truffle

First post in a long time just wanted to mention I'm on twitter now

http://twitter.com/Truffle

I'm basically using facebook and twitter now as my blogging platforms, so not really updating LJ right now. I know, I'm like, totally lame!

Feel free to keep me on your friends list though because who knows, I may come back.

If someone wants to get ahold of me on twitter/facebook leave me a message with your contact info and then delete that message. I'll get an e-mail with that info.

We bought an espresso maker. I've had six shots of espresso today and some diet coke. This is just my normal caffein take now enabled at home.

I went to Germany
I stayed in a good hotel in Leipzig
I did 20 hours of presentations in two days
I stayed in a crappy hotel in Frankfurt
I went home

Trying to fly to and from Germany in 5 days is very tiring

I've been working at my current job for 2 years 8 months, I get 3 weeks of vacation a year, I have 7 weeks of vacation time 'banked'

Apparently I need to take more vacations.

There are many reasons you shall click this link

First you will listen to some cool music

Second, you shall gain access to the most powerful internet music brain in the universe

Pretty good deal for clicking a link

(after clicking the link you have to click on one of the music players to listen, it's two clicks, sue me)

This is one of my rare blog posts. You should read it because I blog rarely.

I bought a PS3. The irony is I bought it because Sony is making it worse.

The 80gb PS3 models lack the "emotion" chip offering hardware backwards compatibility with PS2/PS1 titles. The 60gb models with the chip are going the way of the dodo.

So I bought a PS3 based on the assumption that at some point I'll want to play a PS3 game. I know I'll want to keep playing my PS2 games so might as well get one while it's backwards compatible.

Watch Sony put the emotion chip back in. Go ahead do it, you beat me fair and square, bastards.

http://nigoro.jp/game/rosecamellia/rosecamellia.php

oh those wacky japanese

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14672

Wow thanks Ubisoft! Now finally I can look at clothes, care for puppies and babies, and cook! You're really stretching the boundaries with your games for girls.

Mmm....babyZ with a Z!

Wow this is like the best thing on youtube ever.

Invisible Pink Unicorn rocks you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn

Ok I'm ready sell me a phone.
    - Must be an mp3 player with at least 4 gigs of space
    - Must be a camera with a flash that takes decent quality pictures
    - Must sync wirelessly for both MP3s and photos. Doesn't need iTunes integration but that would be nice.
    - nice if it lets me use an mp3 as a ring tone

Will write a blank cheque!

Apparently I'm second worst at mental roation!!!! :/

http://www.upi.com/Consumer_Health_Daily/Briefing/2007/05/24/sexual_orientation_affects_some_tasks/5245/

World of warcraft videos are usually lame but this one is hella sweet.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/10-simple-ways-to-save-yourself-from-messing-up-your-life.html

I liked this article, but then it's basically buddhism, GO BUDDHA IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY!

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com.nyud.net:8080/blog/2007/05/16/how-scoble-reads-622-rss-feeds-each-morning/

Seldom does a blog entry come along that changes your life. For me that day has come. Sadly I'm refering to browsing the net faster.

The coles not version, use google reader to read RSS feeds in aggregate.

• RSS feeds essentially strip out the crap and provide a consistent interface


• Aggregate reading (browse All Items in google reader) means I have a single information stream to deal with


• Keyboard shortcuts, namely the j and k keys let me move along the information stream really fast

I'm seriously reading the interweb 3x as fast now.

This is old news now but....

After my first day of breaking the fast I pretty much went back to regular food and everything was fine. I was a bit surprised by this, I expected that I'd have to go slower going back to regular food.

About a week after returning to regular food I'm down about 3lb (lowest point was down 5lb) this all falls within the kind of ranges I'd expected.

My overall goal has been to use this as a turning point to just get into healthier eating habits and exercise habits, I'd say it's only been a partial success. It's difficult to find time to work out when you're working 50-60 hours a week, but I don't give myself a free ride I need to find the time anyway. Likewise with healthier eating, I've been successful most days but I've also eaten Häagen-Dazs on some days so there's work to be done there as well!

Mmmm Häagen-Dazs....

I'm recently getting more into investing. Investing is an alternative to spending money on things, which is something I've never been particularly good at. My philosophy - why have fun now when I could have fun when I'm 70? I'm talking of course specifically about RRSP investing.

I'm following an investment strategy called the "couch potato" approach. The basic theory goes as follows - most mutual funds charge high management fees to pay various nerds (not cool computer nerds, dorky financial nerds) to manage your money. These management fees cost you money even if the fund you're investing in loses money! By investing in what's called an index fund - a fund that closely follows the indexing stocks of a major exchange like the TSX, you'll get charged less management fees because the overall investment strategy of the fund is simpler. Perhaps best of all with the couch potato approach you only need to tweak your investments once a year, and you can do so while hung over because it's straight forward and formulaic.

"But wait truffle" you ask "without nerd power on my side will I not end up in the poorhouse?"

It turns out these index funds perform better-than-average. The reasons are complex and make my brain hurt, but basically by following market indexes they're actually leveraging the collective investment wisdom of the market. It's kind of like having the borg investing your money for you.

My particular investment strategy is:
   1/3 Candian bonds (up 5.06%)
   1/3 Canadian equities (down 0.44%)
   1/6 International currency neutral index fund (up 3.74%)
   1/6 US index fund (down 1.18%)

Despite beginning investing just before a major crash adjustment hit both the US and canadian markets, I'm doing ok, with this portfolio returning 1.99% over about a 3 month period.

More on couch potato investing:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/mutualfund/03/043003_ca.asp

Day 1 - Breaking the Fast

First I might as well mention that I lost about 5lb over the 7 days of the juice fast. However, by my understanding the vast majority of that weight was poop. Gross but important information that is generally left out of those "hollywood diet" commercials. I'd estimate I lost about 2lb.

When you break a fast you delicately introduce food to your fragile digestive system so as to not overwhelm it. As far as I can tell that's crap and I should have just ate a couple cheeseburgers right away to prove that point. However, instead I had a protein shake consisting of chocolate flavored whey powder and bananas for breakfast, and ate carrots and apples the rest of the day. Overall a very boring day food wise but novel as it involved chewing.

A few hours after I began eating actual food I felt awesome and full of energy, not in an ascended to a higher plane through the virtues of fasting sort of way, but more a hey I'm normal and feeling pretty good sort of way.

Last day of the juice fast! I'll be glad when it's over. Today juice is carrot/parsnip/apple juice.

I basically feel fine but I'm pretty tired. Overall I'd say the juice fast hasn't had any noticeable positive effects, and the only negative ones have really been tiredness. One thing worth noting I guess is that I've mostly kicked my caffein habbit as I'm only drinking tea and I haven't been drinking much tea, however I don't particularly plan to stay off caffein. If I decide I want to quit caffein though I might do it via a juice fast!

Overall these last two days have been a little bit of a downer. I'm just sick of not eating food.

(My boyfriend has just discovered I've been blogging about my juice fast and now he is laughing at me! He is a jerk!)

With the juice fast coming to an end it's time to think about breaking the fast. Well that's a lie, I've been thinking about it the whole time! It's funny I find myself thinking fondly of simple healthy foods! I'm not really craving crap. I'm basically jonsing for sushi and fresh bread with butter right now.

Breaking a fast will basically involve going from juice to regular food over a few days. This is easier on the digestive system. For the first day I intend to just eat raw fruits and vegetables. I should probably stick to that diet longer than one day, but I intend to try for sushi for dinner on the second day if things are going well.