SteveOH

Equipment:

In preparation for my juice detox I purchased the Breville BJE200XL 700-Watt Compact Juice Fountain which has great reviews, is easy to clean, and had a descent price point.  I wanted something that will extract as much juice as possible without breaking the bank, and this seems to fit the bill.  Other machines are said to be more efficient (masticating juicers by Omega, etc) but they are at least 2x more expensive than this model.  Either way, I think its a good start for the detox and for daily use thereafter.

Books and Resources:

I purchased the following books to assist me in my journey of detoxing and consuming the recommended amount of vegetables and fruits on a daily basis:

The Big Book of Juices: More Than 400 Natural Blends for Health and Vitality Every Day 

• Great recipes for daily use and to add some variety for the detox

The Top 100 Juices: 100 Juices to Turbo-Charge Your Body with Vitamins and Minerals (The Top 100 Recipes Series)

• Same as above

The Juice Lady’s Turbo Diet: Lose ten pounds in ten days-the healthy way! 

• This book provides a step-by-step for the 10 day detox.  It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll update this post once it does.

So I’ve decided to do a 10 day juice detox, which entails drinking vegetable and fruit juices only for 10 days.  There’s more to it than that, which I will outline later, as well as some modifications I’m going to make to suit my personal needs and goals.  I intend to post once a day for the entire duration of the cleanse, which I am planning for the entire month of Feb (more details to come).  I will also outline my motivation (prior to commencing), my supplies and diet plan, supplementation, my goals and my expectations throughout.

I will post once a day with all of the information, outlined in the following sections (below).  The only deviation from this will be the beginning and end comprehensive posts, any recipes I think may be helpful, supplement write ups and reviews, and anything that is not specifically juice detox oriented.

Post Sections and their descriptions:

Feelings and Thoughts

This section will contain my thoughts and feelings about the process, possible improvements, how its affecting my daily life, etc.  This should give the reader an idea of what it takes to get through it (from my research and prior experience I know it’s going to be quite difficult) and perhaps some tips that I can come up with.

Resources and Tips

This section will contain resources that I am utilizing on that particular day, that is, the books (and recipes), juicers and equipment, websites, blog posts, etc.  Further, I’ll include any tips that I discover or think up on a daily basis.  At the conclusion of the detox I will aggregate all the tips, resources and supplies for a comprehensive list.  That way someone can work backwards for the “best” preparation.

Goal Progress

At the beginning of the detox I will outline some of my goals and the corresponding issues / problems that these goals should solve (if applicable).  For instance, I intend on reducing my body fat and trying to maintain as much lean body mass (LBM) as possible, so I’ll be evaluating that frequently to see how it progresses.  (I know a lot of bodybuilders are interested to see just how much muscle they’d lose on this diet / detox, so hopefully this can shed some light on the subject).

Supplementation

Most instructions for the detox omit or exclude supplementation (i.e. vitamins, minerals, performance supplements, etc) for one reason or another.  I’m going to include the ones that I take and their rationale.

Diet

What I eat, drink, etc will go here.  I’m typically add the recipes in a separate post.  So if you want to see progress, you come here, if you want to get a recipe, you can just go directly to that page.  I will also include the removal and addition of foods at the beginning and end of the process.

Exercise

I work out between 3 – 6 times a week (depending on the week) and I don’t intend on stopping while fasting.  But I will definitely change the manner and frequency of my workouts to adjust to the added strain.  All those details go here.

I will be as specific as possible utilizing psuedo-scientific methods so that anyone (including myself) can duplicate the experience, improve upon it, or deviate from it according to their personal needs.

This is an updated post to the previous post regarding the READ ONLY / WRITE PROTECTED VOLUMES IN SERVER 2008.

So the work-around presented in the previous post will get you by, but it’s not a solution.  I set up a script to run the diskpart script every hour, and still, I found that it was almost happening randomly. I noticed that it only happened on my Disk 2 which was on the built-in SATA controller using the JMircron chipset.  Interesting.  After I installed the new RAID array (here) I noticed that now my system drive was now listed as Drive 2, and that in fact it was being listed as read-only and my script no longer worked.  What a pain in the butt.  It was especially annoying since SQL Server and IIS would start failing since they couldn’t write to the system drive.  What a mess.

At this point you have to step back and consider the situation.  I just upgraded some hardware and the situation changed, but after numerous software changes the issue remained.  So what’s hardware related but lives in software such that it can tell the OS that a disk is read only?  The answer is, a driver.

Then began my quest in searching for a driver issues with the JMicron chipset.  Low and behold, it’s a known issue.  Once I installed an updated the driver, the issue that would bring my server to a halt VANISHED.

Link to JMb36X Windows Driver.

Make sure you research your set-up first before installing a random driver.  You’ll only make a bad situation worse.

I purchased 2 WDC WD20EARS-00M drives and raided them in a RAID 0 configuration (124 KB Stripe) for performance of non-crucial operations.  Meaning, anything I have on there I can live with losing OR have backed up at least twice elsewhere.  This includes virtual machines, movies and music.  Anyway, I wanted to post these benchmarks using HD Tach as there have been a ton of reports that these drives are no good in RAID configurations.  They’re probably true, especially since these drives have variable spin rates, which fluctuate independent of each other and can pose problems.

When I first set them up I noticed HUGE fluctuations and large differences in transfer speeds.  From 200+ MB/s to ~80 MB/s.  I could not duplicate them (not yet at least) but the HD Tach results are promising.  Let’s see how this works out.  I will update if I have any problems.

The first 3 images are the RAID configuration, with the last being a single drive.

NOTE: I was unable to utilize HD Tune Pro 3.5 to test the raid configuration as it only showed the drives at 2199 GB and reported read speeds of 12460.9 MB/s. There’s obviously something wrong there, probably caching on the RAID controller and within Windows Server 2008, and the fact it’s over 2TB.

UPDATE: I upgraded to HD Tune Pro 3.6 and it is able to benchmark the configuration.  It shows that performance ranges from 250 MB/s to 80 MB/s at the end of the drives.  Which is great, it’s roughly twice the performance of a single drive, which is what we expected.  I also posted the Random Access benchmarks for the single and raided drives.  You can tell which is which by the drop down list in the top left hand corner of HD Tune Pro.

The low IOPS on the RAID configuration shows that these drives are not intended for high I/O environments, such as a web server or SQL Server.  They do, however, work just fine for low – medium I/O file servers as the good sequential read speeds are perfect for that kind of work.

I will be doing this configuration on my test machine very soon since my previous guide (here) is a bit outdated.  For now you can follow the previous instructions and modify them per the instructions below:

From SuperUser:

I’ve done it but not exactly like in your link, because of some kind of problem (bug?) in Grub2 (tutorial is with grub “1″ but I’ve Grub2), specifically in this

title Windows Vista/Longhorn
rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive
chainloader (hd0,1)/truecrypt.mbr
boot

The problem is known and posted on many forums.

My solution was:

1. Encrypt Windows7 system partition using truecrypt, selecting Single boot and overwriting Grub2 loader with truecrypt loader
2. Boot Debian from Rescue CD and install grub2 bootloader NOT on MBR but on /dev/sda3 which is Debian / partition (so truecrypt loader was not overrided)

Now while booting truecrypt bootmenu is shown and if I’d access Win7 I’m entering password, but if I’d enter debian (via Grub2) I hit esc key and then truecrypt loader is searching all other partitions for boot loader and finding Grub2 which resides on /dev/sda3 and load system properly.

I think its the best way to do this for now (until sb find resolution for Grub2 to read /boot/truecrypt.mbr without errors).

So for the longest time I’ve been drinking beer while studying.  I’d drink until I felt a little buzz and then space out the beers to try and maintain my productivity and creativity while either programming for work or studying for school.  It turns out, I had rediscovered an already well-known phenomenon called the Ballmer’s peak.  Go figure… at least I’m justified in my drinking!

Borrowed from xkcd.

According to this… I’m going to drop dead very shortly… uh ohh.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

I have always loved this tablet / notebook (click here to read about my experience ordering it).  Not only was it very portable, but it was sufficiently powerful for my needs as a technology professional.  Unfortunately, approximately 2 years after I purchased this laptop, it is dead.

Once the power button is pressed the screen remains black, LEDs flash, all lights are on and the CPU / GPU fan spins.  That’s the extent of the laptop’s operation.  Prior to searching on the internet I began troubleshooting it myself, swapping out HDD, RAM, etc.  Nothing worked.

Then I started searching for a cause, since this was obviously a hardware issue, specifically the motherboard.  To my horror, I found my answers here:

TX2500 Dead after 18 Monts..

tx2500 no screen image

There are a few motherboards available on eBay, ranging from $140 – 180 (which is cheap considering the motherboard costs $300+ from HP).  Unfortunately, and in my case, I’m not sure a new motherboard will completely remedy the situation, since the GPU and / or CPU may be damaged.  If that’s the case, then that’s even more time and money to invest in this worthless laptop from a company who’s integrity mimics that of hitler.

In conclusion, I will save the money I would have used to repair this laptop, and purchase a higher quality laptop either a Dell, Toshiba or some other reputable company.  HP has been added to my BLACK LIST.