I’ve inadvertently stumbled onto the calorie cycling method of weight loss. Two days of radically low calorie intakes (1300) followed by two days of “normal” intakes for my desired loss (1850). I’ve seen varying numbers, but the recommended course is to use this method when your weight loss flattens out, I was using it because I couldn’t keep up the 1300 calorie day for more than a couple days at a time. The goal is to condense your calories into waves over the course of a week, so you trick body into keeping your metabolism up even though you’re eating less—short-circuiting the “starvation” mechanism.
I also discovered, finally, one reason why my laptop has always had trouble suspending: if Rhythmbox is playing when you shut the lid it won’t properly suspend. IMO, this is a tremendously evil behavior, and I’ve stuffed my laptop into a bag and let it nearly cook itself to death many times because of it.
James Cape 
You know you can easily disable the Rhythmbox thing right? I personally hate it as well. When I tell my laptop to shutdown/reboot/logout/suspend/whatever it should do it.
It is one of the plugins, just disable the plugin and all is good.
Note: Transmission (the default bit torrent application) does the same thing, very annoying.
Speaking of Rhythmbox and evil, how do I make it stop abusing my notification area?
Ugh. Sorry James. It isn’t supposed to do that. I’ve nearly cooked a laptop too – not a smell you easily forget…
Hmm about that cooking – i wonder if anything has changed in recent versions of power manager or if it is a tweak of ubuntu, but on jaunty the duo seems to respect user input and suspends also when music is playing, and torrents are downloading.
I’ve cooked contents of my bag in couple of occasions and now when suspending computer, I always look on the snooze light for good ten seconds in fear that it doesn’t come to life or maybe decides not to suspend – quite a habit one can develop 🙂
Darwin S: Yeah, I disabled the plugin as soon as I saw the launchpad report on it.
tm: The discovery was made in Jaunty; you need to be playing an internet radio stream that has been disconnected. I think RB is preventing the laptop from suspending until the stream times out, but some screwiness is preventing the laptop from sleeping *after* that. (for the immediate fix, it may be a missing Uninhibit() in the RB plugin)