Sam on Maui

Got it at my friendly local Borders - $150 for the unit, and it came with a $20 gift card for Borders.com. The unit itself comes with 100 public domain books - started "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" last night. The hardware seems nice enough. Light, comfortable. I don't think its going to be award winning or anything, but I'm reasonably pleased with it. Its a bit slow compared to what I'm used to (LCDs and multi-cored gigahertz processors), but I got used to it. The control pad on the bottom goes to the previous page (left), next page (right), up a font size (up), down a font size (down) and brings up the menu (center click). Works nicely, although I do want to press down to go to the next page sometimes. I've discovered that you can make it crash/hang-up if you hold the power button too long. Clicking it puts it to sleep, so (somehow) I've been trained to press and hold to turn off. That hasn't worked so well for me! Having to find a paper ...

Tonight at 6 p.m. I'll be heading to my Weight Watcher's meeting for my second weigh-in. I started at 220.6lbs, first weigh in was 221.6lbs (+1lb), and tonight? We'll see. Its been educational thus far, though. The Point tracking via the little food diary has made me a bit more conscious of what I'm eating, that's for sure. Discovering a bit more about how my hunger works has been pretty helpful, and is helping me plan accordingly. So, today, what am I having for lunch? Jack in the Box. No, really. A Sourdough Chicken Club, hold the mayo, plus a small fries and diet Coke. A gruesome 17 points, or half my point allowance for the day. Yes, this is the same guy who was fretting over a Snickers bar having 7 points, which is more than a lunch from Subway. But I'll tell you what - I've still got a LOT of points left for the rest of the day, especially if I eat sensibly the rest of the day. For a snack today I've got a personal size bag of low-fat popcorn (than...

One of the things that I've found interesting about Weight Watchers is my point allowance is what they say I should be eating. Ideally, after I add up all I've eaten and subtract it from my daily allowance I'll end the day with a nice zero. Slow and steady weight loss at maybe 1lb per week is what its shooting for, along with getting me to change my habits and diet. Good and admirable, certainly. Well, I've run into going over before. There are provisions for that, and honestly, the worst thing that happens is I dust myself off and get back on the program. Slowed progress is still progress. Last night, however, is the first time I've gone under my allowance, and I did so by about 1/7th of my total. Not a big deal, right? Nope. At least not the way I did. If I had eaten a lot of filling, zero to low point foods that'd be one thing. But I didn't. Where I missed things was dinner. I had a very small (less than 3 oz) portion of steak, half a tomato, kim chi and ...

Right now I'm seriously hunting a for a new smart phone (darn my geek lust). At the moment I'm ignoring the iPhone - I know it'll do everything I want, so I think I'd be better off looking at the competition, you know? More likely to find that "perfect" fit for me. I've been looking at Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7's, but feel like I haven't given Blackberry a fair shake just yet. Just doing my research :) Been looking more at the smaller phones - want something that's a reasonable size (no Droid X for me) with a good camera. I've realized that having 1 billion apps isn't important - my wants and usages are actually fairly limited. Nothing major. If my Centro has taught me anything is that I'm fine without multitasking, although it would be nice. I'm seriously NOT power-using my cell phone - that's what I have computer for! I pretty much want: a phone (heh) to be able to check my email (two accounts - Yahoo and Li...

There are a fair number of truisms and clichés about getting back up after being knocked down and learning from one’s mistakes. I won’t bore you with them, but that is what has happened. After doing things my way - at my own pace, and generally not having much success at it – I started up with Weight Watchers. Last week was my first weigh in, and I took home a bit of information for it. Now, anyone who has tried to break, change or start habits can tell you its hard, never mind doing two or even three of them at once. As such, I came back this week and actually gained a pound. Yay me! Thanks to the little food journal I got, I could see where I was having trouble plus figure out why. Seems a bit obvious, I suppose, but I wasn’t doing it before!  After thinking about it, I remembered (or more to the point, made it a point to remember) that afternoons are trouble for me when it comes to food. That’s when I want to eat, to snack, to put my face in a trough of something tasty just t...