Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Diet and weight control are lately one of the most important subjects to me. I had a few worries in this regard for my trip to Russia. It’s difficult to maintain a diet, but it’s almost impossible to do so while travelling constantly over a foreign (yes, foreign) country. With family. Meeting people who I haven’t seen in almost 10 years.

I have to say that I did good.

For the first week, I managed to not eat at least 4 hours before sleep. I hardly had any alcohol. A pint of beer in Moscow on the first Sunday, and two pints at the birthday party on the second Sunday – that’s about it. I had a lot of ice cream though, but the ice cream in Russia is very different from the ice cream in Cyprus. Russian ice cream has much less sugar and is made of much skinnier milk. Low fat.

The second week was much worse in terms of diet. I had loads of fat food, plenty of alcohol (beer and vodka), and I usually finished eating by going to bed. The big No-No.

The strange thing was that I didn’t feel that I was getting any heavier or bigger. I thought that I was, but just I couldn’t feel or measure it properly. I was surprised to find out for sure that I wasn’t.

One day before my departure from Cyprus I measured my weight. It was 109.2 kg before the gym session. When I came back to the gym today, I clocked at 109.5 kg. Not bad.

After thinking about it, I guess the compensating factors were stress and flights. Any travel is a lot of stress, but mine was more than usual. Cultural shock, relatives, places from my childhood memories, etc, etc, etc. And I had a lot of flights. Flights are very dehydrating. And without water, it’s difficult for the body to build any fat. Good.

Now that things are getting back to normal, and we are seeing the best weather for weight loss (hot hot heat), I am sure I’ll continue my way down the weight ladder.

First of all, I have to say that I am not thinking clearly. It’s way too hot and humid. I am trying to get used to it, but I am not doing very well. I went to the sea with Maxim – he enjoyed it a lot, but the water was too cold for me to swim or chill out. I am somewhat confused and still tired. I am also trying to ajust my time zones – I am still living two hours later.

It’s difficult to come back to blogging after two weeks of not doing it. I am forcing myself to write. At least something. I also wanted to work on images, but I can’t find my card reader. Strange, I thought I had it in my bag…

Tonight I have returned from my two weeks of vacations in Russia. I’ve been to Moscow (twice), Mezhdurechensk (Kemerovo region, Siberia), and Togliatti (Samara region). I made short notes during my trip that I’ll convert into blog posts. I’ve also made a few pictures which I need to postprocess and upload. I’ll tag all these posts with megatrip2006 tag, so that they’ll be easier to find.

There’s plenty of work to do around the house, and I am still fighting the jet lag, so I’ll need a day or two to come back to normal.

Thank you all for kind words and staying around.

Today is Day D. That is the start of my travels. I am leaving for Russia and I’ll be back only a couple of weeks. I don’t know how well I’ll be connected to the Internet and how much time I’ll have on my hands, so don’t be surprised if there won’t be any updates to my blogs for the next two weeks. I’ll try to post a note or two, but I don’t promise you anything.

Not to worry though. When I come back, I’ll have loads of pictures and stories to tell. I’ll make it up to you. Twice the size and four times the details.

In the meantime, there might also be problems with my home server connectivity. I’ll leave my keys to a friend, who’ll be passing by once in a while to make sure that everything is OK. But if there’s a problem suddenly – don’t panic. It’s just that I am not around to fix it as soon as usual. But it will get fixed eventually.

I wave farewell to all you guys. I’ll see you all in two weeks max!

Today was my last session at the gym before the trip. Considering that I won’t be getting my of any physical training over the next two weeks, my coach (yeah man, you’re my coach) decided to give me some extra load. Sheesh. I’ll have the whole two weeks to recover…

By the way, for the record – I came in to the gym weighting 109.2 kilograms. That is together with yesterday’s beer and sausages. After the session I clocked in at 108.5 kilograms. We’ll see how much I’ll bring back from Russia.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-07-14

• Create mosaic images with Perl and ImageMagick
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Today is my last day of work. I am going on a two weeks vacations. And for a change, I am going out of Cyprus. It’s time that I go back to Russia and visit my relatives and friends. I haven’t been there for about ten years. I wonder how things changed over there. It feels weird remembering how things used to be and combining these memories with those few bits of information that have about those people and places, trying to develop of these into the picture of today.

To ease my brain a bit I went out with some friends for beer and sausages today. I’ve been doing very well with my diet and excersises, so I decided to take a little vacation from that too…

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-07-13

• Guy Kawasaki: The Ultimate Mommy Blog List
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This post in Sanjay’s blog got me started.

I love kids. I love it when kids smile. Whenever I see a kid, I smile at him. And you know what’s fun – no matter how old is the kid, no matter if that’s a boy or a girl, no matter what time of a day it is, no matter in what mood the kid was, no matter if parents are around or not, not matter if the kids knows me personally or not – the reaction is ALWAYS the same. A smile.

Adults are different. You have to catch them either in the right mood or offguard. Adults’ reactions also depend on circumstances. They think to much. Most of them at least. Why did he smiled at me? Is it a smile or is he laughing at me? What’s so funny? Etc, etc, etc… It’s just not the same.

When I smile at a kid, and the kid smiles back, it’s like we’re the only two beings in the universe and nothing else matters. It’s one of the most pure experiences that I had. Every time.

Try it. Go out on a street, walk a bit, until you see a kid, wait for the kid to see your face, and then smile kindly. That’s it. No laughing, no talking, no gestures, no toys, no “Oh, you sweet little, you…”. Just a smile. And watch him smile back. Enjoy.

I wonder… how many blogs are too much? There are people out there who think that even one blog is one too many. I don’t. I think that one blog is a must and is an absolute minimum. Both for an individual and an organization.

Because I am so much interested in blogging, I allow myself to experiment a lot. And here’s my new experiment – a blog at Bloglines (complete with an RSS feed).

Why do I need another blog? Well, I don’t. It’s just that after my return to BlogLines from Google Reader land I am missing one feature – “starred” items. Bloglines has “Clippings”, which are like bookmarks that can be saved into folders, but these are different from “starred” items a bit.

While stars are much easier to use than Clippings, this is not the thing that I miss. “Starred” items can be very easily shared. And, although it can seem very unimportant, it is not so. I’ve already touched upon this in my new Bloglines blog, in this post.

In brief: blogrolls are very outdated, because they are too large, too dynamic, and too out of focus. Who’s going to scroll through my two hundred links in blogroll? I guess no one. Because even I won’t. But many of you are interested in the selected bits from my daily readings. Those are bits that form my opinion on a daily basis, and those are bits that can help you understand my thinking better. Those are “starred” items, selected pieces of worthy content from all the noise that I filtered out.

So, from now on, I’ll use my Bloglines blog to share interesting things from my daily reading. As the absolute minimum, you’ll get a link to an article with a title. But I’ll try to provide some more. Notes will be helpful for me to find those links again later.

Now, this paragraph is for Bloglines team (bloglines freedbacking). Guys, please please please, either allow for the “Blog this” link to work with third-party blogs (like WordPress installations) or add comments to the Bloglines blogs. Otherwise, who on Earth are we, bloggers, going to build the community around Bloglines?