March 10th, 2004:

I’ve been losing weight pretty quickly, recently, and am quite happy with the results. Due to time constraints and pure laziness, I’ve all but given up on exercize. I need to keep it up and I know that it’s important… but the whole “one more day off won’t kill you” mentality is getting the best of me. But the Low-Carb diet Jess and I are on is really making a difference.

Below is a graph of my weight since I started keeping track. Sometimes I forget to weigh myself, in those cases, I just divided the number of days that I didn’t weigh myself by the difference in weight, and applied that much difference to each day that I skipped. That’s why in some parts of the graph it looks like I lost the same amount of weight each day for weeks at a time. There are two lines on this graph. The green line is my actual weight. The red line is my weight trend computed using a rolling average (basically, each new trend value is equal to 90% of yesterday’s trend value plus 10% of today’s value). It is a more accurate representation of what I’ve lost since weight can fluctuate so much from day to day. I always weigh myself at roughly the same time every morning, always before I’ve eaten anything, and always without clothes.

!http://revjim.net/archives/2004/03/10/weightloss.png(Weight Loss Graph)!

The car stereo install didn’t go nearly as well as expected. The head unit was a breeze. I’ve done a million of those and I’ve even done one in a vehicle similar to this one before, so I knew what to expect. However, the speakers were a different story all together.

First of all, the guys at Circuit City and Fry’s Electronics both lied to me. A 1991 4-Door V6 SR5 Toyota 4Runner does not take 5.25" speakers in the rear. It takes 4" speakers in the rear. If that one little fact would have been made known to me, I would have paid for the installation two days ago and just had it done for me, because I don’t have the tools, the time, or the patience to cut into any part of the body, paneling, or framing of my vehicle.

I think they like watching customer installs fail. Because then they can say, "Ha, ha. You should have paid us." The front speakers are certainly 4", which is what we bought. And I’ve put speakers in before, so I know that, once you get to the speaker, the rest of the process is straightforward. Well, I got to the first speaker, put it in, and everything seemed fine. However, the second speaker was a different story. Thanks to a strategically placed air-conditioning duct, the left side driver’s speaker is a bit too deep (or the hole for it is a bit too shallow).

Now, I can take a stab in the dark at how to correct both of the above situations. But, I’m not even going to take a chance. I’ve got 4 days (counting today and Saturday) until Jess’ parents get here, and way too much to do to be screwing around with it any more. So I called Circuit City and scheduled an install for today at 3:00pm. I’ve paid Circuit City to install speakers before too. I know that when they tell you 2 hours to install, they mean 4. But, I don’t know if the speakers I have purchased in the past have always fit perfectly or not. And, if they didn’t, I don’t know if Circuit City just did their best to hide that, or actually performed the install properly.

The install charge is $32 per pair of speakers. And, since I bought two pairs of speakers, I get half off the install. So, I’m getting all four speakers installed for $32. But I don’t know how much work they are willing to do for that money. I’m sure they are going to try to charge me for something more… something I could have done myself. So, I will be watching them closely and I will not be paying them for work they didn’t do.

We’ll see how this works out.