Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Since ladypine bought the speaker set, it’s time to live up to my end of the bargain and acquire a digital camera. I’m thinking of a Nikon CoolPix 4300, based on the reasonable price (just under 2K NIS) and Oleg’s favorable impression of the CoolPix 3100.

I was a bit sick this weekend and spent a lot of time lying down. This propensity for horizontal entertainment, coupled with the great set of speakers ladpyine bought on Friday, meant I spent a large parts of the weened in front of the TV, surrounded by 6 speakers and experiencing favorite movies in a whole new way. Movies watched include:

The great Saving Private Ryan

The mediocre Terminator 3, although The Governator was hillarious.

The excellent We Were Soldiers, one of the better war movies I’ve ever seen

And the classic Platoon.

Suggestions for more good war movies will be appreciated, in case I end up sick next weekend as well…

By request of ideawerkz, my current workout regime:

Morning workout based on the exercises described in The Hacker’s Diet. I don’t do the leg bends, and I rarely do the running in the morning, but I do the bends, situps and push ups. Currently I’m at rung 15 of the introductory ladder, and it’s time I moved up to the lifetime ladder.

Evening exercises are 3-4 times a week at the gym at work:

30 minutes of aerobics. Currently I use the cross trainer machine to reduce stress on the knees, but I intend to move to running on a treadmill increasingly as my weight goes down and my stamina goes up. Also, it’s time I upped the time to around 40 minutes.

Some weight training: chest, back (rowing), legs (both big muscles), upper back and shoulders. I do one set of 15-20 repetitions, culminating with 100% effort – which means I can’t do another one after the last one.

And last but not least, stomach muscles: assorted exercises, totaling at about 100 situps.

That’s it, I think. I am considering other workouts, inspired in part by this recent acquisition, but since the current one is working well so far, I’m sticking with it. Comments appreciated!

This morning I weigh 5 kgs less than when I started this diet. People have started noticing, asking whether I’ve lost any weight. The toughest part of my excersize regime is without a doubt the morning workout (stretchs, abs and push ups). This morning I did in front of Conan the Barbarian, for inspiration. It worked.

I’ve been busy in the last few days improving my existence one bit at a time. The effort is starting to bear fruit, and I’m happier and calmer than I’ve been in a long time. Yay for self improvement!

Today we had a most interesting seminar at the lab, organized by my department, the Storage and Systems department. The talks were mostly interesting, and it was nice chatting to people from industry and academia. The MOSIX folks gave an interesting talk, and I talked for quite a bit with Netapp’s CTO and NFS guru, Brian Pawlowski. What a cool guy! I hope I’m as cool as him when I’ll be CTO of … something.

I have algorithms class in 30 minutes, and two papers to print out before I go, the Paxos paper, and “Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process”, by Fischer et al.

Some days, I wake up and all I want to do is crawl under the blanket and stay there. This morning, I woke up determined to do the right thing.

Heading over to my parents place now, to hook up the new printer they
bought, without consulting me.

– “But the sales person said it works with Linux!”
– “Great. Why don’t HE come over then on a friday night to set it up?”
Furrfu. I’m grumpy tonight.

The livejournal folks wield a mighty clue.

’twas great, although I was feeling anti social most of the time, and having a great book at my disposal did not help. As for what we did do, ladypine said it better than I could have.

Off to Eilat for the weekend, be back on Saturday, hopefully refreshed. Cheers,y’all!