LinLog

The diet is progressing well, although I'm still having trouble with the scale. As I mentioned last week, I seem to be getting incosistent weights depending on where I put the scale and how I stand on it. Today, the highest weight I could get to come up was 215.0. I'm going by that one because the other options were 211 and 210, which can't possibly be right.

One nifty note: it seems the support aspect of fatblogging is working for me. Yesterday I found this comment on my last entry, from none other than Tanya Zuckerbrot, author of The F-Factor Diet, the book I'm following. Now that's service, huh? Thanks for the support Tanya!

So today I thought I'd talk a little about what I'm actually eating on this diet. The nice thing about it is that, if you're careful about what you choos, you can eat pretty much any kind of food. Some of it doesn't even feel like diet food.

The trick, of course, is to read labels. For example, I've been having turkey sandwiches for lunch. Normally, the two slices of bread would use up two of the three extra servings of carbs I'm allowed on phase 2. However, I've been getting the Weight Watchers whole-wheat bread, which has 17g of carbs and 4g of fiber in 2 slices.

Another good example is dessert. I've occasionally been using a serving of carbs to have some chocolate for dessert. Of course, things like Hershey bars and those oh-so-tasty Cadbury cream eggs are out of the question. However, a few dark chocolate products that are actually pretty good on the carb count. My favorite is probably the Guylian assorted chocolates. A 6 square serving only has 12g of carbs, 4g of fiber, and 160 calories. Another good one is the endangered species bars, several of which have 15g of carbs and 5g of fiber in a half-bar serving. They're not quite as good on fat or calories, but they're awfuly tasty.

Slashdot carried a story today linking to a blog post about Dell deleting a negative Linux-related post from their IdeaStorm site. There was angst, cries of censorship, and so forth. Too bad the /. editors didn't actually read the deleted post first.

For the record, I think Dell did absolutely nothing wrong here. If you don't believe me, go to the blog post linked above and read their screenshot of the removed post. It's a single-paragraph, semi-coherent diatribe with no useful or constructive content whatsoever. It's just one step above, "Hey Dell, you suck!"

Frankly, I'm glad Dell deleted this, because it makes the Linux community look like it's populated entirely by petulant teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. "What do you mean I can't have the moon on a stick?!? Screw you!"

As far as I can tell, Dell hasn't said they won't ship systems with Linux pre-installed. They've just said they're not going to do it right away. And this is a problem? I mean, what did people expect? Dell is a huge corporate bureaucracy with established business practices. It's not like they're the local computer store and they can just hire a couple of college kids to start installing Linux tomorrow. There's analysis to do, tests to perform, procedures to revise, employees to train. Organizations like Dell don't just change overnight and expecting them to is foolish and unreasonable.

The bottom line is that Dell is no longer going to pretend that Linux doesn't exist. This is unquestionably a good thing. Dell has given us an inch. The appropriate response is to push for more, not spit in their face because they didn't give us a mile.

Here's a funny one. I saw the image below while reading Kode Vicious's latest column on ACM Queue. Someone going by the name "Scanning for answers" wrote in with a question about static analysis tools. Note the ad that appears between his signature and KV's response.

I thought that was hilarious. Microsoft couldn't have bought better text placement. They should use that in their advertising campaign. "Scanning for answers... Found 1 answer: Visual Studio 2005."

Cheesy? Maybe. But seeing how they're the face of big, soulless corporations, Microsoft could use a little humanity injected in every now and then.