Rattle & Hum

Interviewer: "What's this film about?"

Larry -> "It's sort of a musical journey really, you know?"
*band laughing*
Bono: "That's good... I was worried."
.
.
*band laughing*
Adam: "...We just wanted to capture this period of the band to.. oh, f**k it, I don't know."

haha. charming. I love this DVD. I don't how I let this one slip through my radar. It happened to be in the Walmart bargain bin. After watching it, I would have gladly paid full retail. From the opening cover of The Beatle's "Helter Skelter" to The Edge's lead vocals on "Van Dieman's Land" to "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" with a church choir in Harlem...What an amazing production of U2's classic tracks. While the video quality is not exactly reference it has a nice "rockumentry" / gritty look. The 5.1 mix, on the other hand, is excellent. There's a poignancy in live performances that studio tracks just don't have...this is a must have DVD for any U2 fan.

Comfort food

With all the doom and gloom this week, I was craving a good burger. We went to one of my favorite local burger establishments last night, Nick's Burger. It's a "mom and pop" with no gimmicks...just great food with outstanding service. I think my appetite is decreasing as I only ate half of my burger and half of my chili fries. So far I've lost 4lbs on my recent diet and exercise routine. So on a good note this week, my excel logs really seem to be working.

The Tortoise and the Hare

In many ways I can relate to the Turtoise.

On the treadmill I don't run but rather I walk briskly with the goal of covering a longer distance / burning more calories.

I invest in "boring" index funds with the goal of achieving higher net results over an extended period of time.

At a restaurant, I am often the last one in a group to decide what to eat from the menu but when I finally do choose something, it's exactly what I wanted.

The latest affirmation came this week and has to do with my career. I learned that I didn't get a program management postion that I applied for internally. The feedback was that my geography and level of cross functional experience were "concerns." When I applied I really thought that my remote work situation would be less of an issue since our company is pretty cutting edge in terms of virtual collaboration. We really "eat our own dog food." But in my group it is apparent that face to face is still very much preferred.

The other feedback was that I needed to better demonstrate my influencing skills. I wasn't sure if my 2nd level Mgr meant they were piss poor or that he just wanted to see more of it in action. I am hoping the latter. I am leading a project today that is outside of the scope of my day-to-day but I have not yet taken the project to completion. My 2nd level Mgr told me that he wanted me to finish it out to get more positive exposure. At the end of the conversation, my ego and self esteem were crushed. But in retrospect this is not the first time I've been turned down. It turns out that every position I've moved into has worked out well. I think back that if I had ended up in certain positions that I think I wanted at the time, I would have ended up in a less favorable situation today. Being careful of what you ask for right?

So the upside to all this is that in the end, we all know the turtoise wins. Not to say that I know I am going to "win" but right now I need to believe that to keep me going.

Ciao Bella

Viks and I both sleepy after a glass of Riesling.

Viks ordered the Sand Dabs. She only ate a bite as we were both near full from the generous servings of mussells and calamari appetizers. What can I say, American sized portions ;-)

Viks is on call tonight so we went to Ciao Bella last night. You'd think I'd order a rib-eye. Instead I ordered an excellent trout dish.

Excel Logs

Excel is your friend. It sure is mine! I hit 170lbs late last year and my LDL cholesterol also spiked. I knew I had to make some changes. Since Dec last year, I've been keeping an Excel log of what I eat and the associated calories. I've given up sugary drinks / snacks a long long time ago but my weakness is still fried foods & bread. I don't believe in drastic diets like Atkins anymore. I'm trying to take the approach of controlled / smaller portions of the junk foods I like while augmenting my intake of fruits and vegetables...a more gradual and -sustainable- change. It is said that 3500 excess calories = 1 lb weight gain. I'm trying to keep under 1800 calories a day. This is where the log comes in handy ..to help me track what I eat and influence my food choices throughout the day and week. I've been slowly working my way up to 1 hour on the treadmill (thank you Armin for your ASOT sets to help motivate me) and also trying to do more weights. It gets tricky whenever I go back to the Bay Area. Going out to eat with friends & family I tend to eat more calorie dense foods and not workout. I've only seen modest results so far but I hope my efforts will pay off in the long run.

Nvidia 7800GS..AGP's last hurrah?

Games released in the past 12 months have pushed my faithful ATI 9800Pro video card to it's limits. I've been wanting a new video card for the past year but majority of the recent Nvidia & ATI offerings have been PCI-E based. If I bought a PCI-E based card, I would have had to also upgrade to a new PCI-E based motherboard, new CPU (socket 939), PSU, etc. I could not justify to myself spending a lot of money for something only to be "outdated" again within another year. Nvidia's 7800GS which is an AGP based card was officially launched last week. I picked up the XFX version. The GPU is factory overclocked from 375MHz (Nvidia reference) to 440 MHz and the memory is also bumped up a bit . It's been rumored that the 7800GS GPUs didn't quite meet the specs of their big brothers and were thus salvaged / repackaged for the AGP market..makes sense..who knows.. who cares...my games look and run a lot nicer now compared to the 9800Pro. While the 7800GS is not the fastest card in the market, it's a great stop-gap until AMD's new socket AM2 + new DX10 video cards from Nvidia / ATI are released later this year.