Diets

I'm currently on what I call a "rice and water" diet. I was trying to think of a food that fills you up but doesn't contain a lot of calories. Rice was the logical choice. I've been drinking nothing but water for a few weeks now. Well I say nothing but water, but I have had a few sodas. I used to drink sodas all day long though. I've probably had about 1/30th of my normal soda intake over the past 3 weeks.

I'm like most everyone else when I say, "I hate diets", though. They usually don't work. I think the key ingredients to any weight loss plan are lots of water and plenty of exercise. That's all one needs to lose weight.

Rice doesn't really stay with you a long time, which is something desirable for me. I wanted something that would promote lots of small meals throughout the day. Rice expands in the stomach and gives a full feeling faster. This is especially true if you drink water along with it.

My theory is, the rice will expand in the stomach, making me feel full. I'll eat less at meals. I'll also get hungry faster because the rice digests easily. I'll also avoid indigestion, which I've started getting quite often in my older age (30+ hehe). The more frequent meals of rice should promote a faster metabolism and a smaller overall stomach size.

All these things along with exercise should help me lose weight well.

This leads me to another thing I can't stand: Diet Drinks, especially diet sodas. The other diet drinks are not as bad. I just don't get diet sodas. They taste horrible. They have sweeteners that are possibly just as bad for you as sugar if not worse. They still have the carbonations. They aren't as good for your body as plain water.

I prefer water to a diet drink any day. Water is something our bodies love. Water is also something that most of our bodies could use more of. We're supposed to drink around a gallon a day. I used to drink that much soda a day. Now I drink a lot of water. Some people pay a ton for fancy diets. Here's a great tip, and it's possibly the only diet tip anyone needs. Drink lots of water. Before, during, and after your meals drink water. During the day when you feel a little thirsty, drink water. That's probably the only diet some of us even need. Well, we also need to stay away from fast food. That will be enough, try it.

Internet Abbreviations

I hate abbreviations in everything we do. I also hate that most people call all abbreviations "ACRONYMS". They aren't all acronyms. Acronyms are abbreviations that form words. For example, WHO is an acronym for the World Health Organization. WHO is a word you can say. FBI isn't. FBI is an abbreviation.

This isn't why I started the rant. I started the rant because I am using twitter these days. The media and everyone on the internet told me I should be. If I want to message someone on twitter it's called a "DM", or direct message. Why the hell couldn't they just call it "private message" like every other damn application with such a function has always called it. It's supposed to be "PM", or "PM me".

Oh that leads me to something else I can't stand. I hate when people say they'll ping you. You hear a lot of IS manager types use this. I believe this resulted from a manager mistakenly overhearing someone say "I'll PM you" one day. They also heard the work "ping" because it's an often use networking term. Then they just substituted ping for PM. They thought it made sense and everyone around them just assumed that it must be correct.

I don't know how it came to mean "PM" but ping shouldn't be used that way. So please stop.

Texting

You are going to want to avoid this post if you don't like cussing, because this subject stirs something inside of me that I can't control.

Everywhere you go, you see someone with a cell phone in their hand "texting" someone else. Texting, for those of you who may have been living in caves for about 10 years is how everyone loves to communicate these days. Texting is DUMB.

Sure, there are SOME uses for texting. For instance, if you are running late somewhere and you want to let the person know so. You can shoot a quick message "I'm running late" to them. That's where the usefulness of texting ends and the dumb use of it begins.

People don't just use texting for short quick messages. Texting is used for entire conversations. The stupid part of this is that these conversations are typed on a CELL PHONE. Cell phones themselves are superior technology. You can actually communicate much faster by talking and listening.

What's worse, in many cases where people are using text messages, if they had just called the person they would have saved money. Calling can be free in the evenings and weekends. It can also be free between two people of the same carrier. Texting however still costs money. People will pay upwards to $60 per month for a text plan.

If that sounds reasonable, remember that before texting and even before everyone had cell phones, there were these things call two-way alphanumeric pagers. They were basically just pagers you could text back and forth on. They weren't very popular compared to texting today which doesn't make much sense considering they were exactly the same thing. The big difference: two-way paging cost us around 9 bucks per month back then.

It's like people are working in reverse these days. Twitter and facebook are other examples. IRC is still much more efficient that twitter and it has less spammers. It is superior in many ways. Calling someone and talking to them is FAR superior to texting any day.

People who aren't proud to be grandparents

Sometimes I think I shouldn't be a parent. However, I see and hear about parents all the time that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a kid. Then there are those parents who are decent but can't wait to get the kids out of the house so they can be "free". I had great grandparents.

My kids have awful grandparents. Well, at least on my side of the family. My wife's parents are much better than mine. I'm ashamed of my parents. They are too worried about their love lives to worry about their grandchildren.

Sometimes I feel like this kangaroo

This kanagaroo has it all figured out. There's a lot of people that deserve what that guy got. Of course, the kangaroo may not have done this to be mean. He may have just wanted to play. Either way, great work Mr. Roo.

First Post

This will be a fun blog. I'm starting it because I'm an opinionated person and instead of trolling forums and other sites, I would rather just rant here. I'm actually working on an idea for a website that allows people to post anonymous rants.

To begin this rant website, I hate "First Post" posts on forums and sites like Slashdot, but not enough to rant about them. So, I'll leave you with an awesome video from College Humor. It's an oldie but goodie by now but still fun.
We didn't start the flame war.