Some of this article is scientifically incorrect/dubious, but I had to laugh at this portion.

To maintain your new weight, you have to fight evolution. You have to fight biology. You have to fight your brain. You have to fight your metabolism.

So what? Is something worth doing or not?

I lost ~25% of my body weight and have kept it off for five years now. Was it easy? Not all of it. Am I glad? Hell yes. Oh indeed hell yes.

My knees went from hurting every day to not hurting ever. Such a huge, unspeakably large improvement in my life.

I walked nine miles yesterday with a pack, without walking that far in a long time. So no training up at all. I just did it. I couldn’t have done that when I was fat. Not in any way. I would probably have literally died (given how much I overheated being fat) or at least wished I were dead.

And no, my set weight point is not small. Judging by family, sibling and all else, it’s probably around 230-280 (assuming this article is correct). Instead I weigh now around 150.

Fighting evolution, biology, my brain, and metabolism?

Shit, fought tougher things than that my whole life. Why stop now?

I eat about 1,200 – 1,400 calories a day now. Every day except Saturday. And that’s not much.

But it’s so much better than the alternative — knees too far into weight-related deterioration to walk. Having my feet fall off at 50 due to diabetes (or getting diabetes at all). And being generally just unable to do the things I want to do.

If you’re fat, maybe it’s not your choice. But I do indeed believe that you as an individual had something to do with it.

No one stuffed that food into your face but you.

I prove that every day.

And this part made me laugh, too.

Although this study is always referred to as a starvation or semi-starvation study, I think of it as a diet study, because the men were allowed nearly 1,600 calories per day.

Amateurs. I eat less than that every day. Of course, I have a naturally slow metabolism. But I don’t use that as an excuse for being fat as so many do.

And yep, I do measure it accurately. If I ate 2,000 calories a day I’d weight about 200+ pounds again quite quickly.

Weight loss comes down to, do you want it badly enough or not? If not, don’t attempt to improve your life or you will fail.

Probably better to do nothing as this very typical-of-the-genre article counsels — aka, the American Way.

A peculiar internet activist culture has sprung up that treats any form of intellectual curiosity as suspect.

Yup. Asking sincere questions to elucidate someone’s views these days is often seen as tantamount to a second Holocaust.

Yet another thing I can’t quite understand.

I realized today that we have more IT infrastructure in our home than many businesses do in their offices.

Including VMs, we have ~20 machines running at home all the time. Networking gear. All of that.

When I’m studying for exams, it can be as many as 50 machines.

That’s funny.

I listen to mostly female artists. Probably 90% or more. Just prefer them and they are usually better and more talented as they have to be to get to the same place a man gets.

These days, I also read mostly books written by women with female protagonists. Hasn’t always been that way, but in the last few years it has been.

When a colleague of mine at an old job figured out that I listened to mostly female artists he accused me of being gay (or “mega-gay,” as he put it).

Later, the same colleague having probably forgotten about the accusation of homosexuality opined that I only listened to female artists that I wanted to fuck.

Yeah, those things really don’t go together.

This despite the fact that I’d never considered the potential fucking status of any female artist I’d ever listened to.

But to many men it’s absolutely incomprehensible that any man would want to listen to anything that a woman has created — especially if the woman in question is front and center.

I can’t understand it. I just can’t no matter how hard I try.

But I heard an example of that myself the other day. Some guy across the room at work said, “I just can’t hear those high female voices. That’s why I don’t listen to them.” (Note: he was not talking about an actual hearing problem.)

Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, I welcome the apocalypse.

Went to a concert recently. Didn’t end up staying for quite the whole to-do because the planning was terrible and there were only enough bathrooms for a few hundred people. Around 3,000 were there. So the wait was around an hour.  Not for me.

But we still had a good time.

Something I noticed is that there were no fat people there. I saw one fairly overweight woman. Just one. No obese men, and no even really chubby women except that one.

It was very odd, like being in another country. It was so noticeable that even my partner made mention of it even though she’s fairly oblivious to things like that most of the time.

This was an outdoor concert with plenty of room so it’s not that obese people were (potentially) worried about taking up too much space.

Part of it is that the crowd was young, mostly 18-25 years old. The rest I can’t explain.

A digression: I saw a girl wearing a Nirvana concert t-shirt and looked at her a little closer and realized she was about 18 years old.

She wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain was still alive.

Dang.

That means I saw Nirvana live in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1993. When she was not even a glimmer in someone’s mind.

But back to the other topic. When I worked for another company a colleague and I had to travel to the UK for work. He was based in Bermuda where obesity is nearly as prevalent as it is in the US.

We were walking down the street one day in Guildford, outside of London. Like me, he tries to be respectful and not objectify women and not leer.  He’s a decent guy.

But he said to me as we were walking, “I didn’t know what it was at first, but when I got here I said, ‘All the women are really beautiful, not like where I’m from!’ And then I figured it out. There’s no fat people! Well, maybe a few but it’s amazing how everyone looks better when they don’t weigh as much as a bus.”

I agreed and noted that I had had the same reaction when I’d traveled outside the US. In Israel for instance I could not believe how ridiculously beautiful the women were — and then I realized that I’d spent a week in country and hadn’t seen a single woman over 150 pounds. Not one, anywhere.

That’s when I realized that — male or female — you can really improve your looks by just not being obese.

The concert was odd because I’m used to being surrounded as is typical in America by people who sound like Puff the Magic Dragon on a rough day after walking up a flight of stairs.

As I said, it was like being overseas again.

I think Key West (and the Florida Keys in general) is my favorite place in the world that I’d never want to live permanently.

But such a different lifestyle, mentality and ethos than the rest of the US.

Not as image-conscious and Southern California, and the pace is very slow.

And everyone knows how to fish, and knows about fish. And food culture is the best in Florida, though that’s not saying much (but the seafood is amazing).

It’s not nearly as quirky and bizarre as it was during the 80s when I first visited the place — but then again, nowhere is.

Too bad it’ll all be underwater soon.

I just figured out a very, very hard problem at work without access to the tools I really needed to troubleshoot it.

So, kids, when you have an inconsistent switch config and ESXi is expecting one VLAN and is instead receiving untagged traffic due to an erroneous native VLAN being configured only on some switchports, you gon’ have problems.

Took a while to figure out, even for me. But I did it without switch access by toggling VLANs on the ESXi host. Process of elimination is always slower than process of confirmation.

And that is why I got four job offers. That, and my humility. 😉

Agreed.

PowerShell is terrible compared to the Unix shell. Bash is so superior it’s not even a competition.

And OMG is PowerShell slow. So, so slow.

PowerShell is like an industrial dump truck. One of those big ones they only use on mining sites with eight-foot-tall tires.

Except Microsoft has tried to make it do everything, so when you try to drive PowerShell down a lane in a suburb it’s either do it at 0.5 mph or ruin everything in sight. And there’s no way to just take the Corolla because there is no Corolla.

It’s the dumptruck or nothing.

And the commands are so long. You have to compose a novel to do something that Bash can do in one line.

PowerShell is Microsoft’s Unix envy showing except they threw out all the good parts of the Unix philosophy and kept all the terrible, unworkable ones.

Lennart Poettering and the systemd morons would be proud. Hell, probably are.

Though I agree with some of this article, the demonization of atheists is just a little too convenient considering just how demonized they already are.

Tarring all atheists with the thoughts and actions of a very few is exactly what happens to peaceful Muslims — too bad the writer of the piece is too intent on some ridiculous position to see that.

Me, I’m not anti-Islam. Any more than I am any other religion.

Fuck ’em all. They’re all brainwashing and on balance evil. Christianity: Evil. Islam: Evil. Buddhism: Evil. All the others, too — the world would be better off without them.

Not nuanced?

I don’t care. Just because some forms of brainwashing are better than others doesn’t excuse them.

I know it is related to cultural traditions, poor training and the idiocy of US companies, but a system administrator or infrastructure engineer in India who is considered “senior” in that country would in most US organizations be considered — at best — capable of help desk tasks and little else.

Dealing with my Indian “peers” is an exercise in wanting to throw chairs at walls. They are not my peers. They have about as much knowledge as I did when I was six months in to my IT career.

This is roundly true. And no, I am not saying they are naturally stupid or some such. Just that most have not been trained well, have been promoted beyond their capabilities to save money and like most people will take the promotion when offered.

Still doesn’t help me a fucking bit when I have to explain someone who is supposed to be more knowledgeable than me and helping me how VMware HA fucking works.

Now something a bit more positive.

I don’t mind the Mac’s Finder and how it works, but it can be much-improved to work better for someone like me who needs more capabilities.

XtraFinder is a great tool that adds a lot of those needed features.

I dislike remembering keyboard shortcuts as if I attempted to memorize even the most common keyboard shortcuts of all the applications, operating systems and tools that I use (I used ten different operating systems today alone*: Server 2012 R2, Windows 7, SUSE Linux, Linux Mint 17.1, Ubuntu 14.10 with XFCE (not Xubuntu),  Server 2008 R2, AIX 5.0, ESXi 5.5, Windows 8.1 and MacOS), it’d be somewhere north of 3,000 items to store — brain areas that are better-suited to actually-useful information.

So I’d prefer not to memorize things that don’t actually make me smarter or better.

XtraFinder makes it so that I have to recall fewer keyboard shortcuts on the Mac and makes me faster at the same time, so I really like it.

*Some days I use more in a single day. Record is probably 15-17. Yep, actively using. What happens when you have seen a lot in IT.

Scientology and Fat Acceptance now vie for the stupidest, uh, mass movements out there.

Ribs showing when you lift your arms a sign of anorexia? Then nearly everyone in shape in all of history is anorexic. Hell, back when I could bench 250 pounds, run 12 miles without being tired at the end and do 130 push-ups without stopping I must’ve been just so anorexic* because my ribs (and abs) showed.

I hate the FA movement so much it’s not even funny because it’s so perfectly emblematic of everything that is completely fucked up in this country.

Oh, they aren’t the worst. No. That’d be our plutocrats and corporate overlords. But they take terrible to a very personal and unflinchingly idiotic level.

*Hint: You can’t do even one of those things and actually be actively anorexic.

When there is any article about military life not rife with inaccuracies, I tend to cite it.

This one is pretty good.

The only major item the journalists got wrong is that the trainees are not using Vietnam-era M-16s. The rifles pictured are M-16A2s, which were not used in Vietnam.

The model used in Vietnam had a smooth stock; the A2 has a ridged stock for better grip. Fired one of those myself plenty of times.

The regular Army did not adopt the M-16A2 until the late 1980s, and almost all of them have now been phased out in favor of the M-4 for regular-duty troops.

The red device on the end is an adapter so it can fire blanks properly. It’s called a blank firing adapter and allows the rifle to cycle correctly, prevents debris that even blanks throw out from hitting anyone and signals that the rifle in fact contains blanks.

Why would anyone choose to become a teacher now, at any level?

You’d have to be fucking crazy.

It’s always been a difficult, under-compensated job.

Now it’s a totally untenable one for anyone who has any other choice at all.

I’ve been using mechanical keyboards again for about three years now, after having used them in the 80s and early 90s (that’s all there was then).

They are faster, more efficient and less tiring. They are a completely better typing experience. Far superior in every way.

This article covers the basics fairly well.

The browns are quieter than the article makes them out to be, though. They keyboard they’re in matters, too — I have two keyboards with brown switches and one is quite a bit quieter than the other.

I haven’t done any formal measurements other than a few probably-inaccurate typing tests, but my typing speed I’d estimate is 20-30% faster with a mechanical keyboard with probably 50% fewer typos.

Recommended in every way.