Connor's First Sentence

Connor's been putting "more" and "please" together for a while now and we have him say "all done" at the table when he's done with his meal, but those have been specifically prompted, so they don't really count.

Yesterday morning, we were getting ready and he heard the trash truck outside moving from house to house and was fixated, saying "car" repeatedly as he got dressed. On the way down the stairs, the truck drove past our front door to pick up our trash and he saw it and spontaneously said "bye bye car". Yup, beaming. Misha told me he also said "bye bubbles" as the tub drained (she had given him a bubble bath).

Next stop: Quantum differential equations

Microsoft Math

We're looking to buy a new PC for my wife, her's is getting on in years and starting to get slow with all these newfangled whippersnapper programs that require more CPU and Memory than her 8 year old machine can provide.

One of the things I'm insisting on is that we wait until after October 22nd so that her PC will come with Windows 7 instead of Vista. Not that I don't like Vista - I'm using it now - but why pay for an on-the-way-out-the-door-to-the-scrap-heap OS when a shiny new and highly-lauded OS is only a few months away?

The thing is, I still can't get over the fact that they're calling it Windows 7. Yes, I know people have been talking about this fact for a bit, but for those who are unaware, sit with me a while.

Windows 1.0, 2.0 came and went but it wasn't until 3.0 that it really got a strong foothold over DOS... at least in my world. There were various flavors of 3.0 (3.1, 3.11) but these are all technically Windows 3.0. The next iteration of Windows would be Windows NT, which was a winner until the dawn of Windows 95 (and all those "Start me up" Rolling Stones commercials... remember those?) For those still keeping track, we're on Windows 5 now.

Anyway, the rest of the 90s rambled on with new versions of Windows that were basically just more stable versions of Win95: Win 98/98se, Windows 2000/Me (or Millennium... I guess the "e" was for "entertainment"? or maybe "eh"?) which fall on the list as Win 6 & 7. Windows 8 would be XP. Vista: Windows 9. And now Windows 7 should really be Windows 10.

So what gives, Microsoft? Why the creative math? Is this all just because Apple beat you to the punch with "OSX"?

Just googling around...

Not sure if I should feel happy or depressed that a Google Image search on "Carl Gomberg" doesn't turn up a single picture of me. Plenty of pics of friends from Facebook though. And my Twitter avatar:

Yahoo Image Search just turns up a pic of my son and the pugs dressed for Christmas/Hanukkah 2007.

Only Bing pulls up an image of me. My old Facebook profile pic.

Go figure that Microsoft would actually get it right in this instance.

Weekly Wednesday Weigh-In

Ok, so I want to preface this with the fact that I had a huge company dinner last night at a fancy place that served steaks much larger than I'm used to. Not much of an excuse, but...

Week 3

Weight: 245.1 lbs

Weight last week: 241.1 lbs
Week's weight loss: -4.0 lbs
Total weight loss: -2.3 lbs

Target weight: 212.8 lbs
Weight remaining to lose: 32.3 lbs

Oh well.

Another odd thing worth mentioning is that I've been working to build a playset for my son and despite sweating up a storm and not eating any differently than usual, I was steadily gaining weight every day after working on the playset. It would be nice to believe this is muscle weight, but I think that's giving me too much credit.

Well, time to redouble the efforts, not dwell on this miserable failure, and let's see where next week ends up.

Weekly Wednesday Weigh-In

Week 2

Weight: 241.1 lbs

Weight last week: 242.8 lbs
Week's weight loss: 1.7 lbs
Total weight loss: 1.7 lbs

Target weight: 212.8 lbs
Weight remaining to lose: 28.3 lbs

Ok, so it's not much, but I'll take it. :)

Yay me!

Diet - Week 1 Weigh In

242.8 pounds. Not the heaviest I've ever been but within 10 pounds of that mark, so a good time to start moving back down the scale.

I'm not going to measure my waist or anything, that's just too depressing.

And no pictures tonight. Working on a huge deadline for work so that's been consuming me. Maybe I'll snap a pic this weekend. Something really unflattering like you always see as the before photo on those commercials. Y'know, the ones you look at and say, "really, you couldn't find a better picture?"

So, are we having fun yet?

ok, so it's the 21st...

I realize that in my last post I promised something by the 20th and in my usual blogging fashion I have missed that deadline. I realize I also may have built it up a bit too much. Because what I'm basically announcing is...

a diet

Yes, you read that correctly. In about 3 months I'm going to turn 35 and I'm tired of being as large as I am, I'm tired of getting winded walking up stairs, I'm tired of not fitting into T-shirts that I used to be able to wear... but mostly I'm just tired.

Thing is, diets work for me, been on quite a few in my time. It's when the diet "ends" and I gain it all back that's the bad part. And the reason I gain it all back is that whatever I was doing to lose the weight has ended and I'm right back in my old tricks.

So the strategy now is not a diet so much as a complete change in the way I eat. I've been working on a "10 Commandments" type document that I plan to make my eating credo from here forward. I'll post it in my next post once I polish off the rough bits. It's nothing trendy like South Beach or extreme like Atkins, just a list of rules to govern what goes in my mouth based on basic nutrition and the fact that while I know better, I've been ignoring the part of me saying "don't eat that second Twinkie". Heck, apparently I've also been ignoring the part of me saying "don't eat that Twinkie" the first time around.

My goal is to lose 30 pounds in the next 3 months. That's 10 pounds per month or roughly 2.5 pounds per week. I'm going to post my weight here to keep me motivated and honest, maybe even post some pictures. I was thinking about also posting my daily meals, but that might be overkill and I'd probably get sick of doing it and fall back into my old ways if that happened. Any advice or motivation from the 4 people reading is greatly appreciated.

1st weigh in and photo tomorrow. See you then.