May

I finally convinced myself on my way home after work to stop by the grocery
store, buy some chicken, and cook it myself, ith rice. I had no difficulty
doing it this time. (I guess I’m finally getting better.) Though, when I
prepared my plate, OW!, it’s like if someone would have stabbed me in
the back.

I just sat down and enjoyed my meal. The chicken was really good, but I
could have been better with the rice… (Why am I always cooking that
bad-taste brown rice anyway?)

After applying some pain-relief gel in my back, I went to bed and I thought
it will be all over tomorrow morning.

Ends up that I could barely sleep throughout the night. I woke up at 6, and
I didn’t dare to move because of the pain. Laid on my back, I just reached
the laptop with my hand, brought it on me, and sent a quick e-mail to my
manager with it, stating that I can’t work today.

I really hate not working because of “sickness”. I don’t like to say I’m
“sick” either, because I always have that mental picture in my head about a
person who’s coughing, has a fever, shivers, and thinks death is soon to
come. It’s not my case, but the fact that I can barely move impairs my work.
And because of that, well, I’m losing money.

With courage, I decided to stop complaining, grabbed my laptop, and went
downstairs. (Where I am now.) At the moment I’ve turned on the TV and
switched to a French news network, Japan jumped in my face again with images
of geisha with the words “Artists or sophisticated prostitutes? The secret
life of the Geisha. Tonight at 8.” I think it’s at 8. Oh well, I’ll just
record it with my trusty Linux video recorded, which has been encountering
strange video overflow problems recently.

I’m seriously worried that I’ll never have enough money to go in Japan.
However, I’ve been really severe toward myself recently about my expenses,
and I think it’s working.

Though, what I don’t like, is the attitude of the people coming with me in
Japan. They make quite more money than I do, so they really don’t think
about that much. Just Sunday, they want to have a meeting about our trip by
going at a restaurant. Of course, we can’t just order something cheap or eat
at home prior the meeting! That would be too cheap!

There’s the Japanese language meetup tomorrow. I recently have less and less
interest for the group. I’m a hypocrite — I’m the one who suggested to do
it twice per month instead of just once, but that was months ago, before I
was getting tired of it. Everything seems to go better there when I’m not
present anyways, so why should I bother.

Everybody seems to think my haircut makes me look a lot better, despite the very few who didn’t say a word about it. I also got a few funny comments:

• “So, what’s her name?”
• “Hey, now you’re a school boy!”
• “You look more serious now!”
• “You’re like a punk.”
• “If I’d be younger, I’d like to be your girlfriend!”

Yes, someone really said the last one, but I think she was just being nice! It’s sweet, but I must say the first one made me laugh the most.

Well, after two weeks, I’ve successfully drank only one can of 7UP. (And that’s because I used a machine where I thought water was sold.) All that was replaced with gallons of water. I try to average at 2 litres of H₂O per day.

By considerably reducing the amount of times I went out to eat or at the cafeteria, I managed to cut my expense in food by almost 50% last week. No pizza. No shawarma. No cookies, chocolates, chips, or any other crap. And I still think I could do better!

I also started recently to exercise almost everyday. Thirty to sixty minutes per day, three days per week, should do it. Now, I just need a bathroom scale to know how many pounds I’m losing.

Anyway, so far, so good.

My friend Choppers suggested I sell my feces for $2 per pound… Well, I won’t stock it in my bedroom, that’s for sure.

Give it a smaller stomach! That way it wouldn’t be eating that much memory all the time.

At work, I’ve stoped using Firefox for the simple reason that it’s often taking up to 50% of the entire RAM of my workstation.

I know my workstation only has 256MB of memory, and that Internet Explorer is, I think, somewhat preloaded with the entire system when starting up Windows, but if you look at Opera (what I’m using at the moment), it’s not using even half of what Firefox is taking up.

But at least Firefox supports NTLM, which Opera lacks of.

With all the ideas floating around for the next Google Summer of Code, I’d love it if they’d stop thinking too much about new features simply to be one step ahead of Internet Explorer, and they’d finally take action at making the whole browser a bit better in performance.

FCUK! You write a long post, hit Meta-R to get the Run window, but mistakingly hit Ctrl-R, the browser reloads, and you lose everything. Stupid waste of time…

As I was trying to write about, I need more money to go in Japan. So far, I’ve only being able to accumulate a third of the total planned expense, and that part will go entirely for the air fare. I’m still working on Dust. However, I can’t rely entirely on that to get me over there.

Meanwhile, jokes about my weight are getting more frequent to the point that I can’t finish a day without hearing a comment about my problem. It’s frustrating. Instead of buying a knife to stab at anyone who says that while saying “Ha! If you had my layer of fat, you wouldn’t be dying right now.”, I decided to try a few things to help myself.

There’s one thing that needs to die out of my system. Pop, soda, cola… However you call it, the evil mixture of sugar, caffeine, and carbonates needs to vanish. Since last Monday, I stoped drinking that stuff and replaced it with a daily 2-litre of water.

I’m wasting money on food. Restaurants and cafeteria are expensive and not always worth the money you give. I’ve reduced outings to restaurants to one or twice per month. As for the workplace cafeteria, I wasn’t impressed when I bought my chicken burger on Monday. It was supposed to be a special, but funny enough, cost more at that time than usual. The supervisor was not there. Screw them. I’ll bring my own food from now on.

Everyday, wasted money to buy a surplus of calories. How dumber can it be? We’re talking about around $20 per day on my daily muffin, chocolate milk, cola, chicken burger (sometimes with fries), and a shawarma with a “desert”. Wow. That’s a load of crap! I bought $35 of groceries today and it’ll last me a week! In what I got at the groceries store: apples, raisins, whole-wheat bread, brown pasta, raisin bran… Much more than what I’ll ever get at the cafeteria!

If I successfully just use $35/week on that kind of groceries, I imagine the money I’ll gain and the weight I’ll lose!