For the last two months, I’ve been on a diet consisting mainly of Nutrilett and Naturdiet based shakes and Varma Koppen soups. It is a type of diet called VLCD, or Very Low Calery Diet. The fundamental idea is to eat less calories than your body consumes (like most diets).  You are supposed to drink about six shakes a day (a powder that you mix with water yourself), but I have not been a rigid follower of the rules. About half of the time I have been eating some solid food after work, mainly drinking the shakes and soups up until 5PM.

Results are in: Minus 10 kilos in weight and minus 5 cm around the waist.

The longer I have been on the diet, the slower the weight loss. On the other hand, I have probably been eating (and drinking) a bit more in the last month as well.

I am dead tired of the shakes, so I will now have a week eating only solid food before continuing substituting some of my meals with shakes again. I still have a bit more to go.

Also, next year I will get back to training Kung Fu, and swim a bit more.

Beach 2009, here I come.

As you might have noticed, I have now changed the URL of this blog to the newly registered frankjohansson.com.

So, to clear things up, the following addresses are valid:

http://www.killersnail.com/blog
http://www.frankjohansson.com/blog
http://www.frankjohansson.se/blog

They will all go to the frankjohansson.com. Eventually, I might move the hosting from my own server to a dedicated web hotel. But nothing is decided yet.

Happy browsing!

Hi everybody!

Do you want to join us on a trip to Iceland this Easter?

Due to the economic crisis in Iceland right now the trips there are extremely cheap. You can fly there and back from Stockholm for about 2500SEK, and hotels are not very expensive. And since we will likely go around Easter, you will only need half a day off from work.

The preliminary plan is as follows:

• 9/4 The afternoon before Good Friday – Flight from Stockholm Arlanda to Reykjavik
• 10-12/4 Time for Icelandification
• 13/4 Easter Monday – Going home.

Preliminary budget (per person):

• Flights (incl. VAT and fees): 2500SEK
• Hotel: 520-1900SEK depending on standards and location. For 480SEK/night you get a four-star hotel with pool and spa. You can also live in a hostel for about 130SEK/night if you want to.
• Food: 1500SEK if you eat out and have a few drinks every day.
• Transports: 500SEK if you want to travel around Iceland a bit.
• Total: around 4000-6000SEK per person. If we go on Good Friday instead, the price will drop about 1000SEK.

We were thinking that if we are a few people the trip will be even better! That doesn’t mean that we have to stick together all the time unless you want to, and everyone can go about to do what they please.

Does it sounds like fun? Let us know! If the trip happens, we will probably book it in December while the extremely low prices are in effect and the tickets remain. Does it sound interesting but you are uncertain if you want to go or can afford it in four months? Let us know anyway!

Frank & Marianne

It is now six weeks since I first got my Asus Eee 1000H.

At the same time as i collected it I bought 2GB RAM, which is twice the amount of the original RAM.

Since then I have also bought a nice skin from laptopskins.net, making it look a little more original (can be seen briefly in the Einstein Tattoo gallery, next to a Mac Air).

So what do I think?

I think it’s lovely. The screen is great, the keyboard is good for a netbook (although the keys can be a little hard to read in a completely dark room), the performance is better than expected and the battery is absolutely fantastic, especially if you use the built-in under-/overclock button to lower the processor speed to 1.2Ghz (Normal mode is 1.6Ghz and Super Performance mode is 1.9Ghz).

Watching DivX/XviD movies while traveling, the battery lasts over six hours on a single charge. That’s at least three full movies. And the 160GB HDD is big enough to store 100+ movies if you want (I currently have around 70 movies on it and a few seasons of my favorite TV shows).

Playing older games like Sam & Max, the WarCraft series and Knights of the Old republic I & II, it handles very well. Photoshop CS4 starts in about 6 seconds. Sleep and Wake-up is pretty much instant.

What I probably have used it mostly for is reading comic books and ebooks. I just hold the Eee like an open book, with the screen to the left, and navigate with the arrow keys.

For comics (.cbr and .cbz), I use CDisplay Comic Reader (also called CDisplay Sequential Image Viewer).

You can set it to always rotate the screen in a certain direction when a comic is opened, and to also fill the screen to fit an entire page. The size of the screen is just perfect for this. Even if the resolution is the same as on the Eee 900, the screen size is bigger. Personally I find that the 900′s screen is a little bit to small for comics. Readable, but not without an effort (not that I didn’t manage to read the whole limited series of Watchmen on it). Not so for the 1000H.

For ebooks, Adobe Reader works just fine. I have set the icon panel to always show the Rotate and Fill icons, and there is also a setting that lets you remember where you last ended your reading without the need to manually bookmark. I am currently in the last quarter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, most of it being read while in bed.

For reading in this matter, I actually find it easier on the eyes reading on the screen than on a printed paper book. The text is very sharp, and the background brightness is usually set to the second lowest setting, giving an even light all over the screen.

So what’s bad about it?

Pretty much nothing. Compared to the Eee 900, if feels a little bulky and heavy, but compared to a regular laptop it is extremely light and portable.

Again compared to the Eee 900, the 1000H actually produces some noise. The fan is inactive 90% of the time or so, but in a silent room you can hear the drive spinning. When the prizes of SSDs gets lower, I will likely buy one to replace the mechanical one. But right now I don’t feel it’s worth spending more than 3000 SEK for a 128GB drive.

Summary:
I do not regret buying the Eee 1000H. Not in the slightest.

[Written on an Asus Eee 1000H]

I just got home from the tattoo parlor House of Pain Sthlm where I have spent money (and some pain) and Micke has spent hours putting ink in my arm(s).

This one only took three hours, compared to about 4,5 hours for Frankenstein. They are about the same size but this has less details due to Einstein’s light hair and smoother skin.

Nah, less talk and more pictures:

I also scheduled a new time for my next tattoo project as well: March 11th. Aside from the two times I already have scheduled in April/May with Nille at Salvation Tattoo.