Fast Diet - Hunger Pangs

When I am doing the Fast Diet, I frequently experience long periods of calm after a brief period of hunger pangs. It is as if the body has gone into hibernation, and I am left well alone to carry on with my daily routine. This is most apparent the morning after the diet day, when I could usually skip breakfast and have a late lunch.

I am reminded of what my diving instructor told me during training many years ago, that feelings of suffocation after a brief period under water is not due to lack of oxygen, but due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream. This means you are not going to die (yet), and with knowledge you should  try to suppress the panic, remain calm and find a way out of the current situation to surface.

Hunger is mostly the same thing. It makes us uncomfortable and compels us to eat to rid ourselves of the discomfort. Worse, we have come to associate a lot of other feelings (both positive and negative) with eating. So we eat to make ourselves feel better, not necessarily when we are hungry. And this slowly builds up over the years in the world we live in today, where food is available in abundence 24x7.

I think occasional calories restriction (which is essentially what the Fast Diet is about) serves to remind ourselves that it is OK to feel hungry, that you don't have to eat at the first sign of hunger. It also serves to calibrate the "gauges" in our bodies and I think that's where the health benefits are derived.

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Looking for the perfect car MP3 player/FM transmitter

I have bought quite a number of car MP3 player/FM transmitters from DealExtreme and other similar websites.

A car MP3 player/FM transmitter is a device that takes a SDHC memory card or a USB memory stick and plugs into the car cigarette lighter socket. It plays the MP3 files stored on the memory card/stick and transmits that as FM signal to be picked up and played by the car stereo.

It is a nifty and convenient device because not all car stereo can play MP3 files, or be able to accept a memory card or stick. Also such a device is very portable. You can simply plug it into any vehicle eg. a company car and it will play all your favorite music.

Other alternatives exist eg. bluetooth, but they are simply not as straightforward and universal as this solution. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car without a cigarette lighter plug.

The perfect car MP3 player/FM transmitter should have the following characteristics/features:

1. Emits strong FM signal
2. Remembers last FM frequency used
3. Remembers last MP3 file played
4. Remembers position of last MP3 file played
5. Supports Unicode font on LCD display
6. Body of memory card should not stick out when plugged in

1 and 3 are pretty much essential for the device to be useful. Unfortunately I have had to throw at least .a few devices away right upon arrival because they were lacking one or both of these features.

2 and 4 are good-to-have features (some may even consider them essential). 2 can be overcome by setting the car stereo to the default frequency, but sometimes you need to change the default frequency on the device because of interference, and having to do that during every cold start gets old after a while.

4 should be quite easy to do (just a little extra memory to store the last play position), but surprisingly I have not seen any device that has this feature! Either there is some unknown technical barrier to implementing this feature, or Chinese manufacturers are .too stingy to spend a few more cents to do so.

5 is a nice-to-have, since none of my Mandarin songs have their ID3 displayed correctly. On the other hand, this is understandable because it will probably add a lot to the production cost to embed a Unicode font into such a tiny device.

6 is simply a design issue. Half of the devices have it right, others have the memory card sticking out so badly I wonder what the designers were thinking.

I have yet to find my perfect car MP3 player/FM transmitter. I have bought at least a dozen such devices now, and none of them have all of 1,2,3 implemented, not to mention the others. The local Chinese OEM devices sold in Oz stores are not .much better.

Anyway, if you know of the perfect car MP3 player/FM transmitter, please leave me a comment. I am willing to pay a premium for such a device, but I am tired of buying one device after another and being disappointed over and over again...

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Children - The ultimate test in anger management

Having just spent two full holiday weeks with my kids, it occurred to me this morning that raising young children is the ultimate test in anger management.

You know the lines. Address the situation, not the other person. Bring change to yourself first, not to the other person. Easy on paper, very difficult in practice.

With adults, it is often easy to blame it on the other person. After all, he/she is a full-grown adult, why can't he/she be more mature, rational, have a good grounding in the facts etc.?

With children, you can't pin the blame on them anymore! They are what they are at this age. You can't expect them to be mature or rational! But we still lose our cool, and that's a perfect reflection of our own emotional management skills.

Therein lies the ultimate test in anger management. We have to change ourselves to address the situation, and that ain't always easy,  because being human means we resist change with all the might we could muster.

Failure to manage our anger eventually leads to child abuse. The male gender is more frequently associated with such behaviour, but it seems the female gender is sometimes not spare such emotional rampage too.

Our children grow up with us, but we grow up with our children too. Good luck to all the parents traveling on this amazing journey together!

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Fast Diet - Incredible Body Hack

In terms of body hacks, the Fast Diet probably ranks all the way at the top for me.

I first read about it in the papers and found the technique rather intriguing. Could something that simple actually work? Besides the book, it didn't really have anything fancy to sell. No secret formula, patent-pending ingredient, celebrity endorsement etc.

A few weeks later, at a whim, I started to try the diet on myself. At this point, I have not read the book yet. I just started restricting my diet two days a week to 600 calories. And I wasn't too particular with counting the calories either. I simply looked it up on the smartphone and kept a rough count through the day. Sometimes I prepared the food specifically for myself. Other times, I simply ate a smaller portion of whatever the wife had cooked. One or twice, I actually broke fast midday as unexpected commitments cropped up.

I also wasn't particularly keeping a keen eye on my weight during this time. Ironically, I didn't really think the diet would work. It just seems too free-and-easy. Not enough suffering! Then about 8 weeks later, I weighed myself in the bathroom and found that I had lost 6kg. To say I was surprised was an understatement! I started weighing myself more regularly from then on, now out of curiosity then anything. I found myself steadily losing weight at a rate of about 0.5kg per week. Another 8 weeks on, I have lost another 3kg or so. I haven't seen this weight for a long long time, not since my university days!

And I was still eating all my usual junk on the off days: cakes, chips, chocolate, fries, fizzy drinks. Nothing "health conscious" has crept into my mindset so far that I was deliberately avoiding them. I was just eating normally as before.

I did pick up the book to see if I coud learn anything new, but I didn't. I am quite familiar with scientific studies of how severe calorie restriction can prolong life, but most of us can't live that way. Even ADF (Alternate Day Fasting) seems too harsh to me. I think the breakthrough for the book is to introduce the idea that even a moderate amount of fasting will do us plenty of good. Other than that, I am not sure one has to read the book in order to get started on the diet. I don't even find the recipes in the book particularly useful. As I mentioned, I did quite alright with eating whatever my wife cooks, but in smaller quantities.

The book did mention that once you reach the desired weight, you can go into "maintenance mode" and reduce the fasting to once a week. For me, I plan to carry on fasting twice a week just to see how far this diet can hack my body weight. I am pretty sure my weight will stabilize at a certain point and will not reduce indefinitely! I will blog about my progress in times to come.

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ComboFix - Malware Removal Tool

Again, I am writing this down more for my own future reference, with the hope that it will benefit others Googling for this info as well.

ComboFix is a relatively unknown but surprisingly good anti-malware tool. I had in the past received a number of computers from relatives/friends that have been infected with malware. The general characteristics are that the machines boots OK into Windows, but runs erratically eg. displays fake error messages, prevents you from running certain executables, logs you off after awhile etc.

In my experience, it was impossible to get the existing antivirus software to perform a proper scan, or to install a new antivirus software because the system ran so erratically. Offline antivirus software that runs off a CD didn't help much either. I have a collection of them and none of them had helped on the computers I was trying to fix.

Enter ComboFix, which was able to get the computers back into good enough working condition so that I can reinstall the antivirus software and perform a proper scan. I am not sure what's the exact magic behind the program. It seems to "implement a collection of pre-made fixes for large amount of known malware and hunts down all files associated with it". Sounds good to me!

Windows Repair (All In One) is also helpful after running ComboFix. Some malware messes up all kinds of stuff, and functions like "Set Windows Services To Default Startup" is invaluable for straightening the system.

Of course, some people will tell you it's best to wipe the machine when it has been compromised. From a technical point of view, I would totally agree and will do it with my own machines. But in the real world with real people, that's not always the ideal solution for them. So I am glad ComboFix and Windows Repair AIO has enabled me to help some people along the way.

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Do not upgrade to CM10.1 if you use Bluetooth A2DP extensively

I flashed my Nexus S to CM10.1 recently and found that the A2DP streaming stutters so badly to the point of being unusable. Some googling reveals that from Android 4.1 to 4.2, Google swapped the Bluez stack that was used in Android since 2.x and replaced it with a stack contributed by Broadcom. This replacement has apparently created more issues than it has solved.

Anyway, I am back to CM10 (based on Android 4.1.2 with the Bluez stack), and all is well again. So if you use A2DP as much as I do (I listen to podcasts, 1~2 hours a day), you have been warned!

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