neiltholland

Replacing alcoholic drinks with non-alcoholic drinks shouldn't be expected to result in weight loss, unless you switched to water of course. The net amount of calories consumed probably didn't change that much.

And it's possible that the non-alcoholic drinks -- soda and juices -- actually have more calories.

FWIW sugar-free sodas paradoxically do not promote weight loss. I recall reading that they are beginning to understand why this is but I don't recall the details now.

The thing is that once you get your diet and exercise routine right 'for you' then the issue of how to keep it up goes away. It's so self-reinforcing that you would be hard pressed NOT to eat and exercise well.

The hard part is getting it right for you. I like to run and I've run my whole life so exercise was never an issue, guess I lucked out there. I've tried going to a gym many times and it just is not for me, for example.

Whereas it took until my 50s to figure out that a low-carb diet was right for me. Before I had a terrible sweet tooth, but now you couldn't pay me to eat sugar.

So my advice is to try lots of things without getting hung up on the dogma associated with each, until you find the things that click.

To help you sleep lay a damp towel over top of you. The evaporating moisture cools you nicely.

Check out iRedmail http://www.iredmail.org/

I don't have the necessary background to set up a mail server and all the attendant pieces all by myself but I've set up a perfectly acceptable mail server (with spam filter, AV etc) numerous times using iRedmail.

Did it on Ubuntu 12.4 (which was the stable release at the time) in a Xen server VM, because why tie up a whole physical server just for email? But now I'm a big fan of ZFS for RAID implementation so if I was doing it again I'd go that way instead (because I never could get ZFS to work under Zen)

It was a just to see if I could do it thing. I don't handle nearly enough email to justify the effort to maintain a mail server. Besides, gmail is amazing at filtering spam.

Another Mint fan here. After years of trying various distos and being decidedly <meh> each time, Mint was a very pleasant surprise.

Have to second the Dell recommendation. People love to bitch about Dell but every single call for support has ended with me satisfied to very satisfied. And spring for the additional maintenance, it's a reasonable business expense. I recommend against buying their entry level PCs however, because upgrade options will be limited.