Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Nightmares and Weigh Ins

Sounds like a Stephen King title doesn't it? Oh that was Nightmares and Dreamscapes... close enough.

Last night was Weight Watcher's weigh in number 3 for me. Don't ask me how, but I managed to come in down 3.4 pounds for a two week total of 8 pounds even. Huh? Didn't our scale which last week was reading less than half a pound off of the WW scale tell me I was up two pounds yesterday morning? Huh? What?

Being down a few instead of up a couple doesn't change the fact that I have to start taking the entire process more seriously. Two reasons, one: I am less than 6 pounds away from being at the lowest weight of the entire decade. (approximately, I took a physical in August or September of 2000 so I could restart taking classes at UMass Lowell. I remember the weight. I also remember flunking the tuberculosis screen. That was a fun day.) That's a goal in my book. Of course, after reaching that goal I have to get the 5% weight loss goal, and the 10% weight loss goal, and then to get down to my recommended weight I have to drop something like 120 pounds total. That's not my end goal by any stretch, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to walk up two flights of stairs and not have to worry about having a heart attack? The second reason to stick with it is that it's expensive and I don't want to piss away this money without any results.

Anyway, enough about weight watchers for now. What about RPM? How about nothing about RPM. We went to bed at a decent hour last night and I fell asleep quick, but around 2:30 or so I had a nightmare that woke me up and kept me up for over an hour. I changed the alarm clock to let me sleep as late as possible in the hopes I'd not be a basket case today.

The nightmare was weird. It started out with me walking home from the weight watchers meeting. (a short 15 mile walk) A few steps after leaving the building one of my teeth fell out. I was pissed. By the time I got home almost all of them had fallen out. I was completely paniced (in the dream) and completely freaked out upon waking from it. Could it be my subconscious telling me to stop being a moron and get my fat ass to a dentist? Or is it my subconscious telling me that weight watchers will rot my teeth? Hmmmm could be either one.

So the result was, no recording today. We'll try again tomorrow.

Now for the lame ass ridiculous why-does-this-red-headed-doofus-keep-posting-lame-shit-like-this part of this morning's post.

Camera phone shots!

Police activity on route 126 in Concord, MA, right near the high school. There were two police cars. One cop was searching the suspect's trunk. Note the guy sitting in the dirt to the left of the cars. Is that the suspect or just a passenger in the suspect's vehicle. I couldn't tell.


Later, coming home from the meeting, we saw more police activity on 495 North. We couldn't tell if this was an accident or a construction site. It was quick, and there were yellow lights and red flares, but we really couldn't tell.


Totally unrelated note:

Yesterday was the Apple demonstration of the next iPhone operating system. I followed a couple of live blogs to see what they were going to do to make my awesome phone even better. There are a lot of things that other smart phones do that iPhones don't, and we were hoping to hear that some of those features were coming our way.

They are. Some of them at least.

You can't send/receive multimedia messages with an iPhone. Text messages, yes. Picture messages and video messages no.

Yet. OS 3 will support picture messages but not video messages. A humongous step in the right direction.

iPhones do not have text cut/copy/paste functionality.

Yet. OS 3 will not only let you cut/copy/paste text in text based apps, but across all apps including Safari. Very cool.

People have been hoping to get the ability to run processes in the background. In other words, multitasking. Not going to happen, but we will be able to get notifications when an app that isn't running needs to be updated. The example they gave was an espn app trying to update you that a game you're interested in had a score change (at least that's what I think they were demonstrating... it was hard to tell over some one else's blog).

Another addition is a change to the development tool kit that will allow for turn-by-turn GPS apps to be written. That is awesome. Ridiculously awesome. It wasn't on my wish list at all, but as soon as I heard about it I was thrilled.

Another great addition is that Apple's Spotlight Search applications will now be standard and work across all apps. No more paging through mountains of emails looking for the right one. Gmail does this better than anyone I've seen so far... far better... but that capability is not available when you port your gmail account into an iPhone like Jen and I do. Spotlight should be a big help.

There were some down sides though. A couple of things from the universal wish list were left off. Still not video messaging or video recording, and still no flash capabilities in the Safari web browser.

There was also a change to the app store that I am pretty upset about. Right now there are two types of apps. Free and not free. When the new OS comes out the not free apps can become subscription based. (I don't know if all of them will, or if it's just a third option. That wasn't made very clear to me) Meaning instead of paying $X for the app when you install it you will be charged $Y per month through iTunes. That sucks. Good for developers and for Apple, but shitty for the users. I think I only have one or two paid apps anyway so I don't think it will affect me much, but that doesn't change the fact that it sucks. Oh and you know any turn-by-turn GPS apps will be subscription based... so it probably will affect me. Damn it.

There were other changes announced too that don't really interest me. It seems they are trying to turn iPhones into the next big gaming platform. You will be able to play multiplayer games over a blue tooth connection. It sounds cool, but I don't think I'd bother with that much. I don't even play online with my playstation 3, I'm not going to suddenly do it on my phone.

Over all there were lots of good stuff for we iPhone users. We'll have to wait a few months before the new OS becomes available to us, and that will probably coincide with the release of the next generation iPhone which will probably have some new hardware added as well. Jen will probably upgrade this time. I'll try and wait a couple of years. Maybe by then they'll have iPhones that can chauffeur us to work in the morning. They already do almost everything else. I'd go for that.

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