Come the start of this summer and they actually fit just about perfectly. Doh.

Earlier this week I put them on and wow, they were huge on me, literally falling off without a belt. Woot! Seeing progress on the scale is one thing, but it’s the random little things that make me smile.

Well, except my doctor, who had a bit of a wake-up call for me a couple of months ago. Perhaps now it is time to lose some weight? Let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to lose weight. Wow, I hear you saying to yourself, someone had a diet that failed? Imagine that! STOP THE PRESSES!

So what went wrong in the past? Well to start with, I’ve only ever really put any serious effort into losing weight once, and it worked. I was doing well… until I wasn’t. I just crashed, completely ran out of energy, started putting on weight despite still eating a reasonable number of calories and being at least a little more physically active than was my traditional preference. I was motivated, but ultimately unsuccessful, until the lack of success and a killer cold (which turned out to be mononucleosis) and a fun round of depression finally killed off my motivation.

Skip ahead several months and I found out why, with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. Left untreated, hypothyroidism makes it almost impossible to lose weight (and caused my depression, not that I’d ever admit I was suffering from depression, of course). Finding the right medication and the right dose took months of experimentation and semi-regular blood testing, and ultimately failed initially since the medication I was taking lost its effectiveness, so it was back to the starting point with a different medication. Things are better now, but I still don’t feel normal. Perhaps that’s a side effect of the thyroid condition, or perhaps just all the weight I put on? Lets blame the medication, less personal responsibility. Either way, I never got back on track to lose any of that extra weight I put on, and so my weight slowly wandered up, 10-20 lbs per year.

Since announcing your plans makes you less motivated to do the hard work needed, I decided to tell as few people as possible until I was making at least a little progress, and so a couple months ago, I started working on losing weight. I’ve made a little progress, so maybe it’s time to mention it?

The red line is my “trend”, roughly based on John Walker’s The Hacker’s Diet, designed to filter out some of the natural daily variations in body weight, instead focusing on the overall trend. The trend line shows I’ve lost roughly 15 lbs since I started, with my real weight loss being right around 20 lbs in the last ~2 months. Technically I started some dietary changes before this graph starts, but this is when I got a new (accurate) digital scale and started keeping track daily.

So now the questions are:

1. Can I keep up the weight loss? Well I hope so.  
2. Will I keep the weight off? That’s always the tough one. I’d like to say yes, but I know that there will be ups and downs. I’d like to say that this is a lifestyle change and not a diet, but lets face it, it’s a bit of both. The real struggle isn’t losing weight, it’s keeping it off. If anyone knows the secret? — Well, lets face it, if you did, you’d be rich.
3. Am I going to keep chattering about this on my blog? Probably. I hope so, since if I don’t, it means I’ve lost interest.

And with this post, a new Health category on my blog is born. With any luck, it will expand to more than one “Hey look, I’m fat” post, but I guess we’ll see — Perhaps I should retroactively add a few articles to this category so it doesn’t feel so lonely. That’ll do. That’ll do nicely.

If it doesn’t, can we all just skip the end of the world stupidity for a couple generations? Please?

How have I discovered this? Well, I put it on a counter top, table or other large flat surface, turn it on and do whatever else I’m doing. A couple of hours later it has vibrated itself off the desk and hit the floor.

So far, no dents and no apparent damage, but it makes me wonder about the long-term viability as speakers don’t usually handle repeated impacts particularly well. Blah.

On the plus side, since giving up even trying to pair to multiple devices, it’s been an absolutely fantastic speaker. Can’t wait to take it travelling again!

I went looking for a Bluetooth solution, preferably with it’s own batteries and USB/5v rechargeable batteries as I have little desire to start carrying spare batteries on me and I ended up with a Jawbone JAMBOX. At $199 MSRP, they’re on the expensive end of “Hey, it’s just a speaker” but given the value of having a decent solution, I felt it was worth trying. At this point odds are better than 50/50 that it’s getting boxed up and returned.

Lets be clear: the sound is great! It could be a bit louder, but it’s probably loud enough to annoy a neighbour in a hotel with thin walls, and is just right for most hotels or single room use, which is pretty much the point. Better, it doubles as a speakerphone and the quality is far better than the iPhone’s built-in speaker, so that’s fantastic. The out-of-the-box-experience is fantastic too, it has a very satisfying rumble in your hand the first time you power it on.

The box is high quality, opens up easily, the speaker is well placed at the top with an accessory USB cable, charger and 3.5mm cable. Great, almost. The website says this is what’s in the box:

1. JAMBOX
2. 60″ micro USB charging cable
3. 12.5″ micro USB charging cable
4. 36″ 3.5mm stereo cable
5. Carrying case
6. A/C wall charger
7. User guide

Mine had only one micro USB charging cable, not the two described. No big deal. The “Carrying case” is just a thick cardboard envelope folded up, it’s better than nothing, but it’s nothing to get excited about.

What is more of a pain, however, is the Bluetooth support, specifically the quasi-multipoint hack. It remembers up to 8 pairings at any one time and out of the box only connects to the most recently used device. I paired to my iPhone and iPad initially, planning on possibly pairing to another device later. Being late at night and having upcoming travel, I headed off to bed. I turned the speaker on and it helpfully paired with my iPad charging in another room and I couldn’t find any way to force it over to the iPhone pairing. A quick trip to Google didn’t help, but indicated that I could enable multi-point (to allow it to connect to multiple devices at once) via the web interface. Great, I connect up the USB cable, install drivers/software on my laptop, upgrade the firmware and turn on multi-point support, restart everything. It connects up to my phone, and boom, sound comes out the iPhone speaker. Fail.

A couple more tries and it turns out that although the JAMBOX technically can connect to two devices at once, only which one it decides is first gets speaker support, the other only gets the headset profile. Unfortunately there’s no way to predict which device will actually connect first; it tries to connect to the most recently connected result but in practice, it seems to hit either device randomly and the other, well, it’s audio doesn’t go to the speaker.

Oh and worse, so once I figure out that it’s talking to the wrong device, is it enough to disconnect from the device in question? Of course not, you have to disconnect from both devices, kill Bluetooth on one, then re-connect from the other.

A hobbled implementation is one thing, but an unpredictable/unreliable UI might just be too much of a pain; for $200, could we at least get the power/pairing switch to flip to the next paired device?

Example: Getting caught offering different prices to new customers vs repeat customers in the past in a “test”

They seem to be doing something like it again today:

In the screenshot the left window is logged in to my account, the right is a private browser (no naughty cookies for Amazon to use to identify me), copy/pasted the URL to both sides to ensure that I’m looking at identical items on both sides.

Note the Kindle price varies from $7.99 to $6.39.

UPDATE: Amazon never did respond. Shame.

But the retarded press releases? Can we all just agree those have been done to death? Pirate Bay buys eBay on eBay? Really?
</rant>