Category Archives: General Comments

Does fast food scare you?  It should.

Just (somehow) get a hold of the nutritional information for a typical fast food joint and prepare to be amazed.
There are shakes that are over 1,200 calories, burgers well over 600, and lets not mention the fries.  Just about every fast food place you go to is a death trap in terms of food health.  There are, perhaps, 10% of thier menu items that don’t exceed the fat/sugar/sodium intake guidlines.
A single typical meal at a McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King, et al is your WHOLE DAY.  Lets take an example:
Big Mac 560 Calories 30 Grams of Fat 47% Daily Value

Large Fries 520 Calories 25 Grams of Fat 38% Daily Value

Apple Pie 250 Calories 11 Grams of Fat 18% Daily Value

Medium Coke 210 Calories, 0 Fat

Lets do the math now, shall we?

1540 Calories, 66 Grams of Fat, 103% of Fat.
Well, that’s it, you are done now.  Hope you are full.  For a typical American, you don’t need 2000 or 2500 calories to live, 1500 is just fine.  Just ask diabetic patients losing weight.  Sick, isn’t it?  You ate your whole day at one meal
As a personal note, my wife and I have been on Weight Watchers for a year now.  She has lost 60Lbs, and I have lost 76Lbs. We stopped eating fast food, and learned what a portion size should be.  I hope the rest of America learns before this generation has a shorter life expectancy than the one before it.

Been a while since I have blogged, but I have a good reason, I have a new job!  I am now a manufacturing engineer at a company called Grayhill.  In case you didn’t know, in real life, I am an electronics engineer.  I have been working here for about a week now, and it has been pretty interesting so far.
On the computer front, my wife bought me, as a present for getting a new job, a DVD burner.  It is an NEC dual laywer drive.  For anyone who doesn’t have one, spend the 70 bucks and buy a DVD burner.  If you use it for just backups, it is worth it.  I have also figured out how to shrink DVD9 to DVD5 movies.  I will post a tutorial later under the Linux section, since I have no idea how to do it under windows.

On the political front, yeesh, just as I thought.  The second term of the shrub will somehow, be worse than the first.  200 billion for Iraq, and nothing for Amtrak or the needy childern in the U.S.A.  What at sick joke.

Well, enough of depressing stuff, I am enjoying my much shorter trips to work and more money.

Happy New Year everyone, well, not really happy so far.
I feel sorry for all the poor bastards in the Indian ocean. The
death toll is over 124,000 now. Not a good start for the new
year. We still have the same chimp as chief as well, so that
does not bode well. I just hope he gets his ass in gear and
really gets something done. We are still in the hole in respect
to jobs overall, and manufacturing jobs are extremely lacking at
this point. We have the potential to be a great nation, or fail
badly. I hope this year is better than the last.

Watched the town hall debate last night and came to the following conclusions:
Bush’s whole camapign is based on more of the same, keep on the same course.  The problem is that the last 4 years have sucked ass.  I don’t know what Bush is talking about, the economy still sucks, we are still at war in a country we shouldn’t be in, and he has done nothing to slow global warming, and hundreds of other things.  These things matter to me, and they aren’t gettig fixed.  At least Kerry is a change.  More of the same will wreck this country.

I have had the new Zaurus SL-6000L for a few weeks now, and all I can say it is still an amazing chuck of hardware with a killer OS (Linux).  I installed all the applications I had on my old Zaurus in about a day.  It is very snappy and runs well.  I was fiddling with playing movies on there, I will post the command I use in mencoder when I get home.  It plays movies pretty decently.