Back then, my meals consisted of three rounds of fast food followed by a small drink of something containing alcohol in the evening.  Usually it was a glass of red wine, but if the day was really stressful, I’d pull out the rum with coke or vodka with OJ.  For breakfast, I’d typically have an Egg McMuffin meal from McDonalds with two white milks.  At lunch, I’d have a double-cheeseburger meal from whatever fast food place I chose that day. On Fridays, my place of business would have the local Pizza guy come in and sell pizza by the slice.  I’d never miss a pizza Friday; two slices of pepperoni or mushroom.  On the way home, I’d stop by McDonalds for another cheeseburger meal.  I’d munch a lot of junk food once I got home, also.  I would also consume no less than three Mt. Dew’s every day.  Some days, I’d consume almost double that.

I had ballooned from my natural 163Lbs to 186Lbs.  I had serious acid reflux and took Prilosec daily to manage it.  I was feeling like a fat old man.  This wasn’t me!  I used to be so physically fit and in shape.  I went from feeling like a maneuverable Porsche to a clunky school bus and it was time to lose the spare tire(s).

Phase 1 – The Diet

In the first phase, I did what most people typically do; I went on a diet.  I switch to white meats and whole grain breads.  I frequented Subway for their turkey subs instead of McDonalds for the cheeseburgers.  I replaced the ground hamburger in meals with ground turkey.  I cut down on the Mt. Dew to no more than 2 or 3 20oz bottles per day.  I enrolled in a gym and started exercising there two or three times every week at lunch.

With all of this effort, nothing that I did worked much, though.  After four weeks, I only dropped three pounds.  I was still at 181 and very discouraged.  What do people who are dieting do when they’re discouraged do?  We say “screw it” and start grubbing down everything in sight!  So, phase 1 was a failure for the most part.  I was building muscle at the gym but you cold only see one set of muscles in my former six pack and the rest of it was covered by belly fat.

I knew that I needed a lifestyle change.  This dieting thing is for people who will always inevitably lose out and bounce back to their original weight.  Diets pretty much imply a temporary sacrifice to obtain a goal; after which you can go back to resuming your former routine.  That wasn’t for me and I needed to find something that I could see myself still doing when I’m 85.  Screw the diet, I wanted to change how I looked at food and nutrition.

Incidentally, I watched a movie called Food Inc.  It talked about the crap that our industrialized food goes through before it enters our mouths.  I also read a book called “The China Study”.  This book talked about the health benefits of vegetarianism and how it’s a lifestyle change that has consistently produced healthy bodies out of unhealthy bodies in study after study.

I hit the Interwebs and started doing objective research on everything in that book and the movie.  I found a lot of strong opinions on both sides of the fence.  it was pretty much a draw on the validity of the facts from both sides.  I decided to give it a try myself.  This wasn’t going to be a diet.  I needed to make this my official way to eat from now on.  That moment, I put the ban on animal meat.

Phase 2 – Vegetarianism

I signed up for an account at TheDailyburn.com to track my dietary intake.  I wanted to make sure that I was getting all of the nutrients that I was supposed to get from this new way of eating.  I didn’t want any guessing or assuming to happen.  This was going to be scientific and totally geeked out!

I also decided to cut out the Mt. Dew totally.  I did still drink a Diet Mountain Dew on occasion but absolutely no other soda at all; only juices with natural sugars.  I was 100% organic at this point.  I refused to eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it or any other ingredient that doesn’t happen naturally in nature.  My body must have thought I’d totally hippied out!  It revolted for the first week.  My body was craving carbs horribly and was suffering withdrawals from something that I couldn’t explain.  It wasn’t caffeine because I was still getting plenty from the green teas and the occasional diet Mountain Dew.  I still had a glass of red wine at least twice every week but that was a big drop from the daily evening drink.

My diets now are as follows:

• Breakfast – organic toasted oats with a very tiny amount of organic white milk. Most days, I’ll also have an organic banana.
• Morning snack – organic fresh strawberries and/or fresh organic pineapple pieces
• Lunch – Morningstar Grillers Original with a small amount of organic Ketchup and mustard. I’d often put some organic lettuce on top, also.  I would sometimes add a side of carrots or another veggie.
• Afternoon snack – more fresh strawberries or lightly salted cashews. I’d have another banana if I felt especially munchy that day
• Dinner – Meatless chili, steamed veggies or anything else of the sort that doesn’t contain meat.  Some days, I’d even eat some Kraft organic Mac and Cheese.
• Evening Snack – Occasionally, I’d eat a handful of baby carrots as I was winding down.

One month later, I have dropped 11 pounds and still going.  I feel like I’m 18 again!  I’m full of energy and more alert than I ever was.  This is something that I can totally see myself doing as I get old and grey.  I haven’t taken anything for acid reflux in weeks!  I’m cured!

Phase 3 – Seeking the Cause

There’s a scientific side of me that tells me that all of my questions have not yet been answered, however.  What, out of the many things that I changed, made the most impact on the loss of weight?  Was it the drop of high fructose corn syrup?  Was it the move to exclusively organic foods?  Was it the increase in exercise due to weekly snowboarding trips?  Was it the lack of animal meat in my diet?  I suspected the latter but I still have my doubts.  I need to find out or it will burn at me forever.

When my body weight reaches my desired 162Lbs, I will begin Phase 3.  I will slowly and deliberately reintroduce things that I have cut out of my diet one-by-one.  I will start with white meat.  I will go one-by-one through all of them with the only exception being Mt. Dew.  For the sake of my teeth, I’m going to keep that one out of my diet forever.

I’ll not go for less than 1 week with each step so that I can measure the impact of that food.  Before switching to the next food item, I’ll eliminate the food item that I was testing the week before.  I’m only looking for a net gain of a couple of pounds at each food.  Even when I was heavy, my body weight was easy to sustain and didn’t fluctuate much more than a pound from day to day.  It should be obvious to me if a food ingredient is having a negative impact within a week.

When I’m done, I’ll publish the results here.  I expect to hit my target weight sometime by the end of next week.

Spinning

It’s still the same as it always was

Woke up this morning and I caught my buzz

Yesterday was the same as today

And tomorrow will be like yesterday

Change my face, now I change my name

Just different ways to play the game

The only thing that will never change

Is that everything will be the same

—-

[Chorus]

The world is spinning around

Inside, Outside, and Upside down

The world is spinning around

Brain fried, I lied, then knocked you down

—–

What am I saying, I guess I just don’t know

Just sit back now and enjoy the show

I really hope you enjoy hearing us play

Cause we’re gonna be in your head every ##@$ day

The only thing that will never change

Is that everything will be the same!

(Chorus)

Today, I’ve clocked a total of 3 1/2 hours either on hold or talking to people at charter that can’t help me and who do not know who can.  All that I want to do is get information and pricing about upgrading our service for considerably faster bandwidth.  In other words, I’m trying to give them more business.

We used to have a sales rep named Vicki that I could call for this sort of thing and get an answer within a few minutes.  She left the company last year and never communicated who her replacement would be,

I’ve called at various times over the past year to find out who this new sales rep is but nobody there can give me an answer.  Now, our company has a project that absolutely requires a very high level of bandwidth so I’m desperate for someone to pay attention to my queries and so far I’m still empty handed!

If anyone knows of a good ISP in the Mid-Michigan area that supplies high bandwidth to businesses, please send me some references.  I’m ready to give Charter the boot. 

• Moving a file
• On the same volume
  • Retains the file permissions as well as inherits additional permissions from the new parent.
• Between two volumes
• Erases the original permissions of the file and inherits the permissions from the new parent folder
• Copying a file
• On the same volume
• The new copy inherits all permissions from the new parent.  No permissions of the original are carried over.
• Between two volumes
• The new copy inherits all permissions from the new parent.  No permissions of the original are carried over.
There … easy enough, right?

We met up with an Apple support person at the Genius Bar named Sutton.  He immediately brought us off to a table and asked the nature of our visit.  I explained the situation to him and let him know that I was very displeased to be here again.  I let him know that I was absolutely positive that this was not a water damage issue and that I analyzed the leads on the phone where the previous Apple employee said was corroded.

He looked at it and pointed out a greenish mark on the plastic tip of the connector and said, “See, there’s the corrosion”.  I looked at it and saw that it was simply a discoloration that had rubbed off from the power connector that was being used.  I told him that plastic doesn’t corrode green when wet, metal does; and even then, it requires a significant and consistent amount of moisture to be that dark of a green.  The metal leads were shiny silver.  We agreed to disagree on this, I guess.  I’ve been doing this for a career long enough to be secure in my assessment, however.

I am positive that the green that was seen was corrosion that had rubbed off the charger and onto the white plastic.  The charger was this old Griffin car charger that also had a wall plug.  It was in my car for about a year and undoubtedly became corroded.  I recently used it to charge her phone because we couldn’t find her other connector.  When I arrived home, I verified this to be true.

Sutton was a great guy and handled my frustrated tone like a pro.  He offered to take the phone back and look at the internal water sensors to see if anything had gotten inside the phone.  AT LAST!  This is what I’ve been trying to get someone to do for a week!  I thanked him and he went on his way.

When he came back, he conceded that there was no water damage on the inside of the phone but he did find the root cause.  One of the pins had been bent.  That fully explains the sudden lack of charging only a day after using this questionable charger.  It must have bent one of the pins in the phone, preventing the charge!

I was excited to hear this because even if they wouldn’t do it for me under warranty, I know how to fix bent pins and would just do it myself.  He offered to go talk to his manager and see if he could help us out even though the bent pin wasn’t really a warranty item.

No matter what happened from here on out, I was going to walk away a happy man!  All that it took was someone to listen to me and do the five minute job of looking over the device for ACTUAL damage as opposed to just taking the faulty water sensor at face value.  (I call it faulty because it’s on the outside of the phone and thus can not do it’s job properly)

When he came back, he offered to replace the phone at no cost!  I was elated!  He had single handedly restored my faith in the Briarwood Apple store!  That store needs to use him as a template to hire ALL of their employees.

So, I still stand by my recommendation to skip the Apple Care on your new iPhone and opt for a third party insurer instead.  The Apple Care plan only extends the manufacturer warranty and does not cover anything else.

I’ve held off blogging about this until after I had a chance to speak with someone at Apple personally to get some sort of customer satisfaction.  After speaking with a senior support person at Apple, I was basically told that I was a screwed victim of the Apple Care hoax.

If you’re considering switching to Apple under the fanboy myth that they care about their customers more than Company X, please read on.  Apple is one of the most controlling and self-serving companies that I’ve ever done business with.

I have been hosting the App Show for almost as long as the App Store has been in existence and have been a self proclaimed iPhone fanboy for years.  I bought into the hoax that Apple so elegantly markets to us every day and switched from my primarily Microsoft world to the glossy Apple utopia that was promised to me.

This week, I finally had a need to call upon Apple to honor this promise of customer satisfaction.  My wife’s phone suddenly stopped charging after using a charging unit that we had never used on her phone before.    Between the time that it was working and the time that it wasn’t, it hadn’t moved more than a few feet.

I took her iPhone 3GS into the Apple Store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I’ve frequented that store spending thousands of dollars there over the past year or so.  I was sure that, considering the volume of business that I did there, someone would help me out.

The guy at the “Genius Bar” took a look at the phone for about 6 seconds with a light and handed it back to me saying that there was water damage and there’s nothing that he can do for me.  I was shocked!  I told him that this can’t be because it’s never been wet before.

He took another 3 second look at it and noticed some discoloration on the dock leads.  He said. “yea, it looks like it has corrosion, too.  Sorry, you’ll need to pay the $200 repair fee for this phone”.  I quickly changed from shocked to furious!  We just bought this phone for $400 only a few months ago!

After seeing my customer record and all that I’ve bought from them, they treated me like a loser that was trying to scam them and sent me on my way empty handed!

I went home and did some research.  You can find quite a few links on The App Show episode 47 show notes. It seems that Apple has been screwing over thousands of their loyal customers this way lately!  Their policy has been to find any fictitious way possible to void warranties and screw customers like me.

If this is how Apple behaves as the underdog, you can just imagine how they would be if they were ever as large as Microsoft!

I have been working in IT for over a decade and in the computer industry for almost 20 years.  I’ve dealt with countless technical support calls and I can tell you that Apple is the worst of them all.  They sound friendlier than any other technical support line as they tell you that you’re screwed and “have a nice day”.  At least there’s that!

I used to dream of success.  I pictured myself in a shiny convertible sports car pulling into the circle driveway of my 3 story white mansion on a crystal clear lake.  In my vision of success, I had the world at my fingertips.  Is this how you envision success?  If so, prepare to never meet it; and if you do, prepare to be disappointed.

I think that this Hollywood vision of success is what drives so many people to either become work-a-holics or just give up and wallow in self pity.  People are measuring success by the visions of others instead of developing their own visions and goals.  I try to show people that personal success isn’t about what you end up with; it’s about who you end up being.

In your next daydream about the successful you, stop thinking about all of the things that are around you and the power that the future you has over others and think for a moment about the type of person that that successful version of you is.  Write out the qualities such as contentment, control, free, confident, educated, etc.  Maybe that vision of success only has one requirement; that you are happy.

Work hard at becoming that person.  That is your true measure of success. 

These users never log into an actual workstation anywhere so I figured that if I did that for them and launched an actual Outlook 2003 session, maybe I would get an error that would lead me in the right direction.

I was greeted with a prompt to change their password because their Active Directory password has expired. Bingo! I changed their password and the error went away.

I thought that I’d share this here because Google doesn’t return any other sites that have this tip when you search for the error.