emacsen's journal
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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "emacsen" journal:
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10:33 am
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Eat for Heath: Calculating ANDI and MANDI scores
Having a father pass away at 57 and a family history of health issues, along with my own ongoing health issues (obesity and high blood sugar), I've always been conscious of, if not involved in, my diet.
I've dieted in the past with varying degrees of success. My weight is relatively stable, but it stabilizes high, just below the BMI measure for obesity, and as I see friends my age suffer from full diabetes or heart attack, I've become accurately aware that something needs to change.
To that end, I'm following ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) annecognito's advice and reading Eat for Health, Joel Fuhrman's book on nutrition and eating. One can distill the book into two basic statements: Eat lots of plants and don't each much else.
To that end, the book offers some excellent suggestions on how to go about this process. The only problem I've had is with the mysterious "ANDI" and "MANDI" scores. These are scores he gives foods based on their nutritional quantity per calorie, or in his words, nutritional density of foods. These scores range from 1000 to .05, and he offers a book (which I recently purchased) giving the values of these foods. What he doesn't do is go into a great deal of detail in how these scores were calculated. He does say they were done by taking nutritional information from a database (which he mentions by name), adding some values and doing a calculation, but never goes into depth on what that calculation is or where he added weights in order to derive his scores.
I did find that in the book, the ANDI scores are footnoted as "Patent Pending". A sidenote...
The patent system was designed in order to protect one from having people copy their work and resell it. For example, if you came up with a better wheelbarrow, you could patent is, and then be giving a limited time monopoly on producing such wheelbarrows. It would seem, then, that one would want a patent right away. What patent attorneys have found, on the other hand, is that it's often better for a patent to be put in the application process and then let it linger there. A patent in process is given much of the same protections as an actual patent, but delays the clock to expiration. This is also important because in the past (before the Internet) it was very difficult to do a patent search. One had to contact the PTO or find a patent attorney with the right contacts. Without a patent number, this would be more difficult.
The great thing about patents is that while you do get protection from your competitors for a limited time, you must also document how your invention works. So, thanks to the Internet, here is the patent application Joel Fuhrman put in for his entire program, including the scores.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20080177572&OS=20080177572&RS=20080177572
There doesn't appear to be any great secret in this document, the dietary program is quite transparent, but it does provide the missing pieces to calculating these scores.
Tags: health, personal
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02:47 pm
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Comcast, The Matrix, and Don't You have anything better to do with your time?
Last week, Comcast cable decided to cancel Cartoon Network. They've since pulled back this decision, but in doing so at all, they triggered a series of events for me that may not have been in their best interest.
I've always had cable television. That is, as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I remember the early days of Nickelodeon and my parents watching HBO. When I went to college, the dorms were equipped with cable, though no HBO, and when I moved out, making almost no money, for $15 more than my broadband Internet, I received cable.
A few years ago, much like the current oil crisis, basic cable exceeded $50 a month and sparked off a question for me about how much this service meant to me. I should mention that the $50 a month threshold wasn't a slow progression but rather a series of bursts during a two year period where cable went from about $45 a month to about $53, almost 20%.
This month's announcement from Comcast of turning off Cartoon Network was the proverbial last straw for me as I realized that Cartoon Network was nearly a third of all my cable television viewing.
It was then I bought a USB HDTV adapter and built the MythTV box I'd been planning on building for nearly five years. Three days later it was done, and I was recording HDTV. MythTV also does DVDs and so I began to rip DVDs from my bookshelf and returned the Netflix DVDs I'd had for some six months.
And so for about a week, I was without cable. I'd disconnected the Tivo for space, power and heat and was getting by on broadcast
television (mainly PBS), DVDs I'd been wanting to see, video podcasts, Internet radio streams, and of course- books.
In less than a week, I'd shifted all my television time into these other medium, as well as realizing I had time for other projects as well (such as my neglected livejournal account).
So, when on Friday a Comcast representative informed me they weren't canceling Cartoon Network after all, I almost dreaded the news. Instead of rebelling against the powers that be by rejecting an unfair deal, I would now be making no statement at all other than "I am no longer interested in your service.".
The Tivo is off and I've found I'm having driver issues getting regular TV to work in the box I have. There are technical solutions to both those problems, but right now I'm going to try to be without cable.
I haven't quite killed my television, but maybe it'll think twice next time.
Tags: personal
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08:30 am
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Computers and Girls
It seems every time I have "girl troubles" in my life, I get inspired to do something computer related.
To that end, I should have an announcement in a few weeks regarding a new approach to handling email delivery and management.
This is only a teaser; I am only an egg.
Tags: computer, personal
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10:37 am
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Thanksgiving Thank Yous
Today is Thanksgiving and for most people in the US, it's the one holiday that has a place for introspection..
This year instead of just being thankful, I'm taking the time do so some overdue self-reflection.
Thank you for the ability to shut off the noise, the lights and other distractions.
Thank you for a mind that's capable of filtering out the messages of the media, of powerful forces who want to push and pull me in various directions.
Thank you for the education that's allowed me to peel back these images, to understand not only the messenger, but deconstruct the message itself, see its hollow form and defuse it.
Thank you for mindfulness, where I can see my thoughts and actions in a larger context, to see how everything I do, say or think has implications on the world around me, and on myself.
Thank you for meditation, where I'm forced into seeing that which I hide from myself, and where I'm able to be most free..
Thank you for compassion, where I can understand others, be able to understand and forgive things done to me, and forgive myself for that which I do to others, as well as myself.
Thank you for the natural world, which blesses us with grace and beauty and allows us a glimpse into the reverent and holy.
Thank you for humanity and the fellowship of all men in this world as a whole.
In return I hope that I'm able to do this world the honor and nobility it deserves.
Tags: personal
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06:30 am
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Painful Choose Your Own Adventure Talk
Several months ago I agreed to give a talk at FOSSED 2007 at Gallaudet. If you've never heard of FOSSED, there's a good reason, it's a new conference. It actually seems to be a series of conferences run by some guy in New Hampshire.
I was at work when I received an email asking for volunteers to talk at a conference that was aimed at education and I decided that it would be a great opportunity to talk about a system administration. Sys-adminry doesn't get a lot of attention but it's an increasingly vital part of the world of computers. I'd go so far as to say there's a critical shortage of well quality system administrators. My talk was accepted, with the agreement that in addition to the academic discussion of sys-adminry, that I'd also do a talk on something "practical", so I chose configuration management.
I've been working on the sys-admin talk for more than a month, and it's turning out to be the most difficult talk I've ever written. The biggest problem I'm having is that no one associated with the conference can tell me anything about the audience. Am I talking to college students? Free Software enthusiasts? High school students? Am I talking to fifty people? Twenty people? Five?
My original talk was entitled "Why System Administration Sucks" and it centered around the problems of system administrators that I see now. The next iteration of the talk was more neutral, but still addressed many of the same concerns of the first. But as the time of the talk gets closer, my questions about the audience keep creeping up. Am I going to be bitching about system administration to a bunch of 16 year olds? Maybe I should shift the entire focus of the talk onto the "fun" parts of system administration, the excitement of putting together large systems and watching monitors whiz by for hundreds of machines you're responsible for.
At this point, I've given up. I'm writing all the talks, all at once. When I get to the presentation room, I'll look at the audience and rebuild the talk. Since each section of the talk is its own file in LaTeX, I'll comment out the sections I won't use, then re-generate the files as necessary. It'll be a sort of choose your own adventure, a custom talk for the audience.
I don't see any other way to have a decent talk without knowing more beforehand. On the other hand, this talk will be far more work. Never let me get talked into presenting again without knowing more.
Tags: personal
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07:39 am
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Mental diet week
This week I'm putting myself on a mental diet. I'm posting publicly so I stick to it.
This week:
* No broadcast television (DVDs are okay, if they're things I haven't seen)
* No video games
* No superfluous shopping trips
* No "filler" podcasts (podcasts which have no benefit in listening to them)
Next week I can go through TiVo to see what I missed, and I'll join my friends for CoH "double XP weekend", I just need a break from distractions.
Tags: personal
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09:33 pm
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My plate
Just so people realize I'm not purposefully ignoring my journal, here's the top 91 things on my plate right now:
1) Find new apartment
2) My mattress leaked last night. Call support, see if I want it fixed or return the whole thing
3) Get paperwork ready for gameday this weekend
4) Write two 1.5 hour long talks for Free Software conference in DC in August
5) Get a version of Pea working with setuputils or distutils, create a Debian package and RPM from it
6) Begin paperwork for the four new proposed Crusaders[1] modules I'm writing
7) Find dentist, get needed work done
8) Finish those posts I started but never finished
9) Pack current apartment and move
[1] The game that's replaced Project: Worldguard
Tags: personal
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12:13 am
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Not enough hours in a day
If I had another 4 hours every day, I'd feel a lot better about what I get done.
Right now my schedule looks something like this:
6am - Wake up
7:30 - Leave apt, go to work
6:30 - Return from work, begin preparing dinner and do some of those little things that need to be done around the house.
7:30- Eat dinner, plop down from exhaustion/meet friends online for a game
8:30/9 - Get some quiet time with pets/do pet chores
10 - Everything's settled down, time to read, write, code
10:30 Should be asleep by now
The hardest part of this is that I know my optimum times to work. Those times are 8-10am 11am-3pm 4-6pm 8-1:00am
But there's no way to fit that into a job, so instead, I have to cut off the edges of my best working hours,
If I start to get engaged in an activity, like tonight, I cut into sleep time, which impacts the next day.
One day I'll find a way to work my optimum hours. One day...
Current Music: Watermelon in Easter Hay - Frank Zappa
Tags: personal
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08:21 pm
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The beginning, the end, the con
Raptorcon came and went.
I'm sitting here calmly, enjoying the cool spring breeze and the sounds of the cars as they drive by. I'm genuinely happy, and that's not something I've been able to say for a long time.
My life is stable and even though it has its problems, I'm content.
I took off Thursday, before the convention, because I needed a rest. Work was beginning to drive me a bit mad. I love my job. I love my job more than any other job I've had. Despite day to day issues and frustrations, I come into work confident in my coworkers and confident in my boss. Despite the intensity of day to day, stress, and ribbing from coworkers, I honestly feel at home.
Similarly at home, with the introduction of pets, I feel I finally have a home. I come home to friends who love me, and I have an outlet for them.
Financially, I'm well off, and there's nothing I want that I can't afford.
And mentally and spiritually, I'm calmer and healthier than I've ever been.
I could talk about the convention. I could talk about playing Crusaders, the game made by Mark, a friend who I admire and a game I've looked forward to for almost a year. I coud talk about the death of one of my characters, Crossed Avenger, and how I sacreficed a character for the good of a campaign. I could talk about the two new sci-fi campaigns, or even about seeing Eddie Silverman, a friend I have who has cancer, and this opportunity see him, which may be my last.
But ultimately all that is a drop in a bucket. The conventions are a mindshift for me, a time and place to get myself recentered, to be me again, without the stresses of daily life in order to remind me of what's really important in that life.
I feel, at this moment, truly blessed. And I should never forget it.
Tags: gaming, personal
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11:30 am
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Faith in Humanity and Apple Restored
My ipod broke.
I plugged it in for the night to charge an when I came back, the unit was very hot, the LCD was messed up and it wouldn't turn on.
So I took the thing to the local Apple Store. The person there told methat I'd need to make an appointment to see a "Genius". He did get my ipod turned on, at which point he saw Rockbox's boot screen and freaked out on me a little, telling me I voided my warranty, etc. I got my ipod back and 11 hours later, came back for my appointment.
The people at the Apple Store were surprisingly cool. Kia, the Australian or New Zealander who helped me, didn't give me any
trouble[1] and gave me a replacement ipod. And on the way out, I ought a cable and the Apple store guy (different guy) and I got into a discussion about Ubuntu, Rockbox, iPod Linux, etc.
Good for Apple for hiring intelligent people. It goes a long way in me considering another hardware purchase from them!
[1] I did make sure to restore the ipod software before bringing it back.
Tags: apple, computers, personal
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