Fighting with Windows 11 introduced me to Linux Mint, which works perfectly! I’m not an OS geek, so I really don’t care about the OS – it’s just the thing I deal with on the way to Firefox.

My 76 y/o spouse loves Linux Mint. The 2017-bought desktop was deemed insufficient for Windows 11 and now runs Mint.

trains and busses that actually work and get people where they need to go with minimal hassle and a reasonable cost

Trains predate cars and busses have always been with us since the car. People have voted – with their cars.

The Interstate Highway System started in the 1950s. Population has more than doubled since then. Of course, we have more traffic, we have more people!

[Text from the video (her story, not my story)]

So, that was me in 2006. I weighed over 300 pounds. I had triglycerides of 500, and I had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Now, type 2 diabetes is when your body doesn’t use insulin properly, and I like to imagine it as this sugar sludge going through my bloodstream to the soundtrack of “Jaws.” Like 29 million other Americans, I was sent home with a diet, a prescription, and a little booklet about my disease. As I dug into it, I learned a dirty little truth – two, actually.

The first says that in America, if you’re diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, you carry the same health risk as somebody who’s already had one heart attack. The second is that the object of the game, unlike cancer or anything else, is to manage your diabetes, not cure you. So, your doctors will work very, very hard to try to prevent complications that might ruin the quality of your life or kill you.

I knew that this was not going to work for me. I was a hard-charging type-A global executive, and managing my diabetes was not going to be an option. So, I enlisted the help of the people at Canyon Ranch in the medical department, who I knew were a little bit more ambitious.

And here’s what we learned on a lesson on a journey that actually took us five years. I learned that even though I was 300 pounds and had type 2 diabetes, my body was absolutely perfect the way it was – for the way I was feeding it, the way I was moving it, and the way I was resting it. Quite frankly, if I wanted a different body or I wanted different health, I had to change the equation somehow.

The second thing I learned was that if I imagined my future healthy self and started living that life now – what kinds of foods I would eat, how many calories I would need to maintain a healthy weight for a lifetime – that would be the way I would achieve my goal. I had to come up with strategies that I could live with for two days, two weeks, two months, two years.

Now, when you do this and you live this way, interesting things happen – like magic. You wake up two years later and you’re almost at your goal. I learned that I had to keep track of everything. So, I used iPhone apps like “Lose It!” and I used my UP band to track how much sleep I was getting and how much exercise I was getting along the way. And this really helped me to keep the game kind of rational instead of emotional the way it can get.

This was a big war. I had to break this down to the smallest battle I could win every day because I have a short attention span. I had to take it down to the cellular level – what would make my cells happier and healthier every single day. And with every drop of glucose or every drop of blood I fed into my glucose meter, I could tell immediately if I was moving in the right direction. I became my own science experiment, and I learned a lot.

For example, when I didn’t sleep or I jumped time zones or took a red-eye, my blood sugar was 20 points higher the next day and I craved carbohydrates. Well, I didn’t need to eat; what I needed was a nap. Portions were always my biggest downfall. I come from the land of all-you-can-eat shrimp and endless platters of pasta. When somebody showed me what a real single portion of something was, it was a huge disconnect for me. So, I needed to really figure out how to do that.

I started eating with smaller plates, eating with chopsticks to eat more slowly, and I promised myself I could have anything I wanted as long as I ate it with a knife and a fork. Trust me, it feels ridiculous to eat a Snickers bar like this, but it helped me be more conscious of what I was eating.

I learned to be in perpetual motion all day, every day – looking for ways to move and to fidget because fidgeting can burn 200-300 calories a day. I counted steps, I got a standing desk, and I learned that my one hour of walking every day was as good for my head as it was for my body.

And finally, life’s too short to live without ice cream. When I was first diagnosed, I made a list of all my favorite foods, and I went and did a glycemic index with my glucose meter of each one. Then I went back to each food and I tweaked it, adding a little fat, removing a little sugar, until everything fit in my plan. And now, I plan for a perfect scoop of premium ice cream every day. What I learned is that, given half a shot, your body will recover. It’s an amazing adaptive machine, self-healing. Mine did.

I lost over 110 pounds. I now have a perfect lipid profile. I have had a healthy, normal blood sugar without medication for more than five years. I am no longer a type 2 diabetic. [Pause for applause] So, thank you very much.

So, if any of you have a health issue that you need to deal with or a life change you need to deal with, I urge you to imagine your healthy future self and start living that life now. Break your journey down into little battles you can win. Become your own science experiment and come up with strategies that will last for two days or two years. And most of all, you need to start eating like your life depends on it because it does.

(Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Punctuation and paragraphs by ChatGPT.)

As usual, I have typed 500 words when 50 will do, and for that I apologize.

Go to those instances and read what’s there

No, I do not care to and why would you do that? You already have determined it’s not right for you. Any alleged content problem that you have to see by going there would, if true, be a problem there. Does that make it a problem here? If I have to take extraordinary steps here to see it here, isn’t that on me? Isn’t the apparatus doing what it is supposed to be doing if I seek out a thing and find it?

The ultimate measure of freedom is the freedom to abstain. (Nobody is forcibly opting us in to reading their content.)

I’m just a regular user of SDF so these things aren’t up to me, but I would think that it would take more than “because it exists.” Defederation and Federation shouldn’t be used to signal alignment and nonalignment of expression, but for reasons of managing the network itself. A telephone company provides service to everyone and doesn’t care what you do with your phone. But, if someone is using it in a way that disrupts the network itself or others’ ability to use the network, the telephone company should act to protect the overall integrity of the network. Even then it wouldn’t silence the speech because of the speech, but because of the network.

Their instance continues to exist without us, their free speech continues, but by remaining federated we are giving them a platform.

Look, it’s one thing to be put off by someone going out of their way to affront you. It’s another to feel affronted after going out of your way to find if there is something objectionable anywhere. By that logic, since you have found something then defederation alone should not be enough, as “we are giving them a platform” still, because other people might visit there directly instead of through federation. Therefore, due to that situation, they should not have an DNS entry so you work on their Registrar to “deplatform” them. Then, because someone can connect using an IP address, their ISP should disconnect their service or else they’re providing their ISP as a platform. But as they can get another ISP in this day of mobile connectivity, you could chase down their power company, yes, because their power company is a platform – as is their landlord – as is their employer. And so on.

I remain unconvinced.

If I am reading the situation wrong, I apologize.

The reason that I am not a member at beehaw was because they were overly wrapped up in concerns such as this one. I’m here for enjoyable chats with people, not to take sides in the latest macro-politics or causes or whatever lately is stirring the pot or making the winds blow. These things are fine and some people are interested in them, but I’m turned off by the idea of an instance that is particularly identified one way or another when I am not concerned with any of that.

What I’m looking for are kind souls that share an interest in technology and an instance that was widely federated so that a wide variety of my interest groups (music, weightloss, networking, ancient Stoicism) are available. That’s why I joined here. SDF has been around a long time and many who have enjoyed its offerings have held many different opinions and yet shared this resource peacefully.

I’m particularly turned off by people that want a silo with only the right causes, only the right thinking, only the right speech.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have management and protection of against those that are unkindly trolling or actively trying to do technical damage. Ban those actually doing evil. But if people of good cheer share different views kindky as neighbors and friends, I have no problem with that and don’t want to see that roped off.

Remember the two rules of FidoNet? “Don’t be excessively annoying. Don’t be easily annoyed.” That’s all I’m saying.