Where's Wil?

So I hit 213 this morning. It may be a phantom 213, but I was that yesterday too, so who knows, I could be lucky. Ate almost nothing all day as I was out in London, but then did have a rather nice dinner of gammon, vegetables, salad and a chunk of Toblerone. Mmmmm.

Starting to think about what to do when I finally hit 210, which was my original goal for this. My original idea was pizza, but I'm not sure I could eat a Dominos special now even if I wanted to - the idea is drool-inducing, but the practicality of sitting down and eating it may be beyond me now. I'm thinking of a book. Something meaningful, perhaps, to encourage me to keep going!

I'm swiftly realising that the people reading this blog are an intelligent lot, and the last couple of times I've put out requests for information or help I've had some great responses.

(Thanks to everyone who offered to help with WordPress - I have a few things to sort out and I will email you all back, I promise!)

Here's a quickie then: I have been doing some media consultancy, and I'm trying to put together a list of 'seminal Web 2.0 works'. That is, online articles (eg the HughTrain) or books (eg The Wisdom of the Crowds) that really make up the foundation of Web 2.0 practices. So far I have The ClueTrain, The HughTrain, The Long Tail, The Wisdom of the Crowds, We the Media and every Wikipedia article I can find on tagging, social networking, user generated content and suchlike.

Anybody got any more suggestions?

I have another day filming IPTV pilots tomorrow, which will be frantic. We have a meeting with a potential backer on Thursday, so the stuff needs to look good. Fingers crossed.

Managed to make it to Monday without that Chinese takeaway appearing on the scales. Two massive runs over the weekend, combined with eating <1500 cals seems to have done the trick. I've also discovered that Sainsbury's tomato soup is only 75 cals for half a bottle, so I can have soup and a roll for, like, 250 calories! That's a lunch of weight loss if ever I saw one.

On the Litvenenko story, at the BBC. This is what my license fee pays for and boy, am I happy about it.

If only the iPlayer wasn't frickin' WMV. Idiots.

Did anyone see the finale of Lost? Seriously, this show was absolutely rubbish for the first 6-10 episodes of this season. There was such a massive fan revolt, and massive internet ruckus about how the show needed to improve, and the guys making the show appear to have actually listened. The second half of this season, they really delivered exactly what the fans were asking for - and as well as making a better TV show, the ratings are up and things are looking good for the fourth season.

The internet makes feedback possible in a way that has never happened before. Writers and producers are reading what people are saying about their work and taking it on board. Look at 24 - the negative fan reaction to this season has led the producers to say that next season will be a lot different. That's big stuff, but the Lost guys changed direction in the middle of a season to try and improve what they were doing.

I think we're only just beginning to understand what the internet can do for us in this regard. In the meantime, the Lost finale - OMGWTF!!!???

I went out last night for a friend's birthday with a bunch of mates and had an awesome time at a bizarre floating Chinese restaurant in London. The upside - seeing my college friends, plenty of laughs and good food. The downside: 2 vegetable spring rolls, sweet and sour pork, egg fried rice, duck pancakes and ice cream. Now I know that for my sanity I have to let myself off the hook occasionally and enjoy a meal out with friends. But now I have to shift my ass out of bed and get running to avoid being a fat mofo on Monday. Gogogo!

Lots of blogosphere action today about John C. Dvorak's new role at PodShow, as Managing Editor for tech video/audio content on the network. FWIW, I don't believe he's leaving Twit, but the plugs might change from dvorak.org/blog to podshow.com/tech. Certainly an indication that PodShow is stepping up its game - it needs to, with tens of millions of investment and not a large amount of revenue to show for it. The rumours and complaints continue to fly about the network, especially here in the UK. Interesting stuff.

I feel stuck. I've been at 217 or in and around for a week now. Granted, my original target was not to get to 217 until the end of next week, so I'm ahead of schedule in that regard. But I really want to head downward.

Thankfully, I know the reason why I haven't made much progress the last few days - London. I've spent three of five days this week on the go, and that has meant dodgy eating habits and not enough time to exercise. I need to get back on the running this weekend.

OMGWTF etc. I don't really think this is real, probably just because I skipped lunch yesterday. [JohnMcEnroe]You cannot be serious etc etc[/.]

I was called 'slim jim' yesterday, which I found rather a musing. Perhaps one day. I made myself a graph in Excel of my weight over the past four months, with a trend line on to see how quickly I will hit 210. Things are looking good for the end of June, and I might even get there ahead of schedule. That would rock.

Almost at my 217 goal for May. I actually hit 217 on Friday, but had a bit of a heavy weekend back home with my mates, so have paid the price for it this morning.

Went swimming yesterday. There's a gorgeous heated outdoor pool just across the road from me in Oxford, and it's just opened for the summer. I forget how much of a workout swimming is, it really works all your body. Top stuff.

If you can hack together Wordpress templates, flash videos, Apache and a semi-custom CMS, along with a dollop of Photoshop and Web 2.0 skillz, please get in touch. I really need to hear from you.

Also, anybody who can work out how to capture an Xbox 360 HD output to hard disk for insertion into a Final Cut Pro timeline, HELP!!

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, real life rather got in the way. Today I tipped in at 221, which isn't bad. I made myself a little Excel spreadsheet of my weight loss so far, and I'm averaging out at about 7 pounds per month, which isn't bad. I've lost 25 pounds overall now, which is some pretty awesome stuff. According to my spreadsheet trend line, I'll hit my goal weight of 210 sometime in June. Good stuff.

I had some interesting reactions to my weight loss at the weekend. I went out and bought a new jacket to go to the theatre in London on Saturday night, and I actually surprised myself by looking rather dapper in it. I don't usually think I look that good going out, but this obviously suited me. One of the female friends I was out with said she thought I looked very good indeed, and asked me how I was managing to lose weight. When I mentioned that I was existing on 1500 cals a day, she was amazed, and said that she would be miserable on 1500 calories. I was, at first, but eventually your mind just gets used to the new proportions of things.

I also went looking for some trousers on Saturday, and found a nice pair of chinos with a 40" waist. Given that my current chinos are 44", this is looking good. I also need to buy some new jeans. My 42" pair of Levis will barely stay up.

All in all, I'd say I'm happy with the way this is going, although I am starting to find that weight loss is kinda addictive. I find myself weighing first thing in the morning, and the numbers tend to dictate my attitude to the day. A bad day on the numbers means more exercise, less food and a tougher day. A good set of numbers means healthy exercise, some nice food and a bright outlook. Today was not a good morning - I was 220 yesterday and Saturday - so I'm getting ready for a bitchin' run up the road in the rain and a coffee for lunch.

I ended up having a bit of an argument with Alex about this whole thing at the weekend, when she suggested that I was starting to get a bit obsessive about this stuff. I can see where she is coming from. Unfortunately, I grew up with such an unhealthy relationship with food - my mother was always telling me how much weight I needed to lose, then feeding me up with oodles of potatos and sarnies, that the idea of being thin has always been this holy grail for me, one that never felt achievable. It was only when I went to uni, after 15 years of being called 'fat', that I put my diet and weight under my own control and got down to a level I was happy with - the 'goal weight' of 210. Even then, I wanted to go far further, but the pressures of exams stopped me. I am secretly dreaming of being sub-200, and achieving my teenage ambition of going on holiday with a fit girl and being happy about walking around in just some pool shorts. Calacanis talks of the Daniel Craig physique, and that's definitely the target. Right now, I feel like I can get it, too, if I just stick to the regime.

Alex suggested that too much dieting, being too hard on myself, would just end with me being miserable. I had to bite my tongue to avoid reasoning that at least I'd be miserable and thin.

All of which is quite enough navel gazing for one day. I'm off for my rainy run, accompanied by the sunshiney tones of Leo Laporte on this week's TWiT. As much as I love doing TWiT, I also love the weeks off, because it means I get to listen to it as a regular listener, and I damn well love that show. Another blog post... is in the can!

Weight is still coming off, slowly. Sloooooooowly. I was 221 yesterday and somehow managed to put it back on.

12 more until I hit my original target weight of 210. I need to be at 217 by the end of May, which I don't think is going to happen - damn being ill.

So, being a massive Linkin Park fan, I have the new album, Minutes to Midnight, on pre-order at iTunes, released on May 15. But when I heard that the album leaked on Friday, there was no way I was going to be able to wait a week and a half when I knew the tracks were out there, and all my other LP buddies were going to be listening. So I went and got it.

Wowsa. This is different. There are a couple of tracks on the album that sound a bit like Linkin Park, a couple that sound like Mike's side project, Fort Minor. There are a couple that sound like System of a Down and a couple like U2. The album is certainly eclectic.

It's had a really mixed reaction from fans on the various message boards. I have to say, I'm on the fifth listening now, and I'm loving it. The new stuff, whilst it sounds a lot different still has a lot of LP styling around the edges.

What's amazing is that Shinoda actually does a fair chunk of singing on the album. I remember seeing LP in concert back in the Hybrid Theory days, and he could barely hold a note to harmony. To put a studio track down and sing on it is a fairly significant progression for him, and he's clearly a musician that pushes himself.

Favourite tracks? I love the single, What I've Done, because it's probaby the closest to old skool LP on the album. But No More Sorrow has an incredible drum beat (and I'm a drummer), Hands Held High has some good rapping, and Bleed It Out ditto. I'm still warming to the ballads, but I think the worst track on the album is Valentine's Day, by far. The lyrics are such a damn cliche. Anybody else listened to it yet?

So having seen a lot of coverage of the HD-DVD hack over the past couple of days, especially re: the events on Digg, it's worth clearing up some misconceptions of exactly what it is, what it does, and how it's going to affect film watchers going forward. Many people have called it a hack to allow piracy, some have called it copy protection, some have said it's HD-DVD for Linux. I followed this stuff closely whilst covering it for bit-tech, so here's the deal.

HD-DVD uses a copy protection standard called AACS. The encryption uses two sets of keys - one key is on each HD-DVD disc, and is specific to that title. The other key is on the player (either software, like WinDVD, or hardware, like the Toshiba players). The first time AACS was cracked, a hacker called muslix64 found out how the title-specific keys were stored and how to access them, meaning that a database could be built up of each disc, allowing copying. Of course, this has the downside that you need to find the particular code for each disc you want to copy, and those codes could change between pressing runs.

The second time AACS was cracked, muslix64 went a step further and found out how the player key is stored and used. Since a player must be able to play every disc out there, this key is more 'universal' than the title-specific keys. The key was gotten from Intervideo WinDVD on the PC, a software player.

09 F9 is the WinDVD AACS code, and it will play every HD-DVD disc previously made. However, here's where things start changing. In accordance with the AACS revocation rules, the code has now been revoked, meaning that any new HD-DVD discs being shipped will recognise the 09 F9 code on any decription request and will refuse to allow playback. Additionally, Intervideo has had to push a mandatory update to WinDVD uses that changes the code and also stores it differently.

So what can 09 F9 be used for? Well, you can use it to build players that will play HD-DVDs made up until the revocation occurred, at the end of April. You can use it to build Linux software players, and to use ripping tools to make perfect, non-DRM copies of your HD-DVDs. You can't use it to rip DVDs pressed after the end of April.

But more to the point, 09 F9, aside from practicality, is a symbol - a symbol of the futility of DRM, of the consumer's annoyance at restrictions on fair use. It's a recognition that hackers will always, always defeat DRM. Whatever the code changes to, however Intervideo alters how its player-specific code is used, it will be, at most, a couple of months before AACS is broken again. And it can only be a limited amount of time before it's broken, permanently. Whilst you can revoke keys, you can't revoke the knowledge of how to find new ones.

Question: Why all the kerfuffle over the HD-DVD keys? Answer: Because geeks feel like they're actually achieving something.

All too often, the causes that us geeks get behind amount to little or nothing. We generally fail to get the general public behind our causes because, let's face it, they don't really care about what's good for them. our petitions and campaigns are thwarted, 99% of the time.

With 09 F9, it's different. The story MSM is picking up on isn't the piracy, it's the acts of online rebellion. The story is the community, not the code - but that's a great mechanism for getting the code out there. Finally, something we care about is getting attention.

The Digg rebellion, the PhotoShops, the blog posts - people are enthusiastic because they are amounting to something. There is coverage and there is action. Things are happening. And that creates a snowball effect - that one act of defiance on Digg captured the imagination of so many, proving that things could be changed, proving that there was a will out there for something to happen. Failure is often caused by isolation, by failure to band together. What the Digg incident showed was that if people are given a common platform on which to join together, it can provide an inspiration to many more.

Check out the Wired PhotoShop thread. Genius.

I'm going to see Linkin Park play in London tonight at the Astoria. Despite being incredibly 'cheesy' rock, I absolutely love LP's music, and eat up every ounce I can get of it. I got cheap tickets through the awesome LP fanclub, and the band should be playing through their new album, Minute to Midnight, which will be a chance to hear it ahead of its release in a fortnight or so.

Rock on!

So I'm not weighing myself today. As I'm trying to recover from a cold, I've found m body needs a bit more than the 1500 cals a day I've been existing on to try and fight off this rubbishness. I'm sure, then, I've put on at least a pound, so I'm going to get better (hopefully a-ok tomorrow), hit the running hard over the weekend and see what happens Monday.

Being ill sucks.

Decided to stick to a very strict diet yesterday. Consumed less than 1500 calories, helped by the fact that Alex cooked a lentil dish for dinner. I hate lentils. Went for a long run through the Oxfordshire countryside, which was absolutely gorgeous. The net result is a pound off this morning. Yes!

Unfortunately, I'm now sick as a dog. Alex had a cold last week, and was just recovering. Now I have it, and it's a stinker. Think I'm going to spend most of today chilling out in bed, watching 24 and Heroes, doing some work and feeling sorry for myself.