The Bizzy!

Well.. Thanksgiving is over and Crystal and LeeAnn are back in Texas.. Starting tomorrow I begin the 21 day Bizzy Diet... Actually it's only 19 days since the last 2 days are rest days.. I have a slew of supplements to take, and I'm essentially cutting out all processed/refined carbohydrates for this diet! I'll be operating on leafy green veggies and fruits with lean meats. I'll work out 4 days a week, for a total of 12 times.. Let's see how much I can change my body during this time! Really I'm trying to lose fat, so this should work very nicely... then I have to get through Christmas with my parents without going up a pants size... if that works out maybe I can finally get back under 100kg, or 20% body fat, whichever comes first! I want to have a surprising check-up next spring :)

(No more Turkey Risotto!)

Anyway, going to bed early so I can get rest up for this challenge!

See you space cowboys and cowgirls!

Rockstar Emma

Emma Grace -- ROCKSTAR!!

Happy Birthday LeeAnn.

Movember

Happy Movember!! Can you see that shadow under my nose? Right now it's a raging hairy monster!!
Here look:

Look at that blurry monster! Today is the tenth day of Movember! you gotta grow out your stache so you can be an ambassador of men's health awareness!! In November, growing a 'stache is very similar to the pink ribbons for women's health awareness!

Anyway, see you guys! GROW THE STACHE cowboys!

Bizzy

So... I just pretty much achieved my bench press goal, so for the end of the year I'm starting this "Bizzy" 21 day work out and diet plan with supplements! Something I've never done before... let's hope it works :) I'll start the first week of December so I will finish before Christmas... it's a lot of work, but hopefully I'll get some good results! Here's what the plan is like: 20 minutes of 1min rep HIIT slow/fast followed by a superset of circuit weight training x 2, with 5 minutes jog + 5 minutes run and 2 more circuits! I did legs today and it's pretty awesome! By awesome I mean... painful!

It's almost Thanksgiving so it's time to start planning dinner! I haven't even bought the turkey yet, but we'll take care of that on Thor's Day. We'll just do a simple dinner... stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, succotash...  and pie!

See you space cowboys!

Top Chef!

Today Top Chef is back! I love cooking shows so much, I suffer through buffering on hulu for some Rachel Ray TV shows!! Anyway.. with no relation to Top Chef, I made Tequila Spanish Mussels and Clams!!  I think it's spanish.. only because I put tomatoes in it and it looks like a paella without the saffron rice!

Anyway, that brings me to my new favorite kitchen tool... and this tool has been around forever! This tool has given me the nickname of "Sauce Master" -- the mortar and pestle:

Here's my favorite recipe for salad dressing: 3 cloves of garlic, 3 pinches of salt, a few pepper berries, a dash of cumin seeds and a pinch of habanero. Mash it up nicely then pour in a tablespoon of vinegar and 1/4 cup of olive oil. pour this over your salad and mix well!

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Now that today's cooking is out of the way.. let's talk about my mood. I've been really out of energy lately.. and I'm pretty sure why. I've been spending a lot of time in front of the pc and it's kinda wearing me out I think... I've been at a real energy loss, I've been having to push it sometimes to give Emma Grace the energy she deserves.

I had a good day today getting away from the computer and shopping so I can see that that is causing some trouble. I'm losing weight lately so hopefully that will help too!

Finally here is me and my angel!!

See you space cowboys!

Meat

It's been a while since I've posted. I hope everyone had a great Halloween. We sure did!

So..well, Emma is a little small for trick or treating, but we gave out some candy to neighborhood kids and apparently in Japan, it is starting to grow in popularity but the tradition seems to be that you have to give candy when you get candy... it's very interesting!
So.. not really since it was halloween, but it's kinda grotesque, I made oxtail soup! It was really really really good!!

Making chili tonight :) it's a meaty week.

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!