It took me longer than it should have (and I’m 90% done), but I’m very cognizant of why it took as long as it did (I’d rather eat nachos with buddies on a Saturday night than not).

It’s really a matter of physics. If you burn more calories than you ingest, your body will lose weight. A bit of intelligent is required to ensure it’s fat and not muscle, but the general premise remains.

It’s also a lot easier to eat 200 calories less than to burn off 200 calories.

And please let’s not get into carbs, paleo, keto, protein TEF, and other shit. That accounts for 10%, not the actual 90%. Even the oft-mentioned hyperthyroidism is naught more than a weak excuse.

So yeah, easy. You have only your diet to look at.

I’ve wanted to change my name for a long time. I never liked my original name. I pride myself on being as independent as possible, and yet one of the most important links to me was something I had not gotten to choose. It was one of the reasons why my blog was on TechsoapBox.com, and not my own name.

For a six month period I tried on new names – everywhere I went I would introduce myself under a new name. It was a hilarious conversation as people would throw out suggestions for names.

Yet in the end I chose a name that came to me. For the past 18 months I’ve been introduced as Sol Orwell. The actual name change process took me roughly a year due to some issues –I had to apply 4x to get it finally approved.

But that is all in the past. I am now officially “Sol Orwell.” The only way to find out why is through a face to face conversation. It involves parts of my ancestry I was unaware of, tattoos, and a whole lot of other stuff

Checking every 24 hours, 3 days later a “Manual Review” was added.

And that was it. The phone number on provided just tells me to use their website. No refund seems to have been processed, and using the refund site now shows no information on my ticket. Customer Support keeps telling me there is nothing they can do. A refundable ticket that can’t be refunded.

Thoughts?

A little odd.

If you’ve emailed me and haven’t gotten a reply – I’m sorry, trying to burn some midnight oil to get everyone taken care.

Time to go broaden my horizons … Spanish and Tango, here I cometh

Great example are air fresheners. Five years ago we had the simple aerosol can solution. Nowadays we have battery powered solutions, dual-smelling systems, plug-in modes with fans, and other feature-rich systems that all promise to make your house smell good.

But what smells good? Yes I like fresh mountain air, but that crap isn’t real mountain air – it is emulated junk. Technology is trying to push a solution that really doesn’t cut it.

I ran into the above problem. My wife had been gone for 8 weeks, and was coming home soon. The apartment didn’t smell bad, but I wanted to make it smell good. And I thought – what smells good? What kind of smells do I like? Smells I could possibly emulate?

The simplest answer possible: baking.

I baked three flourless chocolate cakes. And then I left them on the counter. And then I left to go watch a movie.

When I came back roughly three hours later I could not believe how delicious the place smelled.

This little personal story is just a simple example – we seem to have this need

for tech-oriented solutions when good ol’ fashioned solutions work way better.

When I got out I looked at the line and realized I would still have been #4 if I had gone through the drive-in.

But it got me thinking – there are all these articles on reducing pollution and being smarter about using gas – isn’t the idling in a drive-through a lot of wasted gas? At lunch time those lines become long – cars just idling with their AC on (hey its hot) must not be the greatest use of gas.

So am I onto something? If everyone parked and went inside, would there be a noticeable impact on pollution?

And please I don’t want to hear about global warming in the comments. Pollution is disgusting, and cutting back on it is just good for our lungs, plain and simple.

It now redirects to a site called Assista. A kind of meld between a search engine and Yahoo Answers. A site owned by Sahar. I wonder how Yahoo feels about this?

Yesterday, while attempting to watch I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, the thing died. Or it didn’t die per se – it would play the movie for about 30 seconds, before dying and rebooting. A tad bit annoying.

So I posted on the forum, and helpful people swooped in. I called the customer support number, and even though it was 9:30 am PST, the automated system said that customer service opened up at 9:00 am.

Uhoh … this could be bad.

I called back half an hour later, and had customer support on the phone in about 30 seconds. The conversation went like so:

Ahmed: My Vudu isn’t working, *story goes here*
Operator: Sir can I have your name
Ahmed: Ahmed Farooq
Operator: Okay, found it. There must be a glitch with your hardware. You will be sent a new Vudu, and a fedex shipping slip to send back your current Vudu
Ahmed: That was easy
Operator: Have a good day.

The entire conversation lasted maybe 90 seconds. From dial to hang up was < 3 minutes. Color me happy!

In terms of the actual product, some quick thoughts:

• It is damn easy to use. The remote is absolutely wonderful.
• It really needs to remember preferences. Eg I only use it to rent movies. Why it can’t do that boggles my mind
• I can’t see my viewing history through the Vudu. Boo!
• I hate the 24 hour rental period. 48 hours would be more than enough. Too many times something comes up while I’m watching a movie and I have to pause.
• I know this is a licensing issue/headache, but the delay in getting some movies to rental (and the price for some older movies) is annoying. Really annoying.
• I like the HD offerings. I watched 3:10 to Yuma HD and it was absolutely crisp on my 42″
• Some of the categorization is mind boggling. Eg I believe The Hills have Eyes (or similar) was categorized as ‘romantic’. Speaking of categorization, need more (eg animated!)

Overall I’m very happy. Extremely convenient, fast, and easy to use. Right now it’s like a 90% – if they could get release dates fixed and the prices for older movies more balanced, it would be high up in the upper 90s.

A recent blog post by Topix validates my argument (huzzah!) The one surprise (for me) was that the amount of spam by non-registered was only 50% higher than registered. My experience is more along the lines of 100-200% more.

Of course there was no qualitative measurement done, but we could argue that in general about UGC Skrenta also has some good takeaways from the #s.