One of the many benefits of working at Microsoft is the relatively little-known weight management benefit. Essentially, the benefit pays for a large majority of a diet/weight loss/exercise program administered by the Pro Club, the semi-official Microsoft sports club. I found out about it fairly soon after I started, and I knew I wanted to get involved, but I didn’t have the time. Finally, about a month ago, I took the plunge and got things going.

I’ve been overweight for as long as I can remember, and though I’ve been relatively static the past few years in terms of weight gain, I’ve known for awhile that I need to do something about it. Since I’m making use of all the other Microsoft benefits (getting my teeth fixed, medical check-ups, etc) I figured I might as well do everything.

Anyway, I officially started on the diet last Thursday and the exercise the previous day. This week I’ve lost 13.6 pounds. That’s a lot, I know, but I should put this in perspective. I work out 90 minutes 3 days a week with a personal trainer, and 60 minutes 3 more days a week by myself. I bought a heart rate monitor and with the help of Jeremiah, my trainer, am learning how to do heart-rate-focused work-outs. But the big thing last week was the diet…

Basically I ate nothing but chicken, protein shakes, and a little peanut butter. The dietitian called it ‘detox’ and she was right. I had withdrawal symptoms including severe headaches and numbness in my hands and feet for the first 4-5 days. It seems like most of it has passed though, and fortunately this week I get to add veggies back into my diet. I went out for a salad at lunch and it was quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever had in my entire life after 7 days of chicken and protein shakes. I also talked about my aversion to the protein shakes (I had to drink 5 per day, so I was getting pretty sick of them) with the dietician and she moved me to another diet without the shakes.

I was having a lot of trouble keeping my calories up. I’m supposed to eat between 1500 and 1600 a day, but last week I averaged ~1300. I was sluggish and mentally challenged the whole week, so I am eager to get my count back up so I can feel better while still losing the weight and eating better. I think I’ll be a little happier now with the variety. Plus, with the veggies back and yogurt coming back next week, I should be good to go.

I am pleased with the progress so far, but I do miss the freedom I exercised previously when it came to food. As things go on, I’ll be adding more food groups back in, so I should be OK. The weirdest thing about the whole program is the counseling stuff. The counselor is awesome, and I only meet with here once a month or so, but she gave me a business card that just said Sara S—–, Psychotherapy. That word just seems scary to me, especially since I don’t consider myself psychotic or even ‘troubled’ but whatever.

Anyway, 1 week down, 19 left to go.

PNG celebrated 30 years of independence on September 16, 2005. To celebrate, I decorated my office at work, blew up some balloons, and served Tim Tams. Pictures are in the PNG Independence 2005 Gallery. A few of my co-workers joined in the celebration by putting up balloons and listening to PNG music in my office. Not a bad way to waste time on a slow Friday afternoon.

I have gotten into a pretty nostalgic mood the last few years. I’ve started re-watching a lot of the old cartoons I used to watch on static-ridden PAL tapes when I was a kid. One of my all-time favorite shows was Thundercats, and it seems that you can finally get the first season on DVD. All I can say is, “It’s about time!” And with my new job, I might even be able to afford them!

I decided this morning that I was going to try and learn XSLT today. I think I succeeded somewhat. I decided that my tutorial application would be an iTunes XML feed transformed into a page on my site with the most recent songs I’ve listened to in iTunes. I created my own iTunes XML schema (a really really simple one), though in retropect, I probably should have just tried to use the built-in iTunes XML stuff (though I don’t know if this capability is exposed in the SDK). Anyway, once I had the XML (created by my program in C# and the iTunes COM SDK), I started fooling with the XSLT. It still needs a lot of style work, but I managed to get it formatting the data the right way and everything.

The album art is actually taken directly from the metadata on the audio files in my collection, not from another source like Amazon. I think this is a better solution because I have some crazy stuff that Amazon simply doesn’t know about. Besides, I spent a long time trying to clean up the album art in my music collection, and though there are still a lot of gaps, I might as well get some reward for all my hard work.

As far as the XSLT is concerned, it’s pretty easy stuff, I guess, but there are a lot of “gotchas.” For example, I couldn’t get things to render in Firefox until I added the "" line. It was working fine in IE and I couldn’t figure out what the heck was wrong. Plus, if you’re not careful about dividing your templates for different elements up properly, things come out pretty wierd. Also, my Apache web server isn’t configured right, I guess, because it messes up the MIME types on *.xslt files, so for awhile, Firefox complained it couldn’t attach the stylesheet. Rather than fool with Apache, I just changed the extension of the stylesheet. How’s that for lazy?

Anyway, here’s the xml file with attached stylesheet: nowplaying.xml. Obviously, you’ll need at least IE 6.0 or Firefox (or another XSLT-ready browser)to see it right. And here’s the XSLT itself. Like I said, I want to do a lot more styling, but I have been doing this stuff all day, so I’m calling it quits for now.

Netflix has this (relatively) new Friends feature. When I went there the other day, it kindly reminded me, with a happy-looking purple box that I have no friends yet. Totally brightened my day. It would have been worse, but at least there was a link there where I could get a friend if I needed one. Too bad life’s not that easy. Anyway, add me to your friends’ list if you have Netflix.

Lest some of you get the wrong idea… All of the above is mostly sarcastic. I have lots of friends. I just thought the fact that Netflix would blatantly say “No friends yet” on their website was funny.