Great news from two of my friends.

My college roommate, and good friend Cedric had his second child, a 6.88 lb girl named Bianca. Congratulations to Ced and his wife.

Sam had the health inspection on his food cart today and passed. New York City will now let him sell food on the street. He should be getting going on the business very soon. Good thing the weather is turning nice.

Weight: 172.5
Stagnating a bit.

Looks like I hit a bit of a plateau, although I ended up loosing weight. No weights as an excuse this time. I definitely exercised less, although I am turning that around since the weather got nicer. Although I have beat Jim Henley, weight wise at least. He has a smaller waist then I do. I fit nicely into my 36” pants now, a definite improvement over the nearly 40” waist I started with (40” was loose on me but 38” was tight), but I still have a way to go. It’s good to wear shorts now since most of my pants are 38” and are really loose now. I am putting off getting new clothes, mostly because I can’t afford to buy several different sizes, but I do need a new look soon.

It’s good to be able to run outside again. There is nothing like running from my house to the hudson shore and look over the NYC skyline at sunset. Too bad I think I pulled my calf. I may have to go in the air conditioned, but less exciting gym tomorrow.

I don’t know what else to say. Still no nerdy diet graphs, I have to go compile something to make them and I haven’t had the time. Later, I promise.

The MoveOn primary gives me the perfect chance to talk about what I think of the Democratic candidates for president. I should note that I will of course support anyone who gets the nomination over Bush. In alphabetical order:

Carol Moseley Braun:
Probably my least favorite candidate. Even worse than Lieberman and totally irrelevant. Why is she even in this race?

Howard Dean:
My man. I am totally behind Dean, like many lefty bloggers. And I believe he can actually win, not just in the primary but against Bush as well. Maybe this is just the delusion that Dean supporters seem to get but I can picture him doing better than the others in the general election.

Despite having the support of the left wing of the Democratic party, Dean isn’t that much of a lefty. For example, he isn’t a huge supporter of gun control, preferring that the states make their own laws on that issue. Indeed he seems to evade a lot of questions by saying the states should decide. But I think this is a very good idea. What people want in Wyoming will be different from what they want in Massachusetts. The Republicans keep spouting rhetoric about giving states more power, but they keep increasing the federal government.

Dean also seems extremely motivated. He seems willing to fight and not back down to the point where he has been called mean. That is a positive for me. He can also be quite an opportunist. He has appealed to the left wing of the party, appropriating Paul Wellstone’s “democratic wing of the Democratic party” line, but I think he will head further toward the center as the general election progresses.

He also has the advantage of being a governor, without much record in the national media. Most of the presidents in my lifetime have been governors: Regan, Clinton, and Bush II.

His only disadvantage I saw when I downloaded the commercial running in Iowa: He reminded me of Al Gore. Not with what he was saying, but how he was saying it. That could be not so bad; many Democrats feel that Gore lost the election unfairly and want revenge. I hope he can loosen up a bit though.

John Edwards:
For no good reason I seem to get Edwards and Graham confused, maybe because they are both southern. So Edwards is the handsome one from North Carolina. He has a lot of advantages: Handsomeness, money from trial lawyer friends, experience yet relative anonymity (but not too much anonymity). Being a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee allows him to criticize Bush on security from a very strong position; a great advantage since this is where Democrats seem to be weak.

Richard Gephardt:
The Democratic Bob Dole. He is in the race simply because he has been around for so long. He may have some deep support from unions and such, but he he inept. He hasn’t done a very good job as majority or (mostly) minority leader in the senate. He will clearly loose against Bush.

Bob Graham:
I admit to knowing little about Graham. He is from Florida, and to be elected these days you seem to need to have a southern accent. I know he is a fairly serious contender, and I certainly don’t mind him, but I have little opinion.

John Kerry:
I like Kerry. I really do. He is definitely my second choice. My cousin worked for him and her ex-husband was his chief council for a while. But he will probably loose to Bush. He is the new Dukakis: a boring, albeit right, guy from Massachusetts. Even my mom thinks so.

Dennis Kucinch:
My first impression of Kucinich came from hearing about his flip-flop on abortion. Not a good sign. I know he is supposed to be the most “progressive” candidate, but I am closer to Dean on the issues. He is irrelevant and useless. Don’t waste your vote on this guy.

Joseph Lieberman:
I think Jon Stewart said it best (paraphrasing): “Lieberman is the guy you want if you like Bush but don’t think he is Jewish enough.” I know he is ahead in the polls, but that’s just because people know his name. Is there any reason to elect him, and how can he challenge Bush?

Al Sharpton:
Irrelevant, but entertaining. No one’s going to vote for him, but he is great to listen to. I hope he stays in the race long enough to shape the debate, but not so long that he drives black voters away from a candidate like Dean.

Today is the MoveOn which I voted in today after I signed up at the last minute (~12:30 last night).

My candidate: Howard Dean
But I also emphasized that I would support any Democratic candidate up to and including Lieberman and Mosley-Braun in the general election against Bush. Hell, I’d support many Republicans, even Bush’s father, over our current president.

I am a Dean fan like a lot of left leaning folks, and a seemingly large number of people who read and write liberal blogs. I like him and I actually feel he can win. More on that later.

Bob Harris at This Modern World likes Kucinich who he believes is more progressive. He created a chart showing the difference between Kucinich and Dean on various positions. I am still a Dean fan and am probably more conservative (I certainly have more libertarian leanings) than Mr. Harris.

Then Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tommorow himself) posted an entry where he emphasizes that Harris is the one supporting Kucinich and that he isn’t behind anyone yet. Then he curiously advises that people should vote for the candidate they prefer to see president and not be as concerned with electability. I have to disagree. The MoveOn primary seems to serve two main functions: to act as a kind of poll and to generate press and buzz for the candidates particularly the winner. I believe you should vote as if this was the actual primary. If you want Dean (or whoever) to be the nominee, you should vote for him even if you agree with someone like Kucinich more.

Another issue is that is an online poll, and there is a rule that all online polls can be spammed. MoveOn does seem to be doing all it can to stop that: requiring a full name an address along with a valid e-mail. But of course e-mail address can be generated automatically and quickly by someone with a domain name. They are checking for similar e-mails from one domain name (such as spam001@scharlack.com, spam002@scharlack.com, etc), but many people control several domain names. I, as an occasional web designer have pretty much direct control over six domain names. I could use faked names and addresses of myself, work, parents, friends, etc. or even fake everything. Admittedly MoveOn is doing some random telephone polling to try to catch duplicate voters. While it may be hard (though hardly impossible) to rig thousands of votes, it certainly wouldn’t be hard to get more than a few extras. I am doing none of this of course. I am too lazy to even call my friends up and tell them about this. I am also honest.

Lots of big apple news toady, but you don’t need to read this weblog for that.

Apple finally released their 1.0 version (not beta) of Safari. I downloaded the update via software update and loaded my program and:

The application Safari has unexpectedly quit.

So I get the old version from by backup disk (which thank God I have). The old version loads fine but I can’t go anywhere. I type in (for example) “http://www.google.com” and nothing. Nothing at all!

So I go to Apple’s Safari page (using an old version of Camino) to try to directly install Safari. I enter my e-mail and download a disk image which I proceed to double click on and IT WON’T MOUNT.

So then I try to fuck around in the system folder with some of the frameworks and replacing them from by backup disk. But the finder won’t let me. For good reason I might add. I could of course open terminal and use sudo (super user do) to override this but I was understandably uncomfortable with this.

Then I remembered: PithHelmet.
This is an add-on I installed in safari to block ads. It works great but does seem to be kludged it to the program. So I removed it. You have to go into the <harddrive>:Library:InputManagers:SIMBL folder and get rid of the “PithHelmet” Folder.

Luckily it worked. I am posting this entry using Safari 1.0.

But no more image blocking (at least for now). At least Cocoa Gestures still work.

P.S. Safari (and presumably all cocoa applications) flag AAARG as being spelled right but AAAARGH (or any more As) as being wrong.

Update: PithHelmet has been updated for Safari 1.0. You can download the new PithHelmet Budle from the website. Yea! Image blocking again! That was quick.

Via this post on slashdot. BTW the parent was my first post on slashdot ever.

I have been thinking for a while about expanding my retouching business to include some 3D imagery. Since I basically just work in print, my requirements are very different that most 3D modelers who work in film or broadcast. Indeed 3D is quite rare in print with a few exceptions (I actually met that guy when he was going to do some retouching on a shot Colin did for the now defunct Maximum Golf Magazine. Only Nir did too good a job with the food styling, so no retouching was necessary.).

Working in print I don’t really need any of the fancy animation features in the 3D programs. Since I intend to alter existing photos, not create my own images from scratch, I also have little interest in character animation or other cartoony techniques. I don’t plan on using the software all the time either like I do with photoshop. I have noticed that most of the 3D software is also very expensive. If I get this software I will pay for it myself, so keeping price down is a major consideration.

The three major programs are Maya, 3D Studio Max, and Lightwave. All are high end and quite expensive. Maya seems to be the standard for film. Max seems to be used a lot for video games, but also used in film and video. Lightwave gets a lot of use in broadcast. They are also the only company that even mentions print. I like the renderings I see in Max a lot, since they don’t tend to look all very shiny, but Max is a PC only program, so that rules it out. I haven’t looked at Maya very closely, but it looks very complex. I was most considering Lightwave and went through the effort of…er legitimately acquiring a copy, which only works in demo mode so far. When I loaded it up I didn’t have the first clue of where to start. Even after exploring it for a bit I never got very far.

I think that these big boys may just be too much program for my needs, so I looked for something cheaper. Actually years ago, in another period of trying 3D, I got a program called Ray Dream Studio. I never got very good with it; and I wasn’t very satisfied with its renderer, but I was happy with its capabilities and ease of use. It turns out that has been upgraded and combined with another program called Infini-D in a new program called Carrara. It’s render is faster and much improved and there are more features and it runs natively in OS X. It’s got a neat add on as well that will render to vector output, useful for flash animations (which I never do, but might start) and print. It also only costs $399, or actually only $199 for me since I have a copy of Ray Dream.

Of course it isn’t without its problems. It is a low end program and so doesn’t have the community, support, plug-ins and such that a more professional program would have. It also suffers from being merged from more than one program and so all features aren’t integrated smoothly. It also doesn’t have may features found in a higher end program, although many are not necessary for me.

So I downloaded a trial version. The trial version doesn’t let you save anything, but I managed to snag a few screen captures. Many of the controls are quite similar to Ray Dream which was both familiar and frustrating (I could never model well with Ray Dream). There were some nice additional feature and the renderer seemed both fast and effective. I made the image I posted here, which while a bit cheesey shows that this is a capable program.

I still haven’t decided but I will probably get the program. I still may try to get lightwave to work, but I seriously doubt I want to make that kind of investment. Actually, the biggest investment I have to make is my time: learning how to make good looking images.

I put some more images on my retouching site. Check them out. Maybe I can finally get some good new work.

Weight: 173.5
Steadly falling.

I just got back from seeing my brother graduate (more on that later) and I am glad I managed to keep the weight down. I have been quite busy and haven’t gotten the chance to exercise (or post) much recently, so I am glad I am still loosing weight.

This weekend I managed to keep to my diet, and ate very well. Particularly the fresh sockeye salmon I had the last night. I also drank a lot (a whole lot), which is supposed to be detrimental to my diet, but it seemed to have little effect. I like to sarcastically argue that alcohol can’t be that bad for your weight since you end up throwing up your dinner and you can’t eat anything the next morning. Of course I only drank hard liquor mixed with water or nothing; no beer despite its popularity and ubiquity.

My boss showed me this article (in print) about how people on Atkins tend to gain their weight back quickly. But then it goes on to say how people on any diet tend to gain their weight back, so who knows. I hope I don’t rebound. I have never dieted before, so I have know idea how this one will end. I doubt I will rebound too far though since I have eaten better then ever on this diet. I never want to go back to cookies, chips and doughnuts. For example I just steamed some muscles the other night which were excellent and cheap. MMMMMM.

In other news, the diet entries seem to be the most popular part of this blog (the rest of it being read by me and maybe one other person). I am ranked 9th on a google search for “fitness blog” and comes up 2nd on a search for my name.

Jim has a long entry where he, among other things, responds to an e-mail arguning for exercise machines. I suppose I am luckly to belong to an affordable gym without any membership hassles. I want to add that working out on machines is nice because you can carefully pace yourself and listen to music while you are exercising. It is also where most of the truly attractive women are.

Sorry no nerdy diet stuff this week that I promised; no time. Next week or later this week maybe.

I found this interesting article via gawker who described it:

And yes, I saw Simon Dumenco’s column about Tina Brown’s show, Gawker, Romenesko, etc., and I thought it was pretty funny. He basically says that people don’t actually have to watch or read anything as long as they read the summaries and can fake being “in the know.” Blogs and TiVos are birthing a small army of little faker Jayson Blairs. I’d suggest that you read it, but that seems needlessly superfluous now that I’ve summarized it.

It made me think about how I often get the news now filtered through blogs, usually from a liberal or a libertarian perspective. I never even have to read Glenn directly, since his most interesting entries are usually summarized elsewhere.

Aside from occasional visits to the New York Times website and occasional listens to NPR, I get most of the rest of my news from the The Onion or the Daily Show. All of this keeps me somewhat “in the know.”

My main site, advertising my services as a digital retoucher, is finally up in acceptable state. I have had this domain and site too long without a reasonably designed home page.

Of course the site is, as always, under construction.

I have a nifty new logo too, for which I took inspiration from the image at the top of this blog. The font, if you care about such things, is Myriad multiple master at its boldest setting, stretched considerably and tracked in so the letters touch each other.

I even showed the site to someone in a position to get me more work.

If you look through the site you can hopefully easily see what image manipulations I am capable of. I should be adding more images shortly.

Weight: 178.5
That is a garguantian 0.5 pound drop from last week.
Well it seems that after several weeks of precipitous weight dropping I have stagnated. The 1/2 a pound I lost is probably just noise. The wasn’t any real change in my diet and I have been working out like a fiend. In fact on friday after I ran 3 miles in the morning outside, lifted weights intensely in the gym in the evening, and then ran another 2 miles at 6mph on a treadmill, i realized that I might actually have exercised too much. The only thing I significantly changed about my diet and exercise was the fact I started lifting weights. So I am hoping the steadiness in weight is due to the fact that I am building muscle while I am loosing fat.

Luckily all the signs seem to indicate that I am indeed building muscle and losing fat.. My pants are increasingly clownish and I wore my belt today at the last notch comfortably.

In other fitness blogs Jim is down to 172 and mentions me again. Don’t worry Jim, I am not going to pass you too soon. The weight loss I had over the past few weeks was the excessive weight loss one has at the beginning of this diet. I should lose weight slower from now on.

Another libertarian blogger is blogging about his experience on Atkins. He decided to wait until he lost 30 pounds to tell the (potential) whole world about it. Way to go Radley.

Next week: Nerdiest. Diet. Ever.

Happy Birthday to me. Happy Birthday to meeeeeeee.

I am now 28 years old (at lest for another hour or so). This birthday might be unique in the fact that I have spent about 21 of its hours awake.

Weight: 179.0 lbs

Contiuned downward trend. Pants are now loose as hell and I am down another belt loop (still no measuring tape).

I have been working out like a fiend too; I have been trying to run outside on the few days when the weather has been nice and try to get in a gym on a treadmill or an elliptical trainer on other days.

Being past the first two weeks of Atkins, I have been able to add nuts, specifically macadamia nuts, into my diet. I also had a glass of wine, which had no noticeable effect.

Just yesterday I started lifting weights. Prior to that I had done only cardio for no particularly good reason. I expected to be very sore today and was pleasantly surprised that is wasn’t that bad. I took it easy the first time of course and plan to increase my effort.

My dad and I discussed weights this weekend when I was visiting my parents, and he had some good suggestions. Most notably is that I should go slowly on strength exercises, for example not quickly jerking a dumbbell up and dropping it but to hold it with one’s muscles all the way. I adapted the same things to the crunches I have been doing in the morning. Instead of doing many fast crunches, I am doing fewer slow crunches which have felt more effective.

I have yet to work out a routine, but plan on continuing with weights starting tomorrow.

In other news, Jim Henley linked to my previous fitness blog entries (its near the bottom of the post). I honestly didn’t think that anyone but some friends read this blog. However, I put these entries online and publicly available for a reason: To have a few weeks of diet entries and then quit would be embarrassing not only to me but to potentially all internet users. I couldn’t just post before pictures without eventually publishing after pictures as well.

There is no way that I would give up this diet at this point though. I have been cooking and eating far better than I have before and I love the workouts.

Paul Krugman has recently been my favorite columnist since he seems to be one of the few commentators in a major news source who isn’t afraid to brutally criticize the Bush administration and their horrid policies. This has earned him the admiration of liberals and the ire of conservatives.

Searching around the web I have found a few of his writings which show he isn’t quite the leftist that many paint him to be. Indeed he strongly supports internalization and free trade. Here is one about rent control and another about sweatshops.

For what it’s worth, I wholly agree with both pieces.