I wrote the draft for my second book while in Cuba, and have been spending the last week typing it up.
The book covers the strategies I used to lose weight. Given how personal weight loss is, this isn’t intended to be a “do this and succeed” guide. Rather, it lists a bunch of strategies I used, with the hopes that perhaps some of them will be of use to others.
The title “Diets Suck” comes from my realization that most celebrity diets propose temporary fixes, usually in the form of food deprivation, to what is actually a permanent problem. I gained all this weight primarily because of my eating habits. I can change them for a while with a diet, but if I go right back to my old ways after that ends, I’ll gain it all back. Which is what happened in my yo-yo days.
So instead, I went for making small tweaks to my eating habits that would add up over time. Merely giving up a coke can a week at work, for instance, would reduce my weight by a number of pounds over a year. There would be no going hungry, or denying myself the things I liked. Doing that would not have been sustainable, assuring a sour mood and failure.
Much of the inspiration for my philosophy came from an interview I saw with Brian Wansink, which you can watch here.
The book should be out in two months.
As before, I’ll release a free digital copy and a not-so-free print copy.
Where: Ottawa Marriott Hotel on 100 Kent St., Victoria North Ballroom (2nd Floor)
I got in touch to be among the speakers, but I was too late. Nevertheless, I have the following prepared should the opportunity present itself:
To my esteemed parliamentarians and participants here today,
My name is Julien McArdle. Full disclosure: I organized in the spring of last year a petition to lift the ban on Gay-Straight Alliances, or GSAs, in the Ottawa Catholic School Board. I amassed over 700 signatures to this effect. The accompanying Facebook group has over 400 followers.
I’m here today to talk about Bill 13, and more specifically to discuss Gay-Straight Alliances and the clubs like them. I believe it to be the elephant in the room with regards to this bill and the reason why there is such strong opposition from a dedicated minority.
What I propose is simple: listen to the students. I find that they are so easy to forget when we hold these sessions away, both in time and place, from schools.
If you listen to the students, they have already spoken. They did so when they tried to set up Gay-Straight Alliances. Let me remind you that it was not the students who subsequently forbade their establishment.
I must also speak out on the “Respecting Differences” clubs. I would find it a wonderful asset were it not actually utilized as a tool to legitimize the prohibition of genuine support to students. The guidelines for the Respecting Differences group forbid conversations on gender identity. I ask you: how is a group where you can’t even discuss what you’re facing supposed to be of any help? It can not. Imagine how ineffective an anti-racism club would be if its participants were not permitted to talk about issues surrounding race.
On the matter of religious freedom, an argument oft-cited by opponents, I ask this: how is one’s religious freedoms impinged by the existence of a group whose mandate is to foster understanding? It is not.
That some speakers before you have made comparisons to slavery and the residential school abuses in reference to a mere support group attests to the toxicity in the public sphere that makes clubs like GSAs so necessary to the young recipients of this ignorance.
I conclude with a simple message: the beneficiaries of this bill are the students. They have already spoken, they just need for you to listen.
I’ve just come back from a week-long escape to Cuba. I decided that I would do this two weeks ago, and organized it all the Monday before my departure.
The trip was a success. I read an entire book – the Pulitzer-winning The Forever War by Dexter Filkins – and got a head start on The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. I wrote, start-to-finish, the draft for my second book. Every day, I went to bed early, woke up late, ate well, swam, read and wrote. There was no computer screen, no work emergency to concern myself with. It was absolutely fantastic.
I have never had vacation time before that wasn’t a rush to complete objectives – either by juggling family around Christmas or speed-running through cities on travels abroad. To just have all the time in the world was such a wonderful feeling.
Jay couldn’t come this time round due to school constraints, but we’ve resolved that we’ll go off together once he graduates. I very much look forward to that.
Update: May 3, 2012. According to the CBC, Bill 13 has passed second reading. It will now head to committee. The end tally was 66 to 33, with the Liberals and NDP voting for its passage, and the PCs voting against it. This followed a piece by Xtra! yesterday stating that the Liberals were planning on using a rarely used maneuver to force a vote. According to MPP Glen Murray, a member of the PC party shouted “No to GSAs!” following the end of the vote.
A member of the Progressive Conservative party voting against Bill 13, the "Safe Schools Act" on May 3rd, 2012.
No one should be surprised. The PCs ran on a homophobic and transphobic platform six months ago. In one of the earlier debates for this anti-bullying bill, they asserted that to oppose discrimination against children was to oppose religious freedoms.
This is all because the bill includes references to sexual orientation and gender identity in addition to sex, disability, and race. I believe the strength of the opposition is emblematic of precisely there’s a need for its inclusion.
Anyways, back to the debates. Yasir Naqvi, the Liberal MPP for Ottawa recited a letter he had received:
Ruth wrote, “I support Bill 13 because no one deserves to be pushed, beaten, spit on, called names, shunned, segregated or bullied for any reason. We can’t be judged for race. We can’t be judged for religion. Why should we be allowed to be judged based on sexuality? Please help change this.”
Liberal member John Gerretsen on the stalling tactics by the Progressive Conservatives:
The first thing that I would ask the people of Ontario to do is to go to the legislative website and read Bill 13 and Bill 14. I would ask them if they can actually see a difference in those two bills. There’s very little difference. We’re all talking about the same thing: bullying.
Now, you know, everybody is accusing everybody else of playing games with this, and there have been a lot of games played here and probably on all sides of the House—and I’ll be the first to admit that. But one of the games that the Tories have been playing with this bill—and that’s why it’s been debated here so often—is that whenever they talk about this bill, they make the bells ring for half an hour, wasting half an hour of everybody’s time. That’s why this bill is back here day after day, because every bill has to have so many hours of debate; I’ve forgotten exactly what it is but something like seven or eight hours of debate, etc.
Liberal Bob Delaney on the same subject:
Speaker, I say to my colleagues in the PC Party, if they really want to move forward on this, let’s let debate collapse. Let’s get it into committee. Let’s get it into committee today.
Seven times, representing 12 hours and 55 minutes of delay, the PC Party has just rung the bells needlessly on this bill. There’s no cause for it at all.
The PC explanation by Julia Monroe:
We have a very serious issue on the floor of this chamber: the question of Bill 13 and the question of Bill 14. No one, I think, misunderstands that we also have a very serious issue in the need for a select committee. The bells are simply an opportunity to demonstrate the dissatisfaction of the opposition, and serve as a reminder of the need to look at the issue of Ornge. I certainly don’t think that I mixed those messages in my remarks.
Ornge is the air ambulance service operated by the province. The auditor general had recently found serious issues with how it was handled. The PCs also alleged that the Liberals were obstructing Bill 14 in committee:
Right now, Bill 14 has already passed second reading. It’s before committee. The government that talks about obstruction, and how they are opposed to obstruction, is the very group of people obstructing the passage of Bill 14 and its work through committee right now.
The NDP offered to mediate the differences, but I’d be very surprised if anyone took them up on their offer. Not least of which because the PCs wouldn’t allow a bill that extends protections to queer kids. As they argued, preventing the Catholic schools from banning support groups for queer youth would be tantamount to bullying the schools:
Let’s not force schools. Let’s not bully them into having these particular clubs of a particular name so that it satisfies a particular goal.
The goal being related to a seemingly nefarious “agenda” when speaking of equity policies:
I’ve listened and heard from schools, even now, about certain agendas that are being aggressively pushed in the school. I will put that on the record, and I can refute it from parents and students from high schools and elementary schools who are upset with the current curriculum driving an agenda.
This type of logic either presumes that no kid in an Ontario high school is queer, or wilfully ignores their existence. It looks at policies of acceptance as a negative force from the outside being pushed on to administrators and parents. It is a refusal to help the very individuals who should benefit from legislation to make schools better: the students.
There appears to be a shift in the framing of the opposition by the PC to make their stance seem more palatable. They are now presenting this as a matter of their bill being more inclusive. But their actions speak louder than their words, and their actions tell of a stance that sees inclusiveness as fine as long as it doesn’t include LGBT youth.
I just updated my laptop to Ubuntu 12.04, the latest version of the popular Linux distribution. I couldn’t say this ten or even three years ago, but it’s better than Windows. Everything just works out of the box, and the interface is intuitive. It also doesn’t lock me out of my own files, which Windows tends to do. The screenshots in this post were taken from my machine today.
It isn’t all peachy though – while there’s a good selection of applications, it could be better. It also lacks association with applications that are known to mainstream users. Windows has Word, Mac has Garage Band, and the iOS has Instagram. When it comes to operating systems, apps are everything.
I think now that we have a convergence between mobile and desktop operating systems, there’s a real opportunity here for desktop Linux distributions. Simply said: have a popular distro like Ubuntu be able to run Android apps out of the box. You can right now through the emulator that comes with the SDK provided by Google, but that doesn’t have a native feel to it. You want the Android app to appear to run like any other program (emphasis on appear.)
Ride on the popularity of Android. It and the iOS are a developer hot bed with thousands making programs that people like you and me want to use. People go where the apps are, and I believe there’s a chance here to pull people away from Windows. Especially if you (or Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu) can market the fact that it can also run Windows applications anyways.
