"No Plan" Diet

In six months, I've gone from 245 lb (about 111 kg) to 215 lb (97.5 kg). Nope. Not planned at all. No slimming pills/tea/exercise/vege diet/lower grocery bills. Not a really dramatic weight loss by some standards, but my belt can now be tightened by three additional notches. The benefit: I can fit in my good pants. The flip-side: now I don't have an excuse to wear jeans to official meetings. The reason: around the middle of May, my body just decided that it didn't need that much food to function. And that carting around that much weight was killing my ankles. Yup, getting old, probably. I can still eat quite a bit if the food is really good. Just see me stuff my face at the pizza joint, steak house and sushi bar. But one packet, not two, of instant noodles for a meal is more than enough. Lee Kiang blogged a few photos she took when she visited in September. To answer the comment Wilson made that I looked tanned: try facing a computer monitor, or four, for 16 hours a day. Your face and arms will look tanned too.

Work: Part 2

Work. Work. Work. Busy. Busy. Busy. The second part of my work is to create and maintain web sites. (Regular readers may remember Part 1. Click here.) These are not only regular information web sites (Research Center - http://arc.engin.umich.edu, Group - http://me.engin.umich.edu/autolab, Individual - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~filipi, etc), but also web portals (http://iarc2.engin.umich.edu, etc) that allow researchers from partner organizations all over the U.S. to share and transfer large amounts of data. Chasing after people to give you updated information to put on the web sites is the second hardest part of this job. Editing that information to make it suitable for the web is the hardest. Try condensing a 100-page document describing 40 projects, averaging 600 words per project, into single page descriptions of each project with no more than 200 words. English skills, graphics skills, and of course, HTML and other web-related skills. Add a bit of human psychology and stir.

Medium Snow Fall

The photo on the right was taken around 11am when it started to snow. This was in the last week of October. By about 3pm, the scenery looked like the photo below. And I was wondering why they decided to salt the paths and roads that morning when I walked to work. First accumulation of snow on the ground. So I haven't gotten my balance and walk right yet. Must have waddled like a pengiun on my way home. :-)