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May 30, 2005
Losing Weight - 216 lbs this morning
Ug, went backwards :-( Big dinner last night partly to blame. I gave Melanie my personal firm commitment to have made a noticable drop in weight by time our anniversary rolls around. She was impressed and grateful. Now I've really got to do it!
Posted by mishkin at 10:26 PM
May 29, 2005
Losing Weight - 213 lbs this morning
Posted by mishkin at 10:30 AM
May 28, 2005
Losing Weight - 216 lbs this morning
Posted by mishkin at 05:50 PM
May 27, 2005
Losing Weight
I have decided on a goal for losing weight. By the end of June, I want to be under 200lbs. Right now, I am somewhere between 215 and 220. In order to do this, I will make sure to get regular exercise every day. I am going to focus on push-ups and sit-ups and 20 minutes of running on a treadmill or biking. Additionally, I will continue with my Gym membership and training at Gold's in Richmond. Finally, I will switch over to a diet of lunch and dinner veggie subs at Subway. I will weigh myself every day (don't have a scale today) and put the weight up on my blog. On average, I will need to lose about 1 pound every 2.5 days. The first 10 pounds should be easy... after that, we'll see.
I also have a long-term goal: to get down to 180lbs. This will be difficult, but I want to fit into size 34 pants, I want to be able to run 10km without trouble, and basically, I want to look way better than I do right now. If I can get to 180, I will basically feel like I am back to the weight of my youth (even though I was actually about 165 through most of university). Wish me luck!!!
Posted by mishkin at 03:35 PM
May 25, 2005
Found a great online resource
http://www.scriptarchive.com/ has many excellent, easy-to-use scripts for web servers.
Posted by mishkin at 02:47 AM
May 21, 2005
Tomorrow is Verity's First Birthday
She is taking baby steps (as in walking a few hesitant steps). She is babbling like crazy and even sometimes seems to make sense. She responds to her name. She falls asleep in her crib without too much fuss, often with none, but she wakes up every night between midnight and one AM to nurse. She played a great game with Justice and Haifa this evening and was laughing like crazy. She plays by herself in the sandbox for long periods of time. She loves steamed broccoli and carrots, rice with plain yogurt, peas, and lots of other things. She naps at 10:30 am, 2pm and sometimes at 5 or 6 pm. She is playful and smiles a lot, and she rarely cries. We had family portraits taken today. I'll post up a scan of them when we get them.
Posted by mishkin at 10:15 PM
May 18, 2005
Article about the Newsweek Quran Story
Quran more than a book for Muslims
The article points out that in the West we don't have anything that is comparable to desecrating the Quran. I beg to differ... what exactly was 9/11? Just in case: that's a rhetorical question - destroying life, liberty and property are comparable to desecrating the Quran. The amount of outrage Americans felt at the destruction of the World Trade Center and the lives of the people in it, is exactly comparable to the amount of outrage that is felt about the desecration of the Quran.
Posted by mishkin at 02:49 PM
May 17, 2005
Nice visit
This evening had a nice visit with some of my Baha'i friends in Richmond. We went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner and then came back to my apartment so I could share my music with them. We had a great time as usual.
Posted by mishkin at 10:50 PM
May 15, 2005
An Amazing Weekend
On Friday, and yesterday (Sat.) I had a whole lot of fun with Justice - we took the training wheels off of his bicycle and practiced riding. I held the seat at first, then after a few very brief times letting go (one or two seconds long), I moved to holding the middle of the handlebars. That way he could see me letting go and build confidence. Finally, I held onto his waist. Then he could feel me letting go and also see that he was in complete control. He quickly got up to being able to ride for several seconds on his own. Next weekend we'll get a lot further I suspect.
Last night I went to Toronto to see my brother Cal's play "Soy". It's a comedy about nothing in the style of "Seinfeld". The script is incredibly sophisticated, has some amazing comedic lines and is also fairly complex. I liked the performance a lot. There were a few times when the timing and delivery of lines was just exquisite. Near the end in particular, the performers seem like they are getting to a very very weak ending for the performance. Everyone is quiet, and I thought that the lights would go down any second. After maybe 10 seconds, the silence is broken by the delivery of a hilarious line that relieves the tension perfectly. And then there's a bit more to the play which ends it very strongly. So it turns out that Cal won the most prestigious award for acting and writing (he co-wrote the play with his friend Matt). Congratulations!
And then my mom visited overnight. That was really nice. We made fantastic crepes this morning for breakfast. She spent most of her time with the kids - they needed a little grandma time :-)
Posted by mishkin at 09:47 PM
May 12, 2005
Article about starting businesses when young
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Posted by mishkin at 10:11 PM
May 09, 2005
Fun Problem
Jesse called me this evening to try out a problem with me. The basic idea: given a function which provides an evenly distributed random number between 0 and 4 inclusive, create a mapping function which will take the output of the first function and convert it to an evenly distributed random number between 0 and 7 inclusive.
Turns out this is a pretty hard problem. He and I wrote up some simulation software in Java to try out some theories. We didn't come up with a perfect solution, but I (re-)learned something about Binomial distributions in the process. Fun stuff :-)
Posted by mishkin at 10:56 PM
May 06, 2005
Free Radicals, Anit-oxidants and Aging
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0004094A-849D-127A-849D83414B7F0000
Posted by mishkin at 12:36 PM
May 02, 2005
Agile Advice Blog - Growing Contributions
The Agile Advice blog that I have set up now has two contributors besides myself. There are two more poeple who I am hoping will become contributors shortly. This blog is probably the best way to get insight into the sort of work I am doing.
Posted by mishkin at 05:56 PM
Irreducible Complexity
Both Slashdot and Kuro5hin are running a big discussion about intelligent design and irreducible complexity. I posted discussion entries about my formal discussion of irreducible complexity where I essentially disprove it from a formal stance. I've had 118 hits on the page today as a result (so far).
Update: 3 hours later that's at 285 hits!
Posted by mishkin at 02:49 PM
May 01, 2005
My Dog
Back when I was a young kid, maybe 9 years old, my mom bought me and my brother a dog. We named it Phoebe (FEE-bee). When she brought it home, we were living on 10th Street in Saskatoon. The very first day we had her, she was so tiny and cute. I snuggled her in my lap for a long time while she slept. I only let her go when she finally peed on my lap!
Posted by mishkin at 09:40 AM