to be skipping the ball (they're tiresome events with lots of brown nosing and waltzing in stuffy suits and tight gowns) heard her scream and rushed to her house to see what happened. Once their eyes met, it was love at first sight and they lived happily ever after! -- Afterword: After Cinderella moved away to the prince's castle, her step-sisters and step-mother had to take up jobs as housekeepers since they didn't find any husbands at the ball and they spent all their money on dresses to attend. 

See you space cowboys.

Time

Here's another cute on in the kimono -- actually it's just draped on her but still it looks really cute!! (I picked the pattern!)

I read this story on TechCrunch ( I think?) the other day about the CEO of Twitter going without time for a month or two and I thought "So what?" For the most part, that's how I've lived recently with the exception of using an alarm to wake up at 4-ish to start work. Outside of that I try to let my calendar notify me when I have something scheduled and Rieko reminds me when it's time for Emma to take her bath. So, I don't have any clocks on my desktop, no wrist watch, and basically when time happens it happens :) It's kinda strange and fun :)

Anyway give up your time dependencies!!