10 pounds lighter

It is now about 14 weeks after I started an exercise program. I have lost 10 pounds and over an inch on my waist. I am not doing the program completely as I am basically still eating my regular meals with lots of rice, bread, and massive amounts of roti, but I cut back almost completely on snacks and sugar in general. Another thing is I still have a big dinner 8 or 9 pm which is soon before I go to sleep which may be why I have not lost more weight. I am actually in week 9 of P90X, I skipped exercise some days and repeated a couple weeks in between but kept the routine in order. My stamina is increased, I need to organise a beep test and see how much better I really am. When I find my body fat caliper I will check that too.

Lyndon Lai Tan in concert

Lyndon's annual concert was on the 14th August at the Naparima Bowl. Tickets were $150 and had a door prize of an electric guitar. I did not think the Bowl could look like that, laser lights, clouds of smoke, rockers on stage. One fan had an air horn that was fired off after each song. Lyndon was the lead singer with his band behind him and a couple guest performers that deserve a concert of their own. The electric guitarist was on the ball all the way through with perfectly timed epic rifts and each tone in harmony with the rest of the band. The drummer and bass guitarist who are brothers were the heart of the melodies. The audience was mainly the younger crowd with a small section of older folks in the middle of the room but I am sure everyone thoroughly the show. Close to the end there was a mini mosh pit and screaming fans at the front of the stage. With the right opportunity this band can make it huge. I hope they do. There will be another concert sometime in December.

Menu border missing in Joomla

I am using Joomla 1.5.x but I think this works in earlier versions also. In the default theme I made a new menu in the default template (rhuk_milkyway) and the border does not show up. To fix this go to Extensions--> Module Manager--> Select your problem menu --> Advanced Parameters section--> put '_menu' without quotes in the modules class suffix field. Voila!

The picture on the left is before and the one on the right is after the fix

Honda Vehicle Recall August 2010

"Honda will recall approximately 197,000 Accord and 117,000 Civic vehicles from the 2003 model year and roughly 69,000 Element vehicles from the 2003 and 2004 model years in the U.S. to prevent a malfunction of the ignition interlock feature of these vehicles.... The ignition interlock mechanism can be damaged or worn during use. If this happens, it may become possible to remove the ignition key when the shift lever is not in Park. If the transmission is not in Park and the parking brake is not set, the vehicle could roll away, and a crash could occur."

It seems kind of silly to me, leaving a car without the parking brake on and in neutral and stepping out of it is not the smartest thing in the world to do. There is a complaint that the mechanism that keeps the key in the ignition if the car is not in Park gear is failing. I am sure this problem does not break any laws but something IS wrong with the car since it is not working as it was designed to. More info here

TOBAGO!

This was a very good weekend. I took a plane into Tobago on Friday night with some friends. We met a group who took over a couple cars on the boat a few hours before. The house we stayed in had everything except a pool, which is fine because the beach was better. For three days we went to Pigeon point and it was free entry on Sunday. We had 3 year old identical twins with us so we needed shade on the beach which Store Bay did not have. The sunset Sunday was a masterpiece: blue, red, pink, gold with clouds on the horizon and sun beams around it. The sunlight making shadows on the unevenness and footprints in the sand was a nice detail. From the water looking at the shore I wished I had my camera to get a shot because the now yellow sunlight made it look very picturesque. On Saturday and Monday there were weddings on the jetty, this is wedding season after all, too bad they missed the sunset on Sunday. Also on Sunday was the Tobago Emancipation Day Celebrations in Pigeon Point. I was sitting there thinking- WOW this is cool, under a noni tree on this great beach while I am listening to African Drums, Steelpan and Tassa playing all at the same time.

We rented a couple scooters and I went for a drive one night. I need to sharpen up my cornering but I have the basics right. We did not make it to Little Tobago, only to Buccoo Reef and the Nylon Pool. It rained for a few minutes on the boat ride there but just stayed overcast while we were out of the boat so it turned out well with no stinging sun. In Pigeon Point the banana boat rides gave me bruises from tumbling into people and jumping off the jetty probably helped that too.

Back home we had what felt like unlimited food, drinks and snacks. A modded Wii with a few dozen games on it, big screen TV with cable, karaoke setup, musical instruments and ofcourse Rummikub kept us busy while we were there. I was on the bottom of a bunk bed, I played it safe incase the bed could not handle the weight on top, since I definitely came back home heavier, I did not check the scale yet but I am guessing 5 pounds more. Back on to P90X ASAP.

To top off the weekend I had to worry about missing my flight back to Trinidad. One girl in the group changed her ticket to go home a day earlier but what Caribbean Airlines does is cancels the booking for the group involved. In this case we had two other people in this group of tickets so without us knowing we lost our space to go back to Trinidad. I had to wait standby on the next flight (which was also the last one out for the night) and the second girl was lucky enough to go on the same flight that we were supposed to.

This was a very good weekend :-)