If you ever had a PocketPC, you probably have heard the horror stories of the “Today” third party plugins being the No1 cause for these PDAs/phones crashing. Well, it seems that the Nokia geniuses thought that it would be nice to have such “desktop” applets on their N770/N800 internet tablets too. Apparently the RSS plugin is what causing for some users the N800 to immediately reboot after loading, and in my case tonight, the OMWeather plugin crashing the whole Maemo desktop, re-spawning and eventually rebooting the device — and then all over again. Now, I have no alternative but to re-install the N800 firmware, re-patch the kernel to get SDHC support and re-install all my apps from scratch. This is a case where Nokia’s engineers didn’t learn from the predecessors’ mistakes and made these plugins/applets too integrated to their main desktop so when they crash, they bring hell to the whole system. Poor design. Just like Microsoft’s “Today”.

I found a good way to embarrass myself. I now have added this weight tracker graphic on the top of my blog where I will be updating every Monday. It will track the weight lost after starting my low-calorie diet last week (at the time I was weighing 162 lbs). The reason I put this here is so that I can push myself to go forward with the diet, because if I backtrack, the arrow will become red (instead of navy-blue) and everyone will know that I screwed up. It’s just one more mechanism to push myself. The absolute healthy weight for my size (I am short) is about 102 lbs, but even if I end up losing 50lbs instead of 60lbs that would still be a major success. So, let’s see what I can accomplish this time (although my scheduled August vacations in Europe will obviously disrupt the diet).

It’s stuff like that that make me want to move back to my mountainous village, grow potatoes and have some hens and a sheep herd. Because no matter how “progressive” I am trying to be, in reality, I don’t want to know that the world might not really exist, or that there 11 dimensions or other such far out ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by these ideas, but at the same time I can’t deal with them. I am not sure that we are supposed to learn these truths, but instead just live a simple life for the amount of time we have left. I am not opposing knowledge, but I am not comfortable with far-out knowledge because it comes in contradiction with my dogma: simplicity. I am far more old-fashioned than I have publicly shown…