I think my body is beginning to adjust to the whole notion of not eating anything until dinner. I never did eat breakfast except on rare occasion over the weekend, but I typically ate lunch everyday. Tuesday my stomach howled at me in hunger during work, and yesterday it growled a noticeable amount. Today, however, I made it through the day without any real distress. Granted, I was very busy at work today so the day went by remarkably quick. Still, when I was walking to the PATH with Kate I even commented to her that I was surprised my body wasn’t more hungry, and that I could probably even go a few more hours without eating; and I did.

By the time I got home and cooked up some rice and began eating it was actually about 2 1/2 hours since I got out of work (sucks having a long commute). We made 2 cups of rice tonight because Carin said she was hungrier than yesterday and would eat more, although I think we both ended up eating more. I feel much fuller than yesterday at this same time, but nowhere near bloated. Tonight I carried out the recommendation of David and Marc to crack open an egg over a freshly cooked steaming pot of rice and stir it up, and I must say it was pretty delicious.

About a month ago I wrote that Google was in talks with Orange about releasing a Google branded cell phone. Today, Engadget has released additional details about such a phone from a tipster who claims to have an “inside scoop.”

According to Joe Tipster, the Google phone will be called Google Switch and is the result of a collaboration with Samsung. It is a button-less touchscreen device with GPS functionality built-in for integration with Google Maps. The phone contact management system is an extended implementation of Gtalk that combines Gmail, text messaging and instant messaging. Also, the device is said to have no internal storage capacity, meaning that everything would be run over a network via a web interface (not sure how they would accomplish this, maybe all their dark fiber networks).

Whether this is fact or fiction remains to be seen, however one can’t help but play the “what if” card on this one. This device would simply be incredible, and would definitely have my vote over an iPhone, even if it didn’t have music playback capability. I use Google for the majority of my online services, so to be able to access them via my mobile would do wonders for accessibility and mobility.  Let’s just hope they don’t bring Cingular into the equation.

A senior former US official has told the BBC’s Newsnight program that in 2003 the US State Department, which was at that time under Colin Powell, received a letter that was purportedly from Iran’s elite. In the letter, Iran proposed ending support for the Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, making its nuclear program more transparent, and helping the US to stabilize Iraq. In return for its concessions, Iran sought an end to the hostility from Washington, an end to the economic sanctions, and the disbandment of an Iranian rebel group in Iraq.

It is reported from one of Colin Powell’s top former aides that the state department was in favor of the plan, but in the end, or rather in the beginning, was overruled by higher powers.

But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President’s office, the old mantra of ‘We don’t talk to evil’… reasserted itself.

Am I the only one not surprised that when faced with the brightest prospect for peace with Tehran the Bush White House pulls out the Neo-conservative agenda of their elders and adopts the 5-year-old mentality of stubbornness? Ironically, the same things Iran was proposing to surrender in its letter are the same things the US is seeking to get Iran to do presently. Since that time Iran’s support for Hezbollah allowed it to wage a bloody war with Israel and gain support in Lebanon and across the Middle East, its support for Hamas allowed it to win parliamentary elections in Palestine thus hijacking the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. and it now is under sanctions by the United Nations for its nuclear program.

When o’ when will we ever be rid of this incompetency?

Another day another expedition into the rocket science that is the Polish language. It really is very difficult and frustrating, not only learning a new alphabet and new words, but also new sounds and new ways of using your mouth and vocal chords to make those sounds. Today was about half a review of what I learned yesterday, and half new stuff. Carin brought over a little notepad and as I was going through the Rosetta Stone lesson she was jotting down notes in it. Upon completing the lesson she handed me the notepad and said “here, study this.” The notepad consists of a few pages of vocabulary containing all the words I have learned so far with some additional ones she has taught me over time, as well as colors and some verbs. She said she will be testing me at some point in the near future, I’m guessing over the weekend; but to get an early start I’m going to write out of some them here to conclude this post.

dziewcynka - girl
ryba - fish
ptak - bird
czerwony - red
niebieski - blue
siwe - gray
Ten samolot jest czarny - This airplane is black

Half way home! The experiment is roughly 50% complete now and I am already looking forward to dinner on February 2nd. I didn’t eat a lunch again today and although I felt a bit hungry it wasn’t painful hunger, but rather some light stomach growling. The daytime French diet emerges victorious once again.

For dinner I had a package of Ramen noodles, just the noodles, Carin had the broth, and we split a cup of rice, although I probably ate at least 3/4 of it. I’m guessing my total caloric input for the day, including coffee at work and household beverages, to be somewhere in the 1200-1300 range, which is well below the maximum daily allowance and in line with my making this whole thing more difficult ideology.

I feel comfortably full right now, which is certainly a nice medium between emaciation and obesity. Tomorrow brings with it another lunch-free day and more than likely some rice at dinner. I figure I will try this routine for a few days and see how my body responds to it. If I begin to lose a little weight, then that means I’m doing this correctly, because in actuality I should be starving at least a *little* bit.

A study in the United Kingdom by GfK NOP concluded that nearly one out of every eight men would happily ditch their girlfriend (but not their hair) for a gadget they desired. Gadgets, in the study, were classified as an HDTV, iPod or other desirable tech object. 16 to 24 year olds were the most trigger-happy when it came dumping off their leading lady for a toy, as 17% claimed they would happily make the switch. Married couples fared better, as only 2% of folks 55 to 65 said they would ditch their long-term marriages for something from Best Buy. Also, guys are not out of the clear completely, as 6% of women surveyed said they would leave their scrub for the hottest chic gadget on the market.

What is to be learned from this? Well, the obvious notion is that people are overwhelmingly materialistic en masse. I really cannot understand the rationale in why/how someone could do something like this. True gadgets are fun and great, but they’re no substitute for having a significant other in your life. Also, ladies, beware that Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and maybe consider getting your man that gadget he has been longing for. Otherwise, don’t be surprised come February 14th when you get the snub and February 15th when you see your ex-boyfriend at the mall with one arm around his new gal and the other holding his new iPod.

Already a few names comes to mind…haha

Kyle at work passed this onto me today. A great clip for anyone who remembers old-school Super Mario Brothers for Nintendo.

Another day in the books. I kept my word from my post last night and did not eat lunch today. It wasn’t too bad as I was pretty busy all day at work so I didn’t really notice it; although by the end of the day I was certainly beat and ready to get out of the office.

I came home and washed the dishes and made some rice and I must say I had a serious craving for it after not eating all day. I love rice, and I don’t know that it would be possible for anyone to complete any experiment like this without a deep affection for rice because it seriously becomes as important as water when you’re on a budget. Carin and I split 2 cups of rice for dinner and I felt/feel delightfully full.

I’m going to relive today tomorrow as far as not bringing a lunch is concerned, because as I mentioned yesterday I want to make this more of a challenging task to undertake. But don’t worry about me being malnourished at all, I’m on the French Diet during the day!

Today was my second venture into the Polish language; Lesson 2 of my Rosetta Stone software package. A little more challenging than yesterday but not too much worse as it logically incorporated many of the terms learned in Lesson 1. For example words like kobieta (woman) and samolot (airplane) which were learned on day 1 were reintroduced with a few verbs, such as biegnie (run) and skacze (jump). So an example of something a 2 year old Polish child could say, kobieta biegnie, translates to something along the lines of “the woman is running.”

I can understand how it may seem so trivial to some, however it truly is a humbling experience to attempt to learn another language. I also think that English speakers are at a disadvantage when it comes to learning another language, because English is unlike another other language currently spoken. Whereas Spanish is related to French and Italian, and Polish is related to Russian, English in my experience is truly unique, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Part one of my computer work at home is nearly complete. Last week I made the decision to remove Windows Vista from my laptop. I have the full retail version from Microsoft’s Technet, not a beta, but it just simply is not working out. But before I can get rid if it , I have gigabytes of data to backup. Thus my laptop’s weekend was constricted to backing up data (yes I just referenced my laptop in the 3rd person). However, playing around with my laptop got up my interest in playing around with my home desktop computer.

Currently my home PC is a Pentium III 800mhz, with 256 MB of RAM. I know, I know, horrible by today’s standards. However, this was a hand-me-down system from a friend and when I got it the system didn’t even turn on. I had to pop in some memory, a hard drive, and a PCI wireless ethernet device.. For simplicity I installed Windows XP at the time.

Now, working on my laptop got me interested in an old hobby: Linux. Again I originally installed Windows XP for simplicity, because I highly doubted that any flavor of Linux would support my PCI ethernet card out of the box.

I chose Fedora Core 6, a long-time favorite of mine. Many people swear over their children by Ubuntu but personally I’ve always had the best experiences with Fedora. The installation went pretty seamless. There was only one hiccup, where the installer said that the xcdroast package was missing or corrupt but after a few keystrokes of hitting the “retry” button it started working again; a slight issue reading the installation cd most likely. The total process took about an hour and a half I’d guesstimate, which is long for a Linux install, but also remember my horrible PC specs (I also chose to install a bunch of extras, such as French and Polish language support).

When the system was finished doing its thing I booted into Linux and was very delighted with the UI and simplicity of Fedora. It certainly has come a very long way from when I used to use RedHat 7.1. Unfortunately I was right and my PCI ethernet device did not work out of the box, so currently I have no internet access under Linux. After some brief research last night it appears as though I will be able to get it to work as long as I have pciutlis and ndiswrapper installed, at which point I should be able to load the windows driver and get it to work.

Once this is setup my computer work will be halfway complete, although I must say this is definitely the more difficult part, as the laptop work consists of inserting a restoration cd and copying and pasting data. I will keep you updated with my progress on getting the wireless to work, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to venture into Linux.