not a Lotus!

from down the street, i had misidentified this Tesla as the chrome orange Lotus Elise i would love to have. good looking car!

a little sore

not unsurprisingly, my walking tends to decrease during the winter months in Chicago. i really try, year round, to avoid driving/being-in-a-car on weekends, much preferring to run errands by walking, shopping locally, etc.

yesterday i had to be in Uptown and decided to walk. combined with the rest of the walking i did yesterday, i logged about 5 1/2 miles. sadly, much higher than i'd been doing since last fall. and i did the bulk of that on a smallish breakfast of bacon and eggs.

my energy was really good, no fatigue at all. my only complaint, near the end, was the inevitable lower back pains i get when doing that much walking. by this morning, that has pretty much cleared up, and i'm left with some soreness in my thighs and a niggly little pain in my left foot.

but overall i'm really pleased and hope to log many more miles until the next winter.

a little back patting

i'm about one month away from my first year of Eating Better. labels are always a bit tough here, as the Food Plan doesn't really fall neatly into any already-named category, but loosely what started as something like South Beach has become something like Primal.

i can't argue with any of the results, the standouts being weight and some other lab-measured values.

as a side note, Google docs to the rescue when i needed to convert some spreadsheet data into a chart. after struggling for longer than i care to admit with an ancient copy of Excel (nice chart, but it wouldn't let me scale the y-axis) and AppleWorks (nice min/max on the y-axis, but it kept running the dates along that axis), i spent about 5 minutes in google docs uploading the file and generating a satisfactory chart. huzzah.

update: i uploaded a new chart with all my historical weight data, but due to 1) lack of early data points, 2) a consistent weight for two consecutive days counting as one data point, and 3) not finding any way to tell the chart-generator that the x-axis is time and it should examine the dates and draw the chart accordingly, it's still a bit skewed. maybe the 22nd century will have better software...

finally, i left off the first data point (april 8 2009) as it was a whole month until my next data point, and that may 8 one was an actual weigh-in (the april was a guesstimate).

you can't get there from here

youtube has a nice warning system in place, letting me know recently that my version of Firefox would soon no longer be supported by their site. And they made some recommendations, including FF 3.5.

so i went to see what version of FF i was running on my (vintage 2004) ibook: FF 2.0.0.20.

okay, that's a little old, let me go to "Help / Check for Updates..." and see what I can get. Mozilla makes it easy to upgrade FF versions, downloading/installing in one step and even restoring your open windows. nice touch.

it updated me to 3.0.15. Not even close to the 3.5 I would need to keep using youtube. At this point, I began to get a little worried that my hardware, and OS (Tiger), are a little too outdated to run the latest of FF.

So back to "Help / Check for Updates" and BAM it installed 3.0.18 for me. Try again: BAM now I have 3.6. Try again: I'm at the latest.

I assume there's a good technical reason that i couldn't go straight from 2.0.0.20 to 3.6, but I'd love to know what it is.

Now when is that damn Macbook Pro refresh coming?

is it possible to draw real-world conclusions from playing GT5?

i recently picked up Gran Turismo 5 Prologue for PS3, which is a great bit of fun. lovely graphics, good gameplay, boatloads of depth and addictive -- what's not to like? you race, you get money, you buy new cars for your garage. and then race those (complete car list here).

you can pit your mini cooper against other hot hatches, like the Ford Focus ST, or you can be a dick and race your Ferrari against them.

i like that the cars are pretty distinct, though given my lack of real-world experience, i can't say how close of an analogue they are.

still, i'm happy to pretend that these are valid impressions and will state some.

Biggest disappointment: the 4WD Audi TT Coupe. it's just too underpowered. That's followed closely by the Alfa Romeo Brera 4WD. Really sluggish in the low gears for a 6 cylinder.

Biggest surprise: the Fords! i'm not at all surprised that the Ford ST does well (i get better times in it than i do in the Mini Cooper S). The Mustang doesn't suck! My times in it are similar to those I get with the 2005 Subaru Impreza WRX STI. And I must say I like the Ford GT a lot. It's ridiculously over-powered, and I initially thought it didn't corner well. Then I realized I was taking those corners > 100 mph, much faster than I had tried previously.

The GT compares favorably to the Ferrari F430. Not in every way, but the Ferrari is a good bit twitchier. Also, the Audi R8 makes up for the TT, my times in it are nearly as fast as the GT and F430.

Other nice surprises are the Renault Clio Sport V6 and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX. I get consistently better times in the Lancer vs the Impreza, the latter feeling a little too heavy and weak in the low gears.

other impressions: the BMW M3 is heavy but handles well for its weight. The Lotus Elise 111R is one of my favorites -- tough but rewarding. The Honda Integra is fast and undramatic. And the 2001 VW GTI is slow, predictable and boring.

regarding my original question, after playing this game, is it fair to say i'm no longer interested in the Audi TT?

more n-3/n-6 ratio data

i *finally* found that chart i'd recalled seeing but couldn't recall where. it was part of this Whole Health Source post. here's the chart and some accompanying verbiage:

The ideal ratio is probably very roughly 2:1 omega-6:omega-3. Leaf lard is 6.8, beef tallow is 2.4, good quality butter is 1.4, corn oil is 45, cottonseed oil is 260. It's clear that a large qualitative change in our fat consumption occurred over the course of the 20th century.

National Automatic Garage Door Awareness Week

I'm declaring it such after spending a week opening/closing the damn thing myself. having a working automatic garage door is a minor thing in the overall scheme of things, but damn is it a nice daily convenience.

props to the gf for calling around for estimates ($300-400 to replace an opener?!?) until she got someone on the phone who not only correctly diagnosed the issue over the phone, but charged a fraction of the other estimates to do the repair (worn gears, plus they replaced bushings, lubed everything, and did a bunch of other stuff i can't recall).

Here's hoping my 14 year-old opener goes another 14 years. and kudos to Liftmaster for making an easily-repairable product with a long MTBF, even if that failure was during the middle of winter.