I talked about before how saving posts doesn't work, I had this one planned for Sunday (yesterday), but it didn't work out as usual. It was supposed to be a triumph, instead it marks the beginning of a new struggle. As a person with no will power, I did something daring last week, I went on a diet. I've tried this before once or twice and never could last longer than a day and a half, this time I went the whole week. Well except for Sunday, but that's only because I wanted one day off in between and I thought it would be practical to start again today. All the same, I'm very proud of myself for staying with it, there really was very little no prior evidence to suggest that I would could.

You see, about ~3 years ago I was in good physical shape, and about 73kg. Then I decided to move out and live in student housing for a while, just to see what it was like to not live at home. The very experience was nothing out of the ordinary, but being a lousy cook, I would cook too much food and then overeat like everyday. That's how I gained 5kg in 4 months. I lost track of when exactly I gained the rest, but for a while now I've been 84kg, which is clearly too much. Today I'm 82kg and even if I don't go back to my original weight, I'll be happy to lose whatever I can get the next week or two before I embark upon a voyage (more on that later).

Some mornings are different than others. This is a special kind of morning, the kind of morning when you wake up and think to yourself "this is the day".

If you're one of those people who wake up and immediately get up, then you're probably a rarity. I don't do that, I need a while to "decompress".. a few minutes, sometimes half an hour, depending on how tired I feel when I wake up. Those minutes are unique to the whole day because this is when I do something I never do otherwise. Plan my day. Ok, so today I need to get my shit together, get that overdue homework done, finish that book, do the laundry, go shopping and fix the bike. Well it's not really planning, it's more a laundry list, things to be done whenever just as long as they get done today. Or tomorrow. Those are the things that come to mind at the very beginning. These are the things I will most certainly end up not doing. Then with that out of the way, my thoughts flow to things that are fun, but not important. I spend a lot more time thinking about these. These are things I will end up doing today.

I guess I registered on www.inter.it at some point, could have been to watch their video clips or something, I don't remember at all. Obviously, when I register for bs sites, I give them bs info. But it seems that inter.it goes the extra mile to make their members feel special and today I got an unexpected surprise:

I signed up for an account on developer.berlios.de back in June sometime, kinda because I always wanted to be a developer, think of myself as one. It's taken until now to actually have a project that could go up there and the other day I opened an account for galleryforge.berlios.de. When I logged into my account a few days ago to do this, there was a survey for members to take. Well, a short one. When I saw the question, I stared at it for about 2 minutes and finally decided that I couldn't decide between "yes" and "no". The other question was trivial. So I left that page, did something else, I come back to it and I stare at it again. In the space of 2 days I did this about 4-5 times. By now I had registered my project, had it approved by Berlios and been given an account for it. Knowing that this question would haunt me if I didn't get it over with, I reluctantly decided to say "yes". *click Submit*

The question was "Are you a professional software engineer?" Well, barring any unforeseen event, I will have a diploma to prove that within a couple of weeks. But what about "professional", what does that mean? That's a bit strong, isn't it? I don't have any proper professional experience yet, I'm just out of school. I've done some minor projects on the side, but that doesn't count as "professional". It's like asking if Doug Murphy is a doctor.. fair enough, he's not an amateur, he's not in his pyjamas operating on his stuffed bear, but is he a professional?

Sorry, that's just my policy..