I am on day 17 of my cleansing, 4 more days to go. I checked in today at weight watchers, down to 145.8 (an all-time low). In the last 17 days I’ve lost 9.2 lbs. I’ve got 4 days left, so I expect to lose another pound or two.

In preparation for next Monday (the first day off my cleansing) I’ve already bought a big package or dark chocolate M&Ms and some Hershey’s dark chocolate miniatures variety pack. I’m going to use the M&Ms to make a few banana breads, one for the family at home, and the other to bring to work. I’ll also get some good coffee to brew at work, which will set up Monday to be a fantastic day. The afternoon is jam packed with a Yankee Swap and then a department outing to a really good restaurant.

And moving on to technical stuff:

I was able to get my Ubuntu box to backup a DVD - but I cheated. I could not get DVD decrypter to detect the DVD burner under wine. And, DVD Shrink would run under wine, but ended up locking up and killing my master boot record! I think my problem with the drive detection may be that I installed wine before installing the DVD burner, might need to refresh some configurations or just re-install.

In any case, I was able to get DVD decrypter and DVD shrink to work fine inside my WinXP vmware virtual machine. I mounted a previously ripped ISO and used DVD shrink to shrink it, then DVD Decrypter to burn it. I then used DVD Decrypter to rip a DVD to image, then shrank and re-burned.

The ripping and burning are much faster on this 18x burner than on my 3 year old winxp notebook with a 2x drive. However, the shrinking is much slower, running in a virtual machine, and my processor is a AMD ~1ghz. My notebook is an Intel ~2.2ghz. I could speed things up a lot by buying double layer media - no shrinking needed. But, double layer media are still at least three times the cost - which makes some fairly expensive coasters. Might also be faster to re-author, splitting into two DVDs - not as much compression going on, but losing menus and fancy stuff.