Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I’ve just submitted my first “invention disclosure” at work. I’m rather ambivalent about the whole thing – on the one hand, I don’t like what patents have become, and on the other, I signed a contract, and the honorable thing to do is play by the rules I agreed to.

We spent the weekend at the dead sea. Sucky hotel, but incredible weekend. Pictures will be forthcoming as soon as the camera’s batteries finish recharging.

Orna bought me a bottle of 15 year old Glenlivet. yrk, want to give it a try some time?

PNS training has been postponed for pretty much all of last week. It resumes today.

We are going to see my former flat mate Nadav play in a play today.

I will be attending an Advanced CPP course at work today. I used to work quite a lot with CPP in the Pointer era, and have an interesting love/hate relationship with it.

I woke up far too early today. That is all.

I’m terribly busy today and haven’t had much time or inclination to blog in the last few days, so this will be sweet and to the point:

– PNS day 16, Monday: felt awful. Broke diet, had a
so-delicious-it-should-be-illegal sandwich, with the appropriate feelings of guilt afterward. Didn’t exercise, Haifux in the evening.
– PNS day 17, Tuesday: didn’t feel so well either, short but annoying
day at work, slept in the evening. No exercise, but no criminal food endeavors either. Killed an LG CDROM drive on gofannon, my test box, courtesy of a grub.conf snafu and Mandrake 9.2 rescue disk.
– PNS day 18, Wednesday: Shavuot holiday. Didn’t exercise, ate too
much cheesecake, but feeling reasonably well.
– PNS day 19, Thursday, today: back to the office, deadlines are
looming and the pressure is mounting. Will make it to the gym at night, hopefully!

All in all, it was bound to happen sometime, the “loosening of the diet”. I gained half a kg since Sunday, which is not nearly as bad as it could’ve been. The important thing now is get back on the horse and continue working out and eating right. PNS training suffered a set back, but that’s life for you. I’ll be stronger next time!

In other news, I finished reading Dan Simmons’s Illium, which is boring until page 500(!), and then suddenly becomes a great read. Simmons is up to his usual tricks though (c.f. Hyperion), and the end is not what I’d call an end – there’s not nearly enough resolution. I see a sequel in the works…

More later.

I feel awful. Rescheduled the morning workout to the afternoon, and thinking of rescheduling that too for tomorrow. Hungry all the time, and having gained a little weight back (not too much, less than a kg, but it’s the trend that worried me). Must hang tough, this too shall pass.

Haifux meeting this evening, where gby will be talk about Porting an XFree86 driver to the Altix: A war story.

SecureOS, stackghost (kerneltrap story).

Just came back from a windows uninstallation party. We uninstaled windows from nyh’s laptop by the magic of fdisk(1) and mkfs.ext3(1) while wearing party hats and drinking wine in plastic cups. Despite the wine, only the appropriate partitions were deleted. *hic*

Two new books arrived for me today: David Mosberger’s ia-64 linux kernel design and implementation, and Mel Gorman’s Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager, where I even appear in the acknowledgments section. Happy happy joy joy!

Day 13, Friday, went pretty well. First I went to the gym, and had a reasonable but not spectacular workout. I guess I was conserving my energy for what was about to come. Then I had the standard five kms walk back home, which went far better than last week (I think my ankles are getting stronger). I did it in 1:04, as opposed to 1:10 last week. Picked up Orna at home and we went to the pool together. I planned to do 1km (600m and then 400m), but once I got in the water, I felt great and decided to try for 1km without stopping. I did it, and even had enough energy to go on! For the last 4 pools, I matched pace with Orna, who swims like a fish in water. I think I’ll stick to 1km for the time being, but try for a quicker pace. I also need to start working on my side stroke, since it seems to provide a much better work out.

Day 14, Saturday, was a day of rest. After yesterday’s mili-triathlon, my entire body was sore. I just lazied around, slept a lot, and generally recuperated.

Day 15, Sunday, today: lousy work out in the morning. I wanted to start running after the cross training, but the treadmill machines were all taken. Instead I raised the resistance on the cross training machine to 11, and did 30 minutes (28, to be precise) with a pulse of 150-160. 495 kcals burned, which is a new record. Then I had no strength left for the weights, and had to lower the weight on some of the machines from my usual weight. I think it was a good move in general, because my form while doing weights wasn’t up to standard recently. That’s a sure sign of too much weight, and it’s better to reduce the weight and do the exercise with the right form.

Speaking of weight, I am down 1.8kgs for the last week, which brings me down to a total of 6.4kgs since starting. At this rate, I’ll hit the pretty significant milestone of 10kgs in two weeks!

Pictures from the 100th Haifux lecture party.

Pictures from yesterday night, when we had a few friends over and Orna went to grab a knife and came back with the camera…