I’ve been sticking pretty faithfully to the Testosterone Advantage Plan now for a week and a half, and am encouraged by the results. I’m gradually, but steadily, increasing the amount of weight I can deal with in the gym, and have apparently lost a full 6 pounds already. The only downside so far is a surfeit of cottage cheese in my diet, but that can be remedied with some fairly minor adjustments (and probably will be this coming week).

So far, so good!

Yesterday evening, Meara graduated from Churchill High School with honors. Emily, Abby, and I went down for the ceremony, and cheered loudly for Meara when her time came. The girls actually seemed to have fun, which came as a bit of a surprise for me, since graduation ceremonies in my experience tend toward the tedious except for the few short moments that your loved one is in the spotlight.

Congratulations, sis! You’ve done good, and we’re selfishly glad that you’re not ranging too far afield next year!

Though I’ve always gotten a lot of spam, it seems like lately much of it is just bad. Not in a moral sense, though much of it is of course that, but in a technical sense. I’ll get a message with a subject promising me that I can make $100,000 a month working from home, but when I open it, there’s nothing there. (Oh, the suspense.) Or one of the 5-10 messages a day I get with Viagra in the subject line has a MIME message that’s mangled to the point where all I get is gibberish when I open it. My latest favorite was an herbal breast-growth formula which, while it was actually legible, missed its target market pretty widely.

We’ve been putting the new Powershot A40 through its paces since it arrived. It produces great quality images, and the underwater case is a ridiculous amount of fun, especially with a nice clear, spring-fed river in town. See June 2002 Photos for the latest collection of photos, both above and below the water’s surface.

Abby has been taking ballet at the local studio this semester. She seems to have enjoyed it quite a bit, and wrapped up the semester with an appearance in the studio’s spring recital. She and her cronies did a routine to Marion the Librarian, a song which delights me if for no other reason than it rhymes “librarian” with “carrion.”

The girls milled about in a typically adorable 5 year old ballet troupe fashion, and Abby was delighted that she got flowers for her debut performance. Getting Liam to sit quietly through two additional hours of dancers who weren’t his sister, however, was an interesting challenge.

Congratulations, Abigail! Great job!

The Brunching Shuttlecocks turn their trenchant wit on the world of weblogs. Share and enjoy!

We caught Donnie Darko a week or two ago. I’ve been meaning to write about it since, but kept getting distracted by other things.

Briefly, Donnie Darko is a teenage boy who starts getting visitations from a 6 foot tall, demonic-looking rabbit named Frank. When Frank calls Donnie out of the house one night, a jet engine falls on Donnie’s bedroom. The FAA is mystified, as they had no flights in the area at the time. Then Frank lets Donnie know that there are 28 days left until The End. And it gets better from there.

The film manages to steadfastly avoid typing. It has elements of science fiction, comedy, mystery, coming-of-age, romance, and horror all blended together into an intensely interesting narrative. I haven’t quite figured out all the lose ends, but remarkably, the disparate elements are all pulled together and end up making some sense. It’s still a pretty outre film — probably too much so for a lot of people — but I enjoyed it as much as anything I’ve seen recently. Definitely worth the time if you enjoy unusual cinema.

After my last diatribe on not losing weight even though I’ve been working out, one of my good friends suggested the Testosterone Advantage Plan. I was a bit wary, but because my friend had gotten such good results with it, and because we are remarkably similar for people who aren’t related, I ordered the book. It turned out to be better-researched (and better-written) than I’d expected, so I decided to give the plan a shot. It combines a modified mediterranian diet (higher in good fats and protien) with weight training, and according to their research has produced excellent results with the men who have tried it out. Additionally, it’s a progressive thing, so if I miss a workout or have a slice of cheesecake, I should see only slightly worse results — it doesn’t rely on putting your metabolism into starvation mode by denying it certain nutrients like Atkins does.

The first surprise: shopping for a week’s worth of food yesterday took quite a while, and pretty much filled a grocery cart. There’s a lot of food on this diet — and I’m on the 2,000 calorie/week, lose weight plan. People who are trying to maintain their weight or increase it actually get more!. And though I’ve had some temptation to cheat, the temptation has actually been to skip food I’m supposed to be eating. “Holy cow, that sandwich is huge! And didn’t I just eat?”

I also started on the workout today, and felt like a big old dork looking back and forth between my book and the machines in the gym, trying to figure out what was what. I think I’ve got the hang of the exercises now, though, so I should be able to make do with my Xerox sheets and a pencil next time around. (At least for two weeks — after that the workouts change. Fortunately, I won’t have to worry about it, as by then, my stomach will have popped from all this food.)

As I’ve mentioned a time or seven here, one of my favorite places to work over the years has been Macrobye Resources. Today Macrobyte released Conversant, a very capable multiplatform groupware and application development environment. It’s a large, versatile system for helping people work together in nearly infinite ways, and is what I use for this website, though it’s capabilities go far beyond what I’ve done here.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for an Internet-capable application development environment, it’s definitely worth a look — and I’d say that even if I hadn’t had a hand in its development.

Emily recently turned 10, an event we celebrated with our usual backyard bacchanal. Good fun, and fewer near-drownings than usual. Go to Emily’s 10th Birthday for all the libelous details.