Roku First Impressions

It's much better than the vastly more expensive Samsung P.O.S. I had before. For one thing, streaming video actually works. When I select a video to stream, it comes up on the screen and I can watch it. That's a big difference from the Samsung, where instead of getting to watch the video, I had to watch the download bar interrupt the video every 30 seconds. Like, really, every thirty seconds. After testing, I found out the Samsung was only using about half my available bandwidth, and that was on a good day.

Roku's Netflix interface is vastly superior as well. Netflix on the Samsung was OK, I could access my queue; and aside from the fact that I couldn't watch anything without wanting to chew my own arm off, the interface itself was OK.

Roku's Netflix interface, on the other hand, is more than just "OK". It's very cool. I can access my queue, but I can also search for videos and see lots of lists of recommendations; all organized in a vast two-dimensional grid, where each row is a different type of recommendation. It's actually better than Netflix's own recommendation interface.

One problem I encountered with the Roku - I can't give it its own IP address. It requires DHCP. Which means I can't run a cable directly from the Roku box to the hub that sits by my DSL modem; I have to either connect wirelessly or run a cable to my wireless modem.

That's a drawback, and it's something the Samsung device actually let me do. The reason I did it with the Samsung was because I was trying to find something, anything, I could do to increase the bandwidth and maybe get rid of that stupid status bar every 30 seconds. Giving the Samsung a static IP didn't help; but at least it let me have that one additional way to beat my head against the wall. Roku doesn't have that.

Roku also has a neat content selection option, where you can sign up for what it calls "channels", which are just free and for-pay online media. The selection process for the various channels is pretty clunky, and could be vastly improved; but the services are nice. I signed up for all the free ones, which included some neat news sources; and apparently there'll be new channels available over time. Of course that's not necessarily Roku-specific, but they provide it and it works. Now I can watch Rachel Maddow on my wall instead of my computer screen.

Anyway, bottom line, Samsung sucks ass; Roku kicks butt.

The Whole Diet Thing

So, I'm still losing weight, but it's very slow. I'm basically down to 180, and everyone is telling me I no longer look overweight. I'll probably keep losing weight gradually if I stick with what I'm doing.

An interesting thing is happening. My diet is becoming normal. When I first launched into it, I was highly focused on the absolute healthiest foods I could find. There was a big variety of vegetables, and some fish. I was probably eating roughly as healthily as anyone who's ever lived.

At the time, one of my main goals was to stop the really over-the-top eating and weight-gain that was bringing me past all boundaries of health, and into a really bad zone. I was extremely strict with myself about every aspect of the diet, to the point where my friends and family were scared I might do harm to myself just from being on the diet. I was nervous about that too, but I figured it was life or death, and I was choosing the option that seemed available to me. I was attempting to thread the needle in the only way I could figure.

Since then, certain things have come clear as the real significant issues, and other things are turning out to be less important than I'd first thought.

One of the main things that I've come to understand is that the ban on snacking has to be maintained pretty strictly. Certain snacks are allowable, but they need to be regulated, and I can't let myself get into the idea that I can just go snack on things.

For me, a snack is anything I eat before lunch, between lunch and dinner, or after dinner.

Certain foods are things I'll eat to keep my protein up; but that aren't necessarily wonderful to include in a meal. Sardines, hard boiled eggs, and nuts fall into this category. If I have a tin of sardines, 2 or 3 hard boiled eggs, and a handful of nuts over the course of a day, that falls into the acceptable range of snacks.

Likewise, I might stop at the store and pick up some chopped watermelon or mango to eat after dinner. That's not a great source of protein, but it's also acceptable, just because it's fruit, and a bit of fruit is OK.

Those are my snack options. They've been changing over time, where I'll think about what's working for me, and what I'd like to adjust, and then finally make a decision about it. I try not to make 'impulse snack' decisions; and whenever they happen anyway, I take it as a sign that I need to clamp down and get back into the right groove.

So for the most part, I'm not snacking during the day. And when I'm getting lunch and dinner, the way I think of those meals is as the main chance for me to eat during the day. I don't assume that if I get hungry later I'll be able to just have a snack. The vast majority of my food is consumed during lunch and dinner.

The reason that's good for me is because it makes it much, much easier to guess how much I'm eating. If I were snacking all day, I'd have a much harder time figuring out how many calories I'd consumed that day. And with me, it's so easy to just keep snacking on more and more stuff, which is exactly what happened before I went on this diet. And the more I ate, the hungrier I got.

So the general ban on snacks is one of the key things I've identified as being really useful for me personally. It's not for everyone. But for me, snacking is a huge trigger for more snacking. I have to keep it under tight control or it gets way out of hand.

Another main thing that I started out with in this diet, and still believe, is that I should avoid things that have a lot of sugar, salt, and grease. For me, those ingredients feel highly addictive. They make my brain go dingdingdingdingding! They're extremely tasty in a weird way that's a little disturbing. There are plenty of other foods that I find very tasty - various vegetables - that don't have that disturbing kind of "must...have...more...." quality.

So, like snacking, those particular ingredients seem to be a big trigger for me to eat more and more and more.

Now, the third main thing is more of a surprise. As long as I stick with the first two main things, and only have a reasonable portion of food at mealtimes, I'm realizing it's no longer so necessary for me to be quite so focused on eating only the absolutely most healthy foods.

I still like to make sure I get a nice big helping of vegetables; but I'm starting to feel like it's OK to also delve into grains and various meats. I try to keep the meat servings relatively small, but I don't shy away from them completely like I used to. I still haven't had red meat though.

Basically my preference is to have the vegetable portion be the largest, the grain portion be next, and the meat portion be the smallest.

But that actually describes a lot of the foods available at many restaurants and in the café at work.

So when I say my diet is "becoming normal", it partly means that I'm becoming more used to it, and also that the things I'll eat are coming more in line with what a normal person might eat who didn't have an eating problem.

In terms of my caloric intake, I'm pretty sure there were several weeks or a month there, when I was getting way too few calories; and the result was that I was starting to get extremely exhausted in the middle of the day, and need a lot more sleep at night than I ever had before.

So, even before I started relaxing my approach to lunch and dinner foods, I had started raising my protein and calorie intake; and that ended up having a big positive effect on my exhaustion and sleeping habits. I'm almost back to normal now, in terms of wakefulness and sleep.

And now that I've relaxed my lunch and dinner requirements somewhat, I'm finding that I'm still gradually losing weight. Maybe in 6 months or so the BMI will think I'm normal. But the continued gradual weight loss is basically a confirmation that I'm not swinging too far in the wrong direction by easing certain restrictions.

Overall, things are looking pretty good, from the eating perspective. I seem to be settling on some good habits that work for me, and the health issues I associated with making such extreme changes to my diet seem to be fading as well.

I recently had a little scare though. I decided to quit eating at the super healthy restaurants I usually go to, and to start cooking healthy foods for myself again. The result was pretty strange. I didn't end up cooking for myself, but the effort to do so resulted in my restaurant behavior and snack behavior beginning to spiral out of control. I started eating more, especially snack foods.

It wasn't a huge lapse, and by most standards I was still eating really healthily; but I could see the fabric of all my good habits beginning to unravel. It scared me. I quickly decided to abandon the idea of cooking for myself, and try to settle back into the habit that had been working for me.

What that told me was that my eating habits have become a bit more rigid than I want them to be. I definitely should not have to confront the prospect of total failure, when something unusual causes me to change my eating regimen. I need to have the flexibility to cook if I want to, eat out if I want to, or go on a fast for the day if I want to.

So I'm not 100% sure how to deal with that one. For now, I'm planning to stick with what I'm doing, and just give consideration to the problem and see what I come up with.

FOIA Part II

As expected, all my FOIA requests came back marked "insufficient personal information provided". Remember the requests were constructed by my lawyer. So, clearly, the process is intended to be so opaque that only the iron-willed can get through.

The rejections each included a little bit of information about how to construct the request better the 2nd time around. I decided to drop the Department of Defense request, since they said they'd only have a file on me if I had some kind of nameable relationship with them. Since I've never been a member of the armed forces, that's a no. But I'm going to resubmit requests to the FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security requests. Those are what my lawyer's working on now.

If I can get the government to finally cough up my files, I plan to work with my lawyer to write up a thorough explanation of how to do it and what to expect, and post it online. In theory there are online resources to make FOIA requests easy, but that's what we've used and clearly they don't.

Why am I bothering with this? Well, for one thing, the law exists and it's all about letting me, so why shouldn't I? And if it turns out to be impossible, then something's wrong, because FOIA's kind of an important law, it seems to me. It exists for a good reason, and if a random Joe like me can't get his file, then probably no one can, and then FOIA might as well not exist. I don't like that.

Diet Relaxation

As I get more used to my diet, I'm noticing that certain things are more important to me than others, and certain things are getting to be reliably well-established.

So, I'm good about not snacking between meals, and about turning down food that isn't on my diet. That seems to be fairly reliable at this point.

At the same time, I think I do a fairly decent job guessing at the number of calories that are in a given meal.

And, I'm realizing that as long as I get the right nutrition overall, it doesn't much matter whether any given meal is particularly nutritionally balanced, so long as it doesn't include much forbidden foods (chiefly sugar, salt, and grease).

So for example, last night I had Indian food with my friend Alexandra. I haven't gone to an Indian restaurant in a long time, mainly because the food they serve is very iffy with respect to my diet.

But I went. First they brought us papadum, which is made of lentils. So I felt OK eating that.

Then I ordered a sort of minced vegetable appetizer, which turned out to be a bit more grain-like than I wanted, and probably a bit more salted than I wanted, and probably a bit greasier than I wanted. But really it didn't have a ton of those things, and it was a small dish of food.

Then I ordered a vegetables-in-cream-sauce dish, with no rice. It came in a small metal bowl, and wasn't a large meal at all.

As I cast my eye over the whole meal including everything, I guessed it was probably less than 1200 calories. I would have guessed lower, but restaurant food is always higher in calories.

So, what happened? Clearly this is food that normally I wouldn't consider part of my diet. I wouldn't eat like that every day. But the calorie count was right for a dinner entree, it didn't seem to have too much of the specific foods I avoid; and my lunch had been a very abbreviated vegetable dish.

In terms of nutrition, yesterday was probably a big bust. but not a total bust; I probably got a lot of what I needed. Nutritional "daily requirements" are mainly average requirements, so it made sense to consider the Indian food as part of an overall diversity of eating.

Then this morning my weight was lower than the day before, which is at least partly encouraging.

I think what's happening is that I'm gradually recognizing that as long as I make sure I get the nutrients I need in general, and avoid snacks and 'trigger' foods, and make sure my regular meals are appropriately sized, it may possibly be OK for me to eat a more normal-seeming diet than what I have been eating.

But I haven't made a decision about it yet, and for now I'm just going to continue focusing on the vegetable/fish regime. I want any changes to be introduced slowly, and tested out in terms of how I feel and what I weigh. I don't want to start acting like I can just eat any old thing. I'm just considering the possibility that a slightly less hard-line approach in certain areas might be OK.

New Yoga Teacher

Jessica, my yoga teacher, decided to move out to California. Boom, just like that! I'm sad, but I have to admire her ability to unconstrainedly head off to a new adventure. If I didn't feel some roots in NYC that I don't want to break, I'd probably head out to Europe for awhile, and see what I could see; or maybe to various parts of this country that I've never seen before; New Orleans, the Gulf states. Or Asia, where I've never been and would like to go.

But off she went, without a job or a prospect, to see what she could see. Before she left, she set me up with a friend of hers named Keisha, to take over the yoga lessons. Keisha seemed great when I met her, and today we had our first lesson. In some ways it was different from the way Jessica taught me. They emphasize different aspects of each pose, which I found very interesting. But in a lot of ways it was very similar. Lots of encouragement, lots of clear explanations of what was intended. And Keisha hit the right difficulty level for me, which turns out to be about 3 notches underneath 'beginner' level.

I'm really lucky, because both Jessica and Keisha were willing to come to my apartment to teach me. It's a lot harder to slack off when the teacher is coming to my home at 7:00 AM. The usual excuses don't seem to work as well for that situation. "Oh, I just couldn't get there today. Had a million things going on." Yeah.

I really like taking the yoga lessons. I can feel it improving my posture and flexibility. Some day I might be healthy!