After a year of false starts, many written about here ad nauseum, but with maintaining my tracking of nutrition and fitness goals every day, I can say that this time around I’ve started off on the right foot on dialing in my fitness/lifestyle goals and getting myself back on track.

There are certain things in life that you take for granted but didn’t know you did until you didn’t have them anymore.  Swagger is definitely one of them.

As the whole “what happens to Unity” thing unfolds I decided to redouble my efforts in trying different distros again.  I’m trying everything from trailing edge (latest Debian) to bleeding edge (Solus).  As luck would have it it was time for me to refresh one of my development VMs so I decided to jump that one from Mint to Solus to give it a real world spin.  My first impressions are that it is a really interesting distro and one I’ll keep playing with but there is one not-so-tiny problem that hopefully they will grow out of.

As I’m sipping a glass of champagne while finishing up some coding for the night (yes, I’m one of those people that don’t think you need a special occasion to drink champagne) an interesting self experiment came to me.  I’ve heard of and seen video of people who are put in driving simulators to show the difference between difference levels of blood alcohol levels and the impact on driving performance.  I’ve sadly seen the direct effect on people as well.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to do a direct measurement of this in a safe way?

As much as I’ve never been a fan of Unity I’ve learned not to hate it as much as my host OS (and even in some of my VMs).  Sure, my go-to desktops of late are mostly MATE distros or Cinnamon, but Unity hasn’t been completely unacceptable.  With Ubuntu’s recent announcement of the demise of Unity and people openly pontificating on if this means Ubuntu is abandoning the desktop or looking to sell to someone like Microsoft who will then kill it on the desktop I started to analyze what this meant to me as a Linux desktop user.  Is this the end of the road for that journey and therefore back to Mac or, god forbid, Windows?

Back in November I started trying to mess around with .NET again, with the twist of I refused to become Windows bound to do it.  After some time experimenting holidays got in the way, then work got in the way, and as usual life gets in the way of hobbies.  Today I needed to work out some standard C# code samples for interacting with REST services I had written in Java.  I could have spent two hours installing Visual Studio in the virgin Windows 10 VM on my laptop, or I could fire up a new Linux VM and give cross platform .NET another try.

I’m being impatient, and it’s my own fault.  I started that Linux Craptop experiment to see how much mileage I could get out of a decade old laptop running a lean(ish) Linux.  That actually became my only home laptop while my 6+ year old (I think) MacBook Air was getting its battery replaced.  I was going to “suffer” through it for just the few days and then the MacBook would hold me over for at least another couple of years.  At this point however I’m really chomping at the bit to retire that Mac and go Linux full bore.

I’ve written several times about the use of periodic fasting days to counteract our periodic feast days as well as health benefits of fasting from the perspective of supposed cancer fighting and potentially longevity.  I’ve also mentioned fasting as a means of accomplishing weight loss too.  Now that I’m a couple months into that practice, I figured I’d show what that actually looks like.