Phew! Back on the Bandwagon.

The birthday (and therefore the Buttercream Frosting) are over. Back to the diet. I did manage one day of simply remarkable calorie consumption - I need to keep that to a minimum. No measurable weight gain, fortunately.

That cake sure was tasty, though.

For reference, that frosting recipe spread on a 13X9 Duncan Hines yellow cake mix yields a cake with very close to 8000 calories total (7920). A 1/8th slice then is 990 calories. Yikes.

David

Buttercream Frosting

How ironic is it that I am posting about frosting immediately after posting about my weight loss? Every once in a while you have to indulge a tiny bit. This is the very best frosting that I have ever tasted and by far the best that I have ever made. I am putting it in the blog mostly so that I don't lose it. I almost had a heart attack when I couldn't find the recipe.

The diet is still going well. This is day 16 and I have lost 14 pounds.

6 cups powdered sugar
3/4 cup butter at room temperature
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup half-and-half
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons light corn syrup

Cream butter on medium in Kitchen aid. Gradually add powdered sugar, adding the salt after the first batch of sugar and alternating with the half-and-half and vanilla extract. Scrape the bowl often. At the end stir in the corn syrup (this keeps the frosting from crystallizing).

You can make this chocolate by adding 3 squares of melted cooled baking chocolate, but if you do, reduce the sugar a tad or it will be a bit dry. It would probably also work to add a dash more half-and-half, but I haven't tried that.

I know the chocoholics out there will hate me for saying this, but it is better without the chocolate. My wife vehemently disagrees with that, so your mileage may vary. :-)

David

On Weight Loss

I lost a lot of weight a couple of years ago using South Beach. The total including the pre-South Beach cutting back was around 60 pounds. That is a lot of pounds. I thought South Beach was a miracle.

Then just as I hit my target weight I found out Deb was pregnant. Then shortly after, we found out it was a highly problematic pregnancy. Then we had an infant undergoing lots of surgeries. And now we have a happy healthy toddler.

It all ultimately turned out great, but none of it did anything good for maintaining my weight, including the present happy healthy toddler situation. So now I am a fat pig again. As the weight was coming back on I made a couple of attempts to start South Beach again, but I found that phase I was never as effective as the first time and at some point I stopped believing that I could religiously follow the South Beach plan for the rest of my life.

So what to do? I needed a new strategy. I had tipped over the limit again from "overweight" to "obese" (i.e. my BMI was over 30) and something had to change.

I am a scientist, so in no way do I believe that there is anything ultimately magical about cutting back on carbs. It probably changes your biochemistry a little (OK, definitely), but ultimately what matters for weight loss is calorie reduction. Period. If you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. If you burn fewer calories than you eat you will gain weight. Very simple.

So I have two choices, burn more calories (exercise more), or eat less. Did I mention that I have a toddler? Excercizing much more is out. I can try to keep myself in the "Active" column (defined as 4000-6000 steps by us pedometer wearing geeks), but there is no way I can rationally aspire to the "Very Active" column (>10,000 steps).

OK, so I need to eat less. How much less? I needed a rational no BS guide to optimal weight, calorie intake, and the like. I picked up the No-Fad Diet book as a resource.

Step 1. Validate the caloric intake estimates in the book. I am usually (OK, always, I am in the 99.99th percentile for height) off the chart and what applies to the little people doesn't always apply to me. The book said that to maintain my current weight I would have to be eating between 3300 and 3900 calories per day (or more as I was gaining). So I kept track for several days and sure enough, that was a pretty good estimate.

Step 2. Set a target weight. Did I mention that I am off the charts? Fortunately the charts are linear and I was able to do a linear regression to determine my ideal weight range. In case anyone else needs them, here are the formulas (height is in inches):

OWLow = 4.757895 * Height - 158.411

OWHigh = 5.733333 * Height - 192.66

Obese = 5.733333 * Height - 191.66

UW = 3.785714 * Height - 135.071

You are overweight in the OWLow to OWHigh range. You are obese at Obese and higher. And you are underweight below UW. So I am overweight when over 217 and the middle of my ideal range is 191. That seems low to me, but I'll go with it for now. 217 is definitely OK and if I start to look like a 6 foot 7 inch scarecrow as I move towards 191 I can always reevaluate.

Step 3. Set a target for daily caloric intake. Fortunately my weight isn't off the charts, so I could just look this up. At my ideal weight of 191, my caloric intake should be between 2483 (inactive) and 2865 (active) to maintain that weight indefinitely. I will most likely always eat more on weekends and I can more easily eat less during the week, so I set a target of 2400 calories (or less) on a seven day moving average, during the diet period. I will adjust this to 2800 or so after I lose the weight.

Step 4. Don't cheat. Hmmm, how to do this? I chose to be obsessive about writing down every calorie that I put in my mouth. So far that is working for me.

I have been doing this for 14 days now and I can report that I have dropped from a starting weight of 262 to 250. It is very exciting to lose 12 pounds, and very depressing to think that I have as much as 59 to go. Still, this is every bit as good as South Beach was the first time (so far) and I feel like I have control over the elements of success.

David

Hiring Resolution

I have been having so much fun reading the coding horror blog that I have decided it deserves a permanent link. Not that I always agree with what he says, or anything. But he manages to be thought provoking for sure.

He wrote a post a while back on the vast chasm between those who can program and those who cannot. That post, especially when you dig deep into some of the source material, really gets you thinking about who you should (or should not) hire. Now he has a very scary post up about how most programmers can't program that should be required reading for anyone who has to hire programmers.

"But wait!" I hear you cry. "That is just the opinion of a few jaded people, it isn't scary at all." Regrettably these observations dovetail very neatly with my real world experience. That is the scary bit.

So even though it is well after the beginning of the year, I have a new resolution. I hereby resolve to FIND OUT if people can actually program before I hire them or recommend them for hire.

No. No. No. Do not even THINK of doing that.

Over on Coding Horror Jeff Atwood has a post up about a post that Raymond Chen had up. And I am going to comment on Jeff's post here, making this a meta meta blog, I guess.

The whole thing is talking about how dialog boxes confuse clueless users and they tend not to do the right things when they see them. OK, fine, I agree that that happens and that it is a very real problem with computer usability.

But then he (Jeff) makes this comment:

If you need to update, do so. if you need to download and apply security patches in the background, do so. If you need to send crash data, do so. Silently. And do it in the background, when the PC is idle-- without bothering the user.

AAAAAAAHHHHHH! NO, NO, NO.

I never want my computer to install anything unless I know that it is happening. I never want anything sent out of my computer unless I know that it is happening.

I run software to notify me when malicious software (and anything that does something on my computer that I am unaware of is malicious, even if Microsoft wrote it) tries to access the internet.

And I disable all automatic updates. Of course I want to have the latest security patches (and I do), but any install, no matter how innocent, can break my system and I at least want to be able to identify the culprit. If I install an IE patch and all of a sudden Firefox stops working or something, then at least I know what to blame and where to look for a fix.

That kind of automagical maintainance logic belongs in an appliance, not a general purpose computer. Only when all of the variables can be fully controlled does it make sense in my opinion. If it does exist in a general purpose computer, it should be something I can opt into, not opt out of.

The Lack of Consequences

OK, I admit it. I read Wil Wheaton's blog. Like many trekkies I absolutely hated Wesley Crusher, but I started reading Wil's poker blog when he started playing and, well, he doesn't seem like such a bad fellow.

Anyway, he has this wistful post up about the disapearance of video arcades, which I remember even better than he does being 7 years older. The whole thing makes for good reading, but he makes a point at the end that really clicked with me.

My kids' generation, with their online gaming and its associated sense of anonymity and unaccountability, aren't getting the same social workout that we all got when we were kids. When I played a two player game against another kid and I beat him, if I taunted him mercilessly and made explicit references to his mother's sex life and my role in it, he would have justifiably kicked the everliving shit out of me; so I learned that it was always a good idea to be gracious in victory and defeat. Contrast that with the foul and profane behavior exhibited in today's online gaming worlds, by players who are old enough to know better, or young enough not to care.

I have played a fair bit of MMORPGs and I have to say that while most of the people you meet online behave fairly well, there is a distinct trend for a significant fraction of the younger crowd to behave in ways that are more than two sigmas outside of the normal distribution of social behavior. Sometimes way more than two sigmas. It has made me a big fan of /ignore.

I wonder how I will overcome this with my own son? Will gaming and social interaction get more and more anonymous as he grows?

The little one.

Will is the driver.