Less than useful

The 4-Hour Body is a new book by Tim Ferriss, or at least it was new when I first started writing this post at the end of last year

I bought it because I liked the excerpts I read on Gizmodo. I’m extremely pleased with it and endorse it wholeheartedly, though there is some weird stuff that is probably safe to ignore. Word of warning though: it’s a massive tome. You only need to read small sections at a time (concentrate on one goal at a time), but it’s a little impractical to carry around because of how unwieldy it is in hardcover. I wish I’d bought an e-book version, but originally thought this might be something I’d want to share with people. I frankly want to keep it all to myself, hah.

Back in December, I’d barely started with the recommended diet, but switching to only eating legumes for carbs had made an immediate difference in my wakefulness and alertness. The difference was night and day. I was often still sleeping like crap, but I was vastly more productive during the days. I also lost a significant amount of weight pretty quickly.

Since though, I started falling into bad habits again. While most of my meals are still of the protein+legumes+vegetables variety, I’d started eating junk food again as well.

So it’s time to get back on the wagon. Since willpower didn’t work, I’m trying one of the weirder ideas in the book: take a picture of food before you eat it, and better yet, post it somewhere to keep yourself honest. We all carry cameras around with us on our phones nowadays so it’s simple. The idea works in embarrassment and potential shame ha. Do you really want to take a picture of a hamburger? And it helps to have people keep you honest.

So that said, my food log can be found at:

http://www.markosaar.net/category/food-log/

I’ve set up WordPress to not post those to the main page. For some reason the photos don’t show up until you actually open each entry. I’ll figure that out.

Procrastinating a bit from some contract work I need to get done tonight.

I’d seen Amazon Kindles in person a few times, and was absolutely blown away by the quality and legibility of the text on the screen.  I didn’t get to spend that much time with them though to really get a feel for the features.  I didn’t like how a lot of the device’s real-estate was used up by a keyboard though.

Today I spent a while with the Sony eReaders, and was surprised to find that they don’t look or feel nearly as nice as the Kindle.  They looked great in their press-shots and sounded vastly superior to me, but they felt quite cheap comparatively.  When these things are supposed to recreate the “experience of reading a book,” which detractors keep bringing up, it’s apparently a really big deal.

Speaking of e-book readers in general, the ability to change text-size I think is a killer feature.  However one thing I noticed on the Sony readers, and really disliked, was that they wouldn’t justify or typeset the text particularly well.  It’s especially obvious at larger font sizes. I don’t know whether the Kindle does this either, but it seems like it’d be a great feature to further enhance legibility.  Maybe most people don’t notice this sort of thing though.

It does make me think though that I really don’t want to be an early adopter in this instance, and it’s steeled my resolve to get through all the physical books I’ve acquired over the years before I invest in something that will be obsolete in a few months…