I’ve always had a sexy pretty nice body for a girl my age. I’ve never been overweight but I’ve never been skinny either. I’ve always said that I’ve wanted to lose weight but I never followed through with any plans. It wasn’t until a lovely gentleman doucher at my school pissed me off that I’ve actually been serious about this. We’re going on a spring break trip together and by that time I want to show off my super hot new body and make him regret saying what he said to me. So I have exactly one month and seven days to get a beautiful body.

When I decided to do this diet and exercise thing, I weighed 150 pounds. My waist was 33 inches my thighs were 22 inches and my hips were 39 inches; those are the areas I want to concentrate on the most.

Everyday this week, I’ve been very particular about what I eat and drink. My menu is as follows:

Breakfast: 8 fl oz of Sunny D and a Quaker granola bar (yes, I measure out how much I drink)

Lunch: Turkey sandwich with wheat bread, mustard, lettuce, and onions and water

Dinner: Water and a very small portion of whatever my mom cooks

Everyday right before I eat dinner, I do this really great exercise video. I’m not exactly sure what it’s called, but the cover says “Leslie Sansone Walk at Home: 3 Mile Weight Loss Walk.” No joke, it works really good and I actually feel it working. It’s actually very fun to do and it seems even more fun when I listen to my iPod at the same time. Also, I’ve read that while watching TV, during commercials you can lose inches off of your waist in about eight days by sucking and holding your stomach in during the whole commercial break.

My goal is to lose ten pounds by spring break and so far, it looks like it’s working. I now weigh 147, my waist is a little more than 31 inches, my hips are a little more than 38 inches, and my thighs are still at 22 inches, but a little less than before. Not to toot my own horn, but my legs have always been pretty tight and fit so I don’t think I’ll lose a lot in that department.

To the lovely people that may read this: I’ll keep you posted! But if you don’t care, then don’t read it!

xoxo, Hoshi Star

Assassin’s Creed 2 Multiplayer for iPhone/iPod touch has been released in New Zealand, and will be released in other countries as soon as the clock strikes 12 AM! For an introductory sale, this game will be FREE for 2 days, then going up to the original price of $2.99.

Assassin’s Creed 2: Multiplayer, an exclusive game for iPhone & iPod touch and the first game in the series that allows you to compete against your friends.

Features:

LIVE MULTIPLAYER ACTION
Assassin’s Creed 2: Multiplayer is a REAL-TIME ONLINE multiplayer game using a WI-FI connection letting you compete against up to 3 other player- controlled assassins.*

KILL OR GET KILLED
The ultimate goal of the game is to hunt down other players and assassinate them before they kill you.*

BLEND IN THE CROWD
Escape other players taking advantage of your environments & blending into the crowd of citizens.*

MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENTS
Play in 3 different environments from Assassin’s Creed 2 inspired by Italian cities from the Renaissance.*

LETHAL POWER-UPS
Use up to 6 different power-ups to get an edge over your opponents.*

BECOME THE MASTER ASSASSIN
Increase your notoriety by defeating other players, and fight your way up to the top to become the Master Assassin. The notoriety system uses a dynamic ranking system to position you on the leaderboards.*

ACHIEVEMENTS
Collect up to 24 achievements and post your records on Facebook.*

CHALLENGE YOUR FRIENDS
Manage your list of friends and send them live invitations to join your game sessions and find out who amongst you is THE best assassin.

iTunes Link (NZ Only ATM): http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/assassins-creed-ii-multiplayer/id346782480?mt=8

With over 220 million iPods out there, it is pretty safe to assume that the iPod is here to stay. The iPod began life as a portable music player and seemingly overnight became podcast, photo, video, phone and gaming..  Today the iPod, especially the iPod touch/iPhone, is a great device to use.  And it’s even more lovely when you make it part of your home Hi-Fi or multi-room audio visual system.

Contrary to popular belief, the iPod can sound very good.  It just requires adjusting certain settings in the associated iTunes library so that when CDs are ripped (copied) into iTunes and synced to the iPod, they retain their full bandwidth and are not overly compressed. This can make the iPod ideal as a central music server for your home system. However, because the iPod is based on a limited number of buttons and a small screen, you must constantly navigate up and down through a series of ‘nested’ menus, and remember a ‘mental map’ of where all the special features are accessed this can make any iPod awkward to use when it’s not in the palm of hand.

So what is the best way to make your iPod part of your home system?

The URC PSX-2 is an AV iPod dock, with built in automation for your iPod, that provides simple to use high-end music server functionality using a programmable control system and a TV. As well as all the standard iPod features the PSX-2 also enables non-standard iPod functions like; play more from this artist, shuffle my jazz, alphabetical search and the intuitive ability to create a play list from a keypad, remote control or your TV set, all without having to remove the iPod from its dock or use iTunes.

The URC PSX-2 displays cover art and title information either on your TV screen or on a selected URC remote controls. The PSX-2 also acts as personal jukebox enabling you to add albums or songs to your jukebox and them playing them back without them being stored on the iPod – this is ideal when using a friend’s iPod at a party! The ability to alphabetically search music is another great feature of the PSX-2 , especially if you have a large music collection.

The URC  PSX-2 is £340.00 inc VAT, if you would like to find out more how it could be integrated into your system please contact us.

I’ve had to take the bus a lot more recently since I temporarily lost my license due to a large amount of unpaid parking tickets. In a way it’s kind of exciting to see the city from a different vantage point and to have the chance to observe all the other commuters at my leisure. I like it when it’s quiet and I can just let myself be carried home while lost in my own thoughts. 

Lately though, I’ve been feeling really alienated by all the technology I see around me. I just had a really interesting conversation with a one of my friend’s about this yesterday morning and I certainly get the sense that I’m not the only one. I’ve always wondered at what point in your life you can see the difference between the way things used to be and the way things are. Most of the time, we are living the changes in such a subtle way that it’s difficult to see where the line was formed between one generational zeitgeist and another. 

Our parents have lived long enough to be able to compare their sense of before to now. I never saw such a drastic change in my own live. All the technological advancements seems to follow one another in a linear and logical sense. Each change no bigger than the last, but I suppose that as I am approaching my thirties I have enough experience that I can distance myself and observe all of this technology from a before and after mindset. 

I was twenty-one the first time I got an email address and it wasn’t until a year or two later that I owned a computer and was able to really explore the Internet and integrate its use into my day-to-day life. Up until then, my experience with the Internet had consisted of watching one of my high school girlfriends participate in an online chat room where everyone pretended to be a vampire. We’d be two or three girls sitting around her telling her what to write and marveling at the sort of games people played with one another. 

Now, not a day goes by where I don’t check my various email accounts and networking sites at least five to ten times a day. When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty and living on my own, I would go out when I wanted to feel that connection with others. I’d visit friends, sit in cafes, walk around the city. As things stand today, I barely have a reason to go outside. Hell, I can “talk” all day to a variety of friends and acquaintances some of which I’ve never even met. 

That’s not all that had changed, even out in the “real” world making a connection with a stranger in your immediate surroundings is next to impossible. Sitting on the bus and looking at the people around me, I see closed faces staring down at their ipods, blackberries, cellphones, kindles and whatever else you can think of. Practically all of their senses are overtaken by technology. A technology that allows us to communicate with anyone, at any time, in any place, but that alienates us from our immediate surroundings. Just once, I’d like to look over at the person sitting next to me and see a smiling face instead of the top of their head or to at least be able to take a peak at the cover of the book that interesting person is reading instead of seeing the cover of some homogenized reading tablet. 

Are people so afraid to sit in silence? Do they always have to occupy themselves with something tangible that they can hold in their hands as opposed to feeling the nakedness associated with standing alone in the world? 

I’m not suggesting a return to the way things were before. As annoyed or frustrated as I can be with all of this, I love my laptop and my high speed Internet connection. I’d be happy to get my hands on a kindle and have immediate access to so much reading material without having to stock my apartment with a million bookshelves, but there’s something to be said about the actual feel of paper in your hands, about the weight a book holds. 

Ok so a few people have asked me how to do this.

Firstly go to:
http://www.daveproxy.co.uk and in the box below type in:
iPhone.tvcatchup.com

Then click register.

Sign up and when you’re done you have the list of channels, but they still don’t work.

Click on the station and when the blank page comes up copy the channel link in to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk

Voilà! Tv on your iPhone/iPod touch

Follow me on Twitter!
@Lukeyyy_

Thanks for reading! And questions/comments just @reply me!

Here are some more wallpapers for the iPhone. Just right click each image and SAVE AS.

How to download the above images and save them as your iPhone wallpaper.

1) Click each image to open up
2) Right click on image and click SAVE AS
3) Save the image to your pictures folder that you are syncing with the iPhone in iTunes
4) Next time you sync your iPhone the image should copy across to your iPhone
5) You should now see your custom wallpaper on the iPhone’s start-up screen as well as for incoming calls that do not have a contact assigned to them

Here are some more wallpapers for the iPhone. Just right click each image and SAVE AS.

How to download the above images and save them as your iPhone wallpaper.

1) Click each image to open up
2) Right click on image and click SAVE AS
3) Save the image to your pictures folder that you are syncing with the iPhone in iTunes
4) Next time you sync your iPhone the image should copy across to your iPhone
5) You should now see your custom wallpaper on the iPhone’s start-up screen as well as for incoming calls that do not have a contact assigned to them

Two separate contrarian views of the iPhone phenomenon. Important to challenge and be skeptical of the accepted orthodoxy.

From Dean Bubley’s Disruptive Wireless blog

I’m wondering if the great drive towards mobile applications on smartphones, catalysed by Apple although obviously around for years before, has the longevity that many people seem to be assuming. Operators, device vendors, OS providers, 3rd parties – everyone wants a piece of the supposed action.

But maybe it’s just a fashion? After all, do you *really* want any form of ongoing “relationship” with a handset manufacturer? Will the mass market really want to keep adding new stuff to their device?

The first 100-200m owners of PCs bought and installed lots of applications. The most recent 100-200m have probably just got Office, a browser, Norton or some other security package, Skype and their favourite IM client. Apart from gamers, most people don’t continually look for and download PC apps – although they’re there occasionally if need strikes.

And an older clip from adbusters

by STEPHANO.