Dr. Coop­er, I hope this let­ter finds you in good health. I could­n't avoid over­hear­ing you talk with Dr. Hof­s­tadter on our build­ing's stair­case the oth­er day.

Specif­i­cal­ly when you mused about how life would be if peo­ple evolved from rep­tiles. I am so dis­ap­point­ed in you.

First, you men­tion that lizards are cold-blood­ed. Which is true. And that when it's cold they get slow­er. Which is al­so true. But then you sayd some­thing like "the weath­er­lizard would say 'it's slow out­side' in­stead of 'it's cold'".

POP­PY­COCK Dr. Coop­er! If the lizard is slow be­cause it's cold, it would per­ceive ev­ery­thing out there as fast, not slow, just like slow cars see faster cars as, you know... fast?

Al­so, the men­tion about sug­gest­ing the lizard should wear a sweater is a slap on the face of physic­s. Sweaters are an in­su­la­tor, not an en­er­gy source. What makes the in­side of the sweater warm is the hu­man, Dr. Cold-blood­ed lizards would have no such ef­fect be­yond the tiny ther­mal in­er­tia such an im­per­fect wool in­su­la­tor would al­low.

If you are in­ter­est­ed on fur­ther ar­gu­ment in hu­man-­like rep­tile civ­i­liza­tion and folk­lore I will be hap­py to in­dul­ge, but I must say I ex­pect­ed bet­ter of you.

Mrs. Vartabe­di­an.

PS: things like this are the rea­son why I nev­er ask you to come home for ce­re­al.

'Thin­ner,' the old Gyp­sy man with the rot­ting nose whis­per­s...

—Richard Bach­man (Stephen King)

I was not al­ways fat. I used to be re­al­ly, re­al­ly thin. So thin that when I was 16, my moth­er­forced me to eat. I was 1.75 and weight­ed about 65 ki­los when I fin­ished high­school. So thin I used M sized shirts un­til I was 25.

That has, as those who know me can agree with, changed quite a bit. I broke the 100kg ba­reer 10 years ago or so, and reached 123.5Kg ear­li­er this week. Al­so, I am not 3.5 me­ters tal­l, so I am close to hav­ing dou­bled my weight and body mass in these 25 years.

That is not a good thing. It's such a bad thing, that my doc­tor has ex­plained to me that if I don't lose a lot of weight soon­ish, I am go­ing to fuck­ing go and die. Not next week, not next year, but not in 40 years ei­ther.

Since my weight start­ed go­ing up while I was in col­lege and my dad was sick, I al­ways blamed some anx­i­ety prob­lem, eat­ing crap, a seden­tary lifestyle, the usu­al sus­pect­s.

So, I got some tests done. Turns out I was more or less right. The "more" is be­cause I do have to stop eat­ing crap, and I need to ex­er­cise more. The "less" is be­cause I have (a­mong oth­er things) hy­per­in­su­line­mi­a. Wan­na guess what are the most vis­i­ble symp­tom of that?

• High blood pres­­sure (on med­i­­ca­­tion since 5 years ago)

• In­­creased VLDL (di­ag­nosed 2 years ago)

• Lethar­­gy (fuck yes)

• Weight gain (dou­ble fuck yes)

And what does weight gain of this kind do to you? A lot of oth­er bad things.

Since tues­day I am on a very spe­cif­ic di­et, and tak­ing a drug to re­duce my in­sulin pro­duc­tion (Met­formin). I am feel­ing ac­tive, and have lost 3 ki­los in 4 days (yes, I know that is not a sus­tain­able rate and will plateau).

My feet stopped swelling.

I am not hun­gry all day.

I am walk­ing 30 min­utes, twice a day.

I want to code.

I feel good. I have felt bet­ter, when I start­ed tak­ing BP med­s, I have felt worse when my liv­er func­tion de­creased, I have felt very bad, when my BP spiked, but good? I have not felt good in a very, very long time.

This may not be the drug or the di­et. Maybe it's place­bo ef­fec­t. Maybe it's some­thing else. On the oth­er hand, I have de­cid­ed that my life is too sweet to drop dead right now. So, let's see how this goes.

In 1003, Erik the Red died af­ter hav­ing ruled Green­land. Which of course, was a bad idea, col­or-­com­bi­na­tion-­wise.

Al­so a bad idea was de­cree 1003/89 which par­doned ev­ery "sub­ver­sive" or "ter­ror­ist", in­clud­ing those dead or dis­ap­peared. This is af­ter de­cree 1002, that par­dons those who killed or dis­ap­peared them, of course.

Much milder is de­cree 1003/98 which gives an award to Rober­to De­Vi­cen­zo. I wrote a pro­gram called de­vi­cen­zo, BTW.

Bug #1003 in launch­pad is about launch­pad, the ti­tle is "pro­jects +search page 404" and the de­scrip­tion is "Page not found Page not found". It's fixed.

If you search for 1003 in Google Map­s, it gives you one re­sult, in Latvi­a.

But Bing gives you an­oth­er place, in Lau­sanne.

1003 days ago, it was sep­tem­ber 15th, 2002, the day of my 31st birth­day.

Page 1003 of Gray's anato­my is about the de­vel­op­ment of the eye and con­tains a draw­ing of "the eye of an eigh­teen days’ em­bryo rab­bit.".

Page 1003 of "Fa­mil­iar Quo­ta­tion­s, 10th ed of 1919" says "We are danc­ing on a vol­cano.", at­trib­uted to the Comte de Sal­vandy. Al­to del Za­pote, in Cu­ba is 1003 me­ters tal­l, but is not a vol­cano at al­l.

Oh, and this blog has 1003 post­s.

Turns out there was a ma­jor, show stop­per bug in rst2pdf 0.90: sphinx sup­port was ab­so­lute­ly bro­ken. Not bro­ken as in bug­gy, bro­ken as in it had syn­tax er­rors.

So, 0.91 is now re­leased, and on­ly bro­ken in the tra­di­tion­al sense. En­joy!