Eventually there will be a more formal “Blog” section to this website with more in-depth, and hopefully interesting, entries. There will also be a “Reviews” section that will contain my thoughts on restaurants, hotels, books, movies, etc.

This “weblog” section will always be for random links, thoughts, quotes, events, etc. Much more on the fly.

Anyway, so stay tuned as the other sections will go live soon.

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In any case, I have to say I hate the Starbucks holiday cups. Way, way too red. So Caribou, with cups in several pleasantly muted colors, wins on cups. Also in Caribou’s favor: at least in Chicago, they have pastries from Deerfield’s bakery which are very, very yummy.

Holiday Season: Advantage Caribou (or The Bou, as Kat calls it. It should be noted that the cups say “Bou Wonderland” on them, which must be a shout-out to her.)

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You can use your mobile phone to get information by text message direct from Google. As Google explains, “Send your query as a text message and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you’re looking to find.”

For example, send a text message (called an SMS) to 46645 (GOOGL) that reads “China Garden Chicago, IL” and you get a message back that says “China Garden 2256 North Clark Street Chicago IL (773) 477-3219.” You can even be more general and send “Chinese food 60614″ and see what they recommend.

I will never pay T-Mobile $.99 per 411 call again. I now have even more love for those people at Google.

I look flabby around the waist which I HATE SO MUCH, I plan to vacation in Turkey this summer and have to tone up before then!

A work friend (who is very fat and needs to loose weight) suggested I try a fast weight loss program called Fat Loss for Idiots that she told me she is using to loose weight FAST with their dieting program!

Apparently she’s been using the weight loss program diet advice for 4 weeks and on average has lost 6lbs a week without feeling hungry (she says it’s not a starvation diet). That’s 24lbs or almost 2 stone (if I remember the conversion correctly).

My friend must be 10 stone to 15 stone over weight, so I honestly didn’t notice the 2 stone weight loss until she told me about it, (she’s been on about 50 diets since I met her) though for just a month on the weight loss program 2 stone is very good rate of weight loss. If she continues at this rate it will only take 5 months to lose 10 stone (which would make her my normal sort of body weight).

Anyway, back to my fat ass which naturally is my main concern

I signed up for the weight loss program 2 weeks ago and followed the diet directions (mostly, they are easy to follow ) and have lost 8lbs so far!

I’ve not felt hungry all the time on their diet like I normally do on what could be called fad diets, there’s been a few times where I’d have killed for a cream bun, but because I don’t feel starved all the time I’ve been able to stave off those cravings easily so far and mostly stick to the diet.

I’d say this is a natural/safe way to loose weight fast, there’s no weird foods to eat, like only eat tofu or something

I’d be very happy to loose 1 stone, (which I think will be easy to achieve) though would be great if I could loose 2 and a 1/2 stone, so wish me luck.

You can find the easy weight loss program at the Fat Loss for Idiots website.

If you sign up for the program and loose weight (or don’t) please post a comment below, would love to hear how others are are doing trying to loose weight. I’ll add to this in a few weeks time to let my readers know how I’m getting on.

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It was raining and after breakfast we decided to walk for a bit. We decided to walk despite the rain and even though I had an umbrella in my backpack, I didn’t use it. It wasn’t too cold and there was something just nice about walking in the rain.

I love the rain. Isn’t it great to just sit inside and listen to a thunderstorm? And it’s so nice to just walk and let the rain wash over you. I felt like we were five years old again.

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I had a fight with my TiVo.

I know, I know. Everyone who knows me knows that I usually have nothing but praise for my TiVo. We’re such a great couple. How could we be fighting? After all, TiVo changed my life. I no longer watch commercials and now look at the rest of the world and wonder how they can bear to watch television without TiVo.

But last night we had a bit of a row. You see, TiVo didn’t record Lost. TiVo, who knows me so well, recorded The West Wing instead of Lost. I want to see both The West Wing and Lost. Lost, for those of us in the central time zone, is on from 7-8 and The West Wing is on from 8-9. So this shouldn’t be a problem.

The bastards at ABC, though, scheduled Lost from 7-8:02 and TiVo, realizing that there was an overlap, just recorded The West Wing because it thought The West Wing was a higher priority.

I know I can’t stay mad. TiVo’s heart was in the right place. And every relationship has the occasional tiff. Right?

Call me a fool. Please.

As you might have guessed I fell utterly, deeply in love with the World of Warcraft. Any time not spent researching (generally in the wee hours of the morning) was spent exploring and leveling in the amazing world that the guys at Blizzard have created.

Everything about this game is phenomenal: the quests, raids, the scenery (early in the game other players routinely said things like, “Wow, this game is beautiful”), the interface, and even the music. Sometimes I would go into a building owned by the Alliance merely to admire a certain theme in World of Warcraft.

I even made good friends: I found people both from my own area and the Chicago area who were in to the game of WOW. We’ve exchanged e-mails so we can meet up. I’m also interested in keeping up relations with my readers (and thus people who are interested in the same things that I am).

The other day while playing WOW, everyone decided to abandon the normal leveling quests and start huge raids on enemy lands. The sad thing is that the servers went down a couple of time for maintenance, talk about bad timing.

In my own raid group, we had got together two raiding parties amounting to almost 80 players, intending to storm Kalimdor as we had done earlier in the week. The first time, we made it to the very heart of Durotar (one of the main enemy areas) before being slaughtered by high-level NPC guards.

Unfortunately, just as the massive army that we had made today arrived at the gates of the Barrens, the World of Warcraft server shutdown message came on!

Everyone cried out “Apocalypse NOW” and “At least we’ll die together” and all kinds of other silly things. It was great. But that was not the end. A few hours later, the server was back up, and this time the guys at Blizzard had tossed some impossibly difficult enemies at the gates of Stormwind (capital of the humans) and everyone tried to take them out. Unfortunately, I don’t think that even with all of our combined efforts that a single one of those guys were destroyed..

Get the World of Warcraft game.

The hype is justified.

Update: I’ve been playing this online game for what feels like years now and the World of Warcraft update Wrath of the Lich King that came out late last year (January 2009 now) took the game to new heights. When the other addon The Burning Crusade that gave us the Outlands was released we leveled our level 60 characters to level 70 to open new raids culminating in the Black Temple, the same was true with the Wrath of the Lich King we had to level to 80 fast if we wanted to be the firstto complete the new 25 man raids!

When the Burning Crusade was released a friend I’d met through WOW let me use a leveling ebook from Zygor Gaming Guides, it made leveling to level 70 so much easier so I bought a copy as well. I have many online WOW friends who play a similar amount of time as me that are still leveling their first level 80 character while I’ve got 3!

Highly recommended you buy the ebook for fast leveling to level 80.

Cya in game.

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What was perhaps even more interesting, however, was to discuss the state of politics in Europe. One of my biggest concerns in this country is how divided we’ve become. It scares me that my republican friends hate the democrats so much and my democratic friends hate the republicans so much.

Paolo told me that he felt Europe was similar. We discussed the European constitution and he described the battle over the place of religion in that constitution. Ultimately he said that they decided to keep religion out of the constitution, but the battle was fierce. He feels Europe is divided much the same way American is. It was interesting because I usually don’t think of Europe in those terms.

I was watching the election result last night and it occurred to me that they are unique in that they are simultaneously thrilling and quite boring at the same time.

Anyway, I’m ready for this all to be over.

If you look at the image below you can see the UK has significantly fewer doctors than France or Germany which are similar sized countries.

From Anatomy of a Doctor info.

UK 133,000
France 207,000
Germany 284,000

Considering the UK has the NHS which is a free at the point of use health service why does the UK have so few doctors relative to Germany and France?

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