Conjecture and speculation...

After weighing in at 229 for my annual physical last December, my weight went up to around 232 in January and hovered there for a while until it popped up another 10 pounds during the road trip to Midland and doggedly hovered there, edging back down below 240 only a couple of times.

Over the past week, though, letting Natalie pretty much run the kitchen and eating smaller portions than I am used to (and which I am repeatedly envisioning mentally as the right portions for me), my weight has decreased steadily, to where I am back around 232.

Now, ten pounds in one week is about 7-8 times what is considered the "safe" rate of weight loss, according to the talking heads on TV (and, okay, by doctors who don't play doctors on TV as well). However, the way I figure it, a fairly good chunk of that loss has to do with, um, shall we describe it as "unloading the conveyor"? Still, seven straight days of weight loss would seem to hint, I think, that a mechanism other than simple loss of physical mass is at work.

Yesterday went by well, and all is okay so far today ("tfu, tfu, tfu," as a Russian might say, meaning: knock wood). I rested quite a bit and plan to continue to take it easy and drink tea all day tomorrow (with fits and starts of effort to put together some more stuff that Galina needs for the loan application).

* * *In between naps, I took a look at what the "Feisty Fawn" version of Ubuntu had to offer, as one might recall that, some time ago, I trashed the recovery partition on my VAIO (on both VAIOs, as a matter of fact) to give me an opportunity to take Linux for a spin.

The spin was short-lived, however, given that I pipe the broadband in the house through a wireless router whose signal is encrypted using something called WPA (head and shoulders above WEP, which becomes increasingly easy to crack with every passing day). Although technically, Ubuntu had WPA support available as far back as a couple of major revs ago, I could never get it to work, although admittedly I didn't spend copious amounts of blood or treasure in the effort to do so.

Getting wireless with WPA to work with the Fawn was a near thing with webster, though, as none of the how-to explanations available online seemed to match what was going on in my machine. Eventually, I accidentally stumbled across a solution that involved checking an unlikely check box, and now my Linux desktop works wirelessly without complaint.

Upgrading proust was somewhat a more daunting task that theoretically would have called for me to upgrade to the intermediate version, "Edgy Eft," before going on the the Fawn. I circumvented the entire exercise by booting the machine into Windows and using Partition Magic to reformat the Linux partition (I seem to recall, from experience, that the Fawn install CD seems to get confused during an install when faced with an existing Linux file system. (Maybe the problem has been fixed, but I wasn't taking any chances.)

So now both VAIOs are Linux capable, and now that either can hit the 'net through their wireless cards, the way is clear to take a good, hard look at Ubuntu. But later. Right now, I have to concentrate on recuperating fully. If nothing else, I'll need my strength for this weekend, when I'll be by myself and Natalie is visiting friends in Canada.

Cheers...

Doesn't do my BP any good...

From the GuardianUnlimited:

The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.

"This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

So, it turns out that killing Rushdie is simply The Right Thing To Do™ and in no way should be considered as manifestations of "extremism" or "terrorism"? That makes a lot of sense.

Yesterday, Iranian politicians accused Britain of insulting Islam by awarding the knighthood to Rushdie, who was forced into hiding for a decade after the country's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his assassination.

Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, said the decision to honour the novelist was an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies. [...] "This act shows that insulting Islamic sacred [values] is not accidental. It is planned, organised, guided and supported by some western countries."

Wow.

Cheers...