New beginnings

I've been quiet over the past two weeks because there have been new beginnings in my life and I have been waiting for them to develop before writing about them.

I've started my final year of the MBA; this term's course is Finance, which occupies itself with moving financial resources around in time. So far there have been two lectures, which haven't overly taxed my brain (although the same cannot be said for all the participants); we have learnt how much one should contribute every month in order to receive a large pension, and whether it is better to buy a flat as opposed to renting (no clear answer here, because it depends on the interest rate, the price and any number of psychological factors). This week we should be receiving our financial calculators, which will make calculating some figure to the power of 360 somewhat easier.

After a chance phone call, I have started to visit an alternative medicine care centre (David Lodge has his protagonist visit such a centre in his novel "Therapy"; he calls it the Wellbeing Centre, which is a good name), where I am receiving massages and acupuncture. Unfortunately, my visits will be put on hold for a couple of weeks as yesterday I had a few growths (BCC) removed from my back and I am not to return until the stitches are out. The first acupuncture session was slightly painful, sending electric shocks up my arm after the therapist presumably poked a nerve, but the second was painless. The sole massage which I have received also tended to be painful, but that's because there are muscles in my leg which hurt. Presumably, pain is good. 

It doesn't help my general condition that I have been diagnosed once again with anaemia and that I am overweight.

My goals are to improve my body tone (ie no muscle pain) and to lose at least 10kg in weight. Last night I met with what they call a 'Naturapath'; after measuring my height and weight, we talked mainly about what I eat. There are a few things which I have to cut out entirely from my diet, to be replaced by raw vegetables and plenty of water. I find it very difficult to eat raw vegetables, primarily because they were never part of my diet when I was growing up. I will try to eat cucumbers and carrots.

One interesting aspect is that I eat according to the clock as opposed to eating when I am hungry. I was told not to eat my slice of brown bread at 5:45am, but rather wait until my body tells me that I need to eat it. I got up three hours ago and all that has entered my mouth so far is one cup of cold water with squeezed lemon (something new), three cups of herbal tea and 200g yoghurt (with only one spoon of granola as opposed to three; this is to be replaced with flax seed); I don't feel hungry yet.

There was an interview with a famous Israeli basketball coach in the papers over the weekend; the most important part of the interview for me was the fact that he lost 15kg of excess weight thanks to acupuncture. When I mentioned this in the clinic, I was told that acupuncture can't make the body lose weight (good for them; they are not making any false claims) but that it can lower one's hunger. As mentioned above, I don't eat (yet) when I am hungry, but changing my eating habits and acupuncture may make a big difference to when and what I eat.

Closing off a previous post, I obtained access to the unicode complete Delphi XE. After making a few changes to my program (some of which will back propagate), I successfully compiled a unicode version of our flagship exam. More and more customers were having problems running the exam on their computers, and the new version has come just in time. The exam has no dependencies on outside libraries (such as special components or database access) which is why it was so easy to port the program. Converting other programs to unicode will be a major undertaking and won't be done unless there is no other option.