The Romanian Dream » educating the masses

Equilibrium

Mircea — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:20:27 +0000

I was listening to the radio (92.5FM) while driving the other day. As everybody has to make a living at some point the commercials started. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to them, but since I was waiting at a rather long red light (http://www.bellevuewa.gov/trafficcam/cctv004.asp) I found myself listening. Wait, it gets better

The first commercial was for laser assisted liposuction. Cutting edge stuff for the narcissistic fatso. Exercise? Eating correctly? At least reading the damn labels on the ultra processed food we’re buying? Nah.. We don’t have time for this. Just aim the nice laser at me and suck the fat like there’s no tomorrow. Suck it. Now, if everybody would have the money the “laser people” are asking for, we would definitely eradicate obesity from the face of the Earth.

The second commercial was for McDonalds. It was advertising some cheap Coke that you can buy with some crap menu that they have. The commercial made some sense, I guess, if you were into this fast food shit or if you cannot afford anything else. We are, after all, in the middle of an economic crisis (do not go in the parking lot of your favorite mall if you want to keep living with this apocalyptic image).

Now, each commercial on its own made sense. They were trying to sell you something and were managing (more or less) to get the message through by using pleasant sounding people and light, joyful jingles. The really disturbing fact is that they played one right after the other.

Now what am I supposed to understand if I am listening to the radio? Is this a tactic? Are they just dumb?

After the traffic light turned green and I started accelerating on the interstate ramp I remembered the words of my math high school teacher (who was also a bit of a philosopher): “for everything in this world there are pluses and minuses so everything reaches a stable state, an equilibrium”. If you look at the commercials like that, one was the plus and one was the minus. The radio people had grouped them together like this to prevent an unstable state. Maybe they knew something. Maybe the time-space continuum would have been torn if only one commercial of these commercials was played.

The Humming Kids

Mircea — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:12:53 +0000

Operation “Sorting and Uploading Vacation Pictures” is almost done. But since the progress bar is not yet at 100%, let me take a moment to tell you about an episode of our vacation. We were in the Escalante National Monument, at the trail head of the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail [just completed the 6 mile round trip hike]. A pleasant sound caught my attention while I was taking off my hiking boots.

Two small children (probably around 3-4 years old) were humming a song. A boy and a girl. It was impressive how well they followed the melodic line by gently arching their tiny voices. Their mother was closely watching them from a nearby picnic table that she was setting up. Now, for truly amazing part: the kids were humming a piece of Mozart, this one to be more precise. The surreal experience was kinda ruined by mother telling them something… in German. Those Germans, you cannot get rid of them even when you’re exploring a geological wonder

GPS Path Recording – The Cheap Solution

Mircea — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:07:37 +0000

One of the first thing that I did when I arrived in the US was to buy a GPS unit. I did it because I found it kind of intimidating to drive on the highways in the US without having some sort of guidance. It may sound stupid, but if you miss an exit you usually have a couple of miles to go until you reach the next one. Figuring out how to continue from the next exit or taking the highway in the opposite direction to reach original exit is not a fun experience. After I got lost a couple of times (and lost a good chuck of time in the process too) trying to figure out where I was (no, I don’t ask for directions ) the GPS seemed like the logical thing.

Not really being a fan of spending big buck (I might have been Scottish in a previous life if this reincarnation crap is true), I’ve looked for the most basic unit that I could find and could successfully fulfill my needs.

I ended up buying a Tom Tom One 3rd edition. It was overall a good decision and I was very happy with the prince: 120$ (not the outrageous 184$ that Amazon wants for it right now). I started using it and almost never got lost again

Now, having the unit, the natural question (after I started going hiking) was: how can I record and later plot a path that I walk on? The unit does know exactly where I am (with a certain error of course) and should be able to do that. Well, it turns out it cannot do that with out-of-the box software installed on it. Turns out some wise-guys decided to add this capability (among other cool ones) to Tom Tom based devices. The extra software that they build and you need to put on your device is called Tripmaster. You can read about it and download it here: http://www.webazar.org/tomtom/tripmaster.php?lang=uk

Now that I had the GPS unit and the path recording software I decided to take it for a ride. Everything went perfect until about 1 hour into the test. At that moment the internal battery of the GPS unit got depleted. The recording stopped. Now I don’t know what kind of hikes people usually do, but my hikes take anywhere from 2 hours to 6-7 hours. So this solution wasn’t going to work.

I though about building an USB charger: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2009/06/28/the-usb-charger-project. In the end I ended up buying it (call me lazy). You can see it here: http://www.amazon.com/Tekkeon-TekCharge-Mobile-Battery-Charger/dp/B0014KLX9C/ The unit runs with either 2 or 4 AA batteries and acts as an USB charger for the GPS unit.

So right now, with added autonomy, my 3 part cheap GPS path recording solution was ready. You can see the first recorded path in the map section of my latest hike: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2010/06/20/hiking-bridal-veil-fallslake-serene-trail/

The Results (Losing weight saga – Epilogue)

Mircea — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:50:58 +0000

For the last past months I’ve randomly written blog posts in the “Losing weight saga” category. In these posts I’ve either bitched about some weight loss aspect (I love complaining when something is bothering me, but I’ve tried keeping this part to a minimum) or tried to share a certain aspect that I’ve learned during the journey.
Now, the “Losing weight saga” ends and the “Maintaining weight saga” starts. I will continue to share my thoughts on eating healthy, exercising and living healthy in general, but not under the current category.

So, as with any story this one ends with a conclusion And because a picture is worth a thousand words, the conclusion is in the form of a graph:

Steps to a Better Me – Part 6

Mircea — Sat, 29 May 2010 16:25:17 +0000

All steps to a better me can be found here: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/tag/steps-to-a-better-me/

Step 6 is planning. It may just be that I am a control freak, but whenever I do something I must have a plan. But everyone has to have a plan when they do something, right? Well, sure everybody has a plan, but I guess there are two fundamental differences between me and an average Joe. First is the amount of detail needed for to be satisfied with the activity that I am going to do. Second is the how much in advance I am putting it together. Of course this depends on the complexity of the activity I’m doing. Regardless of this though, there will always be some overhead associated with what I am doing.

Let me give you two examples:

1) Whenever I go hiking I spend 1-2 hours researching the trail that I’m going to hike. It starts with a name, some nice pictures and ends up with knowing specific details about the trail (who actually cares what you’re going to see at mile 1.2??), time durations, GPS coordinates, weather, difficulty, what I’m going to eat during the hike, how much the drive to and from the trail head is going to take, what time I’m going to wake up in the morning of the hike… So from a simple hike now I’ve broken it down to multiple, more manageable activities. Repeat and rinse until the desired detail granularity is achieved. Kinda insane, if I think about it.

2) The other example is the trivial grocery shopping that everybody does. In an ideal world you go to the supermarket and buy what you need. Of course, you will end up buying some stuff that you don’t need and you’ll forget some stuff that you do need. You will get annoyed and at some point you’ll figure that a list is a good idea. This has the effect of reducing the extra crap you buy (only 1-2 items on the list rule) but you’ll soon realize (if you’re me) that you’re still forgetting some stuff you need (not as much, but it’s still annoying). Now, here comes the next step (for the true control planning freak): I ended up building a huge list of every possible item that I would ever buy from the grocery store and use that as a check list when building the shopping list I use each time I go shopping. There might be a case in which I need something that isn’t on the meta shopping list. Guess what? New item on the meta list. This ain’t gonna happen again (at least not for this item).

So, bottom line: the advantage of being a control freak and doing detailed planning is peace of mind. the disadvantage is that I get extremely pissed when something is ruing my carefully crafted plan – but I take that as a challenge and plan for failure also. It’s layers upon layers

Steps to a Better Me – Part 5

Mircea — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:42:18 +0000

All steps to a better me can be found here: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/tag/steps-to-a-better-me/

Step 5 is realizing that what we call normality, in almost every aspect of it, is unhealthy. By normality I mean what most people do by default or think that should be the default choice. Lately this have been a favorite pet subject of mine and the more I look around the more this seems true.

If you look at the ads for food you’ll see exactly what I mean. When is the last time you saw an ad that was promoting eating fruits? How come people choose to eat all this crap but eating a piece of fruit or some fish is regarded as boring at best?

If you look at the ads that are promoting weight loss products you know what I mean. Do you really think that you’re gonna lose weight and look better by just taking a magic pill? Do you think that if you go once a month to the gym and after the work out you drink the magic juice your muscles are gonna grow out of control?

Now if you look at what is the first thing that people do when they go to see a movie at a local theater what do you think this is? Grab a huge bucket of popcorn (with lots of butter of course) and a half gallon soda “glass”. By the end of the trailers they’re done with that and go back for more. Is there something wrong with this? Of course not, everybody does it… doh. That’s why they sell it there, right?

Now look at the choice of physical activity. I’m not talking about “hardcore” fitness. I’m talking about what you do during the day. Confronted with the choice of either walking 15 minutes to a destination or driving what do you think is the normal choice? What about going up or down 1-2 floors within the same building? Do you really think the stairs are an option?

How much coffee do you drink in a day? Do you think that’s normal? What about checking your twitter/facebook/email each 2 minutes? Do you think that’s normal? Maybe in some cases latency is preferred to throughput but it most definitely should not be that in all cases. It should not be the “normal” case.

I could go on ranting about how normal are some choices that we make every day, but I won’t.

Instead I will sometimes just reserve the right to step back and say: this should not work this way and simply do it in another way. In all lifestyle related aspects. Normality is unhealthy. Doing that, I’m taking another step to a better me!

Leaving your mark… the snow edition

Mircea — Mon, 24 May 2010 03:47:15 +0000

Episode 4 from “human nature” series:

All pictures were taken during the fabulous Mt Pilchuck hike.

Cereal Label Fail

Mircea — Sat, 15 May 2010 15:33:15 +0000

Here is the label:

And the fail is the way the difference between cereal with milk and cereal without milk is listed.

Hey Kellogg’s, you have 2 columns in there. Use them to list the nutritional content in both cases (you do that for vitamins and it works, right?). Don’t be dumb and put this info in the foot note – nobody reads that. It makes you look like you’re either tying to trick me, the customer, or nobody reviewed your label. Either way, this is a fail.

And since we’re giving improvement suggestions, the site that you’re using to promote this products totally sucks. Good luck trying to read the nutritional information on the site.

Leaving your mark… the urban edition

Mircea — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:12:37 +0000

Time for episode 3 in “human nature” studies series.

All pictures are taken near Exit 13 I405 ramps.

Binge Eating Calculator (Losing weight saga – 12)

Mircea — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:11:38 +0000

In the right side of my blog, somewhere down, you see a list of items I share from my feed reader. While usually I just share them, I’ve ran across one that is just hilarious and seems to fit the Losing weight saga topic very well: http://www.murraythenut.com/2010/05/07/binge-eating-calculator/

Def: Binge eating [Wikipedia]