Chris Cowherd

In summary, for those that don’t want to read the whole thing, in total I lost 51 pounds. If your thinking about trying it… read on.

Roughly two years ago, after hearing various successes from a friend or two about their experiences with the Atkins Diet I decided to give it a try myself. At the time I was weighing in at 198 lbs. Every “ideal weight” calculator told me I should weigh about 145lbs. I would agree with them as that is how much I weighed when I got married (25 years ago) and I was happy with my weight and looked pretty good.

I started the diet on August 17, 2003. The first two or three weeks were tough because, honestly, I didn’t have any ideas what to eat. The book gives you some ideas but those meals didn’t really fit into my lifestyle. I mean, I have a wife and kids that weren’t doing Atkins so I could not force them to eat the same way. I found my self eating whatever I could find; hot dogs with mayo wrapped in lettuce, pickles, olives, eggs. Kind of crappy. No real meals to speak of.

With the initial drop in blood sugar, I was craving sweets really bad! I was desperate for a Twinkie! It only lasted a day or two. My best advice to get over that hump is to get really full on the things your allowed to eat, even if you go over your carb allowance for the day just so your full and don’t want to eat.

Anyway, after a month, I had lost 15 pounds and my wife was impressed that 1) I was actually able to stick with it and 2) I was actually losing a noticeable amount of weight and it showed. I needed to buy my first set of smaller clothes and boy, that’s when everyone will notice that you are losing weight! At that point, my wife decided to do the Atkins Diet with me.

Once my wife was on-board with me, I actually started eating very nice meals that she would make. Absolutely awesome salads such as her great Chinese chicken salad with home made sugar-free dressing. Mmmm I could eat that every night. She just figured out the recipe on her own. I’ll post it if anyone is interested.

When Thanksgiving rolled around, I thought I would have a heck of a time staying on track but we found lots of recipes on the Atkins.com web site to try. To be honest, the ones we tried were not very good. I think when your mind is expecting one thing, anything else will not be the same. But, I stayed on track and continued on through Christmas pretty much without any problems.

By January, just over 4 months, I had lost most of the weight: 33 lbs. I was still in the weight loss phase, very gradually increasing my carbohydrate intake. By August I was down to 147, just over 50 pounds lost and, seriously, it was easy. The picture in my profile was taken in July at this point.

Here’s the catch and I think this might be what messes people up. You see, you spend a lot of time at the end slowly increasing the number of carbohydrates you consume. The problem is I didn’t stop! You see, the weight wasn’t coming back on as I continued to increase the carbs and at some point I just stopped counting. I never over did it but I was definitely eating more carbs than I should have.

At the beginning of this week, (28 Nov ‘05) after my vacation in Arizona and Thanksgiving I weighed in at 164 lbs. I had put those pounds on over the last year or so.

I had decided that after Thanksgiving was over and was back from my vacation I was going back on induction to get back on track. I started on Monday and have already lost 4 pounds over the last 5 days. Not too shabby. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve been using both Google Analytics and Tracksy to give me some visitor statistics for my miniMame Arcade Cabinet site.

Google Analytics is fairly cool but I don’t really use all the marketing stuff so it is lacking in the basic data I’m interested in seeing plus it is delayed in reporting. On the plus site, Google shows me a cute little map of my visitors and also tells me the Flash version all the visitors are running which is of interest to me for another project.

Tracksy on the other hand is real-time and shows me more information overall like the keywords people used to find my site on search engines, the referrer link so I can see who is linking to me. Both of these are very useful and for me and makes Tracksy the winner for my simple needs.

Have you seen Google Analytics? On the surface, all I can say is wow! I’m pretty impressed and by making it free, how can anyone compete with this?

Thanks to Trev for pointing out that Overlay Plus now has a Deluxe version now which includes a protector for the backside as well.

In my previous entry I had commented that I ordered the double pack and I used the second one to protect the back side. This is not optimal because of the cut out for the thumb wheel but it was better than nothing.

I’m going to order another one today but get the Deluxe version.

The iPod Nano’s design is sheer elegance. The purity of its monochromatic translucent mix is easy and the eyes and everyone loves to look at it when I pull it out, and trust me, it is easily recognized. I opted for the white one.

Unless you live under a rock (or in Sierra Vista, AZ) you have probably heard all the hoopla about the scratching issues. Regardless of what Apple says, it is not the same material as previous iPods. These have a clear, lustrous finish over a color layer (white/black) to give it a very deep finish, like the finish of a very fine paint job on a car. The finish of the llatest regular iPods have the color throughout the plastic and don’t have a transparent layer.

It is this transparent layer that lets you see more scratches. These scratches might exist on all the other iPods but you don’t see them as easily because of the way they are finished.

The iPod Nano is a toy for adults who can give them proper care. They really need to be babied, hence the reason for this entry. If you have a Nano or are thinking about one you MUST get something to protect it.

Now, I am really picky. I mean super picky. I wanted to find a screen protector to keep the finish prestine without altering the look. I just can’t tolerate anything that would alter the beauty of my Nano. It must be absolutly clear but very durable and be removable.

I went with the protectors from http://overlayplus.com. This has to be the absolute best screen protector I’ve ever seen. It is perfectly clear and very durable, and guess what? It’s washable and reuseable! Wow. It has a perfect cutout for the click wheel and fits perfectly. I ordered the twin pack. They are a pinch more than others out there but the quality is a perfect match for the iPod Nano.

On October 7th I’m going to be heading south to Eugene, OR to attend the Indie Game Developer Conference sponsored by GarageGames. It’s going to be a great time to rub elbows with fellow indies and check out all their work.

There are going to be some great sessions around game development that I’m excited to be attending.

This weekend I tinkered with Torque2D to code up some effects for a game I’m working on. I want the camera to intelligently zoom in and out on the player as their ship approaches a planet. In my head, it looks really cool at least.

I also started running through and documenting the engine. I have a sickness where I have to know how everything works underneath. I think it makes me a stronger coder having an understanding of all the inner workings. I think that’s why I’m a decent Win32 and COM developer. So I started documenting the flow of execution of the T2D engine. Every time it branched or used some object, I would dig into the source and at least try to understand why and what it all does. I use Source Insight which is a great for exploring unfamiliar code. I highly recommend it.

I’m actually still going through the initialization but I’m very close to reaching the main game loop of the engine.

Did I ever mention I always wanted to be a cartoonist / animator when I was a kid? In a lot of ways, Flash makes me feel like a kid again

The first illustration is a character concept for HippoSeek.com, illustrated in Flash.

Also below is my current progress on RoboWeenie, a retro styled Robotron clone with the Flaming Weenie character. I’ve got about 3 or 4 hours into it. You can move him around with W,S,A and D and use the mouse to fire in all directions.