Free Software Linux

Where it equals weight. I’m losing some weight and it feels great. More on that below, but first: Hi, readers! How have you been? You may have noticed I haven’t been especially communicative lately. There’s a lot I might write about free software and culture, but for some reason I hesitate. Maybe I don’t feel confident in what I want to say. And also I’m keeping busy with other stuff. Enjoying the summer. Last year I made the big switch to Ubuntu right at the start of June and that drove a lot of activity and posts. It also led to some regret at my time allocation. This year I’m coasting along more and taking it easy, enjoying time away from the computer and with the family. No regrets there, although as always I’m itching to do something. One project I started in May was to do something about my weight. I’m 5 foot 8 inches (minus a few sixteenths of an inch), and for years I’ve hovered around 200 pounds. I weighed 165 in high school. Several years ago I lost 30 pounds, but then found it again and have continued to maintain way too much fat on my bones. So I started doing Weight Watchers Online, which works great for obsessive measuring types like myself. It’s a very objective way to manage things, with the tracking of the points and all. It’s also spurred me to exercise more, because exercise earns you “activity points” which you can exchange for more food on the days you earn them. I like eating more food. Miraculously, the combination of eating less and exercising more has contributed to excellent results so far. I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds in seven weeks, going from 210 to 190 pounds. I’d really like to get back into the 160s. The greatest part of this system is that I almost never feel deprived. It’s amazing how much I’ve been able to eat. In the past when I tried to diet, I wouldn’t eat nearly enough and my body would rebel. “You think we’re going to live like this forever?! No way man. Get back to the cheeseburgers and fries right this instant!” So one surprising benefit of the plan is the way it lets me know when I can eat more. The points system works well for portion control. It’s a lot easier to think in terms of points in relation to food. I currently get 31 points per day. I can make better choices knowing that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McDonald’s is 12 points. In the past I’d have a hard time choosing a hamburger instead, but now it’s easy to make that choice in order to save 7 points. Or even better yet, get a salad as the entire meal for only 6 points. It becomes a game to me to make the numbers work. I’ve cut way down on snacking. Two points for a single Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? I love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I would marry Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups if it were legal, but for that price we’re not even dating anymore. The online tracker also encourages me to eat more healthily by having check boxes for things like fruits and vegetables. I want to check them off and get a smiley face in return. You can start discovering healthy things that taste good. Today I put olive oil on asparagus and grilled it. Delicious! However, a key part of the plan for me is that you can eat anything. I want to eat healthy stuff, but I’m not going to give up the greasy salty food that I like. You get 35 “weekly” points to spend whenever and however you want, and that let’s me enjoy going out to restaurants still. (Where it can be harder to figure out your points expenditure, but so far so good. A lot of chain restaurants publish nutritional info online, which helps. I tend to add on several points to the meal to be conservative.) Of course you can also spend your daily points however you want, but to make it through the day you don’t want to get too crazy. The Bad Part There are two bad things about the Weight Watchers web site, and here we get to a free software angle: One, it requires Flash. I’ve already made the decision to compromise and use the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin as I wait and hope for Gnash to become a good-enough replacement, but this still makes me unhappy. Two, it doesn’t work very well on Firefox in GNU/Linux even with the Adobe plugin. It regularly gets hung up where it won’t save my data or won’t load new pages. I often have to quit and reload — usually just the tracker page but sometimes my entire browser. This part is extremely aggravating. I don’t mind paying the monthly fee to use their web site, but this will likely drive me sooner to create my own point tracking software. The points formula is well-known. I’d be giving up some nice features on the web site, but I think I could get by without it. I’ll likely suffer through it for at least another 15 pounds. The Good Part

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