Last weekend, sailed in the Santa Barbara Sailing Club’s goblin regatta. Very fun and tough competition. Wind was extremely better than what was forecasted. These are pictures that Jenny took on the second day of the race and are just awesome.

Previous Next

January 1^st, 2016, I looked into the mirror and told myself: “Michael you are fat.” I know that it is not PC, but problems cannot be solved without stating the problem. I started what I called my Quest for a Healthy BMI. Target weight was for a BMI of 25 or 175. Since that time my lowest weight was167 pounds. What I discovered, is that keeping the weight off is hard. I allowed myself to gain weight back up to 195. My current seven-day moving average weight is 186.5. My current goal is 170.

Some of the reasons that I am doing this again are:

• Vanity: I liked the way I looked.

• Makes it easier to sail, dance and be active.

• I do not have support for the damage that overweight causes later in life. I do not want to be a burden to my family, friends or society.

This time around, I am not looking at BMI as the goal target. I am going to use the body fat percentage. Currently, I am 23.8% or average. I would like to be at 17% or at the fit level. The number is based on the chart from American Council on Excerse:

To my body acceptance friends (yes I have been called anorexic because I wanted to be healthy). From experience and observation, nature does not care about my feelings. These two paragraphs from Rising Obesity in the United States Is a Public Health Crisis is scary enough to get motivated again:

Obesity is a grave public health threat, more serious even than the opioid epidemic. It is linked to chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Obesity accounts for 18 percent of deaths among Americans ages 40 to 85, according to a 2013 study challenging the prevailing wisdom among scientists, which had placed the rate at around 5 percent. This means obesity is comparable to cigarette smoking as a public health hazard; smoking kills one of five Americans and is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

The obesity crisis may be less dramatic than the opioid epidemic now gripping the nation, but it is just as deadly. Opioids accounted for around two-thirds of the 64,000 deaths related to drug overdose in 2016. Excess body weight leading to cancer causes about 7 percent of cancer-related deaths, or 40,000 deaths each year. This number doesn’t include deaths from the many other medical conditions associated with obesity. Obese people are between 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to die of heart disease than people with normal body mass indices (BMIs).

Yesterday, I had to spend half my day dealing with cable television. I had called Cox Customer support. I had already done most of the general debugging: Turning off the television off then back on. Turning the TiVo off ten back on. By the time I called Cox I was quite sure it was not on my side.

I had the choice of the virtual debugger or and agent. I chose ‘Agent’. I still got the virtual tech support. A very calming automatic voice (condescending) started walking through all the steps again. It was like a combination of the IT Crowd and H.A.L. If cable was not important to the household at this moment, I would have canceled.

Problem with automation, is that it is decided to make a customer give up in frustration. What is so unfair to the person customer service person, and to me, is that the survey after words is designed to rank her performance. The virtual help got a bye.

I will say this; Cox live people are great. The virtual needs work.

I consider myself left of center and a lunch bucket Democrat. I do not have problems with the dichotomy of being fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In my defense of the former I have seen too many programs where money was thrown at that did not work, yet simple solutions did. Many programs have too much administrative overhead for the sole purpose of generating reports that few read to prove that they are working. Lastly, I am not a fan of meta charities which one gives money to, so they can decide who is worthy of support. Yes, on the selfish side, I do enjoy the fruits of my labor.

On Facebook, I was shown an ad and was curious about why I got it. This was the answer:

One reason you're seeing this ad is that ****** ****** wants to reach people who are part of an audience called "US politics (very liberal)." This is based on a combination of factors, such as your activity on Facebook and other apps and websites, as well as where you connect to the internet.

There may be other reasons you're seeing this ad, including that ****** ****** wants to reach people ages 18 and older who live or were recently in California. This is information based on your Facebook profile and where you've connected to the internet.

If this is what the internet thinks of me, maybe I am not as jaded as I thought I was.

One of my favoraite pictures of the season. It was taken by a crew mate on the second to last Wet Wednesday of the 2018.

Messed up my virtual environment for Nikola Static blog generator. I decided to create a small script to automate some of the process.

Also, the doit process that Nikola uses keep tracks using gdbm. Gdbm does not work well with Microsofts one drive. I changed the dependency file DB backend of gdbm to sqlite3 in the file: nikola/lib/python3.7/site-packages/doit/cmd_base.py

or

--- nikola/lib/python3.7/site-packages/doit/cmd_base.py 2018-09-08 12:00:32.217679190 -0700
+++ cmd_base.py 2018-09-08 12:00:01.618008492 -0700
@@ -164,7 +164,7 @@
         'short':'',
         'long': 'backend',
         'type': str,
-    'default': "sqlite3",
+    'default': "dbm",
         'help': ("Select dependency file backend. [default: %(default)s]")
 }

Just testing different table types in RST from exmaples (and a definition sneak in)

csv-table

List Table

And a definition:

definition

the act of defining, or of making something definite, distinct, or clear