arbitrary user

Jonathan Endersby, Recovering Technologist

Archive for category Aggregate This

Who invented the lightbulb?

Aug 20

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Philosophy, hacking | 3 Comments

Lets get one thing straight. Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the lightbulb.

This story requires context:

  • In 600AD the greek writer Thales of Miletus started writing about Electricity. Mostly this was all about rubbing Amber together and noticing static charge
  • In 1760 French physicist Charles-Augustin Coulomb starts actually making sense of electricity.
  • In 1779 Alessandro Volta builds the first true battery.
  • In the late 1700s and early 1800s every scientist, tinkerer and hacker is playing with electricity.
  • 30 years later, in 1809, Humphry Davy builds the first true electric lamp. This is 38 years before Edison is even born.
  • 50 years later, in 1860, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan builds an electric light bulb and starts tinkering with carbon-filament incandescent electric bulbs (The same stuff Edison eventually used).
  • Ten years later in 1877, the American Charles Francis Brush manufactured carbon arcs and was lighting public parks and office blocks.
  • In 1879, three years after Brush already had electric light in office blocks, Thomas Alva Edison discovers that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb was able to stay glowing for up to 40 hours.
  • Two years later some dude named Lewis Howard Latimer makes a better filament.
  • 20 years later another guy called Willis R. Whitney invents a process to stop the globe getting dimmer as it got older
  • Seven years later, in 1910, a guy called William David Coolidge invents a tungsten filament that lasts a lot longer than the carbon ones.

Thomas Alva Edison - Douchebag Extraordinaire

So all that Edison ever “invented” was that a vacuum increased the lifespan of the filament.

So, the next obvious question is, why does everyone think that Edison invented the light bulb? The answer to that question is an interesting one because it has more to do with propaganda than it does to do with invention.

A lightbulb is useless without electricity, Edison knew that… and like many clever businessman Edison knew that real inventors are generally very bad at making money out of their inventions because they’re always too busy working on version 2.

Edison realised that the only way to make real money was to get electricity into people’s houses so that you could sell them lightbulbs, and electricity… This was brilliant because it’s the “Give away the razor, sell the razorblades” plan except both lightbulbs and electricity are consumables… so its more like “Give away the connection and sell the lightbulbs and the electricity”. Edison also wasn’t the first person to figure this out, he was just really really good at marketing… Or really really bad at marketing, depending on how you feel about Elephants.

Topsy the Elephant

Another person who realised that Electricity was going to make a lot of money was a rich businessman called Westinghouse. Westinghouse had become friends with an eccentric Yugoslav scientist called Nikola Tesla who had been experimenting with electricity his whole life. When Tesla wasn’t busy building Tesla Coils or trying to harness the power of lightning (or trying to harness energy from outer space, I shit you not) he worked with Westinghouse to build electricity generators and plan electricity distribution systems. Tesla knew more about electricity than pretty much anyone else alive at that point and early on had realised that Alternating Current (AC) was far better at distributing electricity than Direct Current (DC). So Westinghouse and Tesla started generating and distributing power to the rich and famous.

Edison didn’t like this. Not only were Tesla and Westinghouse competitors, but they were also proposing a different, better, system (AC) that Edison knew would eventually win the battle. Edison had managed to market himself as the father of electricity — a magician and folk hero — and he was getting incredibly rich.

Nikola Tesla - True Genius

So Edison did what any self respecting douche-bag marketer would do… he started publicly torturing animals… and filming it. Thomas Alva Edison, the “inventor of the lightbulb” went out into the streets and publicly electrocuted, to death, animals in a bid to show the public that Alternating Current was far too dangerous to be in their homes. And yes, in case you’re wondering, that reference to elephants earlier is because Edison even electrocuted, to death, an adult elephant.

Of course AC isn’t really any more dangerous than DC and Edison knew that… While there are some issues with AC’s 50-60 Hertz frequency being closer to that of your heart, both AC and DC are equally able to kill elephants and small children.

Sadly the public was gullible and Tesla was devastated… He went from being an eccentric socialite magician to being that guy who wants to murder small children and animals. Westinghouse had thicker skin and managed to keep his chin up, but Tesla became a recluse and started working in isolation on increasingly crazier ideas like harnessing power from the stratosphere. Tesla believed that it would be possible to get this power so cheaply that it would become free. Whether Tesla was onto something or whether his eccentric genius mind had finally snapped will never be known… In 1943 he died, alone, drowning in debt, in a hotel room.

Thomas Edison was no doubt a very clever man, but he was also ethically a disgusting person who thought nothing of destroying others to elevate his own fame.

Single handed sailing is not for the faint hearted.

Jul 1

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Philosophy, Sailing | No Comments

knox_johnston_golden_globe

Robin Knox-Johnston on board Suhali

I’ve become increasingly fascinated by single handed (solo) sailing and specifically single handed circumnavigations. The first person to sail around the world single handed was Joshua Slocum in 1898. His journey took 3 years and he made many stops along the way.

Sixty eight years later Francis Chichester, who Later became Sir Francis Chichester for obvious reasons, decided to try his hand at the journey. He left Plymouth on August 1966 and returned 226 days later after stopping once in Australia. He was 67 at the time and was the first person to circumnavigate with only one stop.

This meant there was only one thing left to do… Circumnavigate, single handed, without stopping. Two years later, in 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston left Falmouth and 313 days later arrived back in Falmouth to much fanfare.

It’s far too easy to romanticise these journeys but reading the books written by these men is both inspiring and scary. It’s often in the minutia that the true risks involved in these kinds of endeavours are exposed.

I found this in the “Pilot’s Notes” section at the back of Knox-Johnston’s book “A World of My Own”:

“There was a small diver’s lifejacket on board, but again I did not use it. It got in the way for one thing, and if I had fallen overside, although I would have swum in the direction of the nearest land, one has to be realistic, and it would probably have been best to get it over quickly.”

I think those two sentences sum it up better than any book every could.

Defining moments

May 13

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Hiking, Life, Observation, Philosophy, Sailing | 1 Comment

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about defining moments. Those splinters of time that shape who we are and act as decision making references for the rest of our lives. I find it odd/sad that some of the people I talk to don’t have defining moments or perhaps they do but just aren’t aware of them.

Here are mine:

Fishing
I was probably about 8 years old. We were on holiday at the Brede River. Like most boys that age, I really wanted to catch a fish. We had tried unsuccessfully from the jetty but firmly believed that the real fishing was out on the boat, after sunset. The dads had made promises that always seemed to dissolve into comfortable couches and post-braai bliss… and it was our last night there. I decided that I was going to go and catch a fish off the jetty, and, in the absence of bait, I decided that bread, mooshed up onto the hook, would have to do. The parents were understandably sceptical, but I was adamant and marched down to the jetty in the dark and cast my line into the water. A few hours went by and I had caught nothing and eventually started falling asleep and decided it was best to go back inside.

I remember walking back into the house thinking how awesome it would have been to be carrying a huge fish! At that very moment, thinking about how great it would have been to catch a huge fish, it dawned on me that no one ever catches a huge fish unless they put their line in the water. You have to be in it to win it.

Bravery
I haven’t witnessed much bravery in my life. I’ve never seen someone run into a burning building to rescue a puppy or lift a car to free a trapped driver. Sometimes however bravery takes the form of personal courage. Courage to stand up and do the right thing, even if doing so may make you look like a loser in the process. I was 15 and my little clan of nerd friends had a favourite whipping boy called Andrew. Andrew was often the butt of our jokes. One particular day, in the absence of Andrew, the jokes got progressively meaner. Then someone piped up and said “Come on guys, that’s not cool… lets stop”.

I realise that that might seem trivial when compared to rescuing puppies from burning buildings, but if you’ve been a teenage boy you probably know that sticking up for the “loser” isn’t the cool thing to do. In that moment I realised how brave my friend was, and more importantly, how I wanted to be like him.

Your happiness is your responsibility
I think I was about 19 years old. I had recently broke up with my girlfriend, it was New Years Eve and all my friends were out of town. I got so bored and depressed that I decided to just drive around. I wasn’t suicidal or even close to tears… but in that uber-pathetic moment I decided that I was the only one responsible for my happiness. Simple.

Web Based Accounting Software
After many years working as a developer in a bunch of different industries I found myself working on a web based accounting package for a British company. It was painful work and the boss had overcommitted and we were working stupid hours with pizza as “overtime”. One evening, while working late, I decided that this wasn’t for me. I’d only been there for 3 months, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been putting my heart and soul (and life) into other people’s businesses all over the world for the previous 5 years and I was finally done. I resigned in the morning. I was never going to let a job take priority over my life again.

For about a year I floated around doing odd freelance dev jobs, I even got a job as a barman so I could meet cool people… I made a lot of friends, I managed a band, I lived in a digs with some cool people and some psychopaths. It was fun.

I can be a Butcher
About mid way through my year “off” I decided that I could do anything. Nothing was above me, and similarly, nothing was beneath me. Not that I consider butchers to be at the bottom of some food chain, it was just that being a butcher was probably the furthest thing from what I had done up until then. I never did become a butcher, but I’m pretty sure I could be flippen awesome at it if I wanted to.

A loaf of bread or a pie
At about the same time as the “I can be a butcher” moment I found myself rather broke. There was a shoprite up the road from where we were staying. I walked there, hungry, with only a few rand in my wallet. I had to decide whether to buy a loaf of bread or a pie. I bought the pie.

Many people would consider that reckless. It was reckless I guess, but, I wanted a pie. I had faith that tomorrow would somehow bring more money or feed me. I’m still here so I guess I was right.

I don’t want to make light of it, but I also know what it’s like to live off almost nothing. I know that I was incredibly happy during that time, my life didn’t suddenly fall apart the minute I cancelled my medical aid and couldn’t afford to buy one of the “nice” toothbrushes. That realisation has helped me be a little more willing to take bigger risks in life. In it to win it.

Water
I really like hiking. Especially on Table Mountain. I’m not nearly as fit as I should be, as my waistline is testament to, but I do occasionally just go for walk. It was during one of these spontaneous walks that I ended up about 6km away from my car without any water in the middle of a ridiculously hot summer’s day. (This was on the contour path near Platteklip with my car parked at Kirstenbosch). I came across this tiny little trickle of water, seeping down a rock. I was so hot I ended up basically licking the mossy rock to try and get some moisture out of it. I spent a good 30 minutes getting water in tiny little doses. (I just want to make sure it’s clear here, I was never in any real danger… I was just hot and tired… worst case scenario was some sunburn.) I was incredibly grateful for the water and in the heat I got all philosophical about water and nature’s provision. I started off again towards the car. About 300m down the path I came to a river. Not exactly the Holy Ganges, but enough water that I could actually fill my water bottle will real water, not sandy moisture. What did I learn from this? It’s tough to explain. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is to just say that sometimes in life you need to be make sure you’re not being an idiot by walking a little further down the road.

Death at Sea
Almost 2 years ago I went on a little sailing trip. Myself and another guy sailed a tiny little yacht from Hout Bay to Knysna, and then back to Mossell Bay. (It’s a long story). The reason we couldn’t go in at Knysna was because a huge storm had kicked up and the Heads were closed. The boat didn’t have a functioning radio, life raft or EPIRB. The flares were old and our engine was dead. At sunset, when we realised the storm wasn’t going to die down, we decided to sail to Mossel Bay where the harbour was protected by a breakwater. The swells were picking up and at some points our tiny boat was pretty much dwarfed by the water around us. We were sailing a yacht designed and built for the Vaal Dam in some of the strongest wind and biggest swells I have ever seen. We were being pushed around like a matchbox in a pool full of cannon balling fat kids. The boat’s keel was creaking as if it wanted to snap off (something that would result in almost instant sinking) and then suddenly, in the pitch black, howling night, we hit something. HARD. The entire boat stopped dead for a second. I still don’t know what it was but I do know that I have never felt closer to dying in my life. I imagined myself floating in the middle of the sea, with my tiny life jacket trying to get dodgy flares to work even though the chances of someone seeing them were pretty much zero. The keel didn’t break and after 5 days at sea we eventually got to Mossel Bay in the early hours of the morning.

What did I learn? I don’t know… But I want to do it again. It was fucking awesome.

Standard Bank, Information Theft and Apathy.

Apr 8

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Rants, Service, Tech | 3 Comments

We place our trust in the organisations we deal with on a daily basis. Many of these organisations have access to large amounts of our personal information. We assume that there are systems in place to protect consumers against the theft of that information by staff members. We assume that if a staff member did steal data, that the bank would treat the matter with urgency. We assume that the bank would press charges against the individual and try and recover all the stolen information.

We assume incorrectly.

About two weeks ago I was called by a guy called Riaan Geldenhuys. He is supposedly a financial planner and wanted to meet up to discuss policies etc. I was intrigued as to where he got my details from so I played along and then eventually asked him where he had found my number. His answer was, in context, quite shocking. He was an ex-Standard Bank employee and had a “list” from when he worked at Standard Bank.

If we ignore for a second the absolute idiocy of this guy actually telling me that, I was obviously left wondering what other information he had on me… I told him that I would report him and that I hoped the bank took him to court. He said he was “sorry”.

In a world where information theft is rife, bank fraud (using information theft) is all too common and everyone is legally married to at least two people they’ve never met, I would have thought that my reporting of this matter to the bank would have resulted in an urgent phone call from the fraud division, asking me for all the information and then a subsequent call a few days later telling me that this Riaan guy was going to court. But no. Typical of their lackadaisical concern for our privacy, the banks auto-responded and then a week later told me they were “looking into the matter”. I let them know that “looking into the matter” wasn’t good enough for me… I wanted to know that at the very least my, and their other customer’s, stolen information had been retrieved. Another week goes by and still, nothing but auto-responders and “we’re looking into it”s.

Eventually, in an incredibly bitter fit of resentment I succumbed and wrote about the issue on HelloPeter, a site I usually avoid because of their reputation of extorting businesses who can’t afford to pay to defend themselves.

Surprise, in a few hours I had a phone call. Now I was told I needed to go into a branch and fill in a form. When I made it clear that the chances of me doing so were similar to, well, just about anything very very unlikely, they then realised that they didn’t actually need me to go into the branch… With promises of swift action I wrote another long email, detailing the entire saga and hoping that it would finally result in some form of action.

Then this morning I am asked to email them either my bank account number or my ID number. The irony of me sending either over unencrypted email to the very bank that breached that information in the first place seemed to be lost on this new individual I was dealing with. Never mind the fact that I had given Standard Bank my account number numerous times, and never mind the fact that I am the only Jonathan Endersby in the country and never mind that really, my bank account has nothing to do with them investigating this Riaan Geldenhuys guy because lets face it, their internal audit logs are obviously quite sloppy, so assuming that they would specifically find detail that Riaan Geldenhuis had looked at my account is, well, optimistic.

To complicate (or obscure) matters, the bank (or at least Clinton who works in their Fraud Division) insists that the only way that anyone would have gotten access to my information would have been via an auditable system which has logs. I explained the retardedness of that statement, detailing how the emails I’ve sent with my information were obviously not tracked because they are apparently lost. Next I asked whether all their email is also linked to this magical system, because I’ve worked in a few banks and I know that the sales teams are big fans of Excel spreadsheets generated the Sales Manager and then emailed to pretty much everyone, including the tea-ambassadorial staff (corporate refreshment executives?). I suspect it is probably one of these lists that was stolen. Anyway, according to SBSA, if they can’t find access logs for Riaan Geldenhuys, “there is nothing we can do”.

Clinton also said that he was looking into whether Riaan Geldenhuys, financial planner guy, was ever employed by Standard Bank. He said they were investigating whether he was ever employed by Standard Bank by speaking to the division he worked in. Yes, that is exactly what he said. I almost shat my pants thinking that this guy is investigating fraud for Standard Bank. I’d like to assume he simply meant that they were speaking to HR, but I have suspicions.

To cut a long story short, I’ve lost hope that the bank will ever take this matter seriously and pretty much assuming that they have better things to do, like close at 3pm, than investigate information theft… I mean, it’s possibly only my id number, salary, home address, mother’s maiden name, signature, phone numbers, previous places of employment, information about the various insurance companies I use, who I invest with, previous addresses and all the account numbers for the various services I use…. I mean, you can’t do much with that information, can you?

There is no spoon – The challenge of unlimited bandwidth in a limited world.

Mar 31

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Service, Tech | 11 Comments

Change is constant. With increased international capacity it was inevitable that ISPs would eventually enter a price war. It was MWEB, a traditionally not-so-forward-thinking ISP, who shot first.

Uncapped internet for a price that didn’t seem insane – Terms and Conditions apply... It didn’t take long (a few minutes actually) before the nerds were frothing at the mouth over what seemed to be overly-burdensome (and in some cases just-plain-stupid) regulations. Rules like “No unattended downloading” being one of them… while in principle most people understood the ethos, the unfortunate reality is that rules shouldn’t be _made_ to be broken… and telling an old granny she can’t go make a cup of tea while her email downloads is simply not intelligent.

The problem is simple. Internet Service Providers have a limited resource and they are selling it on as an unlimited resource… It’s the all-you-can-eat ribs special, only in a digital world, where the limit to how much you can eat is simply a question of how big your hard drive is.

Most of the nerdosphere understood that ISP’s would have to enforce some limitations, and in fact, most ISPs worldwide have some form of Acceptable Usage Policy. The difference being that the kind of numbers that constitute abuse are generally in the range of hundreds of gigabytes/terabytes per month, and then only after consecutive months of “abuse”.

The problem in SA is that the business model is really hard to get right because it revolves around a number of unknowns:
1. What can we offer that’s good enough to a) Attract customers. b) Be called uncapped. c) Not piss off the nerdosphere. ?
2. How many customers can we sell this to?
3. What will the average usage of those customers be? (Ubernerds download a lot more than your Granny)
4. If we scale up operations because of a surge of new customers, how can we be sure those customers will hang around to support the increased running costs?

Additionally, ISPs are obviously terrified to not enter the market because not having an uncapped option will inevitably mean losing pretty much every customer who isn’t living under a rock.

So, possibly with a fair dose of fear and trepidation, a number of other ISPs quickly entered the market with their own offerings, all clambering to try and get that business model right.

Some ISPs even appear to have decided to start selling the product before they figured out what that business model would be. A bold move that cost the likes of Afrihost a fair amount of pain when they realised they needed to implement a soft cap (they call it something else) at 60gb. That 60gb number wasn’t anywhere on their website because it appears to have not existed when they launched… it was only after seeing the real usage numbers that they realised they needed to implement some additional limits. (After downloading 60gb your connection is throttled, and then once you hit 120 it’s throttled further etc etc)

So we come to what is really the crux of this debate. What is uncapped? Currently the uncapped market is unregulated and very unstable. The rules are changing on an almost daily basis and pretty much anyone can offer anything and call it uncapped. Someone could have a product that calls itself “uncapped” but that limits you to 1kbps after the first megabyte. This is not good for consumers.

The market is in need of a lot more transparency or a regulator. There are really only two groups that could play the role of regulator: The Advertising Standards Association and the Internet Service Providers Association. I’m ignoring ICASA for obvious, incompetent and toothless, reasons.

The ASA unfortunately doesn’t have the knowledge to regulate such a highly complex industry and any attempts to do so would probably have very negative effects for all involved.

ISPA on the other hand does have the know-how but hasn’t publicly said anything about the matter. All of the ISPs currently offering Uncapped ADSL are ISPA members. I think the only reasonable solution is for ISPA to get a bunch of its members together and lock them in a room until they can all agree on what the minimum provision for an uncapped account should be. This would need to be measurable limits and not warm-and-fluffy, open to interpretation, language. They may even decide that calling these sorts of accounts “uncapped” is dishonest, perhaps it should just be called something like “Managed Cap 60″ etc.

I look forward to the day that we have true uncapped internet in this country and I salute those ISPs who are trying their best to bring us closer to true uncapped internet. They are brave businesses operating in an increasingly brutal space.

Most importantly we need the ISPs to be honest about what they’re selling. If they’re selling something that has graduated throttling (like Afrihost is doing) they need to say so before they take the customers money. Afrihost doesn’t currently say this on their website, but their CEO has published (very bravely and honestly) the planned (and he understandably pointed out that it was plan that might change) approach on the mybroadband forums. I’m sure that this info will make it onto their website as soon as the dust settles.

Publishing the exact structure/behaviour of their uncapped product is a brave move that hopefully will force other ISPs to do the same. It’s only when all ISPs are showing their hands that consumers will be able to make an informed decision.

Ging!

Sep 28

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Ging, Life | No Comments

This evening at the GeekDinner someone pointed out that I haven’t blogged about my cat, and best of all, they weren’t being sarcastic.

So for everyone who’s not following me on twitter, here goes.

just over a month ago someone posted an email to the community mailing list saying that they had rescued a kitten from the train station and asking if anyone had lost it. The cat would end up at an animal shelter if no owner was found and that just wasn’t an option so I mailed the woman and told her that I would take the kitten if nobody had claimed it after a few days.

A few days later we got Ging.

Ging likes to eat.

Ging likes to eat.

Ging is the most precocious cat in the world. She’s tiny but is fearless and wants to explore everything.

Ging is always ready to pounce.

Ging is always ready to pounce.

But Ging is also a lover.

Ging loves things that are tasty.

Ging loves things that are tasty.

But never, EVER, turn your back.

Because the Ging will get you!

Because the Ging will get you!

Ging sits on my lap while I work and lies on my chest while I watch TV. It’s all incredibly cutesy, but I must admit that I’m totally sold on cats now. Dogs are still awesome, but in a very very different way.

As usual you can see more of my photos on my flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbitraryuser/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbitraryuser/

Coffee Filters and Frickin Laser Beams!

Aug 24

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Service | 1 Comment

I’m always amazed at how difficult it is to get some businesses to actually sell you something. When we moved we lost a box of kitchen stuff. For weeks we searched, convinced that we couldn’t have actually lost it, and equally convinced that the movers wouldn’t have stolen something as arbitrary as a box full of tongs and cheese slicers. The most troublesome loss was the metal filters for our espresso machine.

frikkenlaserbeamsAfter weeks of searching I admitted defeat and decided we’d have to buy replacement filters. I’d bought the machine at @home and every time we’d come across a branch I would ask if they had replacement filters and every time they would say no, but offer to take down my details and call me when they got stock. I did this at about 4 different branches, and after three months of hearing nothing I started returning, weekly, to the same branch in hopes of getting somewhere. Still, 4 months past and I never received a call, not even to say that they were impossible to get.

Our cat loves chasing lasers… Somewhere in the middle of this whole story her laser broke and we were left laserless, which, any cat owner will know, is not a happy place.

I had bought the previous laser for R15 from a street vendor outside Cavendish square. He sold bouncing balls and other bits of plastic whatnots. This was not the pinnacle of retail by any means. Unfortunately he was out of stock but offered to call me when he had stock. I didn’t expect him to… I mean, he’s sitting on a beer crate and has a radio built into a plastic flower blaring badly tuned 5fm. I gave him my number but promptly forgot about our interaction.

2 days later my phone rang. It was the guy from the bouncy ball stall calling to tell me he had lasers in stock.

So, 4 branches and 4 months, weekly reminders and hassling and the big retail store couldn’t even get it right to call me… but a dude sitting on a crate, selling spiderman underpants and cardboard puzzles, called me, knowing full well that the call would cost roughly 10% of the sales price, to let me know he had stock.

I never did hear back from @Home and we eventually found the filters, and all the other stuff, in a box we thought was empty ;)

More Before and Afters

Apr 4

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Property | 1 Comment

Since we moved in we’d been wanting to buy one of those pine workbenches they sell at places like builders warehouse and do it up for the kitchen. We decided on painting the base in white enamel and staining and varnishing the top.

As you can see, before:
Before

After:
After

I’m quite happy with the difference, it’s made the kitchen feel far more structured.

Visualising the Interest Rate

Mar 24

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Property, Tech | No Comments

I though it might be interesting to try and graph the Reserve Bank’s prime rate data… It goes back a long way. I used Python to scrape and collate the data and PyCha to generate the graph.

UPDATE: I’ve replaced my graphs with new versions made by Russell who corrected my original code by interpolating the data correctly over the y axis.

This is the narrow version.

And this is the wide version (click to download the actual 10000px wide png)

Interestingly enough, todays rate cut *was* on that page earlier today, but now I see it’s gone… so I inserted it manually ;)

Odd murmurings about diet.

Mar 16

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Diet, Food | 5 Comments

I’ve been on a pretty strict diet since last Monday and although the goal of the diet is simply to lose some weight I’ve noticed a few very interesting things during the week.

  • Mindset is King. I don’t know what flipped the switch in my head, but I feel ready to diet now. I think this is very much to the “can’t quit until you really want to quit” argument for drug addicts etc.
  • It’s not that hard. I’m not hungry. When I notice myself getting hungry it’s usually less than an hour away from lunch time etc so I just push through till then.
  • I feel better. It’s not that I used to feel bad, but I just generally feel better, less lethargic. I didn’t expect this.
  • Eating smaller portions is a habit you can get addicted to. I used to eat really big meals, now I’m trying to see how little I can eat while staying healthy.
  • It doesn’t take long for your body to adjust… by Thursday I was already feeling stuffed after eating a relatively small dinner.
  • It can be hard to make healthy food interesting but it also gives you the freedom to experiment a lot since you’re going to be having a chicken breast 3 times a week etc. My chef is doing a really good job of trying to keep dinners interesting.
  • I get cravings for massively unhealthy food (think deepfried everything). This is probably the result of my body not knowing what the hell is going on and trying to get me to eat some “normal” food. This will obviously pass.
  • At this point I’m very aware of the diet still, I’m sure that as I carry on it will become “normal” and I’ll stop thinking about it.
  • Saturdays are dietary “off days” and I had a chicken mushroom pie. My lord did it taste good ;)
  • Fruit is pretty good stuff.
  • I’m aiming at a loss of 1kg per week. I lost 2.5kg in the first week. I don’t expect that trend to necessarily carry on into the subsequent weeks, but who knows? I’ll keep you posted.