Changing up Breakfast

Spinach. It's not gonna kill you.

Yeah, I’ve been putting on quite a few pounds the past year. In fact, 20 pounds. It’s a freshman’s 20, except I’m in military college and I exercise quite frequently. What’s the source of my weight gain? I think it’s my diet.

Life is like a Plane Ride

“Know where you want to go in life”

I remember taking the Korean Airline to In’chon International airport in the summer of 2006. When I got on the plane at Pearson International, the pilot told us that we would land at In’chon in exactly 13 hours and 51 minutes. Now, if you know anything about flight, you would know that headwinds and tailwinds, as well as turbulence affect the speed of the plane enormously. In fact, for 99% of a flight, the plane is off-course. The pilot simply adjusts the plane’s direction constantly so that it does not veer off-course too far.

What freaks me out to this day is the fact that we landed at In’chon International exactly 13 hours and 51 minutes later, like the pilot said we would. How did the pilot do that? How was this possible?

Karaoke

Today I went to Yonge and Steeles to go and meet some of my dad’s friends. They’ve been practicing some old school music from the 70′s and 80′s in an amateur “band” or so to speak. so I felt really out of place. But after a while, I surprised my self by having a good time – relating with people who were, perhaps, thirty years my senior.

I tried my best to sing those oldies songs – like “up where we belong” and “kokomo”, etc. but then I added in a few new songs like from epik high and sg wannabe etc…. the whole teenage kpop list. I was surprised by their open-mindedness to the music of today.

As you know, I’ve been having this awful cold. It made me sing out of tune and I can’t count how many times I cracked my voice. It was okay though – everytime I made a mistake I kinda smiled a sheepish smile and the older women laughed… I found myself doing that more and more. Maybe that was kinda off the wall and/or inappropriate… whatever I had fun teasing them ^_^.

As I sang those few songs tonight, I really began to think to myself – so much so that I sometimes stopped looking at the tv screen with the lyrics on it and kinda paused a bit – just thinking to myself.

I never really had true respect for seniors. Because of my Korean heritage, I bow to them, I greet them respectfully and I am generally well-mannered towards them. But I never saw 40-50 year old men and women as potential friends before.

I think what I learned today is that the youthfulness within people never disappears – it just appears less often as time goes by. The people I met today were just like me – albeit a bit differently dressed and behaved, but altogether a bright, jovial bunch of high spirits.

Teens today are too caught up with people of the same age. Sometimes it pays off to spend some time with those who are younger than us, and those who are older. Our seniors indirectly teach us a mentality that is mature and beyond our current knowledge and wisdom. Our juniors indirectly remind us of ourselves in our youthful stage; we may benefit them with the knowledge gained through our experiences and also receive from them an essence of something eternal within us – our own jeunesse (youthfulness).

Thinking in this mentality rings a famous line from Louis Armstrong’s song – “What a Wonderful World”

I hear babies cry I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than Ill never know
And I think to myself… what a wonderful world

What better way to end this post than with oldies song??
-Eric

Fixing Corrupt Word Documents

So I was working on a Calculus summative on Microsoft Word when some of the formatting started to go all out of wack.

I saved it, and re-opened it and got this file error:

The Office Open XML file Unit 1 Summative.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.
Details
Unspecified error
Location: Part: /word/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 208781

… like what the heck is going on?? I have to turn this in in less than an hour!!!!

So I downloaded about 10 programs that claim to “fix broken word files”, and tried them all – not even one of them worked.

That’s it- now I’m really pissed.

I researched on the web and found out how to extract specific XML files from word documents. Apparently, if you rename yourdocumentnamehere.docx file to yourdocumentnamehere.zip, you can gain access to the file structure within the word document.

From here, I opened up the document.xml and searched for Line: 2, Column: 208781. At column 208781, I found the specific .xml tag I’m looking for: “/m:e”. The slash at the front of the tag tells me it is an ending of the tag, so I then basically I scrolled around trying to find the beginning of the tag that looks identical to the ending, except without the “/” at the front. After thirty minutes of searching I found “m:e” and then deleted everything between and including “m:e” and “/m:e”.

I then saved the document.xml and then converted the .zip file back into a .docx file.

OMG it works again!!!! I lost about a paragraph of information, but it’s better than nothing.

If any of you guys ever have the same error, try my method out. If still having problems, contact me via e-mail at ericchoi53@gmail.com and send me your file – I’d be happy to fix it up for you ^_^.

Lose 20 pounds in 4 weeks… without exercise!!

As teens, we’re very conscious of our physical image. Two years ago, I was very overweight. I used to hear bull$#@^ from several people telling me that I’m just fine the way that I am. No; if I can’t run for an hour, and have normal heart pressure, I’m not fine. Besides, my man boobs (my friends used to jokingly call them moobs) prevented me from swimming or changing for gym class – even though they were not severe at all. So here’s the diet plan I used to lose 20 pounds in a few weeks about a year and a half ago – since then I’ve never looked back ^_^.

While balancing diet, supplements, and exercise may be the most effective way to lose fat, there is rarely any teen who has either the time or willingness to go to such lengths to lose weight. Fortunately, there is yet hope for all of us lazy teens. So listen in and follow carefully.

There are four parts to losing weight without exercising. In order to understand this procedure, you may need some background knowledge in nutrition – how it is processed by our body in fact. Here’s a reworded excerpt from bodybuildingdungeon.com:

Carbohydrates have to be burned up before fat is burned up… that is why it makes perfect sense for step one to be cutting carbs.

When you do so, your body realizes there’s no more carbs to burn for energy, so it must find another energy source: fat.

Part 1: No High-Carbohydrate Foods

That’s right, no high-carbohydrate foods: no rice, bread, cereal, potatoes, pasta, or breaded fried food (i.e. chicken nuggets). The only exception to this would be within 90 minutes of resistance training, but that’s off topic since we’re trying to lose weight without exercise.

One nifty way to tell if something is high-carb would be to see if the carbohydrate is a “white” carbohydrate. (you notice how bread, rice, potato, etc. are very pale in color)

Part 2: Eat the same stuff everyday

Most successful dieters eat the same stuff everyday. It makes perfect sense – the more your body eats the same stuff, the better it is at handling it. I suggest mixing proteins, legumes, and vegetables every meal. The more you repeat the ingredients, the more effective this diet will be.

Proteins

• chicken breast
• egg whites (avoid yolk)
• pork
• several other kinds of meat like beef

Legumes

• peas
• beans
• lentils

Vegetables

• cabbage
• spinach
• broccoli
• mixed vegetables
• you get the idea

You can eat as much as you want of the above three groups of foods. Yes, even chicken breast. Also try to eat 4 times per day – eating three or less times a day actually slows down your metabolism and makes you gain fat much easier.

Part 3: Don’t drink calories

I can’t stress this enough – drink colossal amounts of water. Other drinks that are allowed are coffee (without cream), or other low calorie beverages like green tea (which actually speeds up your metabolism and helps you lose weight from what I hear). If you want to, you can drink diet soda since it’s low in calories.

Never drink: milk, soft drinks (coke, sprite, pepsi, etc.) , fruit juice (fruit juice contains massive quantities of sugar and calories)

Part 4: Take a Break

Yes, please take a break once a week from dieting (I recommend Saturday since you get to eat out with friends on Saturdays). If you don’t, it’ll get harder and harder to lose weight. Why?

Because if you diet for extended periods of time, your body freaks out and thinks you’re starving. Then the body tries to store a lot of what you eat as energy for the long term – also known as body fat.

So go ahead and eat that chocolate bar! Drink that milkshake! You’re free!! You’re all free!!!

So bonne chance everyone; you’ll be sure to get shocking results provided that you try this out. Like I always say: it won’t hurt to try it out.

-Eric