Ejecutive

I’m a fat lazy slob. It’s true. Having just weighed myself after the usual Christmas excess, I’ve come in at a whopping 81.5KG, which is 12 stone and 11 pounds. That gives me a BMI of 25.7, which is into the overweight range (25-29.9).

And to think I used to be a skinny bastard! Before 2006, I used to weight between 11 and 12 stones, which is reasonable healthy for someone my height¹ but then I went to university and it was all downhill from there. I stopped regularly riding my bike, which I think was the main factor in my weight gain. I also started to eat less healthily, as students do, living on pizza, pasta and curry.

And now the fact that I’m working in London all week has compounded the issue, as I spend twelve hours a day sitting on my arse, eight of them in front of a computer monitor and four of them on a coach. I get up at 05:30, have a reasonably large breakfast, get to work at 08:15-08:45, then eat nothing until 12:00 when I get lunch. Lunch is the killer here, the staff canteen can server very large portions of very unhealthy food. I once had a half roast chicken! Then after lunch I usually have a snack, maybe a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar, until 16:10 when I start the commute back home, usually arriving home around 18:30 if the traffic is OK.

This ballooned my weight from the mid 75KG to 81.5KG in under six months, so imagine how fat I would be in another six months if I kept this up! So I’ve decided to do something about this. For breakfast, I’m only going to have yoghurt and a piece of fruit, either orange or banana. Maybe if I’m feeling peckish I’ll have some toast and honey instead.  Then I’ll get into work and go to the gym² for about an hour until 09:30. Then at lunch I’ll either go down to Boots and grab a healthy sandwich or something decent from the canteen if they have it (no more fatty foods from there!). Then after lunch I’ll switch the snacking from chocolate and crisps to bananas and oranges.

My dinner is pretty healthy anyway so I’m going to leave that alone for now, but I’m going to start taking the stairs at work instead of the lift, and stop eating all junk food when I’m out. This means no more KFCs, no more McDonalds and no more TGI Fridays.

The target is eleven and a half stone, and the date set is June. Wish me luck!

Just when I thought I had a nice and clean installation of Windows XP, one that was stable, fast and had everything where I wanted, it starts randomly freezing up. The main problem is that it seems to do it randomly, it can freeze up because I plugged in a USB device, unplugged a USB device, tried to shut down the computer, opened My Documents even start a phone call on Skype for christs sake! I’m not trying to sound big headed, but I do know Windows reasonably well and I like to think I can fix the majority of problems it presents me. But when you get random crashes that don’t BSOD and don’t write to the Event Log, I’m completely stumped for a fix.

However I don’t want to spend several hours reinstalling Windows XP, only to have to do it for Windows Vista less than a month later! Repairing Windows is also a long shot, I’ve tried it before with no avail.

Fortunately, I do have another computer, an Apple Macbook which only ever crashes when I try to run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a 18MB RAW image from my D80 with just 512MB of RAM, which will do for a month. I’m still to lazy to shell out a couple hundred to upgrade the RAM of the Macbook to 2GB, all I currently use it for is web browsing, e-mail checking and instant messenge sending.

Going from twin 19″ TFTs at work and on my desktop to a rather clostrophobic 13″ TFT on a laptop with as much memory as Saddam Hussein at his trial is going to be a challenge.