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Big Bang Theory Intro #14: Cave Painting

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:33:27 CST

One of the earliest signs of artistic expression is next on our list - it's painting!

Cave paintings have been around for a long time. Really, a long, long time. The earliest cave paintings have been dated to over 32,000 years ago! That's a lot longer ago than the Big Bang Theory timeline suggests, and far before our previous scene of The Wheel. These are all out of order.

No one really knows the purpose of cave paintings. I always thought that they were some way of storytelling, but some of them don't make sense, because they are tucked away really deep into some caves, in places where there aren't any signs of habitation. Some have suggested that they might have been used in some type of religious ceremony.

It's also been recently thought that the paintings weren't made in one session, but instead added on to throughout the years, some taking over 20,000 years to complete. I love the idea of people stopping in a cave while being the migratory people that they are, and finding a painting which is partially done, and then adding on to what they saw. It hearkens to some type of Noble Savage impulse in my mind.

This would also be the first image in the opening sequence to have a female human subject - the figures on the left side are definitely of the chesty variety. I look and wonder what the heck they are doing though. The one on the bottom seems to be fulfilling some sort of either ammo restocking, or possibly waving something around to distract the hunted prey so that it is easier to shoot.

The one on the top is definitely giving someone the finger, suggesting it might be even more universal than I previously thought. Maybe M.I.A. was just trying to educate everyone about how old the gesture is. Apparently Diogenes of Athens used it in 4th century B.C. Then again, most Europeans are more likely to use two fingers.

Computing Happiness

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:37:41 CST

I've been thinking lately about how happy I am about the state of the computers that I do most of my work on. I've gotten into a situation somehow where most of the work that I do is on Linux computers, which I have enough control of to set up exactly as I want. This means that they all reasonably match, because I use Dropbox to store my dotfiles. I don't have an exact copy on all the machines, but the basic plan for when I set up a new development environment is to copy the .Xdefaults file, then copy the awesome config file, find some backgrounds that are the right size, and then symbolic link a bunch of files to the synced folder. Using that synced folder for the dotfiles makes it certain that I am updating for example my vim config file (and plugins) across all the systems, and the git aliases as well.

It reminded me of Alex Payne's Rules for Computing Happiness, which I had bookmarked a while back but didn't actually read through and think about until now. I agree with most of them in principle, if not by exactness. The list has certainly stood the test of time. The changes that I would make are mostly in the hardware section. I don't use Macs anymore because I use Linux on most of my machines, so I just need to make sure that the hardware works. Lately that has only been a second thought, because hardware is starting to become even more standardized than it used to be. In the past, you would have to worry about your network card being supported, maybe the sound card, or the disc burner. Nowadays, the only thing I double-check is the graphics card.

I also use a Desktop machine even though I have a pretty rocking laptop, because I really like working at a big display and having a numeric keypad when I am typing for some reason. I could argue that the compiling that I do rather regularly is resource-intensive, but that's not really the case most of the time.

So, notwithstanding the rules from Alex, which are (mostly) still valid, my rules for computing happiness (with a slant toward programmers):

Software

Use a plain text editor that you know well. (Yes, it's on the other list. It is important.)
Use only software that you either don't care about fixing, or you can understand the source code to.
If you do something more than 5 times, write a program to do it for you instead.
The command line is a powerful tool. Learning awk and sed will pay back in spades.
Sync your configurations so you can go from zero to programming comfortably in 5 minutes or less.
Prefer older, simpler versions of things instead of newer, GUI versions.
Don't do anything with a program that you can reasonably do with your text editor and a plaintext file.
Use source control for everything you will edit over more than one month, and all software you develop.

Hardware

Use Linux on commodity hardware for everything.
Get as much memory as is possible in every computer.
Try not to use anything but Linux on commodity hardware.
Get at least two monitors if you are working at a place for more than three hours regularly. As big as you can afford.
Backup everything you can't replace easily. Trust no hardware.

If I can't follow these rules, I don't make a big deal out of it. I still use Windows for Office, Excel, and other random stuff at work, and I use it for developing programs that others should be using. It's just not what I use for every day. However, if I am working for an extended period of time, following these rules make me happy and focused on the work instead of focused on the thing getting between me and the work.

Big Bang Theory Intro #13: The Wheel

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:04:28 CST

It's round, and it rolls. Nothing like the wheel.

The Wheel is one of the inventions that is always pointed towards as one of the earliest smart things. You see them on a ton of advertisements for patent filing stuff. The source image this time was from a different source. I think that I could make an argument for Irrigation, since it has been around longer and has more of an impact on civilization when it happens. The Wheel showed up on vehicles starting in around 4th century BC, and they were using irrigation in ancient Persia almost 2000 years before that.

Reinventing the wheel is something that people are supposed to avoid, but there's always something to be said for improving on a design. There isn't a ton of things that you can do to improve on the round shape though. Then again, if the roads were slightly differently constructed, then square wheels would work fine.

One of the best reinventions, or improvements, to the wheel, was done by John Boyd Dunlop who invented the pneumatic tire, which uses the property that air is an incompressible fluid and a rubber tube in order to make it possible for the tire to roll over small bumps and rocks without damaging the tire. It will just roll over, compressing and expanding the rest of the tire until the obstacle is over. This provides a type of shock absorption as well.

Even though they have a lot of advantages, airless tires have been one of the things that you always hear as coming in the next few years. Some of the more recent ones are from Bridgestone and Michelin. They look pretty freaky when they are in a moving car though - almost like the hovercar.

February Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:38:02 CST

It's been a good month of exercise, and I've been doing pretty good on my goals that I have laid out for the year. The scale has been frustratingly un-helping this month though, and done some ups and downs. I have also devised a schedule to keep my running a little more exciting. The most frustrating part of the diet and exercise this month has been the diet part. Let's start with the charts.

The last thirty days can highlight my frustration with my weight over the last month or so. This graph has far more red areas than I am comfortable with. It seems like my weight is still on the downward trend, which is good at least. My daily deficit from this graph is about 300 calories less than I am aiming for, but it isn't a big surprise.

The year to date graph looks better. There were a lot of gains in the first month of the year which make the whole year not look so bad. I've been a little more lax on my diet in the last month. I don't watch the calories as much as I used to when I go out to eat, and sometimes have days when I overeat by a ton because I am eating lots of empty calories like chips and sweets.

I've found for a while that eating too many carbs just makes me hungrier later in the day, and makes me want to eat more again. This is probably some of the reason why a low-carb diet worked so well for me last year, and makes me want to start adding a significant amount of protein back into my diet, especially at the beginning of the day when it will have the most impact.

Recently I have been having a meal at about 4pm, which does some kind of substitute for a lunch meal which I usually skip. I really like to work at my job straight through the day so that I can get a full day in without having to take time off for lunch, and also get in fairly early. Having a meal right when I get home helps me get through the three or four hours of structured work that I have at home before a real meal, usually something wonderful cooked by my partner or a nice meal out.

Usually this mid-day meal is carb-packed because it's the most efficient way to get a decent number of calories into me. I usually don't want to spend a ton of time before I start cranking on some actual work and the exercise schedule.

Speaking of the exercise schedule, I've been pretty happy with the progress since the last report. By running graph shows the miles that I've run, and can lead you to all of the miles that I've done. The swath on the graph also makes it clear that I will handily make the one hundred miles a month goal that I have planned for the year. I've already got far enough ahead that if something kept me from exercising, I would be okay skipping a couple of days. According to my dailymile stats, I've almost ran 1000 miles since I started tracking it as well. That is a pretty nice accomplishment.

I'm starting to spice up my running schedule with the new workout type that I laid out in the last month's report. The pacing runs, I've found, are good for my confidence, and hopefully will help in the long run to nudge me toward running a longer time without stopping. I'm toying with the idea of running a half marathon without stopping sometime in the future, and I definitely can't do that if I keep running at my natural pace, which I end up tiring myself out too much.

In order to incorporate them into my workout, I've started replacing some of my interval runs with some of them throughout a month of workouts. My schedule is a little complicated now - it doesn't follow a set schedule as much as it used to before. I run on the "training schedule" on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, which consists of three interval runs followed by a pacing run, that I end up repeating. Because this is four slots for three days in the week, I only repeat the schedule every four weeks.

On Thursdays, I run "As You Like" days, where I run the course around the park, and run whenever I feel like it. Lately that has been meaning that I run longer distances than I would on my normal interval run, and have variable speeds. Usually it's not faster than the interval run days, but one of them is still in my top five fastest. Sundays are still the one day between two training days, so they are a dedicated walking day.

This schedule ends up being regular enough, and spiced enough because I'm not always doing the same day for the pacing day every week. I'm hoping that I can still have some gains in the next months like I had earlier when I first started running. It's still a lot of fun to run though, which is a good sign. I still haven't talked about staying warm, but there hasn't been as much need in the last month, with more forty degree days. Maybe next month.

Get Myself Organized

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:22:24 CST

Lately I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed, and not able to track all the things that I want to make sure that I don't miss in life. It's especially frustrating because I used to be a very organized person who could get a lot of things done in a day, and I could keep track of what I needed to do next. In the past I've used a number of systems to organize myself, but lately I have been flying by the seat of my pants so to say.

Going anarchic works for me for a certain number of tasks and a certain amount of time, and I usually end up working towards some type of list system in the projects that are large enough for me to have so many tasks that I can't remember all of the things that I need to do in order to completely forget about a task that needs to get done. In general, I tend to keep a master list in my head of all the things that I need to get done in every part of my life.

Earlier systems that I've tried seem to focus largely on removing the list from my head, and getting it down into a system which I can remember. This is one of the pillars of the GTD system, which is referred to as the "trusted system". It's really more of a pre-requisite of the system, because if you don't trust the system at all, then you're still left with the list in your head, and you've just externalized some of your list for no reason other than to remind you of the list that you're still carrying around in your head.

I've worked toward a trusted system in the past, and usually trust it for a while, but I have never really fully trusted it, partially because I have tried a lot of systems, and abandoned a lot of them for days or weeks at a time, and then the system doesn't have the most recent tasks in it. That's why the ubiquitous capture is one of the most important parts of the system for me - if I can't capture any task (any task, no matter if it is relevant at the time) right away, I can't trust that it will actually make it into the system, and therefore I can't trust the system to have all the things that I need to get done into it.

So usually I migrated toward some type of list-based system which I can use with paper, which I can carry around in little notebooks that I carry around with a pen. When I think of something to put on the list, then I can put it on the notebook right away, and process it later into some other lists. The most recent system which I abandoned was AutoFocus and then SuperFocus, and a strange hybrid of the two systems, which I had a strong affinity for because it has a strong list-based component, a very strong ubiquitous capture, and all works in a single massive list.

This single massive list worked okay for a while for me, and even survived through a destruction of the system which is way more than I usually expect. Usually I end up reacting to when the system fails like that by deciding to find a new system, and spend a week or two looking at some productivity pr0n before I settle on a new system to try out for a week, month or year. It really is a great system which does a great job of dealing with the "I don't wanna right now" aspect of the massive task list, which happens when you look at your next thing on the list and you have an aversion to doing it. It is one of the strengths of the system that it eventually just figures out that you won't be doing that task that you have passed over thirty of forty times and forces you to admit that as well.

The big failing of the system that is making me move to a new system now, is that it fails in the presence of two major things that have emerged in my task list lately: tangible priority and massive volume. Tangible priority happens when you have a specific list of projects which you should be working on from the top to the bottom. This is pretty strong in the work environment that I am in right now, where I am expected and really should be working on one project until I can't do anything, finishing tasks for this highest priority project until I'm either waiting on the calendar, another person, or a long-running task. Tangible priority screws with the "don't wanna" system of AutoFocus, making it that you have to do certain things on the list, and if something pops out at you and you want to work on it, you really can't do that because someone is counting on you to get the high priority thing done.

Sometimes tangible priority takes the form of the deadline that is farthest in the rear view mirror, and sometimes it is just that you want to have the whole office be more productive, and need to have the person who is waiting on you be the one with the ball. More often the rear view mirror is a symptom of massive volume though. AutoFocus and SuperFocus don't deal very well with tasks that come at you from all angles and in massive quantities, because even if you do manage to capture all of those items right away, you won't be able to actually get to all the items in the list, and it will just grow longer and longer. This happened to me at work. Eventually my list got to 20 legal pad pages of tasks, and wasn't getting any shorter. I abandoned the system and couldn't make it continue to work.

I've been working on my time-limited anarchic mode for about three weeks now, and it works well in the short term, especially when you have two or three project which have the higher priority that I mentioned a bit earlier. However, it falls down when you end up with a state where you have to actually keep track of all the tasks. I don't like depending on asking other about what they need from me right away, and I've been asking the question "What do you need?" a bit too much for my comfort lately. I'm determined to organize myself into something that resembles a strong system again, so I can get back to saying "oh, I finished that for you already" instead of "Do you need something?". I find when I'm in that mode at work, lots of great things start happening.

I haven't worked out exactly what I'm going to use yet, but I'm closing on it from all sides right now, and will be trialling a system for the "home life", which consists of a bunch of smaller projects as well as normal errands which are micro-tasks, and of course the massive thesis project. The varied sets and sizes of tasks made it a good trial run in the past, and I'm hoping to have a good system soon.

Big Bang Theory Intro #12: Evolution of Man

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:14:30 CST

Oh boy, a controversial topic. Well, controversial to some.

This is a fairly famous image and most people recognize it now as a symbol of the evolutionary process. I couldn't find the exact source image for this, but there are literally thousands of versions of it around the web. Although many would attribute the original idea to Charles Darwin, I couldn't find anything even similar to this in all his illustrations, which are all available online.

Personally, I have a belief in the theory of evolution, if only because you can see it from first principles and it makes sense to me. You can simulate it with a basic set of rules, and see natural selection happen over thousands of generations, which makes up a significant part of evolution. If you accept some basic assumptions, it's pretty easy to simulate. There was a marginally popular video which explained it, but that got also turned into a javascript thingy which works pretty good as well.

There are a ton of parodies of this depiction out there. I am a big fan of the computer-based one where we eventually evolve into typing on computers, because honestly I spend most of my day in front of a computer (although I'm standing more when typing lately). There's also one with the obvious natural ending of the obese man which seems to be fairly popular, and there are a large number of cartoons making fun of the image in one way or another.

Interestingly, there is some thought that evolution has stopped or slowed because we have less prolific fathers than we had before, and possibly because we are somehow cheating the natural selection by the use of technology. I've wondered about this for a while, and I think it's interesting both from a scientific perspective, as well as a ethical perspective. If we are somehow cheating natural selection through technology, is it a bad thing? Ethically, there are a lot of questions about the existence of genetically passed diseases and whether someone should procreate based on knowing that their child might be diseased simply because of your genes. I don't have a good answer, but it is the type of question which I wish would be asked and debated more than whether evolution is actually valid.

Two months with ICS on a Droid 3

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:29:37 CST

I was pretty excited when Ice Cream Sandwich was announced last year. So much that I actually considered getting a Galaxy Nexus phone just to develop for it and make sure that I was on the bleeding edge. I'm really excited about Android phones in general, and ICS looked like a big upgrade from the previous Gingerbread phone version. Eventually I had decided that I would let my phone get an official update or a ROM for ICS and I would use the cash I would have spent for an Android tablet.

So I was pretty stoked when I found out last year that hashcode had released an Alpha of the upgrade for the Droid 3. There was a lot of stuff missing and not working quite well, but I decided to take the plunge and check it out. Not the least of my concern was assuaged by the fact that the excellent safestrap by the same coder lets you essentially dual-boot your phone between the stock ROM and the new one.

There were a lot of things wrong with the ROM at first. Lots of apps didn't run at all, including Google Talk, which I relied on pretty heavily before I upgraded. I realized that I don't usually talk that much to people with it, and I have backup whenever I am near a computer in the form of my constantly-open GMail window. The OS itself was really fast, and didn't even seem to have many of the problems of previous CyanogenMod imports that I had tried on phones, which have always had a hit to my battery. The new launcher would crash a lot, basically whenever something strange happened, and it didn't have support from all of the applications that I ran before.

The good stuff first (well, almost first), because I have basically been running this new ROM without any breaks for the last 90 days that I have had it on the phone. The advantages have been outweighing the disadvantages. The most obvious ones are that the native apps are a lot more efficient and easier to deal with because of some of the new UI paradigms that they have been pushing lately. The "up" navigation direction is specifically something that I have been wanting in some apps for a while now. Back is great, and it shouldn't go away, because there are definite great uses for it (I've wished for it a lot on the iPad when I am navigating around), but sometimes I land in an app and I want to go "up". The new menu style is something which I appreciate as well, because it looks a lot more like a menu, as well as working better than the previous menu style which only could accommodate basically six buttons, and when you ended up with more than that you would have to sacrifice one of them for a "more" which basically was a neutered version of the new ICS menu paradigm. The action bar is also pretty great.

The new GMail is definitely the best email client I have ever used on a phone, and the upgraded regular email (which I use connected to an Exchange account, hey, there's a use for two email apps!) has similar improvements which find me replying quickly to an email more often than I would before. Talk (now that it works in the newest Alpha), works a lot better with the swiping side to side than it did before. Messaging works well still as expected, and the Maps application is improved even more on ICS somehow than it was on Gingerbread, which I didn't think was possible.

I should talk a little about the Roboto Font, since it got some previous attention for being anything from a Helvetica Knockoff to a frankenfont (make up your mind, peoples). If you haven't seen it on a phone, I think you should hold off your judgement. The difference when you are reading on a tiny screen is palpable, especially compared to the old Droid font family. I had previously switched to it on my (rooted) Gingerbread phone, and it was like night and day. I think it probably has too many problems at larger point sizes for the larger screen (I would never use it on my 260 square inch normal workspace), but it reads great on a phone, and I have seen it on a tablet where it looks pretty great too.

Of course, there are some problems though. I've already mentioned the app crashing problem, but I expect that from any Alpha or Beta ROM which I am on. The bleeding edge also comes with a huge downgrade: the Droid 3 ICS ROM doesn't have a working Camera right now. This is a serious downgrade for a phone, so much that I seriously considered never trying the ROM. Hashcode is working on it though, and in fact doing something like a compatibility layer for other ROM developers to get it working, because apparently the tiling manager is significantly different in ICS than it was in previous versions. For now, any app which tries to access the camera just force closes, which I have come to expect. For the first 55 days or so of trying the ROM it also meant that I couldn't use GTalk because of it, which I worked around, but there is a working one now which has just disabled it's access to the camera. There are also issues with saving things to the SDCard, partly because Google changed where they put the card in the Nexus, and it also doesn't always work right away when I am plugging it in to download some media. Also some growing pains caused the 'B' key on the hardware keyboard not to work for a while, but that hs also been fixed.

All in all, if you can stand not having access to the camera on your Droid 3 and are a bit adventurous, I would recommend trying it out. You can always go right back to your old system, because safestrap keeps it around. I have avoided it mostly though, only going back to it in order to load new versions of the ICS as it gets upgrades. It's enough of an upgrade that I have actually told my wife (who has the same phone) that when she sees me take a picture on my phone, that she should make me upgrade her phone. Once the camera works reliably, it will be the best phone I've used.

Book Review: The Necromancer

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:06:48 CST

The Necromancer is the fourth book in the series by Michael Scott which is titled The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. I have been reading this series for a little while, but I haven't reviewed any of the books until now, so this review will also cover a little bit of the whole series. The series centers around two kids, Sophie and Josh, who are twins and they are special. As should be apparent by the name of the series, they get into some adventures with Nicholas Flamel, who is famous for being a scrivener in Paris.

This book starts with so many of the characters in disparate positions - two of the main characters are in the Pleistocene era, others are stuck running away from their masters. Josh and Sophie are separated from Nicholas and Perinelle. So right away, the events at the end of the last book are starting to make things difficult for the narrative. There are a lot of things going on from the start of this book, and there is not a lot for them to go except for some of them to resolve themselves.

Nicholas and Perinelle meet up with Josh and Sophie pretty quick in this one, and they wander around some places in San Francisco, while the story mostly revolves around the other characters. It may be fitting that the most compelling storyline in this book is the one that John Dee is taking, as he is the one which the book is titled from. He is in the most danger, after his failure to capture either of the main duos, and ends up with a particularly nasty price on his head.

All in all, I think that this book is really flawed for a few reasons. First of all, the previous three books have taken a long time presenting Dee as a particularly nasty character, so centering this book around him is a little stretching it in the first place. Part way through the book, I am not sure whether I should be rooting for him or not. The main villains which we are supposed to be worrying about causing the end of the world are all out against him, so it's somewhat confusing to double down on some of the antagonism. So while he is clearly against these looming bad guys which we have been rallying against while he was their champion, he is suddenly against not only the main enemies, but still set in his ways against the main protagonists of the previous books.

The book also suffers from pacing problems. Part of the problem with starting all of your characters in mortal or near mortal danger is that you really don't have a lot to go from there. The first half of the book it seems like all that is happening is either the characters in the story are staying as status quo (which is not very quo) or they are slowly solving the problems that were all set off in the previous books' blockbuster of an ending. Halfway through the book I found myself not caring that much about the characters, and especially about some of the new characters which got added. It could be that the series is just flawed because it is centered around a group of people who don't die by nature, but there are a lot of people to keep track of at the beginning of this book, and the list doesn't get any shorter.

Even with these flaws, it was entertaining enough once the middle section got a bit less crazy and some of the characters ended up in little groups. Scott coalesced the story lines into just two at the end, both of which I was genuinely interested in because they involved characters that I had come to know from the previous books, and at least one of which I am rooting for in each storyline. There was also some revealing in the middle section which I was happy to see, having the world which is similar but not exactly the same as ours spelled out a bit more.

I think that I will be taking a break from this book series for a while, so that I can get onto some of the other books in my reading list, and also because I think it might be a bit stale partially because I was trying to read them straight through. I'll at least alternate, and then maybe the books will be a little more interesting when I am picking up a familiar character set and revisiting them instead of just continuing what could have been just one long story, but with what seems like the book breaks caused some unnecessary writing acrobatics which may have hurt the story in the long run. Overall, I'm giving this book a C because of the middle when I was very not enthused to continue with reading, and the fact that the beginning was a bit forced in order to get all the characters where they needed to be at the end.

Big Bang Theory Intro #11: Chimpanzee

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:14:33 CST

It's a monkey! And something that's genetically related to humans. The original image is in color, and looks pretty nice.

Yes, I'm someone who believes in evolution, which says that humans might be descended from apes. The chimpanzee used to believed to be 99% in common with humans, but more recent studies suggest 94% or even as low as 86%. Technically the chimpanzees are in the genus Pan, and not the Homo genus that Homo sapiens are, but there are some other species in the Homo genus which are less related than them.

They are the types of apes which have a strong social structure, with alpha males, empathy, and use of tools. There are the ones that Dame Jane Goodall were studying for the longest time, and she discovered a lot of things about them, including the fact that they have unique personalities for each chimp, and not just simple social norms. I've always thought that she was a good person, but was more convinced recently when I found out about this far side cartoon. It was originally opposed by the Jane Goodall foundation, but then the woman herself thought it was amusing and put a kibosh on the smackdown. There's nothing like a sense of humor in my book. Now they sell a shirt with the cartoon on it.

Closer to home, the Como Zoo is building a habitat for some apes that will be done in 2013 that they're calling the Gorilla Forest. This is a big improvement to the current habitat that they have for the big apes. They also have a bunch of other monkeys and apes in the primate house. The designs look like the visitors will be able to get pretty close to the gorillas, which will be interesting to see.

Apple's iBooks Announcement

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:50:30 CST

This may be a little late in order to actually make any dent in the massive amount of news and opinion that came out about the iBooks Author announcement and what I actually think about it, but I have a want to express my thoughts anyway. Hopefully it's not too stale.

The iBooks Author Announcement was about a week and a half ago now. I watched the liveblogs and then heard all about it for a week (and the follow up is still going) on the 5by5 podcast network. I usually agree with most of the people there (with the exception of Gruber, which I am usually either laughing at or yelling at), since they have reasonable opinions. There are a few points that I haven't read about yet though.

Firstly, this is obviously about hardware. They may be giving away the software, but no one thinks that this won't sell more iPads in the coming years. A few people brought up the notion that they are selling the iPads to young people, in order to get them into the hands of kids - then they grow up, and they want to continue using their iPads. While the iPad has gained some major inroads into business, most of the major computing still gets done on Windows computers on Office, and even when you're using a Mac you're probably connecting it to an Exchange server somewhere. This is very similar to the type of thing that happened before though, where Apple was dominating the education market, especially at the primary school levels. It didn't work then, and I don't really think it will work now in the long run unless some major things change in the business landscape.

There is still a great thing for Apple in the hardware angle though. Parents are a little leery about buying the iPads for their children now, maybe because they think that they might be spoiling them, or may be they think that they will be more apt to break when the kids get their fingers on them. Now, they have an excuse which definitely pushes them into the "buy" column for many of the parents in the country. School districts will want to look like they are high tech and they want to get on this bandwagon, so they might buy the iPads for the kids themselves. Apple just made a killing on iPads in last quarter's earnings, and selling to the academic market will certainly not hurt those sales. They're practically giving the books away (and are giving away one decent section of one, which I'm sure they paid a nice fee for).

Secondly, I think that this is about hardware in another, more brilliant way. Getting an iPad or an Android tablet might actually become something that you will have to ask yourself a question about in the near future. Right now it's a foregone conclusion, because unless you have a specific reason to get Android (for example, if you're like me and don't really like iOS), reasonable people will be buying an iPad if they want a tablet. It has a better selection of apps, and the hardware has been historically better built, plus the speed is fast enough for everything you might want to do. However, the fact is that the Android tablets are starting to look pretty good. The hardware itself is getting better, being much faster, and the screen quality is starting to climb as well. Android tablets are starting to look less like toys that are clawing for a slice of the non-iPad market and starting to look like real competitors. It's my belief that in two to three years, there will be a set of iPad competitors that will look great in comparison.

So when is the best time to start giving people reasons to use the iPad over other tablets? It's right now. Leverage the market position that you have now in order to create exclusive content that is required in some way, or at least greatly improves the experience of the user. If you're a college freshman, and you could buy an iPad and a bunch of books for iBooks, or you could buy a bunch of books and buy an Android tablet that won't have any of your books on it, you're going to choose the iPad every time. It doesn't matter if the Android tablet has a better screen, longer battery life, better accessories, and a great selection of apps and games, because you just got a huge tilt in the iPad direction because of the iBooks exclusive component.

Thirdly, people got a little mad at Apple because of the EULA on the iBooks Author saying that the books that you write in it can't be sold in any other medium except the iBooks store. Many people have already commented on this, and I believe that it's their prerogative what they say people can do with their software (as long as the content itself can be ported over to another book and they're not claiming that - it would be overreaching), but I think there is a second reason other than the want for awesome software to do what they want. Apple started using language like the rest of the corporations that spout bullshit that people don't like. They began the presentation talking all about how the US isn't great in education, and we can help the students learn better with this awesome new iBooks tool. The problem is that they are speaking one thing, and doing another. If Apple really was being altruistic like their speech acts like they are, they should not care where the output of their awesome tool goes. If it makes new textbooks that are better for other people, then it's great, and if you can get some money, you should consider selling in our store. You're advancing the education in the world by using iBooks Author, and they would be happy about it. That's not what they want though, they want to use your content to sell more iPads. It's the kind of doublespeak that you would expect from other large tech companies, and exactly the kind of thing that makes every actually read the fine print when something comes out from HP or Microsoft. I don't mind Apple acting like a for-profit company, I just don't want the doublespeak with it - people want better from Apple.

How's the Thesis? - Putting the Hours in

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:59:13 CST

This week's thesis work is Windows focused, which means that I was working in Windows 7 all week long. It was going a bit slow earlier, but I made a lot of progress today, and I almost am at the stage where I put the portable app together and start beta testing. There's a bit of server work to do still, but I think I should meet my goal of opening to the public in early February.

Today has been quite productive, getting the client to the stage where I am comfortable packaging it up. At the same time, it was quite frustrating throughout the day looking at the clock and seeing that I wasn't making the progress that I wanted on my hour goal. The goal for today was to get 8 hours of real work done on the project. I think that I am counting today as about 7 hours, even though I only logged 6. At the same time, I worked from about 10:30 am to 9 pm, with only a couple breaks.

If you think that math is a little wonky, it is. Even if we take out the breaks that I did take -- half an hour for lunch at around noon, and an hour and a half for my regular run around the neighborhood, it should be eight and a half hours of work. However, I'm using an interesting bit of math for counting my work on most normal days, and I was trying to continue it for the "thesis day" that I have scheduled each week.

I mentioned this method before, the Pomodoro technique. I have my intervals set at 30 minutes for the work time, and 5 minutes of break. It usually works, and I'm not exactly not thinking about my work when I walk away from the desk to do something else. I also have a long break every 4 pomodoros I do of 15 minutes. Today, I have performed 12 pomodoros, which equates to 6 hours of real, focused work. I don't check email, I don't do Twitter, Facebook, and I even am a little short with anyone who is walking up to me (sorry, honey!) when I am on a work interval.

The breaks do add up though, and it makes my time calculations a little bit weird. 12 pomodoros have 9 short breaks, and 3 long breaks in them. This means that I have an extra hour and a half that I'm on a break, doing something else which is not related to the work. That means that those 6 hours of focused work add another hour and a half of scheduled breaks, which I really believe make the focused work better.

If I add those to my "real" breaks that I took in the day, that comes to nine hours. I don't really know where the remaining hour and a half disappeared to. I am guessing that I was a little lax in getting back to the desk right away on some of the rest breaks and took a few minutes here and there, or maybe my lunch was really an hour and not just half an hour.

It's really teaching me that getting real work into the project is difficult. I've decided that I am going to count my scheduled break time as 2/3 of normal time on the days when I do enough to make a long break, which will make today count for 7 towards my 12 hours a week goal, but keep my 1 hour thesis days at a real, solid hour because I won't count any of the break in the middle, which I often take my daily run between, making that one much longer than the five minutes.

There's still nothing more frustrated than looking at my pomodoro count at 12 and the clock at 21:00 though. It's like I feel that I could actually finish at 16 for the day, but I would have very little time to myself. Maybe I'll try to get started earlier next week, and the wallclock time won't get on my goat as much. In the meantime, you can watch my progress towards the 12/week goal on my beeminder graph.

Big Bang Theory Intro #10: Woolly Mammoth

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:00:07 CST

It's our first subject with fur!

It's a Wooly Mammoth! Look at how huge it is. Wait, the cropped version here doesn't have a good sense of scale - maybe you should gander at the source image from photos.com, where there is a friendly scared dude with a spear to see how big this guy actually was. They could get almost 10 feet tall. Unlike everything up until now, there is actually some evidence that humans, or neandertals were around when the mammoths were walking around, because there are some cave paintings.

One of the most interesting parts about these large creatures, are that they often aren't fossilized, but just freeze in place, so you can end up finding one just frozen solid. I've thought sometimes in the Minnesota winter that I might end up in a similar fate. The latest one was found less than five years ago. They are often still found with their soft tissue intact. This means that there might actually be a real-life Jurassic Park situation, where they could extract the DNA of a frozen specimen and make up a clone. It doesn't look like there is an actual clone coming anytime soon though.

It'll be fine if you drop it!

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:15:30 CST

I spotted something on the Verge liveblog of the Apple event today.

Remember, kids:

Books are not durable.
iPads are durable.

Thoughts on the non-iPad Market

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:06:20 CST

Lately I've been thinking about tablets, partially because I ended up with a iPad over this Christmas season, and partially because the tablets that are coming out that I actually want are starting to heat up and look a lot better. I have a rant which has been working around in my head for a while about this, and it's not really going away.

Part of this is my own fault, because I'm one of those crazy people who reads a lot of Apple focused tech blogs even though I don't (or didn't recently) own any Apple products. Recently, it seems like every time someone in the mainstream tech press talks about the competition in the Android tablet market, some snarky examination and explanation of the many reasons why we shouldn't care happens in the Apple blogs. John Gruber, being the most prominent of the bunch, brings to mind the most examples in recent memory, although Marco Arment makes the point earlier in the year.

It's not that I am disagreeing with these stories, or their viewpoint that non-iPad tablet sales are much smaller than iPad tablet sales. That's pretty much written in black and white on the reports that the news stories draw their numbers from. The thing that is irking me is the implication that the stories shouldn't be written at all, or they should more focused on how iPad is dominating the entire area.

There clearly is a market for non-iPad tablets. Using the same report that the most recent spat of articles (and echoing on each other's linkblogs) is using, we see that the headline is that non-iPad sales are at 1.2 million tablets. That's a big market. Let's have some fun with numbers ourselves.. Assuming that those tablets are selling cheaper than the iPad 2, let's say maybe $300 on average, the market size is around 350 million dollars in the first three quarters of 2011, that makes the non-iPad market almost half a billion dollars a year. The same report states that non-iPads are selling once for every 10 iPads. (btw, let's look at the trend - in August Gruber estimated one for every 20)

It's pretty boring to just focus on the winner, especially when there is no competition for the best tablet for the general consumer. I can easily admit that the iPad is winning hand over fist, but the exciting news is in the competition, which is pretty heated in the Android field. CES this week brought us announcements of Asus Transformer Prime, Acer Iconia Tab and Visio VIA. All three are quite interesting and in direct competition with each other. Which one will sell more? That's a question that you might not know the answer. You know which tablet will sell more than all of them? The iPad 2. I don't care because it's an obvious conclusion considering the state of the market.

There's a lot of competition, and a lot of different options, because Android is a lot more open than Apple is. When I shop for an Android tablet I need to pick what size, what resolution, whether I want mobile data, which manufacturer, colors, and many other options. The only choice on an iPad is what size I want, or whether I want a 3G modem. They're all essentially the same. Let's compare the iPad to the iPad. Boring. On the other hand, comparing a Galaxy Tab 10.1 to a Motorola Xoom is something where you might actually learn something.

The tech press is reporting on the non-iPad market because it's where all the interesting stories are, and they can actually contribute to the discussion, and there is an actual market there. You only need to tell me once that the iPad is a great tablet. What if I don't want one? What do I buy then? Now you have a question that I need to look into.

(I'd also like to hammer about how market share is somehow important for tablets, but not important for phones now, because the iPhone is losing the market share battle in phones but winning in tablets, but it's getting late. Maybe another time.)

January Diet Report

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:57:21 CST

It's only been a couple weeks since the last report, but I have a full column in my tracking notebook so I guess I'm getting back on track with these reports. I've mostly been on track for the month, with a little blip around the holidays as expected. Exercise has been going well, which is really encouraging to me in many ways. I've also added a new style of workout to my schedule that I will work in as I can.

Looking first at the weight chart, it's pretty obvious that I took a week or so off from caring about what I eat, right around christmastime. This isn't really a big surprise because we went on a stay-cation for the holidays this year, which involved a bunch of room service and eating out at the same time. It was quite relaxing though. Lately I've been pretty happy with the progress that I show on the scale, and able to ignore it when a day or two goes blipping above the trend line.

Little changes in my weight and trend look really big on these graphs now, which is actually a good thing, meaning that I'm not fluctuating or going all in one direction, keeping to my weight maintenance goal that I've been doing for the last couple months. My resolutions call for a loss of at least 12 pounds, which comes out to about 212 at the end of the year. That's not a lot of weight lost compared to last year's 75 pound loss, but I really don't want to push it and really want to be able to keep this weight indefinitely.

I've been good at the exercising lately, which is actually somewhat viewable on my beeminder running graph. I'm on track for my goal of 100 miles in each month, with 47.7 miles so far that should climb to above 50 when I finish my workout today. The training plan has been working out well, as yesterday I just upped my interval running time to three minutes. I'm still taking two minute breaks, which means that I will be lowering the walking break time in the next time I change the intervals, probably two weeks from now. Lately I've also had a few runs with a sub-45 minute final time, which means that I'll probably change up the route a bit in the next month so that it is longer.

Weather was something that I was worried about when I started running around the neighborhood, because I do actually live in Minnesota, meaning that it can get very cold and the snow can definitely pile up and cause some problems. I promised Diana that I would not run when it was exceedingly icy or piled with snow outside, but this year we have had a mostly mild winter so I haven't had to worry about it that much. There are some patches of ice around sometimes on the sidewalk that I have to be on my toes watching for, as the case may be. Mostly I've been worried about the cold, which hasn't been overbearing, but has gotten in to the single digits a few times. Lately I just finished up my gear by buying some running gloves which should keep me from frostbite. There were a couple days before I acquired them that I ran insidje on the treadmill in order to avoid injury though.

I outlined my running schedule in the last month's report, but part of the treadmill running gave me an idea for a different type of workout that I can do on my non-training days. Last Wednesday on one of those indoor days I did what I call a "pacing run" but is probably more accurately referred to as something else. I set the treadmill to the average pace that I run in one of my training runs, and just left it there for the majority of the run. So instead of running 8 mph and then walking at 4 mph on a rest interval, I run 6.5 mph the whole time. I was somewhat worried that I would just get tired and wouldn't be able to continue even at the slower pace.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to keep such a fast pace through twenty minutes of straight running, completing more than two miles without stopping at all. I didn't really know how to run slower, as it were, until I had the treadmill keeping the pace. If weather encroaches in the future and the treadmill is open when I show up in the exercise room, I think I will use the equipment to my advantage and have these runs to try to teach my body to run a consistent pace for a long time instead of the running / walking intervals that I normally do. I am definitely more bored when I am just running and not doing intervals though, I may need something to distract me from the monotony. Maybe it would be different if I was outside and the landscape was falling by, but I don't really have a good instinct to run at that slower pace continually yet.

I still haven't written about how I keep warm, but I think I'll put that off until next month's report. Lately it's been in the 40s here, which means I haven't even had to use much of the cold-weather gear that I have around, just walking around in shorts and long sleeve shirts. Even if it doesn't get too cold, I'll write about keeping warm in the next report though.

Big Bang Theory Intro #9: Stegosaurus

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:50:37 CST

More big dinosaurs in the next Big Bang Theory Opening picture.

This time I could find the source image on jupiterimages and many other sites. The original is in color, and looks like an interesting diorama or claymation setup. Since the Apatosaurus was in the last picture as well, I'm going to focus on the foreground beastie.

The Stegosaurus has long been one of my favorite dinosaurs. I always liked how his fins on the back looked, they were spiky but they didn't have a lot of stuff. Also many times they are depicted as having a spiky tail, which I just thought was cool. I learned that there is some debate about whether they could actually use the spikes on the tail as a weapon.

I also learned that they have two brains, one stored in the tail, which was mentioned on Fringe, one of my favorite shows. The second brain was not necessarily used for extra storage, like posited on the show though, but more likely as some type of extra brain processing like an extra core booting up when they were in a dangerous situation.

Until researching for this post, I didn't know that there are states with official state dinosaurs. The stegosaurus is the oldest state dinosaur, which Colorado designated in 1982. Denver's Museum of Nature & Science has one of only 6 on display in the country. The fossil is in a super-awesome display where there is a mother and baby Stegosaurus being attacked by an Allosaurus (T-Rex).

How's The Thesis? - Anonymity and Consent

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:26:01 CST

This week's thesis work has focused on client work and website work, and has brought up some interesting conundrums about consent, privacy, and self-run studies. I thought that I would share some of the things that I'm working through right now, because it's one of those topics that you don't think about when you are first starting thinking about a thesis topic or your experiment in general.

First, a little background on the experiment I am running. I have a self-run experiment, where the subject will download a client onto their computer and run the experiment, and the program will gather data on the interactions between the user and the program and then submit it to a web server application for later processing and analysis by myself for the purposes of proving my hypothesis. I ran a study in a similar way last year titled Selection and Movement Methods for Multiple Mobile Agents. (The study server is down, so you can run the program, but no additional data is collected.)

In order to make the subjects want to participate in the study, I would like to let the subjects enter their email in the program which will then be submitted along with the data, and have a random prize drawing for participants of an online retailer gift card. This brings up some concerns for me as an ethical researcher, because I don't want to have a list of emails just sitting around after the prize is over. It's a privacy concern that I'd rather not deal with, and it relies on a level of trust that I will not use it for some nefarious purpose.

I am technically competent enough to assign each user an anonymous identifier and keep it separate so that I can delete all the emails without losing any important data (the user can run the program more than once, and that could provide even more useful data about training times and such). At the same time, I know that anonymizing data is hard and would like to avoid any issues with that as well.

The main conundrum at the moment is this: to get consent to monitor the user, I want to have a click-through title page at the beginning of the program. I need to word this in a way that clearly says that I'm only monitoring them for the purposes of the study itself, and will only use their email for the drawing and will delete that data later. I also need to be careful that this page isn't too scary so that a lot of people don't decide right then that they want to bail. Adding to the fun is that I need to be somewhat vague about what I'm actually testing, so that I don't spoil the results. The wording is.. delicate.

As if that isn't enough to think about, there are two special bonus rounds which are complicating matters further! First, I am going to get an IRB waiver for this study, so the review board will be reviewing my "consent form" that I am presenting, and will need to give it the OK. There really is a large amount of oversight for any study which involves subjects, including making sure there isn't gender bias and many other things, but that's another discussion. The second bonus round involves fancy statistics which I think that the subjects themselves would be interested in. Personally I think it's nifty to see a page of your stats at the end of the thing, and would want to let each user see how they did, possibly in comparison to the rest of the subjects, or to earlier runs themselves.

So some part of this week will be nailing down the exact wording of that page, which is only a tiny fraction of the program itself. Because I have a study website to avail myself of during this, I am probably going to include a sample piece of data that they can look at if they're curious exactly what I'm collecting, as well as an explainer page that is somewhat reassuring. I'm hoping that I can finish the site and client soon, and start the study in the next few weeks, so that I can get a decent amount of data to crunch before February, because I can then wrap this section up and move on to the rest of the thesis of doom.

A lack of sleep

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:15:38 CST

I don't get much sleep. When I tell people that I get to work at 5:30 in the morning most days, they are usually surprised, and often afterwards they ask me when I go to bed. When I tell them, then they are even more surprised. The answer that I give is between midnight and 1am, which is true most of the time. Lately, I've been trying to get into bed before midnight, but I still often don't try to sleep until after the witching hour (?).

I don't really seem to have a problem keeping up this sleeping schedule on normal weekdays. There is some leeway on the amount of sleep that I get on the weekends, but usually my to-bed time isn't changing, but rather just the wake-up time. My alarm is set to 9am on the weekends, but I'm also not worried about it being right next to my head most of the time, so commonly I will sleep until 10 or 11 on Saturday and Sunday. I've read a few articles that say that you can catch up on sleep, but then again, there are others that don't believe it.

If I go through and do the math, these weekend sleeps aren't really balancing out the score though: on an average weekday I will get between 3 and 5 hours of sleep. On a weekend, I increase that to 8 to 9 hours, and sometimes up to 10. Doing the math, that's only about six and a half hours per day when it comes to the end, still less than the recommended amount of eight hours.

I've been confused as to why I can do this for a while now, especially during the weekdays when there is so little sleep time. I've read about polyphasic sleep and REM cycles, which suggest that I am perhaps getting a single full sleep cycle in, and it just happens to be convenient for the time that I've chosen to get up and head to work in the morning.

Ever the experimenter, I tried napping during my lunch break for about a month last year. I would have my lunch out of the office, and then start sleep now to wake me up half an hour later. I did it because I read that just a short nap can actually improve your mental condition for a long time if you take it during the day. It didn't work out for me, I just ended up feeling no better or groggier than I did before. Possibly it was because I was doing it in the full sunlight, as there is some evidence that you need to have a dark room for good sleep.

Alternately, I could be actually detrimental some part of my day, penalizing the work that I do in the evening towards my thesis, or making it that much harder to concentrate on the programming that I do on my spare time. Then my lack of shut-eye could be actually hurting my life. It's just one more thing to worry about, so I usually just keep doing what is working for now, and maybe worry about it later.

December Diet Report

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:55:25 CST

Okay, so it's not December anymore, but the data and charts that I'm presenting in this post are, so it's still the December report. I am proud to report that while most of the month is already done I have been on track. I've been watching what I eat less, mostly because of holiday treats in the office and various social functions, but I haven't been super off my game, and I've been able to make sure I don't go overboard too often.

The chart still says that I'm losing at 1 pound a week, but the data itself is showing me a lot of red points which I haven't been really that used to seeing in the last year. I should be expecting to see it a lot more as I switched from losing weight to maintaining in October. The closest I've come to giving up the ghost has been 229 shortly before Thanksgiving, and I haven't come close yet. At this rate it looks like I will succeed with my goal of being below 230 at the end of the year.

The yearly image still makes me look good, with the lions share of the year losing and being on a straight trend downwards, and with the last few months showing the kind of straight across line that I should be seeing when I am maintaining weight.

Exercise has been going as well as can be expected, and I still don't have a good way of graphing my runs or anything, so no fancy graphs, but I have been improving. My average was 10:17 per mile a month ago, and the last run that I did was at 10:07 per mile, which is not bad of an improvement. I've kept on schedule for the interval increases, which means that now I'm running for 2 minutes 45 seconds and walking for 2 minutes still. I think that when I get to 3 minutes and am comfortable, I will try reducing the walking time instead of increasing the running time.

This month I'd like to expand a little on the workouts that I do, and my plans for improvements in the next year. Each week, I run or walk five days a week. On Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, I run the Five Parks Goal Loop, so named because while I am on it, I run past or through Audobon Park, Deming Heights Park, Cavell Playground, Waite Park, and Windom Park. The route itself I would rate as pretty hilly, if only because of the monster of a hill which just precedes the Deming Heights - I took a picture on one of my off days of this 80 foot climb. Lately I've been finishing it in about 45 minutes, and when I am consistently finishing it in less than 45 minutes, I'll be changing up the route so that I am running farther.

So that's three days of what you might call "training" a week, at about 4.5 miles. On Thursdays, I am starting to do something that I am going to call "run as you like day", where I run and walk at the intervals that I feel like instead of in the lock step of the timed intervals on my other days. Lately I've been going around Columbia park during these, but that might change in the near future as well as I want to be able to shake up the routes every month or so just to keep things interesting. In the most recent one, I've been pretty happy with the pace that I kept up. Usually I try to get some longer distances on this run just because, and I have been able to run for almost a mile straight, which is pleasing.

Sundays are my day where I am really giving myself a break, because it's between two "training" days, which means I don't want to strain the system too much. Usually it's the same route as Thursday but I am very restrained, walking almost the whole route. I usually end up trying to keep a pace which is under 12 minutes a mile though, which I consider to be a fast enough walk to get the heart rate up. On Tuesday and Friday, I have actual rest days where I don't exercise at all.

In summary form:

Monday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
Tuesday: Rest day
Wednesday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
Thursday: "Run as you like", 4.8 miles
Friday: Rest day
Saturday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
Sunday: Walking day, 4.8 miles

Every week this ends up being about 23 miles total of running or walking. I'm hoping in 2012 to increase this to about 25 miles a week so that I can make my goal of 100 miles a month. I don't actually have to that much because of the extra few days beyond 4 weeks in a month, but I will probably be doing it anyway, because I like my interval running to last between 45 minutes and an hour, and lately I've been under 45 minutes so I need to make the route longer.

I don't know if this is a great training program, but it's been the one that I can keep to for the last few months, so I am happy with it at least, and I've been improving my times. As the weather gets colder, I have had to gear up in order to avoid freezing my extremities off. Next time, I'll be writing about how I keep warm.

Twelve in Twelve

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:55:17 CST

As the new year dawns on us, lots of people like to take the time and make some resolutions, or plans for changing habits throughout the year. Usually I will make a few of these, and historically I have been pretty bad at keeping them. I'm pretty sure that this is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Last year I made one grand resolution which I had many paths to success at. It was something which I believed would make a big difference in my life - I wanted to make more money. Usually something like that would be considered not really fodder for a new year's resolution, but it wasn't just greed which was driving it. I could see potential and skill that I had, and I knew that I could do better for the both of us. I am happy that I actually succeeded in the goal for the year, and I think that both Diana and I are happier for it.

This year I have decided to take a different approach, and make a bunch of small changes which will hopefully add up to a better life overall. Partially this is because I was thinking for the last few days about how 2012 is convenient for splitting the year, due to our calendar system dividing 12 into somewhat equal months.

So I'm taking the theme through all the resolutions this year. Most of these are small, but some will be more difficult to accomplish. Some are things that I want to do, and some are things that I think I need to do. So because I'm taking the theme all the way, I have twelve resolutions for this year, in no particular order.

Read 12 books

In the past few months, I've acquired both a e-ink reader and a tablet. There isn't any excuse for not carrying around at least one book with me and getting to reading it. The list of books which I will read is mostly fiction and just for entertainment. I've noticed that I like to read though, and there is definitely a big pile of books to read. This is quite a modest resolution, only one book a month, and I think I should be able to get that done.

Lose 12 pounds

Last year, I had a focus on weight loss, which I've reported progress on monthly. It wasn't a resolution as much as something that I wanted to do for myself. I was pretty successful in 2011, losing almost 80 pounds over the year and feeling better about myself. About a month ago I switched from a focus on weight loss to a more fitness-related goal and maintaining the weight that I had taken off. This goal is more about keeping the weight off than it is about losing those few extra pounds, but I do want to still be on the right trend.

Work 12 hours a week on my thesis

It's been a long time coming, but one of the top things on my list for this year is finishing my Ph.D thesis. I have a clear path to the end, and I want to defend it this year and get on with the rest of the things in my life. To this end, for a while I've been working on it at least one hour a day for every day in the week. It's working, and I'm making progress but it is slower than I want to, so I'm going to increase the amount of work that I'm putting into it, and spend one full day in the lab as it were getting the work done.

My justification for the 12 number here is that I still want to work on it every day of the week, but I also want to get a full day in, so this is one hour every weekday, except for one day which I will put in at least a full eight hour day of work.

Run/Walk 1,200 miles

This is in the same vein as my other fitness related resolution, but it's a bit more ambitious. I've been running and walking for exercise and to stay fit for the last few months, and I want to continue that for the next year. This number represents 100 miles in a month, which should be possible because that's only about 25 miles a week, or 5 miles a day if I am exercising for 5 days a week like I am now. It's only a little more than what I'm doing now, and it's a nice round number which pleases me. It may be a bit difficult to keep doing this when I am getting to crunch time on the thesis work or when I am on vacation travelling but I feel like I could make up for those days in the long run, so to say.

Blog 12 posts a month

This should be pretty straightforward. Three posts a week should be doable, especially when I have some things already put in place in order to get some stuff. Not all of the posts are guaranteed to be on the base0.net blog, because some of them might be movie or TV reviews, and I would put them on the wherestheclicker.com site. I still have a bunch of easy posts in the form of the Big Bang Theory Opening posts anyway though.

Publish 12 Android Apps

It's been a long time where I have wanted to start publishing Android Apps in to the market and get some of my ideas into the world. This goal might be the hardest one for me this year, because I am going from zero to one a month. I believe that I can do it though, and I think it will be a good way to expand my skill set a little more. I'm not coming from nothing though, I have some code started on a couple of apps and a lot of ideas for ones which I will be pulling from.

Meet 12 new people

I've been going to a couple of networking events approximately monthly for a while now, both ruby.mn and lately also the AUG.mn user groups. Historically I have been shy and somewhat reserved at the events though, and really I want to expand my group of professional and personal contacts which is the reason that I started going. This year I want to meet at least 12 people from these groups. There are also minnebar and minnedemo events throughout the year, and various other geeky events, so this shouldn't be too hard as long as I get over some of the social anxiety that I experience.

Watch less than 12 hours of TV each week

I'm an avid TV watcher, and I really sit down in front of the thing and try to pay attention to the shows that I watch. Lately it has been taking a lot of time and I haven't really been enjoying the shows as much as I feel like I should. I am going to try to limit the TV to the shows that I actually enjoy watching. This one should be somewhat synergistic with the other goals, because reading, programming, and working more on the thesis are all ones which take up free time which is currently probably going to television.

Inbox 12

My email inbox represents something that I look at a lot throughout each day, and I carry around with me on my phone. I want to keep the list of things on a single page, which I've been able to do for the last few months, but I want to extend that so that I have less than 12 things in the inbox at any particular point in time, which I hope will get rid of some mental clutter.

12 Dates

I always want to spend more time with my wonderful partner Diana. This one is pretty straightforward - just go out on a date night once a month. I'm trying to decide if built in ones like Valentines Day, birthdays and other holidays count. Probably not. Dinner and a movie is fine, but I'm hoping we can do some museums, theater shows or other things that we both enjoy for these too.

Meditate 12 minutes a day

In the past, I've experimented a bit with meditation for relaxation and some contemplative time. I should be able to find at least 12 minutes a day for some type of meditation. Usually I go for just mind-clearing and breathing, and that can be done almost anywhere.

Call my parents 12 times

One of the things that I've been unhappy with myself in the last year has been how much I've kept in touch with my family. I want to call and keep them in the loop on things, and talk to them about what's going on so I can stay connected, but I have been busy or used some other excuse. I think that this is a doable goal, which is important, and it's also something that I want to make time for.

So there we go, it's 12 resolutions for 2012. 12in12 is the uncreative name that I have given for it, and I hope that I can do all of these numerically-themed things this year. I'll be reporting back on things as the year goes on, and I'm also tracking a number of them on beeminder as it makes sense to do so. Some of them are not really suited to the site, but here are links for the ones that I've setup so far:

November Diet Report

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:20:43 CST

It's been almost a month since October's update, and there are a lot of exciting things happening. I've been working pretty hard at keeping track of my weight as well as kicking my exercise into high gear and doing something akin to training.

In terms of diet, I've been completely lax on what I've been eating, but I've been working pretty hard at keeping an idea of how many calories I've been eating though. I've been watching and recording exactly what I eat for most days, and according to the BMR rates that are available basically everywhere I am eating at about 500 calories below the rate to maintain weight. While my goal is to maintain weight, I wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to start gaining again, and ensure that I stay below 230. So far, it's been successful, as you can tell by the chart.

The chart says that the 500 calories that I was below the maintenance calories weight is actually accurate, according to the trend line. However, I think that I'm not going to change my diet goals until 2012 rolls around. Partly because it's the holidays coming up and that causes a bunch of extra eating that I can't really track, and also I'm not really sad about still losing some weight at the lower rate that I am now. I'll be happy to eat some less in order to make up for some of the awesome pumpkin pie that is the sign of the season.

Speaking of eating a lot at occasions, I am trying to eat more intuitively lately, attempting to get a good gauge of when I am full and don't need any more food. I've tried a few times now, and it's been a bit hit and miss. Some times I will eat a lot less than I should, and be overestimating the calories, but I am just not hungry or something. Usually those are the days where I was actually eating less in preparation for knowing that I will have an unknown amount of food later in the evening. Other times, I will still be hungry, or at least have a hunger feeling, and then I will be eating more than I actually need to. One time I actually ate to the point where I felt sickly overfull. I'm trying to learn to listen to the body signals so that I can train myself to eat without watching every single calorie. I'm going to try to do it more throughout the holiday season, because it is definitely the season where there are a ton of these events where you can't exactly ask for a recipe or nutrition facts.

This month, I had my yearly checkup at the doctor's office as well. There was only good news in the experience, and every person that I met was complimentary and seemed happy. The receptionist said that I lost weight because of the difference in pictures on my license. The doctor's assistant who took my weight, blood pressure and height was entering the stats into the computer, and she asked "You've lost 26% of your body weight in the last year?" kind of quizzically. The computer was actually alerting her that it might have been a typo because it was a large change from the last year, she showed me the screen. Finally, the doctor himself was highly complimentary and asked about how I lost the weight, and used the word "impressive" to describe the weight loss a bunch of times.

Speaking of the doctor's visit, I got some weird looks at the office because I was there in a running outfit. I took advantage of the relative location of the office in order to get a run in that wasn't one of my normal weekly runs, and took this route home. Running has been my main exercise goal since I started focusing on it more intently in the last month, and I've been rocking it out over the last month.

While I stated last month that I was going to start focusing on exercise instead of diet as much, I didn't expand on how I was actually going to get it done. My current training plan is focused around cardiovascular interval training, with a goal to run some 5km races without stopping under 30 minutes in the spring of 2012. In order to increase my endurance, I do a fairly simple routine, of a 5 minute warm-up walk, followed by a set of intervals where I walk for 2 minutes, and then I run for some amount of time. Right after I finished my last report, I was running for 1 minute 45 seconds. Every two weeks, I increase the amount of running time by 15 seconds, which means that my most recent runs were for 2 minutes 15 seconds.

As I run for longer, I am getting faster as well, probably just because the percentage of running time is going up. I've increased my time on the standard running route from almost 50 minutes to almost 45 minutes, which is a big deal for me, because 45 minutes is a threshold point for me to shake things up a bit. This is getting a bit long, so I think I'll make it one of the topics for next month.

Amazon's eBook Competition

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:23:38 CST

Lately the e-ink and eBook readers have been gaining popularity, and the price war has been heating up, with Kindle dropping to $79 and Barnes and Noble following suit with price cuts. It really is the next stage in the book reading experience with finally the electronic readers being in the "buy it to try it" price range. Diana and I both have e-ink readers and I like mine so much that I am actually considering getting another one before this one is even a year old. The e-ink is really nice on the eyes, and it's nice to know that I can toss it in the bag and always have someting interesting to read. The Kindle itself is enhanced completely by Instapaper which is a kind of way to port the tldr reading on the web to a format where I'm actually more apt to sit down and go through it. It also has the advantage of splitting the content from the ads most of the time.

Because I like to read books on the Kindle for many reasons, usually when I am surfing around and I see a book recommendation, I'll check it out and see if it's available for the e-readers that we have in the house. As Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and ad-hoc e-ink reader reviewer noted recently, the library advantage of Amazon has been going away recently.

The thing that annoys and confuses me lately is that the Kindle price is most often several dollars more than the cost of getting a paper copy delivered to my door. Let's look at the same books that Marco looked at:

Book	Kindle	Physical (new) & Type
Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs	$14.99	$17.88 Hardcover
Steven King: On Writing	$12.99	$10.88 Paperback
Nicholas Sparks: The Best of Me	$12.99	$10.19 Paperback
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex	$9.99	$9.48** Paperback
David Simon: Homicide	$9.99	$8.98** Paperback
Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore	$11.99	$10.85 Paperback
George Carlin: Last Words	$9.99	$6.00 Paperback
Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics (4th Ed.)	$17.68	$19.99 Paperback
Scott Berkun: Confessions of a Public Speaker	$9.99	$11.55 Paperback
Michael Lopp: Being Geek	$9.99	$16.48 Paperback
Steve Hagen: Buddhism Plain and Simple	$9.99	$9.60 Paperback
Don Norman: Living with Complexity	$14.72	$16.47 Hardcover

In more than half of the 11 cases where you can buy the book on the kindle, it is actually cheaper for me to get a new physical copy that I can carry around, and more importantly, I can give away or resell later. These aren't even the most aggregious that I have seen in my searching, since they are skewed toward some newer books. If we really want to go crazy, some of these books are available at the bargain price of $.01 (plus $3.99 shipping of course), which is less than half of the cost of the Kindle book if I'm willing to get it in the horribly used state of "Acceptable". Something is wrong with this model - it is encouraging me to buy the book in a form which is less convenient for me, certainly more cost to the publisher, worse for the environment, and most paradoxically at more cost to Amazon itself.
Amazon doesn't like this of course, most of the ones where it's cheaper to get the copy physically have displayed prominently This price was set by the publisher. It's becoming clear to me that once these lower prices start making e-readers more ubiquitous, the competition isn't the Kindle versus other readers, who have all almost have a price parity nowadays, but versus the physical copies of their own books.

Reader was failing me before Monday

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:04:58 CDT

Last Monday, Google deployed a redesign of Reader.
The Internet was not happy. There are a bunch of problems with the new design in my opinion. The design takes up too much space with headers, not enough space for content, and forces anyone who wants to share to use Google+, jumping out of "the flow". People are rebelling, even going so far as to build a clone of the previous version and offer their services to fix it. Aside from the problems with the new design, though, Google's Reader has issues, and they were broken far before Monday.

The biggest gripe that I have with Reader is the performance. For what looks like a basic page, it's remarkably easy to overload your browser with it. I regularly use Reader to browse through thousands of articles at once. Because of the infinite scrolling feature, the reading pane can get very long, and even the best browser can start cranking the CPU cycles. With the old design, I would reflexively hit the "R" button (to reload the page) every hundred items or so. If I didn't, it would freeze up and sometimes crash the browser.

Not that it's much better in the new design either - performance is at least a hundred times worse than it was before. In addition to the infinite scrolling, they decided to add a bunch of other new features. The page itself pegs one of my CPU cores with less than 15 stories on the scroll list, and reloading easily can take half a minute if I don't catch the slowdown fast. The worst offender seems to be related directly to the new Google+ sharing feature. Every story has a "plus one" button attached to it, and takes a round trip from the browser to plusone.google.com to find out how many other surfers pressed the little colorful button. For the company which invented SPDY, there is something wrong with expecting a browser to round-trip hundreds of times just for a glorified counter. I added the domain to the blackhole in my computer's /etc/hosts file and the new design got faster immediately. I'm still reloading easily every 50 stories though in order to make sure that the browser doesn't crash.

I'm no javascript application expert, but it seems like the major problem is the length of the reading pane. One solution which I think could be tried is to remove the large selection of 'read' stories from the page completely. It is a method that Cullect used when it was in service, and it worked well. It was user-triggered then, but I think it might be possible to make the removal of stories that you are far past automatically in the same way that stories are added automatically just slightly before you get to them on the page, making the infinite length page a little less infinite in length, and making the performance a little more tolerable. For bonus points, make it possible for me to have only one story visible at a time, and load the next or previous story on demand when I use the magic "j" or "k" buttons. After all, the browser is going round-trip to Google's servers already.

Project 52: Week 40, 41, 42, & 43

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:18:40 CDT

Got quite a ways behind on these, again. I'm cheating on the last one, because I somehow didn't take any interesting pictures.

October Diet Report

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:28:12 CDT

I've been a bit lax in the updates on the diet that I normally post monthly. I have some good news to report and then a new challenge for the future. The hard part starts now.

The last two months have been a continued vigilance of what I am eating, and how much I am eating specifically, and my weight has been reflecting it. I didn't reach my goal before the vacation that I was hoping for in the August update, but the first international travel that I made after this whole thing started was a lot more comfortable this time than it was before. The airplane seats were marginally more comfortable, and there was nothing that I was really regretting about the whole thing. The seats are still too small for me, because I am a tall as well as a big guy still.

The low-carb diet itself has gone completely out of the window lately. I wasn't even trying to keep it while I was on vacation, and I kind of kept not keeping it after we returned from the vacation. I have still been keeping track of my calories when I can, and trying to overestimate when I can't keep track of what exactly I am eating. It continually is a struggle, because Diana is a great cook, and we have a comfortable enough life that we can go out to eat at least a couple of times a week. These meals are really fun to go to, but are the hardest to budget for on my diet because rarely do they include nutritional information on the menu, and most likely not even on the website for some of the more local places that we like to frequent. The calorie counting is doing okay for me still except for these types of meals that I can't keep track of. If I have some warning that I'll be having one of these "untrackable" meals, I'll try to eat significantly less throughout the day to make up for it.

The big news for this month is that I've succeeded at my first stage goal for weight loss. I now weigh less than 230 pounds fairly consistently over the last few weeks. This means that I am 110 pounds lighter than when I started focusing on weight loss almost 22 months ago. Right now, I'm planning on making this a stopping point in my weight loss, and trying to maintain my weight at this stage until the end of the year at least. This means that I will be upping my calories, and actually eating more, and also replacing a bunch of my clothes as they were getting comically large on me at this point. I'll still be tracking my calories as closely as I can. I've been promising a more up to date picture, and some of them leaked out last month during the vacation, but here is one from today, juxtaposed with one from last summer - not exactly the start of my diet, but close enough.

That looks pretty good, partially because I was actually eating in the first picture, but I can't really find a better "before" picture for myself. The before and after pictures are available in full size too. I'm also wearing my new jeans in this picture, which are size 38. Compared to my old size I've lost about 10 inches. The shirt I'm wearing is a size Large, and the before picture I'm wearing a 3XL shirt. It's pretty great, but feels strange when I'm wearing clothes that are so small now.

So I've decided that I'm done trying to lose weight, and will try to maintain my current weight until the end of the year. I've started already by increasing my calorie budget by 500 calories. Technically that's still a diet, because I was cutting 1000 calories below BMR before, but I don't want to overshoot and start gaining weight again. I'm going to keep it at this level and then reevaluate whether I am losing or gaining and adjust as necessary.

More importantly, there is another goal that I will be focusing on from now until then is my fitness. I've been exercising all through this diet trek in order to give myself some headroom on calories, but now I'm doing it in order to get a bit more fit. My first goal is focused on running. I've been running around the neighborhood, keeping this running course so that I can measure my progress. I've been getting faster lately, with my best pace being 10:30 per mile which was just about a week ago. That's about a minute per mile pace gain since August.

Last month I ended up skipping the update, mostly because I was just lazy, but this month the graph looks good. Last month looked pretty good as well. You can see some of the stability at the end of the graph once I hit the 230 goal that I have been working towards. I'm hoping that I can keep that line straight or going slightly down in the next report that I end up posting.

The yearly graph still looks great. There are only a couple of extended red areas, which both correspond to vacations. These graphs have been keeping me on track, even though I only look at them once a month. The daily deficit is based on the best-fit line that is shown here, and fed into my idea that I shouldn't be too hasty to increase back to the BMR.

So there's my first intermediate goal met. If I am still at or under 230 at the end of the year, I'll claim victory and re-evaluate my health and my goals for my body for the 2012 year. I'm still somewhat not happy when I look at myself, but my fitness goal I think might help with that a bit by reshaping my body a little more instead of just making it smaller. If you're interested in tracking my progress, feel free to follow me on dailymile or runkeeper.

Project 52: Week 36, 37, 38, & 39

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:13:37 CDT

Got quite a ways behind on these.

Paris: Day 7 - The Two Types of Vacation

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:59:51 CDT

It's almost a week after the events of this post happened. The last day in Paris was mostly spent not in Paris though. There wasn't a lot of time in the city on the last day because of various travel concerns. We woke up at our "normal" time and did our last bit of packing and a sweep of the room before we checked out. We went straight to the RER, because Diana was rightfully worried about getting to the airport on time with the addition of the train travel and all the stuff surrounding that.

We got to the airport on time, and then there was the big line at the gate (apparently there were a lot of people flying Iceland Air that day). We got to skip the line thanks to us checking in the day before - even though we couldn't print the boarding passes, we could still skip and just check in bags. CDG Terminal 1 is really nice once you get to the final gates, and it seems to be set up in a nice way, where there are a lot of little nodes of nice plush areas which have about five gates each. Once we finally found our gate, we sat down and had breakfast, a croissant and apple pastry, which weren't as good as the other patisserie stuff that we had, but I can't expect much from airport food anyway.

The flight was mostly full, but we did a good job of selecting our seats in order to maximize the possibility to have a row to ourselves - I chose the aisle and the window seat in a single row which left the unhappy middle seat, and there wasn't anyone there after the plane filled up. One thing that has been nice in both directions is the plane seats. It is probably slightly because of my weight loss over the last year, but also it seems like the Iceland Air over-seas flights have more room between the seats. At any rate we got our own row for the flight.

The layover in at Keflavik Airport was pretty short, but we had to go through a whole maze of gates and stuff. It is interesting because they have to corral the people who are headed out of the EU, but they still have all of the gates on the upper levels, so they end up making us go downstairs just to have us climb up the stairs again, and walk in the same hallway except separated by a glass partition. It could be very disorienting, making the airport seem larger than it is. We picked up some dinner while we were there though, just packaged sandwiches from the café, and our last calorie-laden drinks that wouldn't have any corn syrup for a while.

On the second flight, I managed to snag an exit row near the front of the plane, but miraculously it still had the normal non-stationary seat armrests, which meant it was easy to fit into and not uncomfortable for either of us. I think that they just crammed these two seats in row 8 when they discovered that they had the space. There wasn't any reading light or air though, so they would be pretty bad for someone who couldn't sleep on a overnight flight. The entertainment on Iceland Air was not bad in either direction. I watched The Adjustment Bureau on the way out and What Happens in Vegas on the way back, as well as some random TV shows. Mostly I ended up reading books on the Kindle though, which has increased it's value in my eyes after reading on a plane - it really is so much easier to read and bring on travel, I recommend it if you take at least a couple flights a year and normally read, because there is no page turning and the page is nice and big but it is very light. I would seriously consider one of those DVD rental service type of things where you rent them for the flight, but kindles with books loaded up instead. That's probably not allowed by the Kindle user agreement and DRM though.

In the last couple of days of the trip and over the last few days, I was thinking about how I seem to be taking two different types of vacations lately. The first type is the kind that we took here, and has a similarity to the trip to Portland last year. They are the type of destination trip where we want to see a bunch of things. Paris was very much a busy vacation, with so much to see that it was impossible to see everything in the same trip even given the six full days that we had. The second type of vacation is the type like when we went to Kauai for our honeymoon, where we want to really just get out of town, go somewhere beautiful, and then relax in a chateau or on a beach for some time.

The different destinations are telling of the type of vacation that most people are taking to that locale, including the types of activities available. Paris is in some ways the ultimate "busy" vacation -- it seems like it would be possible to take an entire year of vacation there and still never see everything that there is to see. There is something about the city that makes it just have so much to take in. Most cities would qualify for a good location for a "busy" vacation. Most of the "relax" vacation areas are geography-dependent in some way, because they are in a tropical locale, where it's just that much easier to relax and enjoy the weather. They are also more situated towards coasts than other places, because it's just that much more relaxing, I guess. The types of things that you would do on the "relax" vacations are more likely to be physical, like swimming, surfing, snorkeling, hiking. The types of things on "busy" locations are more likely to be cerebral in nature, looking at museums, visiting historic sites, and taking in art and culture.

While some people seem to take more of one kind of vacation than the other, I am thinking that I might want to try to even them out for a while. Paris was definitely a relaxing vacation, because it was different from the ordinary and a joy to see and experience a foreign country, but I can't say that it was more relaxing than a beach for a week, or hiking around some foothills. It is hard to say that I like one more than the other. Another thing is that both of the types of vacations tend to have a time limit for me. I don't think that I would enjoy staying in Paris for two weeks for example, because I would just not be able to process it all. At the same time, I end up getting antsy and wanting to get some stuff done when I stay too long at a relaxing locale.

I'm thinking that this dichotomy between vacation types is the reason that sometimes people can get to the point where they need the "vacation from the vacation". Maybe the best way would be to schedule something busy for the first half of a trip, and then relaxing for the second half? When I travelled to Greece, the first half of the week was in Athens, which is definitely a "busy" location, and the second half on the island of Kos, which is beach-laden and mostly a relaxing locale. It might have been the perfect combination.

For now though, I am working back into the swing of things, and almost catching up on the work that all needs to be done since I have been gone. The next vacation I think will be "relax" though.

Paris: Day 6 - Montparnasse Pontoise

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:12:09 CDT

For our last full day in Paris, I only had one goal for the day, and that was to see as much of Paris as I could at once in the same shot. Also, we were getting even more tired by the day, so it couldn't really be asked for us to do a lot of running around, even as much as we did the day before. We got up at our usual time, and started the day out right with a breakfast stop at a café around noon. It was the same café that has some merengues in every flavor you can imagine the size of your head. Diana was very entranced by them, thinking they would collapse in an instant with some stuff.

The café experence was still pretty stressful - but less so, because we are finally getting used to it. A café is a little easier on the manners because most of the time you can sit down and just order what you want, and they don't mind if you just have some coffee with your meal. At a restaurant or bar they look at you weird when you ask to have a coffee before the last thing in the meal, even after dessert. I had a café crema which is similar to a cappuccino at least and a ham and cheese sandwich that was pretty good but not too filling. I am a little worried about how badly I will end up off track for the diet plan when I get back. I only have a couple of days until my next report, so you all will know soon.

Our next stop was Montparnasse Tower, which is a building in the south part of Paris which is otherwise pretty nondescript except that it is very tall. Of course, because it is tall and in Paris then they can make a decent amount of money just carting tourists up to the top to take pictures off. It was 11,50 € a piece to get up there, which I didn't really mind but still seems like a lot. I really like high places and vantage points that are above the cities, so I was not balking too much, but if the cost had been a little more, I might have thought differently.

The view from the top is spectacular, and really if you had a great camera it would be the best place to take a lot of pictures on your trip. They have two levels, one which is completely enclosed by the building, but you can also go onto the roof of the building which is surrounded by glass but open to the top! It was pretty amazing to go onto the top of the tower and look around the city. Diana commented that we should have done it on the first day of the trip, because it really gave her a sense of how large the city was. For me it just solidified my thought that Paris is really a urban city - for every direction that you can see, there are buildings which are at least four stories tall, and it is only broken by the large gardens which are spread throughout the city itself. It was actually a great day outside, possibly the best day to be outside on top of the building, because it wasn't really chilly up there. I took at least 100 pictures with my cell phone, it worked out great.

When we were done on the top of the tower, we went down and looked at some of the shops which were in a shopping center that they call Galleries Layfayette. It was mostly just like a normal mall, but there were dotted within it some French like shops like a chain patisserie and such. The brands were different but otherwise it could have been a mall in the US. It was the first time that we saw something similar on our Paris trip, so I don't think that they are all that common. We sat and had a drink for a little while and talked a bit.

We wanted to see if we could see the Catacombs of Paris because it was in the same general area of the tower. We walked past the cemeterie which is a real working cemetery, and down the street looking at the shops. When we got to the catacombs (at least the part open to the public), they had some people at the end of the line which were telling people that it was iffy if they queued up now whether they would get in. The last entry was at 4pm, and it was almost 3:30 at that point. We decided that it wasn't that important to see. We walked down the street for a while and saw some more shops, and stopped and bought some things that we couldn't get in the states. That area of town was a lot less touristy than the areas that we had been in so far - we actually met a shopkeeper who didn't speak any English! It was the first time, but Diana still got what she needed.

We took the metro back to the hotel and hung out in the room a while, having a siesta of sorts. I was still set on going to a real French restaurant and getting le menu. I had picked out Le Petit Pontoise, but I was at this point not caring too much about it, and didn't call for reservations or anything, I figured that we would just see if it was possible and if it was then great, and if not, then we would go to a fondue place that we had spotted on the way home. I did the blogging for the day and took a nap, and checked into our flight which was just the next day by then. We also pre-packed as much as we could so that we could have a smooth getaway in the morning.

On our way out of the hotel to go to dinner, we got stopped by the conciergé and he mentioned another restaurant which he recommended, and was very insistent. He gave us a card and called ahead for us. I said that we would check it out, he was quite insistent. So we walked up to the Quai next to the seine and checked it out, but it was 45 € for le menu and that was a bit more than I had planned on spending. Also we got a bad feeling because there was basically no one there and the other restaurants on the Quai were pretty full at that point. We decided to head to Le Petit Pontoise after all.

That was possibly the best decision of the night, because the restaurant and the meal were absolutely wonderful. It was possibly the best meal of the trip, and definitely the most French of the trip that we had in the whole thing. It was 37 € per, but completely worth it - we had appetizers and main course, and dessert with it. Diana finally tried Fois Gras, which I had a little bit of and is insane, insanely rich. I couldn't have even a little bit more of it. I started with some honey ravioli and then had some shellfish risotto. We ordered a bottle of wine which was fantastic, and the waitress was really great. The decor in the restaurant was really cute as well, with a lot of boat pictures on the wall. It was a small room and there was another large party, we had a great time there and talked about our trip. I had my first creme brulee for dessert, which is super sweet and almost too sweet for me.

We were tired afterwards, and it was late - we started dinner at about 8:30pm, which is typical, and we ended up leaving around midnight. I only wish that we had had as great a restaurant experience every night that we were there. It was expensive though, so possibly not. ;) We went back to the hotel, apologized to the pushy concierge saying that it was a bit too expensive, and back up to the room. Our last full day went well, I think.

Paris: Day 5 - Eiffel Triumph

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:54:45 CDT

We're taking a short siesta here on our last full day in Paris, so I will post the day before the last day now, and then write up the last day later this evening. I'll probably have some time to write a retrospective of the whole trip on the plane. It was a day mostly filled with seeing the sights as they are more traditionally done in Paris.

Each day that we're here we take in more of the city and we get just a little more tired, so the day's plans get less and less full as the vacation goes along. It's probably better that way anyway. Our goal this day was to see the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe, and possibly go up some of them, then I had my sights set on making the Museum pass worth the money by visiting the l'Orangerie and seeing what we could of the rest of the Louvre. Now that I think about it, it was a pretty full trip.

We started the day around 10h again, which has been completely fine by me because I am staying reading up until late in the night lately. Our first stop was Breakfast in America, which is a restaurant which is set up like an American cafe and serves breakfast all day long. I don't know if it was some weird version of homesickness, but it was actually pretty nice to sit down to an American-style breakfast for a while. The menu was even laminated just like a cafe in the states, and the waitresses and staff talked in English most of the time. I guess it works. We went to the one on Rive Gauche because it was just a short walk from the hotel. I had a cheddar and ham omelet that I swear was more delicious. I think that all the food here in Paris has just been great for some reason.

We walked toward the metro and tried to stop at a magic shop on the way, but it was closed, only open for about three or four hours each day. I wasn't surprised but still it would have been nice to poke around inside and see some things. There are a lot of comic and sci-fi shops right in the district of the hotel, and we walk by at least three bookstores on the way to the metro station every day.

The ride on the metro to the Champ du Mars station wasn't that bad, and we took a short walk along the seine towards the Eiffel Tower at a leisurely pace. The tower is bigger than you picture it because it's usually taken from very far away. It really is as tall as a skyscraper. The queue for going up to the higher levels of the tower was too long, so we just walked underneath it and took some photos, and then stopped on the Champ du Mars for a little while and people-watched some tourists. Afterwards we walked underneath the tower again and up the Jardins du Trocadero, which was a nice uphill climb but we got to see the fountains go off, which was a nice sight to see right in front of the Eiffel Tower. It is also a pretty good picture shot.

I wanted to see the Arc du Triomphe, so we got on the metro at Trocadero station and off at Etoilé station. It is definitely an arc, and it's in the middle of a huge roundabout. We didn't fancy going up a lot of stairs to the top, so we basically just went in a little loop around it and then back to the metro to visit the Musee du Parfum, which was mostly a lot of things used in perfume making - it was all true stuff but it was all attached to a perfume maker's shop so it wasn't as well kept as perhaps a real museum. I'm not complaining any though because it was free and the things there were actually pretty neat to see all of the methods that are used in order to get the fragrance out of the flowers and other parts of things. There was no pictures, but that didn't make that much sense, there wasn't much there that was really picture-worthy anyway.

Afterwards we were getting hungry again, so I wanted to seek out a shop on the way. We both were getting tired of the whole rigamarole around eating at a Café, so we stopped at a fast food boulangerie and had a sandwich and some stuff. I was happy because I got to order a formulé which was actually a lot cheaper than the ingredients separately. Leave it to me to be happy about ordering a happy meal. I got a suissage sandwich and strawberries with a drink. It was actually really great, filling enough but it only took about half an hour to eat and was less than 10 €! If we come back to Paris I think that we will eat from these small shops during the day more, because it is much cheaper.

Afterwards we walked through the Opéra district and scoffed at some of the fancy shops there that had super overpriced things that are all available in the US, and are just expensive because you're buying them in the shop in Paris of course. The same brands that you would find at a high-end shopping mall in the US. We reached our goal for resting in the afternoon around 2PM which was the Jardin des Tuileries. There are a lot of flowers and a bunch of places to rest, which we did. It was a nice day outside and the sun was shining. I decided to give up on l'Orangerie for the day because it was going to just be not enough time to do both of the museums, and we went to visit the Louvre again. This time we saw all of the antiquities from the middle east and just a few of the pictures from some French and Dutch painters, and a lot more of the sculptures which were on the other side of the building.

We decided that the street lunch was so successful that we should try it for dinner as well, which we did by getting some sandwiches and panini from a street vendor which was on the way home after another ride on the metro. The sandwiches were not as good as the ones we had at lunch but they were still pretty good and they didn't come with having to deal with a waiter and French table manners again (major plus). We also got some snacks and drinks from 8 à Huit to go with it.

I conked out again and we just ended up staying in the hotel room for the rest of the night because I woke up at around 11pm, and thought it would be a little late to go get anything for dinner or even a market because the markets seem to close early-ish. There isn't a 24h/24 market anywhere around here from what I can tell. It turned out to be pretty nice to see some of the sights and visit the Louvre again to see a little more, and I was actually pleasantly surprised to walk through a couple of the Jardins here in Paris which are very nice. Again I was able to do some fun summer reading of The Magician which is all set in Paris. It is interesting timing at least, and makes the book a little more interesting.

Paris: Day 4 - Orsay what?

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:06:29 CDT

I realize that these blog posts are getting later in the day every single day that I'm here. The city is starting to get a little more reasonable to navigate every time and we are seeing a lot of things every day. I like to see a lot of stuff while we can, and we had a four-day pass which will be expiring at the end of what will be Day 5 here.

In hopes of using our museum pass to it's fullest and also to see a bunch while I was here, the plan for the day was to visit the Musee d'Orsay and then get a Paris lunch, and walk along the seine to the Archaeological Crypt of Notre-Dame. We woke up fairly late by our standards again, crawling out of bed at about 10am - but if you can't sleep in on vacation, when?

It was Sunday, so the patisserie which was just down the street was closed when we walked by, but there was one which is closer to the Saint-Michel Notre Dame station which was open, and we again got some croissants and some other sweets for breakfast. Diana isn't happy with the breakfasts that we've been getting here. We had planned to go to Breakfast in America on Sunday, but it was a bit late to get started. We sat down in a park and had the breakfast foods instead of eating on the Metro platform like the day before. There were some pigeons which came around and obviously are being sustained through the fact that croissants are super crumbly. I have to admit that I will be spoiled for croissants from anywhere else after having them in Paris - they are super crumbly and delicious. Just bread has no right being that delicious.

After the small breakfast we headed to the Orsay, which I wanted to see mostly because it has some more recent paintings and a great collection of impressionists from the beginning of the last century. Unfortunately there are no pictures inside the Orsay, which I have to say doesn't please me to see in a museum but the whole place would be infinitely worse if there were people taking pictures of every painting in the place. It is an old train station which has been re-purposed into a museum and it is beautiful inside, but there are many side rooms that are small and while they hold plenty of people in them, the addition of cameras always seems to make a room that much fuller because of people avoiding the camera's line of sight.

The paintings inside were all pretty great and I was very pleased to see many of the impressionists paintings where the paint actually takes on more of a 3D quality and you can see the strokes of the artist more. They also appeal to me because they seem somewhat similar to some other styles of art where you are trying to get a lot across in a very small information, like pixel art. There was also some pointillism there which has even more similarities. I also was interested in the Van Gogh part of the collection that they had there, which was great. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that they had a good collection of Rodin sculptures which were displayed outside of the paintings rooms. We spent a couple of hours there and then decided to head out to find a lunch.

I made a big mistake planning to find a meal "on the way" to Pont Neuf from the Orsay museum, doubly so on Sunday. We walked through a part of the city which was mostly made up of art boutiques and galleries, but they were all closed. We also spotted a number of restaurants and brasseries that we would have stopped at on a normal day but they were also closed. After a long walk and stopping at a convenience store for something to keep Diana going (she was getting very hungry, understandably), we found Les Bistrot Mazarin which looked like a good place to stop.

I have to admit that I was quite hungry and stressed out at that point. I was hoping to find a place for lunch with a menu that we could order directly, because I was hoping for an experience which was a little cheaper than our normal la carte dining so far. The meals here have been pretty expensive, with each lunch and dinner coming to about 50 € each time. It's okay because we have the money, but if we can get a menu at 20 € per person, it would be better for us in the long run. There wasn't any of that here but I was tired of walking to find a place. The menu that we got was in French, and I could have asked for one in English but I was actually trying to understand the one in French because it is somewhat important to me that we try to actually speak the language. It didn't work out that great, because somehow I ended up ordering a cornish hen (or similarly sized duck) and while delicious, I find whole or halves of poultry incredibly difficult to eat with a fork and knife. I am ordering some buffalo wings this coming Sunday for the football game in defiance.

The meal was wonderful though, and the dessert that we had afterwards was great. I finally got the dessert du jour which was a cream cheese fruit tart thing which was actually delicious. Diana got the first creme brûlée of her trip, which was equally great.
In true Parisian style we had coffee after the dessert. Despite the negative reviews, I was really happy with the bistrot. At the end of the meal, I was fed and much happier, and the waiter was actually willing to put up with our broken French.

After the meal, we walked up to Pont Neuf and onto the Île de la Cité. We've thought about taking a seine sightseeing tour, but haven't been able to have one yet. There is one which takes off from Pont Neuf, it would be the closest. We walked through the island and past the Palais de Justice de Paris which is decked out in gold. We headed along a pedestrian street across from it and then headed to the Archaeological Crypt.

The crypt was very interesting because all of the rocks that were there are mostly in the same place, or at least that is the illusion that they are trying to keep up in the museum. It was very dark but it had a lot of information on the sides about the history of Paris, which I was glad to read in English and pick out the words that I knew in French as well. The exhibits were more interesting because in most places, there is a dual exhibit, of when the island was used by different settlers in different ages. They had different parts that you could light up to see the changing ruins and point out the areas which were different. There were also a lot of little models to show what you were looking at in a little less crumbled style. It wasn't a long tour which was also appreciated.

When we were finished with the crypt, we headed topside to see Notre Dame in full light (and with all the tourists of a normal day). There were plenty of people on the square getting their pictures taken. We decided to walk through. They were just starting the night Sunday service, but we were just walking along the outside to see all of the large stained glass windows and such. We had a pass to see the towers, but it was just after the last entry to them, and I don't think Diana would have been game for a long stair climb anyway.

Even though it was only about 6pm, we were really tired from all the walking. We went back to the hotel room for a little break before dinner, which is also held late in Paris - we headed out at about 9pm. It was starting to rain and quite cold when we went down the street. We stopped at Cluny Bar which was on Saint-Germain and seemed reasonable. They also didn't have le menu but I mostly didn't care because it was cold. I had rum steak with pepper sauce and fried potato slices, and watched France get beat by Spain in a FIBA basketball game on the TV. I also had a white beer which I have rediscovered here and really enjoy.

The waiter in the restaurant brought us English menus right away which was actually unwelcome. We know that we're American of course and don't expect to not be noticed as American, but the waiter was being it seemed very patronizing to us and a lot over the top. I think it might just be a little more than normal though, because I observed him being somewhat silly with a couple that he very clearly knew well (they did the French kiss-greeting).

When we were done with dinner, it was straight back to the hotel, rushed on a little by the fact that it had started to rain in earnest by that point. I read until I was falling asleep and then turned out the light. Another full day in Paris.

Paris: Day 3 - Versailles

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:14:04 CDT

Internet has been a little bit flaky in the last couple of days, so I'm posting this in the afternoon of the fourth day. Yesterday we ended up waking up earlier than we planned, even though we were up late. I was a little worried about getting to Versailles early so that we didn't have to queue for everything while there. We had enough time to stop at the patisserie Parisien and grab a couple of Croissant and some macarons for later. We went right across the street and into the station which was only a little bit away, and got the tickets allez-retour to Versailles. I keep trying to practice my French, but it doesn't work out that well - I tried to ask for the ticket en français, but she was confused. I think that I need to speak slower, I keep trying to say things fast and probably mispronounce it.

After we got to the station, we ate our croissant and got some advice from a nice lady at the platform about which train to take, which wasn't the next one at the station, but the one after. I wondered whether we should really be eating on the platform, because I didn't see anyone else eating there. Maybe it's more common to have a croissant and coffee at a Cafe in the morning.

The train trip to Versailles was nice, it was almost empty which I thought was good because there wouldn't be so many people. The trains are very quiet when they run, because they have been running for a very long time I guess and the tracks are all worn down. There is almost no noise like there is on the trains in Minneapolis when there is a curve. I can see how some people would fall asleep. It only lasted about half an hour and I passed the time looking at the sights on the way. We passed Microsoft's Paris Offices, which had a big advertisement for Windows 7 on it.

After we showed up at Versailles Rive-Gauche station, it was a short walk to get to the palace and get inside. The tour starts right away and there wasn't really a shop that was open early in the morning. I should have taken some time to stop and get something while we were in Versailles (the town) because we hadn't had enough for breakfast. I gather that breakfast isn't very popular here. Diana wasn't happy about walking through the whole palace without any coffee or anything to eat. There was a small snack shop at the end of the walk through the main palace and we stopped to get some drinks and coffee. Everything inside Versailles was pretty expensive by American standards (probably by French standards too). Coffee was about 2 € and the drink was about 3,5€.

The main palace was quite resplendent and the hall of mirrors was nice and large. There were so many rooms and they all had different colors of wall coverings. In some ways it was a bit too much, so much gold. The ceilings were quite interesting as well and the advice to keep looking up from Diana was well taken. She got most of the pictures inside the palace itself, but I was taken by the Museum of French History's Galerie des Battailles with it's paintings along both walls chronologizing the great French battles going through the ages. They were all floor-to-ceiling renditions and covered from way in the past up to pretty recently.

After seeing the palace, we went outside to the part that I was excited about - the gardens behind (in front? Which is the back?) of the palace. After finding out that they were going on, I scheduled the trip on a Saturday so that we could witness the Grandes Eaux Musicales when the fountains run and there is music set around them. The fountains themselves are pretty spectacular, and there are about 30 of them to see. They weren't all running because of drought conditions, but the main ones ran from when we got there at about 11h30 until they all shut off at 12h00. The gardens themselves are also quite amazing even without the fountains, They have tall trees that are groomed to have really tall (20m?) walls and foliage around the areas with sculptures. Each area was fairly unique.

There are many restaurants on the garden grounds and it was about lunchtime, so we stopped at one and had some lunch to pass the time. I was convinced that with what amounted to a normal length lunch at a Brasserie there we could eventually wait out the break in the fountains, because they were starting again at 15h30. The lunch was very nice, I had some sausage with fries and Diana had the duck confit, something which the waiter said was "traditional French". The meal was good and there were about four or five different cats who obviously lived off of table scraps.

We walked through a couple more gardens and saw the Mirror Fountain display, which runs all day long every 10 minutes and is choreographed to music. It was pretty great, and then we walked to a small boutique and considered going to see the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon. The walk was just a bit too much for me and definitely so for Diana though, and I didn't want to pay for the little train 3,30 € to go there for only half an hour or so. We were le tired from all the walking. Again another French sight seeing monument that has defeated us by it's massive size! We only got to the start of the Grand Canal. Right before we started on our journey back to the palace, the fountains started flowing again.

I charted a course through the other side of the gardens that we hadn't seen before, and tried to keep it short-ish but still see the unique gardens. I'm glad because there were three very interesting ones in the trek back. There was the Encelade Grove with a Titan being punished in the center, and then the Grove of Appolo's Baths which is in a very different style than all the others, with curving paths which winded through the garden instead of geometrical ones. Finally the grove of the three fountains which had no sculptures at all and was very long with multiple levels.

After all of that we walked back through everything and past some of the flower gardens on the way back to the main gate and then the station. Diana wanted to stop at the Starbucks in Versailles and see if they had Pumpkin Spice Lattes, which they didn't have, and the barista was very interested. "They're spicy lattes?" she asked. I think she thought they were spicy hot. Di just got a coffee and relaxed for a little while before we headed back to the train. I was getting quite tired as well on the way back and almost fell asleep a couple of times.

After getting off at the station, we stopped at a grocery store and got some snacky cheese and water for nourishment, and then noticed that the Fromager was open that we wanted to try out. We stopped and bought some cheese that we will have later - they were vacuuming some so that they would be possible to take on the plane home, but we didn't get ours because we will have it here. Super tired from the trip, I ended up sleeping until about 23h, at which point we didn't feel like going out for the rest of the night and stayed up reading and fighting with the unreliable internet wifi at the hotel for a while. I ended up reading The Magician, which just happens to be set in Paris. I wonder if I will spot any of the monuments.

Paris - Day 2: 5e & Louvre

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:53:42 CDT

The second day of Paris was just as interesting as the first, with a lot of interesting things seen. We woke up and started the day late, still recovering from the jet lag of +7 hours. We walked around the 5th Arrondissement, going for a little walk in the direction which we had gone before, but when it was darker we couldn't see a lot of things, and of course many of the shops are not open in the night when we were walking. It is an interesting place to walk and we stopped by the famous store Shakespeare and Company before having a lunch at Creposuk. I had the Gargantua which was ham and cheese and an egg in the middle. Diana had a dessert crepe which had some honey on it. Both were very good.

After that, we walked down in the other direction from the hotel toward the University in Paris, and stopped at a couple of shops to buy some things and look around. Diana found a store which sells a lot of perfume oils and supplies, pretty much exactly tuned to her likings because of the small business of custom perfumes and she bought a few of them. We kept walking, saw a lot of the area around the university and made a small stop at a Cafe and had some Cafe au Lait for an afternoon small treat. A man who teaches business English chatted with us and helped a little with the order although I already knew about the things there. Sitting at the bar looking at some French people and students walk by was interesting.

We walked back to the Hotel for another nap, passing by the other side of the Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet while we went. I noticed that while we were by the university there were a lot of gaming shops and comic shops, which I guess could be expected. There were some stores showing off their Warhammer minis and how they were painted. It was interesting to see such a familiar sight in the middle of this fairly foreign country. We had a short hour nap or so before heading off to the Louvre.

After walking across the Ile Saint-Louis, which had a lot of interesting looking shops and restaurants (note to self: try out some of these restaurants!) and a great view of the other side of Notre-Dame (see above), we took the metro for the first time since the trip from CDG airport, and I was happy to find that it is much easier once you know a little bit about how the system works. We got to the Louvre pretty easily since the station was only a couple of stops down the line.

The Louvre is humongous. I am glad that we set aside two days to see it more on a second day, and that we got the Museum pass so that we don't have to worry so much about getting tickets each time. Just starting from the outside it is situated on truly spectacular grounds where the trademark pyramid sits and there are a ton of statues on the whole structure. I took a bunch of pictures outside and there was interesting people watching as people just kind of sat on the area there.

We got there at around 6pm and then started our self-guided tour, which is nice because we can take it at our own pace. The "big things" were all marked out on a map but there were specific areas which we wanted to see first and make sure. Diana was interested in the ancient things from Greece, Rome and such and we went right there, after we saw some of the moat that used to be part of the castle that the Louvre is built on in the basement. The collection that they have of the ancient sculpture is super, with a lot which are in pristine condition. It took us nearly the whole time we were there. I wanted to see some of the large-format paintings which were on the top floor of the same wing, and they definitely live up to their namesake. Most were taller than I was and while I don't know much about the paintings themselves, they were all well preserved and good. We walked past the Mona Lisa, opting instead to gaze at The Wedding Feast at Carna which is another massive display.

Honestly it was a lot to take in, and both of Diana's batteries went out during the trip there. We marked on the map where we saw so that when we go back we can see some of the other things. At about 8:30pm we were quite hungry having only had the crepes and some cafe au lait from earlier in the day to eat. We walked down the Rue de Saint Honore and stopped at Cafe Saint Honore about a block away. The waiter there was nice and the food was really great. I ended up having half of a chicken which had herbs on it with french fries. It was filling but hard to eat with a fork and knife, so I think I want to avoid having something so complicated to eat in the future. I was kind of hoping to find a restaurant with le menu available for this evening but we have another 4 days here so I think it will not be a problem. We had dessert as well which was more Crepes for me, this time with chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Fantastic!

At this point it was about 11pm so we headed toward the hotel, taking the Metro almost the entire way this time with a change in the middle to get on the one that goes right by our temporary place here in Paris. There was a small restaurant / cafe on our way and we decided to stop for some wine and maybe fromage. We got seated right away but didn't tell our waitress that we were just having drinks and she got somewhat mad at me when I tried to order off of the wine menu and didn't get anything else. I wasn't very good at ordering, and it put me off a little, I didn't know that I was supposed to say something on the way into the restaurant that we just wanted drinks. The wine was pretty good though, and she treated Diana okay when it was more clear that we don't know French that much. It was the first real screwup in Paris, although I don't really know what I could be doing differently. :( Maybe when we get in, we should say deux pour dessert, which might give them the right idea? I couldn't seem to find anything in to say "just drinks". Maybe we should just go to the Cafe when we just want drinks.

At any rate, we got back at the hotel pretty late, and now I need to get some winks in because tomorrow is our trip out of town to Versailles. I'm a little worried about getting the correct (return) tickets on our way out, because we don't need any tickets to the palace itself, and I hope that the station ticket offices are open.

Paris - Day 1: Metro Jazz Fusion

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:56:12 CDT

We landed in Paris about 24 hours ago. Getting off of the plane I was starting to get ready for the trip ahead to the RER and then the Metro and then our hotel, and to see Paris for the first time. The airport is quite nice at CDG, and we didn't have to go through any additional screening or a passport check when we landed. I thought for sure we would need to get our passports checked again. Oh, by the way, we ended up going through security in Iceland for the EU, which was similar to going through it in the US. Similar enough that I almost ended up dropping my pants for the inspector because I had to take off my belt and my shorts don't exactly fit snugly anymore.

After getting to the Notre Dame station, I realized that I was entirely confused by the Paris metro signage. I had known on the map that I looked at before we left that we needed to go to the Cluny-La Sorbonne station and then from there on to the next station down to minimize our walking to the hotel, but I couldn't see the words Cluny-La Sorbonne anywhere and there didn't seem to be any indication of the correct color-coded on the signage as well. I also was a bit nervous because at that point we were walking down the street with everything that we had brought to paris including our museum passes and all of our clothing. I was feeling a bit exposed. We ended up finding both the way to the wrong metro track (the one that goes by the Eiffel, I found out later) and the other RER track before I finally figured out by the stations marked. I should have paid more attention to the fact that the lines are marked with their terminal destinations rather than their colors most of the time. I also could have figured out the numbers that I was supposed to run, because it was pretty clear once I figured I was supposed to be on line 10 headed toward Gare d'Austerlitz.

So after minor trouble, we finally arrived at our hotel - Hotel Abbatial Saint-Germain, completely jet lagged and tired. Our room is quite small, but the hotel is about a block from the seine and Notre Dame, so I think it is a good location. It is also clean and everything seems to work, which was a problem the last time that I decided to book a hotel in a metro area in Europe. It will be a good base of operations. We unpacked and put the importants into the safe, and promptly took a 3-5 hour nap.

After we were a little more rested, we changed for going out to our first Paris meal. I was a bit worried that I would get everyting wrong, picking up the wrong forks, sitting down at the wrong spot, ordering incoherently, and such. I steeled myself for being horrible at Paris. We walked down the street to the Cafe du Metro which is fairly nice and open to foreigners with an english language menu even available outside. I ordered the beef steak with fries and Diana got ham sandwich with cheese on top. I'm not exactly sure that she was supposed to have cheese on top as well, but it was definitely delicious from her review. She also got some fromage on a plate which was very delicious (she kindly shared).

After dinner, we decided to walk around the neighborhood a little. I wanted to see our first monument as Notre Dame was definitey within walking distance. As we walked toward the Seine, some people were behind us and seemed to be in a hurry. Diana asked "sorry, are we in your way?" Immediately the response came back - "I don't know, what is your way?" from a quite happy it seemed Frenchman. He explained quickly that he was headed to a jazz club to see his friend in a jam session, and would we like to come to see his friend? Normally I am quite wary of people being this friendly so quickly, so I was wary, but I figured that I still had my wits about me. So we walked along the Seine and around the neighborhood looking for the bar that his friend was going to play at, and got to know his friend Lisa, who was really happy to be meeting someone from Chicago originally.

We ended up in the La Guillotine Pub, or more specifically, downstairs in Le Caveau des Oubliettes. True to the man's word, there was a bunch of Jazz being played in the basement, which was a 19th century cellar at least, and it had a lot of stuff on the walls. We each had a beer and listened to the band play out the rest of it's set. Somehow, we had accidently stumbled on one of my goals of visiting a jazz bar while we in Paris. Still a bit tired so we did not stay long, also the drinks were quite expensive (€ 7 for a small beer).

Afterwards, we walked and saw Notre Dame up close at night. I took some pictures with my phone. It was a successful first day in Paris, I think I'm already going to like it here.

Paris - Day 0: The machine of travel

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:20:35 CDT

Everything is amazing, and I am thrilled. I'm writing this blog post in the first day which I've been out of the country since 2007. We just passed the last land that I'll see for about 2 hours as I share a trip over 30,000 feet in the air with about 100 others on my way to Paris. I am happy that I am taking this trip, that it's even possible for me to travel so far in so little time, and that I am able to experience this all with my partner.

The first day of travel is always the one that I freak out on the most. I get worried that I'm going to forget something crucial at home, that the flight is somehow going to go horribly wrong, that something big will happen that could prevent me from going on the trip. From the moment I woke up this morning, I could feel the weight on my chest of all the things that could go wrong in the day, holding me back, keeping me from taking that first step out of the covers.

It's important that I make that conscious decision to start the day, and to get all of the obstacles that are in my way out of the way before I can enjoy myself wherever I am going. Usually I start the day on autopilot like most days, and then I make two lists. The first list is the one in my head of the things that could go wrong and cancel the trip. The second list is on paper, or on the whiteboard, which is a kind of anti-list for the other one. If I accomplish everything on the second list, I will have done all the reasonable things that I could have done to counter the first one.

The longer and more foreign the trip, the longer both lists get. Part of this is just because of the added complexity. There are more moving gears, so it's easier for someone to throw a wrench in the works and screw something up. Add an extra set of identification that I need to keep track of, and the complexities of foreign currency, and other languages into the mix and we've graduated from simple machines into the renaissance.

I've felt that weight on my head every time that I take a trip, and I have noticed it consciously in the last couple of long trips where the cogs start to pile up. This time has been the most trying yet, with the triple whammy of travelling with my partner, out of the country, and to a foreign country.

So far, everything has gone according to plan in this trip, starting from the time when the decision was made, many months ago, through foreign language classes to get some basic French, financial planning to make this all possible, and this morning and early afternoon's work all falling into place. As the machinery works, the lists get smaller, and the weight gets lighter. As big chunks of what could go wrong fall off of the first list, the second list fades to nothing.

Usually by the time I am in the hotel, I am ready to explore a new place, making memories that I treasure. It's a wonderful time, and it's only more exciting every time I get to go. I am so grateful that things are even better with Diana. It's a joy to see new places with her every single time, whether it is around the corner or around the globe. She helps me set up the machine - she was the one who thought up the language lessons - and provides torque to help get me in gear.

In 6 hours, I'm going to be stepping on the ground in a city half the way across the world, where I can see great works of art, sample fine cuisine, and explore a city which has so much to see. The weight will be lifted, the machine run it's course.

I'll do it again as soon as I'm able, because I live in an age where it's possible, and the reward at the end is great. And with experience, putting together the machine gets easier.

Project 52: Week 34 & 35

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:19:27 CDT

When 1 hour is not 1 hour, again.

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:57:20 CDT

If you've been following my twitter stream lately, you might have noticed that I am posting about once a day with an update on my thesis work. I've been working for a while at a particular piece of the puzzle, making slow but steady progress. The key has been partly due to the fact that I'm forcing myself to do it every day, and not slack off. It's a big productivity booster, and I think it has been helping me get more done for a while now. There are a bunch of reasons why I think it has helped me eek a bit more than an hour out of that work every day.

The first is that I am making myself culpable after the fact about what I have done in that day. While there is some evidence that telling people what you're going to do before you do it is detrimental to finishing, it's a little hard to keep something like a Thesis a secret. I've compromised by switching the rules around a little bit, and posting what I've done after I do it. It helps me stay on task by reminding myself that I will have to fess up to not doing anything if there is nothing that I accomplished in the day. It also helps me look back on my progress for the day and gives me a little review - reminding myself where I was if I lose track as well.

Another facet that I've been gaining from is that when I'm in downtime, I'm never really not thinking about my thesis work. Everything that I end up doing at work and especially the pieces of my work which are related are keeping my mind on task and making me think about what I need to do at the end of the day. I also make a point of trying to split my work in half for the day, and take a walk while I'm still thinking about stuff. Lately I've been listening to some podcasts on my daily exercise, but I am convinced that there is still some part of my brain working on it, especially because I know that I'm only halfway done with the day - I am thinking about what I want to accomplish in that second half-hour of work.

Related to the half-hour nature of my time management, I also use the Pomodoro technique in order to time the intervals. I'm specifically using Pomodroido, which works quite well for Android. The advantage of using the pomo as a timer is that I don't think about looking about how much time is left, I know that I will get at least a 5 minute break between sessions, and it also has a nifty progress bar and levelling-up system which gives me a great sense of accomplishment. By looking at how many pomos I've done in a week, I can confirm that I did my work for every day. I've used the pomodoro in the past for general tasks, but I have a harder time when I'm not able to focus on a single task. Using it for something as focused as "thesis work" works out well for me.

Lastly, I think that the timing of my work is a big factor. I do my work at the end of my work day, which means that my mind is still in the productive mode from being at work all day long, but I also do it in a different environment, so I am training myself to think about other things. There is also somewhat of a "thinking about it outside the timebox" which happens because of completing the work nearer to the end of the day. I haven't actually experimented, but I am fairly convinced that if I did it at the beginning of the day, I would get less done.

Working every day on my thesis has been a big boon to making progress on it in the last few months. I am making real progress which is shown by the fact that I'm almost ready to run my first experiment. Using the timebox in the way that I do, by using a specific timer, splitting it in half and doing something else in the middle, and putting the work at the end of the day, has been a big help to getting a lot more out of an hour of work every day than I would expect. I'm hoping that I can take these tools and apply them to other projects as well - I'm wondering about how well they would apply to something like my consulting when I have a project that needs to get done. I'm also wondering if I can add another hour to the work in the day to "ramp it up" for the last parts of the thesis when I'm in crunch time.

Big Bang Theory Intro #8: Apatosaurus

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:09:51 CDT

From lizards last week to the big lizards this week. These are the peacable kind, well, as peacable as you can expect from a gigantic lizard.

I spent a little bit of time looking but I couldn't turn up the source image on any of the normal sites (or any of the new ones that I found to sift through either). It's probably not original though, it looks like a drawing of some kind or a painting. It might be one from a museum like the one at Dinosaur National Monument where they have found some other bones as well.

This particular type of giant lizard is called an Apatosaurus now, although I learned it as Brontosaurus when I was growing up. They lived in the Late Jurassic period, making the ~7000BC way off the mark of course by about 140 million years. Lots of these are in big museums, or replicas, with their heads craning upwards kind of like a giraffe, but recently people have been saying that they would never be in that position, because it would be impossible for the circulatory system to pump the blood to the head when it was up - they would put it at the max horizontal from the center.

I remember seeing a lot of these on the side of the road in the past, next to Sinclair stations where you could get gas. I always thought that it was a cruel tip to the ultimate source of the oil that you were buying. They are legitimate roadside attractions and I'm pretty sure that I've had my picture taken to them some time before.

Book Review: Microserfs

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:52:44 CDT

It's been a while since I read this book, having picked it up at Powells on our Portland vacation last year. It was sitting on my shelf for a while before I read it, but when I finally did get to it, I was pleasantly surprised at the discovery. I had originally picked it up because I liked the title, the blurb on the back, and the lego man on the cover (the current version is less lego-y), but it was some good fiction, and strangely relevant to today's times.

The book focuses on a group of software developers who are working at Microsoft on the bottom rung, which isn't necessarily a bad place to be, but in the 1990's when this book is set it meant that you were basically a geek of the highest order and didn't really have much of a real life. The main characters are staying in a typical of the time "Microsoft House" which meant that they were all workaholics and sharing a house with a bunch of other Microsoft employees.

After a couple of character-establishing chapters in which we are introduced to all of the characters and all of their quirks, the whole house gets recruited to Silicon Valley to become part of a startup which will be revolutionizing the industry and making something that has never been made before. The product they are building is a kind of object-oriented block-building world, with procedures and things that you can attach to everything. It is very reminiscent of something like Second Life and eerily similar to Minecraft when it is described in the book. The product and company itself goes through some interesting transformations and pivots, but that's not really what makes this book any good.

It chronicles from the perspective of Dan, who could be called the main protaganist. It reads really like a geek blog, with time passing between chapters and things happening that are discussed in the past tense. Every chapter brings new things, and like a blog, it can meander from subject to subject from times. It also contains some of classic blog-style interdictions of "computer thought" which are really just some random words which are placed strangely across the page and make you think because of their placement between the chapters, about what is missing between these tellings of goings on.

It's grounded in the reality of the 1990s and the dot-com and tech boom which happened around then, so there are the main players like Sun and Apple which are marginally involved. The style of writing really makes you feel like you are reading from someone who is inhabiting this world of startups, high ideas, spending money and coding sprees. True to form, the startup company begins in a company house and then moves to an office which has it's own style later on.

There are somewhat of a group of plots in the book, each riffing off of each other in strange ways and connecting at various points. One of the group at the original house didn't leave Microsoft and there are various little interludes to keep us up to date on what is happening with him, and the main character gets hooked up and a love story develops with another of the developers at the company. There is also a lot of family dynamics between Dan and his parents - his father is one of the older generation who worked in the valley when it was just getting started and doesn't know what to do with himself.

All in all, I would say that this book is surprisingly relevant and a clear look into a geek culture which exists even today, even though the pages of the paperback that I got were yellowed and frayed, almost 15 years after it's publication. The main storylines are connected and the characters are written very true to life. Some of the references are dated but you could place these same people in a similar situation at a company today (although Microsofties have grown up quite a lot I think) and it would be believable and just as compelling.

The only downside of this book is that it feels like it's lacking any type of closure. You get to the end of the book and there really isn't anything resolved, and while you've though about some interesting things along the way and the journey was great, there really is no destination that the author takes you to. Some would say that this is a bonus, because there is a lot in the story about how life is always evolving, but it still felt like there was a chapter missing at the end for me for some reason. I give it a B+ because it could be better, but it's extremely satisfying in it's own right.

Standing for work

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 10:42:23 CDT

In the last two months or so, I've been working a different way when I am at my desk computer at home. On July 7, I converted my desk from a traditional desk into one where I am standing up while I work. I had been a bit curious about standing for a while, owing it to a couple of people I know who had tried it out. They claimed that there were a lot of advantages to working while standing, not the least of which was that they felt more productive than they were when sitting down all day.

After reading their accounts, I was thinking in the back of my mind that I had somehow worked out the perfect system for my desk where it would be easy and free for me to try out this new form of working. When I originally moved to the Twin Cities for the beginning of grad school, I needed a desk, and somehow got it into my head that it would be a very cool thing to have a massive work area to work with. Someone introduced me to the idea of wire shelving, and I eventually put two and two together and acquired with great effort a 3 foot by 5 foot sturdy wire shelf, which I covered with a Lexan sheet and use to this day as my main work area. (Diana uses a second one - incidentally at the time I had to buy them in pairs.) One of the great advantages of using a wire shelf as a desk is that you can adjust it to be as low or as high as you want, in one inch increments. This meant that for the majority of the time that I was working or playing on the computer -- something that takes a significant portion of my life -- that I was sitting at exactly the right height for ergonomic purposes. It also meant that I could do this transition without too much trouble:

I moved the main desk from 25 inches off the ground to 40 inches. It wasn't exactly as simple as pushing a button, which some more fancy standing desks use in order to make it easy to sit for some periods of time as well, but I figured that if I was going to give it a try, I should really go all in and try to stand all the time. I still had a sitting desk at my day job, so it wasn't going to be all the time I was standing.

Directly after the transition, the first thing that I noticed was that I was a little more attentive, and was just a little more comfortable. This was despite the fact that I had miscalculated the height which should be comfortable by about a third of a foot, which meant that I was standing with a wide stance in order to be the right level to type and look directly at the screen. I moved my chair to the other side of the room and didn't even look back, starting on work right away. It was refreshing to be standing. I also felt that I had a better handle of the situation for some reason. I felt pretty productive that first night, but got tired pretty quick and retreated to the living room and my laptop on the cumfy couch.

I tried it out for the majority of a month, working at least an hour a day at the standing desk every night, for most of my thesis work and a bit of other work as well. When I am working at the standing desk, I am much more likely to do a little bounce to the music that I'm listening to, which I think will probably be good for me in the long run - I'm not really standing statically and stoic. Even when I am not listening to anything, I feel like I am more active than when I am sitting because I will shift from one foot to the other, just to even out the weight or get a little more comfortable. When I am in a chair, I am content to just get comfortable and sit there for a while, but when I am standing, I seem to be unconsciously vigilant about how comfortable I am at each given moment, and adjusting to make it that much easier to work.

After about a month, I remedied the situation of the four inches suboptimal placement of the original desk, and it just became more comfortable than it was before, and I can stand there for much longer periods of time. When I had to wide-stance in order to work there, it wasn't bad but it was still somewhat uncomfortable, and now I can just walk right up to the desk and start typing on my computer. I've played games for hours on end there with no trouble at all, and I will spend a significant period of my day standing there working when I can.

One of the side benefits that I haven't heard people write about before is that when I do decide to sit down, it's a much more relaxing experience now. In the same way that cutting out a lot of sugary sweets from your diet makes the chocolate cake that you eat on your birthday that much more tasty, standing for most of your work makes it just that much more relaxing to sit your ass down on a cushioned couch and watch some great TV.

So I'm two months into the experiment, and I feel confident saying that it's been a success so far. I would recommend trying standing for anyone who can wrangle a way to get their work space up to that level. I think that it's definitely not for everyone, and there are still a few bad things about it (I think that I need to get a standing mat now), but the advantages in productive work and just general active feeling for me have been great.

Project 52: Week 33

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:50:20 CDT

Big Bang Theory Intro #7: Iguanas Basking

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:52:55 CDT

We're continuing to zoom out into bigger and bigger viewpoints through these first seven images in the flashing montage at the beginnign of the show. Today we are seeing some amphibians, just like the last image:

This image again is available in source form, and in color, through Jupiter Images. The title of the image is "Marine iguanas on rocks", which is exactly what this image depicts. Marine Iguanas are unique in the world, and are only found near the Galapagos islands. It relates really closely to the image from last week, because it can forage and live off of the sea, not needing any of the things on the land. This image might be the first hint of a slant (other than the obvious timeline with billions of years) towards an evolutionary angle, as they were commented on by Charles Darwin when he was on his visit to the Galapagos.

They are protected by the Equadorian government, and are considered threatened by many becuase their food source is affected and these rocks that they bask on in order to raise their temperature (they are cold-blooded or course) are both affected by the El Nino effect.

August Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 21:32:58 CDT

It's been a quiet month on the blog front, mostly because I don't have a lot of organizing energy lately. I should be able to put these up once a month at least, so true to the promise to myself, I'm putting this one up now.

The last month has been pretty good to me in my diet. There has been a lot less roller-coaster-ness than there was in the previous months, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel that I might be able to hit my goal before I head off on vacation in the middle of September. That would be nice. In regards to my diet, I've been mostly still keeping with the keto diet that I have been on before, focusing a lot on the protein and fat portions and limiting myself when thinking about carbs. Lately I have been loosening up on the restrictions of the diet lately, and not watching the ketostix as much as I did when I was hard-core on the diet. Now I just am kind of passively trying to stay below 50 or 75 carbs a day by not eating any bread in general, and counting the carbs along with the calories that I'm eating.

Lately weekends have been a pretty good deal for me, because I told myself last month that I was going to start letting myself eat a little more freely over the weekends. So I get to give myself a treat on Saturday before we go out to the farmer's market here in town and have some pancakes or hash browns. I've found that some of my tastes have changed though, since the last time that I have been eating out "normally". I'm ordering a lot more things with peppers and tomatoes in them, and with cooked onions. They are pretty tasty and give an otherwise bland breakfast omelet some more zing. I've also been avoiding a bunch of carbs by having pancakes with sugar free syrup. Almost every restaurant which serves breakfast will have some kind of sugar free syrup available, which means that you won't just be pouring on the carbs when you eat your cakes. I am likening it now to asking for diet soda - because I have the sugar free syrup, I can have a couple of pancakes.

In the last month or so, I've decided that I need to start upping my exercise. I mentioned last month that I had a new course for my training, and I started interval training. I've stuck with the running course pretty religiously, because I think it has a good mix of hills and slow climbs along with some falls, and goes far enough afield that I can feel accomplished every time. It also helps that it goes past five of the parks here in northeast Minneapolis, so I get to have a little bit of nature on the walk.

The running pace has been going up a little bit, but I am staying with the type of training I was doing before, which is a two minutes walking to one minute jogging or running throughout the whole course. You can see some of my intervals on RunKeeper (look me up and add me if you want). I really like the graphs on there, because it shows how fast you run and it is really nice. I am still logging at dailymile as well, because I have more people cheering me on at that site. At any rate, my best pace has been improving dramatically lately, with the best pace dropping over a minute in the last month to 11:25 per mile. I'm really happy about the fact that there is such a tangible improvement from these runs. I'm hoping that I can make my goal of doing the course in less than 45 minutes by the end of the year.

After a rocky graph last month, it is heartening to see that most of this month's graph is green. I have a little blip above the line at the end of the first week of August, but it is working out pretty well for me, and the weekly loss is spot on to what I have been aiming for on the calories scale, so it works out overall. I am somewhat terrified to see what these will look like when I start ramping it down and eating a little more. I am worried that my body will rebel at the idea of eating more foods and start gaining weight instead of just going to a steady state. I am really, really close to the "before and after picture" goal that I set for myself, and with any luck I will post it with next month's report.

The yearly graph looks great. I have even apparently sped up my weight loss in the last two months, despite the heavy upwards blip around the fourth. I'm slightly worried that my next vacation will have a similar uptick, but a graph like this will make me just get right back on track and lose any gained pounds.

I've mentioned my transition to a different period a couple of times in this month's report. I've decided that I want to get comfortable where I am for a little while, at least when I get to the next goal that I have set for myself I will start focusing on toning and being more fit instead of losing weight necessarily. If I'm lucky, I'll still lose some of the pounds just because I will be getting rid of some of the excess fat rolls that are on my body. I'll still be posting monthly on my progress, but it will start focusing on fitness and such instead of just the diet itself. I'm hoping that by keeping really close track of everything, I won't have a problem staying at around the same weight until the end of the year.

Big Bang Theory Intro #6: Leaving the Sea

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:47:30 CDT

Wow, it's been a long time. Maybe I can do these weekly like the Project 52.

This is our first image which I couldn't reliably find on one of the stock images sites. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I just can't search through the millions of fish images and amphibian images out there. It's set in the timeline on the screen at about 10,000 BC.

It's meant to depict the evolutionary link from sea to land, one of the Tetrapods who have similarities to the frogs or lizards of today. I think it looks most like the Tiktaalik. There is a nice image on the Wikipedia page which shows one walking out of the sea. Of course the 10k BC number is off by a ton, as the Tetrapods were all from more than 300 million years ago or more. Then again, things haven't really been that accurate up to now (and I don't really expect them to be more accurate).

For the longest time I remember that the evolution deniers saying that they hadn't seen any fish coming up on land, but they just didn't like to look at the amphibians or something. There was always the "those don't breathe water" things about them though. I also think that those Darwin stickers that people put on cars are cute, but I wouldn't put one on one of my cars. For some reason I am quite timid, and that seems like a pretty direct jab at christians. I believe in evolution, but I don't want to be hostile about it.

Project 52: Week 32

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:50:20 CDT

Project 52: Week 31

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:50:20 CDT

Project 52: Week 28-30

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 14:16:20 CDT

I got behind again. I need to take more pictures.

July Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:26:05 CDT

Well, I've been a bit lax in the updating of this blog lately, and it seems that I've let an entire month go by without updating everyone on my diet status. I'll try to be a little less flaky in the future, but for now, you get two, two, two months in one update.

The last two months have been the most roller-coastery of the entire diet so far. Even so, I've managed to keep an average steady pace in the weight loss domain and keep eating the foods that I love while avoiding the ones that would cause problems. I've still been keeping mostly to the ketogenic diet, which is very low-carb, but I have been able to be a little bit more lax in this month than I have been able to in the past. Partially this is due to me actually measuring when I am in a state of ketosis (that is the state when the liver is breaking down fat to produce glucose). I've been using these Ketostix in order to measure when I am in ketosis and when I am not in it. They are a clear indicator of when I need to keep a better eye on the amount of carbs that I am eating.

In the last month I took my first long vacation from the diet in a while (when I was in Spring Green, and I had a big jump in my weight right away because of it. Luckily I think it was mostly water weight and "shock weight" because after a couple of days of being back on the low-carb diet I was below the trend line again. I am somewhat concerned about it now, because I do eventually want to turn back to a more natural eating style where I can have a greater amount of carbs in a normal day, although probably not the unrestricted amount of carbs that I was having before.

According to many, the ideal amount is 55% of your calories from carbohydrates, and then 30% from proteins, and 15% from fats. Ketogenic diets turn this on it's head, with as few as 5% of of the calories from carbohydrates a much greater percentage from the "good fats" that are in animal meats. I think I will try doing something different like maybe swapping the proteins and carbohydrates, and making sure that more of my carbohydrates come from good sources like beans and grains. One of the main things that I didn't realize how much of was in my diet before and I am coming to terms with now, was how much refined sugar I was having. In a typical day I would have more than 100g of refined sugar, which is pretty appalling considering how little I have now and is super sweet. I was convinced that I was not going to be one of those people who would shirk at the sweetness of things (I've always had a sweet tooth, and still do), but after just a little of a sweet thing, I can't have much more. It could also be a big factor in the blood sugar levels, which make a big difference for me now.

I've been pretty consistent with my exercise in the last few months, with most of the exercise coming in the form of outside walking around the neighborhood. I've started taking pictures of these little lions that are situated around my neighborhood, that I didn't notice before because you just notice more things when you are walking at 4mph instead of driving along at 25mph. I am maybe going to map them out and see what I can do. In the month of June it was pretty much straight walking, and I tried to cover the map with my walks, making sure that I walked every street. I got a decent amount of it covered, but there is only so much wandering that I can do with the limited amount of time that I gave myself each day. I still think I did a decent job of covering the neighborhood.

In the month of July, at least for the last couple of weeks, I've been keeping a consistent path and trying to see if I can get my speed up and start going faster. This all started when I took a longer walk than normal and saw a tiny lake which was nearby. The walk itself was quite enjoyable and actually walks nearby five of the local parks, and is of a distance that I feel like I am accomplishing something every day that I can exercise and do the whole loop. I've been doing it pretty consistently every time that I go out. Since it is mostly straight lines, but it is still very much variety on the walk, I can make sure that I go the right way and it gives me something to measure against when I try to go faster. Lately I've been trying to incorporate some short jogs into the runs, with intervals like 2 minutes of walking to 1 minute of running or jogging, and have been getting faster. Right now it's my goal by the end of the year to be able to do this course in the 45 minutes that I had been allocating to my exercise before I started the extended walks. That would mean that I am very close to a rate that is a 10 minute mile. Right now my best pace is 12:30 a mile, which is still much faster than I've ever been able to run as I can remember it.

This is probably the worst graph of diet progress that I've been able to present this year. The hump in the middle represents the shock of those many cheat days on the vacation. They are also estimated by the graphing system here which is those open graph marks. I've still been steadily going in the downward trend nowadays though which is great, and I have had a solid week of all below 250 pounds which is a good milestone to be happy about. If I keep going at this rate, I'll get to my first major weight goal before the end of August, and then things will get more interesting as I try to maintain the weight until the end of the year. I also promise a before and after picture of me when I get to that point, if only to remind myself that I want to maintain the smaller me.

The year to date graph again looks pretty nice, with a net loss of about 50 pounds since the beginning of the year, and only one major blip there at the beginning of this month. Even with the bump it looks like I'm right back on track already and haven't really had a major setback.

It's an odd month, so let's look at the graph showing all of the progress from the beginning of me trying to get fit, exercise and lose weight. I'm almost 100 pounds down from my previous weight of 340. This graph looks great. One part of this graph which is encouraging to me is actually the part that probably looks pretty bad to you, which is the time right around October 2010. In this period I was able to just stay at the same weight for a very long time, which suggests that it will be possible for me to do it again. I'm thinking about that because it is what I will want to be doing soon.

Project 52: Week 24-27

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 23:51:18 CDT

I'm a bit behind. Have fun.

Spring Green Minivacation - Day 3

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 05:16:48 CDT

(This post is part of a series on a short vacation that I took with my partner Diana Rajchel at the beginning of July 2011)

Fortunately, after a couple of days in Spring Green, Wisconsin, finally it looked like the weather was going to turn into something more like comfortable vacation weather. Unfortunately, half of our vacation was over. After waking up for the second day in a row without an alarm clock and completely rested in the Usonian Inn's lovely Room 11, we had a day of actual touristy things ahead of us for our last full day.

The first thing we needed to sort was breakfast though. We went into town and stopped by a coffee and pastry shop that we had tried to stop by on yesterday's walk through the town. It was closed when we had stopped before because we showed up at around 12:30 and the owner was on his siesta. He was in, and so were a couple of locals. We got some coffee and donuts for the breakfast and sat down. The locals wanted to know if we were in town for Taliesin, which we had considered going to but hadn't yet. I had two donuts, both of which were very nice and obviously made in the bakery. Diana chatted up the locals a bit and some left and others appeared while we tried to get online via the tethering on Diana's phone. It worked to an extent, more in the coffee shop than it did in the hotel room because there is slightly better reception in the town.

After breakfast, I had at least one thing planned, but there was no real schedule for the day, which is something that I really like to have while on these kinds of relaxing vacations that are not really to a touristy place, but are really a getaway from everyday stresses for a while. I wanted to head to the Cave of the Mounds and do a tour, along with a short drive because it was about half an hour away. While on our way there, there was a scenic overlook which we stopped at because we didn't have any particular time table - it was looking basically straight at the House on the Rock which was an option for later in the day if we had time. We also stopped to get some more supplies at the Walmart in Dodgeville. Cave of the Mounds was a decent drive from Spring Green, but it was not too long, only about half an hour. That's about the maximum that I would go while on vacation to see something - I feel like that if it's an hour away by car, then we should have stayed in a different location. We did spot a couple of hotels that we might try out if/when we came into town again - one being the Don Q Inn which has a plane parked out front and a big Q mowed into the lawn.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Cave of the Mounds, because I hadn't been there before. I had been to other caves as a child on family vacation trips, but I was thinking that a lot of caves can be very different and this one might not be as impressive as the one that I was at as a child because of either my less-than-fantastic memory of the cave and also the fact that this seemed to be a tourist location in Wisconsin, which isn't exactly known for it's caves. I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful it was to be guided on a short tour of a relatively small cave. I got a lot of pictures with my cameraphone, although not all of them came out great. Diana got a bunch of photos with the much better camera which I haven't seen all of, but what the picture above is taken from. There were some areas where the guide takes you through some narrow patches and you go up and down almost 70 feet in the cave while you are walking around. I correctly remembered before that you shouldn't touch almost anything in caves because the oil from hands will prevent the further growth of the stalactites and stalagmites. There was a short section where there was natural phosphorous as well, which they activated with a bright lamp and then let us see it give off it's glow. One thing that I remember from the child trip to a cave which was very different in this trip, and probably will be different for all time now, is that there was a section of the tour where the guide plunges you into complete darkness, the kind where there is no light and your eyes will never adjust to the darkness. I remember being amazed at the time when I couldn't even see the hand in front of my own face. Alas, that won't ever happen again probably - when the guide tried it in this tour, a bunch of light sources came out in the group, mostly from cell phones and LCD displays from cameras. The tour was really fun and Diana enjoyed herself too, so I think we might go see some other caves if we visit areas of the US where there are some, or if we are on a road trip and see some as a roadside attraction.

After the cave, we drove back into Dodgeville to check out a place that we had driven by before, but it was closed the last time. It is a small coffee shop and bistro called Cook's Room. At that point in time we were pretty hungry because the breakfast that we had acquired before wasn't exactly the strong breakfast that we got used to on vacation (how quickly do we get used to large breakfast), so we decided to get something for lunch. They had a menu which was filled with some great panini and other cafe like things, and they had thankfully a great selection from the coffee shop as well. I had another iced coffee, which I hadn't had basically ever before this trip, but is growing on me quite strongly as a regular drink. It has the right amount of bitterness and sweet if you add the cream in the correct portion. I had a fairly wonderful chicken panini with some pesto and mozzarella and Diana had a similar panini with some Italian sausages in it.

Before the end of our journey for the day, we had time for one other attraction to see that day. I was very enamoured with the idea of seeing the Taliesin school, so Diana indulged my thoughts even though she was leaning towards seeing the House on the Rock. When we return to Spring Green, I think that we will be going to House on the Rock, but it was not in the cards for this tour. Taliesin is the school that Frank Lloyd Wright started at the end of his career and is an architectural school that's still in use today as students learn the stylings that he has introduced. The tour of the main house was far too long for our tastes, so we took a tour of the hillside studio where the students stay and they are even working while we were there. The building itself is quite unique - there are, in typical style, a lot of sharp angles, but it does not feel like it is a boxed in space at all. One of the reasons that I like the architecture of Wright is that he has different angles than most traditional buildings. I also learned that he is a major advocate of only using material which you can find locally in the area of the structure being built, which is quite interesting. Inside the building, we weren't allowed to take pictures. I snapped a few shots outside of the buildings, one of which is viewable above.

While on the tour, I got a bit uncomfortable with some of the other tourists that were with us as well as slightly with the tour guide, because it seemed like there was quite a bit of hero worship going on. I definitely admire the works of a great architect, but I don't really think anyone deserves the type of undying praise that these people were giving to the person. There were definitely a lot of great rooms and interesting things to see there, but he was not without his faults. Most of his buildings had flat roofs, even in areas like Wisconsin where there is a lot of snow and that was a horrible idea because the melting and freezing would cause them to be quite leaky. Also the studio that we walked through had a strong smell of mold throughout the whole area, almost to the point where we thought the whole "preservation" thing might have been taken a bit too far for a building where people are meant to actually be there continually. All in all, it was a nifty experience though, and I was glad to have been on the tour to see the building.

We went and took a rest at the hotel, and then back to the Taliesin visitor center to have dinner at the restaurant which is situated there. I was happy to get reservations for earlier in the day and we had a nice meal while overlooking the river there as well as a bunch of people who were playing in the river after a hot day across the way. The visitor center was designed by Wright as well, and I can't imagine having it as a home but it works very well for stunning views of the river. I had some lovely local pork and asparagus, with a dessert of Lemon Meringue pie which was a real treat. Diana had some badgerberry pie, which was a berry that I hadn't heard of before, but tasted just as lovely and sweet.

It was our final full day in Spring Green, but we were tired from a full day's worth of visiting places and seeing new things. I always enjoy having a vacation with Diana because she is such a wonderful travelling companion. On Sunday we drove home, and it was mostly uneventful, but I'll write about it separately soon. Until then.

Spring Green Minivacation - Day 2

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:05:25 CDT

(This post is part of a series on a short vacation that I took with my lovely spouse Diana Rajchel at the beginning of July 2011)

Waking up at the Usonian Inn was interesting, because there are large bay windows that let in the light very well throughout the day, including the morning. Even though they aren't oriented toward the sun, I woke up basically naturally, and then decided that I wanted to sleep for a couple more hours. One of the things that I end up getting a lot more of on vacation than I do in "real life" is sleep. I really relish being able to wake up, look at the clock, and decide that I don't have so many pressing things today that I can't sleep for another hour or two. I think that I didn't have a night with less than 6 hours sleep in the entire trip, which is a significant increase over the amount of sleep that I get on a normal night. That's not to say that I wasn't waking up at my normal times, I would just get up at 4am, and decide that I wanted to sleep some more, and then sleep for 3 hours or more.

After my sleeping in until almost 9am (crazy!), we got dressed and headed to the Round Barn Restaurant, which is one of the places that Diana has been to before on her trips to this area. We at first didn't know what to do, because the dining room is right within the door, and there was no hostess at the station, nor a sign stating to either seat ourselves or wait to be seated. Diana decided to take the initiative and we wondered around until we found a table at a secluded area. It had an interestingly placed mirror, so I took the self-portrait that you see above. The menu was fairly standard fare for a restaurant in the US when serving breakfast, and I ended up having a breakfast burrito. The portions of the meal were quite small, but both of the entrées were less than $15 with coffee, so the prices were also similarly small.

After breakfast, we ventured into downtown Spring Green again to see what the shops were like along main street and the main cross street. We visited a lot of places including what must be one of the final remaining small mom-and-pop department stores in America (no big box store here, except 20 minutes away in Dodgeville), a shop that was quite focused on quilting, and an office supply store. Everywhere we went we were trying to check into Foursquare at these places, and more often than not we did not find a location in the service for the store. Diana was kind enough to add the locations basically wherever we went, and I believe she got some kind of badge for it because of her vigilance in making sure we could document our trip digitally. We also found some interesting benches which were painted in some kind of town square thing.

I didn't catch why these were painted so much, but they were interesting to look at for sure. We also visited The Opal Man, which is situated in a quite small building, but had some magnificent opals that we stared at for a while, including one that was just sheared out of a square of rock, and had some beautiful transparent blue and green flecks in it which reminded me of the types of things that we just wish we could duplicate with the colors on a computer for electronic-y themes.

The heat from the previous day did not dissipate overnight, which meant that walking around downtown wasn't exactly an easy thing - it mostly involved walking to the next store while we were sweltering and hoping that it contained an air conditioner to relieve the amazing 100 degree heat and high humidity of the outside. It made us use the car when we would normally just walk around, and that made me somewhat sad but I was happy because our air conditioning in the car was just chugging away like there was no problem. It could be considered probably one of the largest tests of the car's air to turn on for 5 minutes while we drove and then turn off again and have the car subsequently heat up like crazy. One of the ways that we combated the heat was to stop in the Arcadia Book Store which also included a coffee shop, and get some iced coffee and juice. On the trip in general I would say that I had iced coffee more than I've had in the past five years. Usually I will still drink the hot stuff even if it's really hot outside. The Arcadia is a charming book store that I would recommend to anyone who wants to stop and have a coffee and look at books, it's just the right size that you can easily browse the whole store but had a great selection of books. I already have too many books to read through so I didn't buy any, but true to form, I took down a couple of titles for me to add to my queue of books to read later, as they looked interesting enough for me to try to find later.

We visited some other stores, but then decided that we wanted to take a little break before the main event of the trip, tickets to American Player's Theatre performing The Critic. Back to the hotel to have a short nap. After the nap, we visited Arthur's Supper Club for a meal before we headed off to the play. This restaurant was pretty packed, and had a fried fish and chicken buffet going on. I had some gumbo soup and salad from the salad bar, but decided to just order the fish and chicken from the menu. It was mediocre at best, and I didn't even finish the meal.

The play itself was staged interestingly and was a play which was split into two acts which were quite distinct. The first act I dare to say was the better of the two from an intellectual standpoint - it was centered around a character who was a patron of the arts in the sixteenth century. His wife finds this insufferable because there are more important matters of the world to think about. The main character has a couple of friends over and there is a quite great scene with an artist who just cannot take criticism (I've met a few petty much exactly like him), which was possibly the best performance of the play. There is also a large section on the various types of advertising (or poofery as it was called by the character espousing it's virtues), many of which we would be keen to see today, including a few "all publicity is good publicity" angles. Also there was a hilarious scene with some lost-in-translation type humor with English-French-Italian things, and a small slapstickish dance number which was funny. In the second act, all of the characters so far travel to a dress rehearsal of a play which one of their friends is the writer/director for. The rehearsal is fraught with difficulties, and the play itself has a number of holes in it's plot and expositional character lines which don't make sense. All of these lines are of course lampshaded by the audience's surrogate and pointed out to great humor. The whole thing has a lot of pratfall comedy in it which was also enough to laugh at but wasn't as good humor-wise as the first act I believed.

The whole play was still such a fun thing to go see, and it is really in the middle of a forest. The seats I was happy to see were the padded kind, although I really do wonder how they deal with it when it rains, because it's basically an open-air theater on the top of a hill exposed to the elements. It was still incredibly hot and humid which made the play viewing a bit uncomfortable. Normally I would have hiked up the hill in order to get to the theater itself, but because of the heat we took a shuttle bus up the quite steep hill to the top. The APT were also kind enough to provide a bunch of insect spray, which I am convinced is the reason I wasn't bit to smithereens as I was in later days.

It was a quite full day of vacation, although not rushed at all which I was happy to have. In the hotel room we indulged in some sweets and some TV which was a nice relaxing thing after the long, hot, day. On Saturday the heat finally broke, and we did a few more tourist things, I'll post about them in Day 3. Until then.

Spring Green Minivacation - Day 1

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:09:41 CDT

It's been a while since I've had a vacation, and one of the presents I gave Diana this valentines was a trip to see the American Players Theater which is centered in Spring Green, Wisconsin. There are also a bunch of other tourist-friendly things around that area and Diana enjoys the place, so we decided to take a mini-vacation over an extended Independence Day weekend.

Our first day was a travel day, and our first long trip in the Yaris that we got last year since Christmas. Most of the trips that we take are long enough that we are travelling by plane and leaving the car at home. Since I knew I wasn't going to be getting my normal exercise while on vacation, I got up early and did a walk around the neighborhood. Lately I've been listening to the Critical Hit Podcast while I exercise, because when I have 5 days of exercise a week, I quickly run out of podcasts. Usually I find something to listen to a long backlog so that I don't run out of entertainment. I had a good walk and then we got ready to go.

The drive to Spring Green was pretty nice. It was very hot outside, which made us very thankful for the air conditioning in the car, which actually works quite well in our tiny car, and didn't seem to impact the mileage that much. The last part of the trip took us off of the highway and through some of the highways around the country in Wisconsin, going through some of the tiniest towns that I have seen in a while. It made me think about how these tiny towns actually pay for things, because they have some pretty nice streets and like streetlights (well, one streetlight) in some of them. Regardless, there was some nice views on the way to the hotel.

We're staying at the Usonian Inn, which is unique in the world for being the only motel which is built in the Usonian style of architecture. Looking at it makes you think that it is not really nice on the outside (although that is debatable), but it looks very nice on the inside and is quite interesting with lots of straight lines. Even with the small room that we picked, there are a lot of interesting elements. I took some pictures. The hotel itself is also a very eco-friendly hotel, and is one of the only ones in the areas which is kept on a couple of the green registries. While it's a little more expensive than a run-of-the-mill hotel, I think I would stay there again.

After we got situated, we wanted to get something to eat, so we drove along the road looking for stuff. We did a little random driving and went through another tiny town -- Lone Rock -- which was a little depressing because there wasn't much there. After we got through the town we drove over a couple of nice bridges though which took us over a river (which was quite high) and a drive along a cliff which provided some quite nice views of the Wisconsin countryside.

We ended up in Dodgeville to get some grub and some vacation supplies. We ate at one of the last remaining Country Kitchens which are rare nowadays. We overheard from the hostess that there was quite the scandal with the CEO or someone high up at the company got convicted for embezzlement and all of the company owned stores had to be closed, leaving only the franchise stores left. There are only a few left - less than 40 I think was the number they said. All of the franchise stores are individually up for sale as well I think she said. It was interesting to hear of this story which impacted quite a large chain of restaurants.

I had some ribs and fries which were just what I needed since I had only had some cheese curds since breakfast. It being a vacation, I'm letting myself eat freely instead of trying to be strict to the super low carb ketogenic diet that I am normally eating. To that end, I ended up getting some sweets for dessert and munching on as well. I'm hoping that it doesn't make a big impact on the scale when I get back on July 4. I'll be going on an extreme carb cut for the first couple days of next week, trying to go actually zero carbs to see how quickly I can start burning the fat.

After some supplies, we were both very tired, so we went back to the hotel and plugged in everything to recharge and watched a little TV before drifting off to sleep. Friday is the day where we will have a full day to spend in Spring Green and see the play in the evening. We might end up going to some other spots, or put them off until Saturday. It's set to be another over-90 day pretty much all day long, so maybe not. Until then.

If congress was run by programmers

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:57:01 CDT

There was a large confusion when I first decided that I wanted to read an actual law. If you try to read the text of an actual law (here's an example of some text), it's a bunch of really dense text which is all about what is changing in the US Code. It's all about "adding paragraph" or "adding an additional subsection", or "striking out this section".

I was thinking that things would be different but still the same if programmers ran congress. The entirety of US code could be put into a single git repository. In order to propose changes, you would fork the repository and then make the changes that you need. A law in it's current form looks a lot like a patch to the "source" of the US code.

Debate and voting could be done very similar to the github system where you would make a pull request - then amendments to the bill would be more commits which are added onto the pull request. Debate on the floor of congress would be similar to comments on that request.

Once debate and amendments are over, you could put in your voting electronically just like they do now for CSPAN and for the full count. Right now there's someone who's job is to make sure that the code is amended correctly - there are a lot of actual cases where the laws aren't written correctly, and they are amending the wrong part of the code or something. It's the Office of the Law Revision Counsel to fix them. It would be a lot easier with git, because of the automated merging.

Whether this would make the proposal, debate, and enacting of laws is another question. I like to think that it would make things a lot faster of course, because I'm a programmer and I've seen the fact that adding these types of "social code review" features make things a lot more clear and speed up the development cycle.

It's also an idea for an open government project: Keep track of all of the laws which are in congress now in the form of patches to the US code, keeping track via branches in git that are continued based on the amendments to them. You could also see which laws conflict with each other by trying to merge them all together into a single "after all these laws are passed" branch.

Project 52: Week 23

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 01:36:49 CDT

No, do this, it's better.

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 23:12:23 CDT

I started playing non-traditional board games about the same time that I stated graduate school. That was a long time ago, but it was definitely a good time to start. The non-traditional games that I'm talking about are games like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan and Robo Rally. They're not the type of game that you would have played as a child if you are in the same generation as me. Sometimes they have complex rules (one game took about a half hour to just explain the rules to me recently), and the goals aren't really obvious, and the strategies are complex. Many times there are multiple ways to win, and those ways are in competition with other players. I find these types of "advanced board games" incredibly fun to play and engaging. The strategy is really interesting to figure out and there seems to be almost an endless supply of new games to play.

I used to play these games occassionally with a bunch of guys from the lab, a group which migrated / expanded when the startup spun off and many of us started working there. The go-to game was Settlers of Catan, because it is easy enough to teach people but not so complex that you wouldn't be able to win on your first try. For various reasons the same host isn't hosting the events anymore (one of these days soon I will have to host one or a few).

I've found a bunch of people who are into the same types of games and have about the same unlimited capacity for them on the twincitiessocial subreddit. We all meet at a great event center which always has basically a bunch of open tables waiting for people to come together to play some games. Usually I end up staying about 5 hours and playing 2-3 games (yes, most of them are this long to play). I'm also finding that meeting new people this way is pretty nice, because I have some type of social construct to interact with them other than the normal random chit-chat and that's lead to a couple of casual friendships.

It's really pretty great, but I've been noticing a trend with my play style lately which is starting to be prevalent. I've turned into a "Do this, it's better." player of the games. Someone will be playing their turn, or setting up a strategy, and I'll jump in and try to play their turn for them. Diana first pointed this out to me a month or so back, but I didn't really think it was a problem in my playstyle (Diana usually notices these things way before I do). Now I am rethinking that conclusion, and considering that maybe I'm a guy ruining the fun for someone else. Two or three times ago, I kibitzed on a game and tried to "help" some people out. Last week I was thinking through almost everyone's turns, and in every game I played, I am sure that I made a comment about how to play a turn.

I'm a fairly competitive person when playing (even if I don't win too often), and these aren't cooperative games usually, so why am I "helping" my opponent play a better game against me. I've come up with two theories why I'm doing this.

The first is a strong sense of playing a "fair game". I really think that games are really fun within the constructs of the rules. Most if not all of these games have some type of random component to them - otherwise they usually aren't as fun to replay. Part of me wants to have everyone play the best game that they can, and we just enjoy the experience of playing the game competitively to see who wins. To that end, when I see someone playing suboptimally, I want them to play it absolutely to their advantage.

The second is the idea that somehow by playing it without taking advantage of all the rules, they're "playing it wrong". This comes from a history when I was teaching games to other people. The rules for these games are necessarily complex and there are some twisty turny passages that some people just won't understand the first time they're playing. It's certainly possible that they are making a move and they just don't know that they can do something that is better. If I point it out to them they might be a better player of that particular game in general. This is somewhat tied in with the first season, but has more of a "did you know?" angle. I'm really a minimaxer when it comes to the rules of many of these games, so depending on how twisty-turny the rules are, it could be unnecessarily complex. I have a natural teaching instinct, to you might see this as a dark extension of that in some way.

I don't believe that either of these reasons are justifications for my behavior at the table. I absolutely should be letting the other players play their own turns - the enjoyment that they will get out of the game is going to come from taking those actions and figuring out the plans and strategies of their turns themselves, without my help. Their enjoyment of the game is just as important as mine, and as long as they are playing within the rules, they aren't "playing it wrong" by doing something suboptimal.

I have noticed that it happens more in games where almost all of the information is available to all players. With more hidden information, I obviously can't chime in because I don't know all of the facts of their situation. Seven Wonders is particularly nice for this, as almost all information is hidden while playing. On the other side of things, in Alien Frontiers I have a lot of chances to "help" other players.

I'm hoping that now that I've noticed the behavior, I'll be able to curb it the next time I am at a games night. To this end I'll probably do some sort of introspection throughout the night as well as a review when I'm all finished. One of my desires is to be a better player of these games so that I can make more connections and not be an annoying person to play with. Everyone having fun is more important.

How many languages are too many?

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:39:49 CDT

In the past week, I've programmed for at least an hour in: - Ruby (with and without Rails) - Javascript - Python - C++ - Embedded C - Java - Non-trivial Makefiles - HTML and CSS (if we want to count them)

If we went back a month, we could add C# to that list, as well as the go language, and the ever so strange awk. If I was pressed to write down on a resume all of the languages that I have programmed in, it would probably take up at least a quarter of a page, especially if they wanted me to list the frameworks that I've used in each of them.

Lately I've been counting about how many languages I use on a regular basis, because it seems like I am a programmer that seems to jump from language to language, using whatever is most convenient at the time. If I want to make something, I just choose the tool out of the toolbox that seems reasonable to get the job done, and start hacking away. I'll pick up Python, Ruby or Perl randomly when I want to get a more-complex-than-a-shell-script thing done.

I don't know why I have this outlook on my language selection, and I was blissfully unaware that it was somewhat bizarre until recently, when I've been noticing more that people seem to focus their programming attention on one or two languages, and don't really delve deep into any others. People will stay in a single job coding .NET applications for years at a time, and not look at any other language. That seems quite bizarre for me.

I've been wondering what this means for me as a professional developer. The resume question specifically is interesting to me. As someone who can legitimately name a product that I've shipped in so many languages, does it make me look better or worse for me to put all of them onto my skills list? Will they assume that I'm just padding the list with languages that I've only tinkered in? Of course, this is all just a curiosity because I'm quite happy in the career that I've chosen now, but it's still something I think about.

I'm also thinking about whether I have been going about it all wrong - would I be better off as a developer if I had a single-language focus? Could I finish more projects if I did so? Maybe I should try to pick one or two of the languages and then convert everything to those, and I will actually be more productive. It's hard to judge these things because I've always been the person who is interested not only in being familiar with a language, but building a decent size project in each one. For example, I've been thinking of building a side project in node.js, not because I have a pressing need to learn a JavaScript-based event-driven framework, but just because it looks interesting.

It seems like most of the developers that I know that are into as many languages also have an interest in compilers - but I'm not that interested in them myself. Parsers of course are part and parcel of any programmer's toolbox, if only because sometimes a domain-specific language is what will be the most powerful and useful, but I have never been interested in taking things down to the machine level myself.

I know that there are other people with at least a curiosity into other languages like I have, because there is a Twin Cities Languages User Group that I've attended a couple of times. It's been a while since I've been back at that group, and my life is a little too busy to attend again. It was a short look at a bunch of different languages, which was pretty great.

I'm not sure that I'll ever stop learning the new languages and frameworks of the times. I consider it a good thing on the whole because I am flexible to do things like start programming an Android app, or pick up Objective C in order to hack away at a iOS app. Whatever next new language is coming around the corner, you can probably bet that I'll be programming something in it eventually.

How to weigh a human

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:27:14 CDT

I've been dieting lately, which means that I am weighing myself pretty regularly now. I try to weigh myself every day. Because I'm trying to be so consistent, and I don't have some kind of fancy scale, just this cheapo scale, I've had some troubles over the years getting a consistent read out of my scale. I've finally got it working about as best as I can expect out of what I have, so I thought I would write down the tricks that I use to get as consistent as possible.

One thing that I have gleaned from my job working with electronic components and also looking at some hobby robotics and destroying my old scale to see how it worked was how the new scales that are cheap and completely electronic work. The scale itself doesn't have any springs in it at all, just a circuit board with some wires leading out to four sensors, which are attached directly to the feet of the scale. Many times you can see that the feet aren't actually touching the bottom plastic piece of the scale - that's because they need to be attached to the sensor plate. The body of the sensor is attached to the bottom of the scale. From there, the body is attached to the rest of the scale so that when you step on the scale from the top, the entire body of the scale is pushed down and the feet are effectively pushed into their sensors, giving a sensor reading.

The sensors are calibrated to give a reading which you can then use a simple lookup table in a microprocessor to see what it is supposed to represent in pounds. Of course there are four feet, so that means that they're not exactly on, but the scale manufacturer assumes that there is about one fourth of your weight distributed on each one of the sensors. This brings us to tip number one, the most important:

Stand as close to the center of the scale as possible

This means that your weight will be distributed so as to make the assumptions of the manufacturer as correct as possible. Using this first rule, you will get as an accurate a weight every time you step on the scale. If you have to move the scale to the center of the room in order to stand on the center and not tilt yourself, do so. There's a tip later if you have to move the scale every time.

Of course, that's not the whole story, because you want to have a consistent weighing over multiple days. That means that you need to take into account three more things. The first is that more than half of you is water. This means that the amount of water that you drank in the last 24 hours and how hydrated you are right at the moment that you weigh is going to make a big difference. If you're a heavy person like I am, just two percent of your body weight is easily 5 pounds. The second is more obvious than the first, and that is that you will gain a different amount of weight throughout each day based on what you eat and drink versus your elimination. That means that weighing at the end of the day is completely useless. The third is even more obvious: your clothes weigh different amount every day. These three facts bring us to tip number two:

Weigh yourself at the beginning of the day, naked.

Weighing yourself at the beginning of the day in the buff will give you the most consistent reading day-over-day that you can get. This is because after a night's sleep, you are about as dehydrated as you're going to get in the day. That minimizes the impact of the body water that you have around. It also means that you probably have digested most of your food from the previous day, and you don't have clothes tying you down.

The third tip that I use is one that is mental. Many of the dieters that I have conversed with (hi /r/loseit!) have a problem mentally with getting on the scale every day. Getting on the scale every day is very important to me in order to keep the accurate graphs that accompany my reports. To get all of that data, I keep a logbook right next to my scale, and I put my weight in it.

It's a simple book with the date, and the weight that I read off of the scale on that day. Even though it just looks like a weight log, it also doubles as a motivational tool! Because this type of logging lets me see all of the numbers very quickly, it's easy enough to look back a month (it's just one row over) and see my progress every day. The number that's important to me is the number of a month ago minus today, and it's always in the negative. I've never been on the right track and had that number come out positive. Over a longer period of time, all the variability of the last few days goes away.

Finally I have one final tip, which might not apply to everyone. I don't have space in my apartment bathroom to keep the scale on the floor all the time, so I keep it on it's side under the sink. This means that the zero calibration of the sensors will be off the first time I step on it every morning. The solution is simple, and applies if you have to move the scale every day as well.

Place the scale on the floor in the same position every time.

Ignore the first reading that you get - keep stepping on and off until you get two readings exactly the same

If you can't get the same reading from two weighings just seconds apart, your scale is broken. Get a new cheap one and use these tips to weigh yourself consistently.

Following these tips, I've never had a problem with the 30 dollar scale that I use every day to measure my weight.

5 Android apps that I use daily

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:33:07 CDT

So most people who know me pretty well will know that I'm an Android user. I don't exactly shout it from the rooftops, but I'll bring out my phone when I have any free moment in order to check on something or make sure that everything is working the way that I want it to. I never considered myself to use a lot of applications on my phone though. I have of course the requisite Twitter client available (which I switch out on occasion) and I use all of the Google applications pretty extensively (mail and calendar mostly). I do have a small core of Android "apps" that I use pretty extensively on a daily basis though.

The one that I'll put first, because I use it by time more than probably all of the others put together, is the DoggCatcher Podcast Player. It's one of the first applications that I ever paid for on the Android Market, and I actually paid $10 for it, more than it's going for now. This podcast downloader (or "podcatcher") is easily the main reason that I have my phone - I listen to podcasts on the thing all the time. The interface is well-done, although sometimes it can be easy to accidentally hit a podcast on the list and switch to a different podcast, it's pretty easy to switch back. The author does a good job keeping the application up to date as well, having shipped at least 50 updates since I bought it so long ago. If you're interested in what podcasts I have on my list, I have another post about that.

After that in terms of time used is a newcomer. TagTime helps me keep track of what exactly I'm spending my days doing. It does this by randomly sampling me by buzzing at me every once in a while, and then I respond with what I'm doing at the moment. The original creators have a web page that explains the concept better. I started using this application because it was close enough to something that I had been meaning to build for a while. I recently started contributing to the source as well, and that has accelerated my personal Android development. I'll probably be adding more features to the application soon, since there is an itch that I can scratch myself.

Lately, Pomodroido has been getting more use on my phone. This is a simple timer application which helps you implement the Pomodoro Technique, which is supposed to be one of these "productivity hacks". I honestly use it because it's an easy way to time out half an hour, which is conveniently half of my minimum thesis working time every day, as well as the smallest period of time I feel comfortable billing out for my consulting work. So it is used in a dual purpose to both keep me honest in both of those goals. I had used it in the past at work in it's "hack" capacity and it didn't work that well because I was interrupted too much. Using it at home doesn't seem to have as much of a problem because I can explain to my lovely wife about the "focus" aspect of it.

As most of you would if you've been reading the blog for any period of time, I've been on a diet for a while. That's why MyFitnessPal has a permanent position on my home screen. MyFitnessPal (and the accompanying website is easily the best application I've found on Android in order to keep track of calories. It comes very close to what I would consider an ideal eat watch in the Hacker's Diet sense. It has a nice big number in green of how many calories under your goal you are in the day, which incorporates the amount of exercise you've done (if you enter it, it's not automatic or anything) and the amount of food. If the number is red, you're done eating for the day because you're over your limit. The food database is extensive and it makes it easy to enter foods that you've been eating recently which is great because my diets tend to have a lot of consistency. It also added a bar code scanner so you can just scan the boxed foods that you eat.

Lastly but not least, I use SpringPad as a note taking application. It was quite important to me to have a note application which had some type of online component, because I was definitely not going to back it up enough on my phone itself, and it is nicer to type things long form or add things from the web as well. There are quite a few options out there, but Springpad, and it's website are probably the most simple for my purposes. You can do fancy things with the notes, but usually I am just using them as grocery lists, or lists to remember books I want to read, music I want to purchase, and movies to watch. It's a notebook - I use it for jotting down notes.

I have a bunch of other applications on my phone, but these are the ones that I use the most, and I would say that I use all of them on a daily basis. I'm always looking for more productive uses of my phone though, since I've had a smartphone it's evolved over time. I don't play that many games on it, so it's mostly productivity for me. If you have any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them in the comments.

Project 52: Weeks 20-22

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:00:06 CDT

May Diet Update 2

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:23:38 CDT

Due to an interesting fact about how I time these updates, now I have two in the same month. I won't have another until most of the way though June though. The diet has been going pretty well in May, mostly keeping to the ketogenic diet (essentially very low-carb). The scale is still bugging me on the day-to-day, but I've started doing some things which help my outlook directly after the daily weigh-in, so it's not too bad.

One thing that I really like about the ketogenic diet is that I can eat a lot of meat. I've been a meat eater for a very long time now, and I don't expect to go vegetarian anytime soon. My normal breakfast is made up of eggs and some breakfast meat. For most of April and May it was bacon all the time, but I've been mixing it up by switching to some breakfast sausage lately sometimes. I try to make my breakfast a reasonable amount of carbs because I don't expect to eat throughout the day.

Another nice thing about the ketogenic diet is that on the days when I am not keeping strict count of my calories, or when it is difficult to count the calories because I am going out to eat or something, then I can still stick to my diet without too much fuss. I just avoid all bread, potatoes, sugar, and I guaranteed to keep on the diet. Doing it with both the low-carb and the low-calorie seems to be having an effect, keeping me on my 2 pounds a week goal.

Exercise has been pretty consistent this month, consistently hitting my goals of 5 days a week with taking a day off every 2-3 days normally. One of the nicest things about this time of year is that it is not completely muggy yet, and it also is warm enough to walk around, so I've done a couple of nice long walks around the neighborhood. Other than that, I've made a habit of watching some educational videos while I've been working out, a ton of which are available on youtube thanks to google. Google I/O was last month which means that there are a lot of good talks that I've watched that are relevant and recent.

Cheat days have been a little more fast and loose than I have really wanted in this month. My willpower has been a little down lately, and I don't really know why. It might also be that the progress that I'm making is just making me think that the cheat day schedule isn't all that important. I took one cheat day on the day of the Doctor Who Meetup, and another on the seventh. The one on the seventh was almost a whole week early, but it made it so that the one on the meetup day lined up so I didn't care that much.

I feel like I need to plan out my cheat days a little more, becuase twice in the last three times I've made the decision to take a cheat day part way through the day - it feels more like my willpower is breaking than I am actually sticking to a diet plan. There are good arguments that I can make in my head for both of these methods of taking the days. On the "planned" side of things, I can feel more like I'm sticking to a plan, and I can plan out the breakfasts as well -- pancakes are one of my weaknesses with regards to carbs. On the "unplanned" side of things, I can try to stay off of the carbs for as long as possible, and it is more spontaneous, and if there is a full day where there is nothing to eat but something that includes carbs, I don't need to starve myself. I'm still not sure what is the best way. I'm going to try this month to stick to the "planned" method a lot more, and see how it goes.

Practice days are making a comeback into my diet, in the form of says where I don't care that much about carbs, but I still try to make an effort to avoid the big sources - this means no bread or sweets, but I can have maybe one dessert in the day, or maybe I skip all the meals.

The thirty day graph is looking pretty good, with almost all of the points below the trend line. The beginning of the month and the seventh being the blips above the line because of the cheat days within the month. Interestingly the second cheat day in May didn't produce an above-the-trendline day at all, although you can kindof see it in the data points. Overall I like seeing this much green in the graph, and the calculated calorie deficit is looking pretty good too.

Again the year graph looks pretty awesome. The trend line is looking pretty straight and the overall loss of almost 40 pounds is really great. I haven't seen any difference in the speed of weight lost between when I was just doing the low calorie diet and the ketogenic diet. It makes me think that maybe the only benefit of the ketogenic diet is adherence.

Lately I've been using a new service called Beeminder in order to make my daily weigh-in less impactful. I get a graph like this every day, with the trendline similar to the physicsdiet one, but it gets updated every day. Another thing that I like about it is the "yellow brick road". Mine is set to about 0.5% lost per week, which is the semi-default setting. I have been thinking about changing it to be a little more agressive, but because it's a beta service you have to email the owner of the site to change your goals. I interact with it by email mostly, and I look at the graph every day as I'm having breakfast and it reminds me that even if I have a more "up" day that I am still below the trend.

I'm getting dangerously close to my short term goal of 250 pounds. I definitely will keep going until I hit 240, because then I will be 100 down. Before and after pictures will come then. At this rate, I will probably be there either at the next checkin or the one after.

Speeding up factory_girl tests with "Model.first or"

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 26 May 2011 23:06:11 CDT

Lately at work I've been trying to make sure that I follow test driven development. That means that I'm using rspec with factory_girl in order to make building objects to test against easier. As the amount of tests that I have grows, testing gets longer and longer.$

While this gives me a nice break from working, similar to the compile time that a large program used to give me at my old job, usually I want to see the results of my bugfix faster. Turning on rspec test timing had me confused though, because it was saying that the longest test was similar to this one:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

There's nothing there - it's all calls to factories that I've built. So I went investigating what was actually happening there by making a simple helper for telling me what was actually being built:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

Adding a call after the model factory showed me that I was making 7 User, 5 Address, and about 21 other support objects in order to simply build a valid Product. There should be ways to eliminate a large number of those. A lot of it comes from using x.association :user in the factory. There are a lot of these in the various factories for this application because I'm keeping track of who is creating various items.

What I really want to say in most of these places isn't "I need a new user that relates to this" but instead "I need a user, any user" So I've started using a construct that follows Model.first or in these places, so x.association :user becomes x.user { User.first or Factory(:user) }.

I went to building exactly one User and Address for the whole test suite, and reduced the suite run time from 5m13s to 1m45s by just switching to this wherever I needed an object and not a new one. I'd suggest it to anyone who is having a lot of slow tests and is using factories, it's saved me at least a couple hours by now considering how often I run tests.

When 1 hour is not 1 hour

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 25 May 2011 23:46:07 CDT

One of the reasons that I'm waking up earlier nowadays is because I can take my commute an hour earlier. I get up at about 4:30, then finish all my prep in an hour, so that I can be on the road by 5:40 at the latest. This means that I'm using the highway much earlier than the rest of the population. There are still a decent number of cars on the road, but it makes the drive easier.

This week I also discovered that it cuts my commute time for the day by at least one third. I woke up an hour later than normal, because for some reason my alarm wasn't going off that day. I thought I would just do everything an hour later in the day and everything was going good up until I got onto the highway at 6:40. Suddenly there was a lot of traffic on the road, and all of the congestion traffic controls were in effect. It lengthened my commute from a normal 20 minutes to 35, and made me even later than I was in the first place.

An hour later in the morning is 75 minutes. It put my whole day back even farther than normal. I ended up taking an early day because I know that on the other direction it's also at least 15 minutes more when I have left late because I was busy at work, sometimes it's even as long as double. Suddenly my day would be 23 hours.

With the amount of time I have, I am making sure for as long as I can that I will be up on time. Of course, the ideal commute might be from the bedroom three steps to the office - at some point I might want to try that once a week. There are other advantages to going into the office though, especially at my work where there is a whole lab of equipment needed sometimes.

Github branching with feature orthogonality

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:37:08 CDT

This weekend while I was playing around with stuff, I decided to improve an app that I've been using on my phone for a while. The app is Tagtime, an application which helps me keep track of the time that I am spending on things by sampling me randomly. I was happy to find it because I was thinking of building an app with a similar purpose (although my approach was not statistical but rigorous) and because it was both simple and open source. There were a couple of things that I wanted to improve about it, and the source is right there on github so I could download it and start making it better. Also github is a "social coding" platform which means that I can make changes to the app and then submit a "pull request", requesting that the feature that I worked on be included in the main repository. The basic idea is that people will fork (or branch, the terminology is fuzzy) the repository and then make improvements, and if they are good, then they will be included in the "canonical" version of that repository, and be used by more people. This is the way that things like Linux have worked for a while on git, but it was kind of tricky to set it up until github came along and made it easy.

One thing that github encourages on it's help page on pull requests is that you make a feature branch for your changes, so that it's easy to update the pull request later, and so that it's not mixed in with a bunch of other things. This is generally a good idea, but I hadn't used it in practice until this weekend. I discovered that it's a little cumbersome when you are doing a lot of little changes like the ones I made.

First, you need to know that you're actually working on a feature, and not get distracted by some other feature at the time. Git is actually pretty good at this, because if you find that you're mixing a couple of features together, you can simply not commit some of the files, or even only commit the parts of the files you want. Next you need to actually create the branch of the feature. Thinking up a name for this branch might be important, but it's not as important as later when you actually initiate the pull request. After that, you do the work on the branch, and then commit your changes to your version of the repository that belongs to you. Finally, you go to the github site and click the pull request button. Then you will fill out a title and description for your pull request (this is the more important part). Hopefully then someone will look at it and integrate it in.

Then you go and work on another feature. But wait, what should your other feature be based on? You have to branch from somewhere in step two. Here's where feature orthogonality comes in. If your feature doesn't depend on the one that you just worked on, then you should make another branch from the original fork's master branch. Hopefully you haven't actually committed any on your master branch in the meantime, and it's easy to find.

Maybe an example will help. Originally I branched my repository of TagTime from the original repository. Then I set out to make my feature reality - that is, cleaning up tags that aren't in use because they will clutter my screen when I'm tagging (I mistyped them once and now they're everywhere!). I created the cleanup-tag-button branch from the master branch and then worked on my changes. I committed them (they weren't much, just one commit) and then generated this pull request. Then I wanted to work on another feature - there was a delay in hitting the buttons when it polled me. I rewound my branch to the master branch again, and then created the speedier-tagging branch from the same spot. These features were orthogonal, which means that I could do this without an issue, and test the features in isolation. I did the same to update the icon that is used in the notifications, because it was black-on-black in my UI, adding a white background in the visible-icon branch. You can see how all three branches sprout from the same commit (the most recent commit on the "canonical" repository) in my network.

There are two actual issues that I found when I was working with this model. The first actual problem is that when I was working on this, I wanted to have a copy of the app with all of my new features in it. For this reason I created the integration branch, so that I could put all of my features together. This makes it easy to make sure that my features are orthogonal as well, because if I can't get integration to work, then they are conflicting. It's somewhat annoying to re-merge all of the branches every time that I update it just to get a new copy. The second actual problem was that I was stuck working in the branch for each feature when I was working on the feature. This meant that I couldn't use some of the changes that I made in the other branches and I was somewhat lost when I was testing it on my phone when, for example, the visible icon wasn't there when I was testing that the speedier tagging worked.

I also thought of two theoretical issues that I didn't actually run into, but could have imagined running into quickly. The first was the problem of non-orthogonal features - should they just be included in the branch for the feature that they depend on, essentially making them part of that feature, or should I branch again from that feature branch to go one level deeper. What would a pull request for the second feature look like? I ran into this problem because the canonical repository for TagTime has a bunch of files in it that shouldn't be there, compiled files that I don't expect in the repository. I would have based my branches off of a cleaned up version of the repository, but I didn't want to force that choice onto the original branch, so I was working in the "messy" repository for most of the time.

The other theoretical issue involves publishing, tracking, and rebasing. I would like to say that if the "canonical" repository master changes, then I could rebase the feature branches against it, but if I do then I have to push a non-fastforward of that branch to github, and it looks all strange. If someone had that branch and was forked off of my integration branch for example because they want all of my features, what would happen when I rebase the feature branch? It's unclear to me.

All in all, I was happy with the model. I'm not sure what a better model would be - maybe there is something in darcs or mercurial that would be better for this type of collaboration and wouldn't have the issues of above. In the meantime, I'm going to keep trying to keep my features orthogonal and work with a feature branch model.

Project 52: Week 19

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:47:44 CDT

A visit to the math factory

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 17 May 2011 05:28:42 CDT

Last weekend I did something which many people who might know me would think I am completely opposed to, yet I do almost once every two months nowadays. I visited the casino. Visiting the casino isn't strange on it's own, but I didn't go to see a show or have the buffet (although I did partake in the buffet this time), but to gamble my money away.

Usually the games at the casino are set up so that the house always wins. I know that in my mind, and my only hopes on most of the trips there are to spend as much time as possible having fun while losing the least amount of money. Lots of people go there and play poker, which is not actually played against the house (although usually there is a fee paid to the house to play) and they have a lot of fun and make money doing it. Alternatively they'll play blackjack, which theoretically could be actually slightly on the player's side if they played perfectly and were allowed to count all the cards.

I play something which is much more in the casino's favor though - I play slots. The variety of games peaks my interest and I love that I could play each different type for five minutes and never repeat playing the same game twice. They are obviously a big money maker for the casino - they are all over the place, covering almost every square inch of floor which isn't needed for walking or the gaming tables. The only thing that I can think which gets more space is the BINGO hall.

I find two things fascinating about slot machines. The first is that they are basically a rudimentary video game where you can win money. You put your money in, you push the button and you either get more money out, or you lost your money. This is the essence of gambling, without any of the facade that is messing around with cards or playing with numbers. Slots take your money and show you some flashy lights and then they give you the result. It's part of the reason that the casinos like them so much - they have a fast result.

The second reason is that I am fascinated by the math which must be involved with the slots. They are only ever so slightly in the favor of the casino, although they always are, but they have to make it seem like it's possible to win them. The variations on the reels and the combinations for winning the game which is presented are nice to think about. There are a lot of different types of slot games, some of which will give you free games every once in a while, some have wild cards, some have more or less symbols, or symbols in a different order. Also there are many different combinations of winning lines, making it "easier" for you to win a prize on wheels which don't actually line up exactly. The math which must go into the more complicated ones I'm sure is quite complex to prove that yes, indeed, the game is tilted toward the house even when you play with all of the varied ways to win and the bonus games or free spins which show up.

Many would say that it's a tax for people who are bad at math, but I like to think of it as the math factory. You build these games that will return value to you because the math says so. Sometimes it doesn't work out in the short term, but the math factory will always create it's value in the end, just like the factory that produces milk or widgets.

Diana likes to go and play the video poker, which I actually like to play as well, but I'm not as lucky as her. I've been thinking of playing around with some of the math involved, and see if I can figure out some of the games and how exactly they work. They're not exactly opaque but not really transparent either. I might have to take some trips to the factory floor for some research.

Doing Things Super

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 12 May 2011 23:51:53 CDT

I'm always looking for a better way to get things done, and keep track of what I need to get done. In the past I've used a lot of systems to handle the parts of capturing and completing tasks. I started first with reading a lot of blogs and getting hooked on some systems like the Hipster PDA which was what I tried for a while. I then moved along to something else using a Moleskine notebook, and then shortly for a while using a set of cards which I had written down things on and carried around with me at all times. I switched whenever a system seemed to stop working or just have a big enough backlog pile so as to make it obvious that it is not working for me to actually get the things completed.

I think that there are a few things about a todo system which are important. Ubiquitous capture is very important. That means that it must be available at all times, and the easiest way to do that is to make it paper-based. I have a smart phone with me almost all time so it might be acceptable for a todo system to use that, but I definitely haven't found anything that works well that is electronic. Also, I've accumulated a number of notebooks from various manufacturers which I can use for my various works. Making it easy to capture is the reason that I have abandoned using most GTD systems, because they either require a lot of work putting things in order. This reason was also why I stopped using a system which I brought up with myself which was project-based, but would require me to update the correct card every time.

In the last few years, I've been using a set of systems which I read about from Mark Forster. I started working based on AutoFocus shortly after I discovered it. I was happy with the fact that the way to capture tasks in the system is just to open it to the last page and write down the task on it. With a marker for the last open page, it is basically the perfect ubiquitous capture - always available and no thinking required. I also like it because I don't have to do the tasks in any particular order. One of the problems that I was having with the GTD system was the order of contexts, where I had to sort everything into different zones. It was very easy to go overboard, especially because I have at least three contexts which are mentally separate, but in the same physical location. It's the nature of working on a thesis, running a consulting company and doing housework in the same place. AutoFocus was the first system where I could just take a look at a number of tasks, and do the one that I feel like working on at the time, which is a good thing for whatever context that I'm on.

Since then, Forster has revised his system four times, and then made a major change to it, adding a urgent list in the SuperFocus system. This is the system that I'm using now at work. It works fairly well and I'm thinking of working it into my personal system sometime soon. The urgent column works very well for items that need to get done right away. It seems like not many people know about these systems and they're working okay for me so far. It's easy to pick out something that needs doing that I can do right away, add a new task whenever I need to, and also to remove tasks which I will never do. One of my only complaints is that it's a little hard to understand from scratch, even though it only uses one notebook. Maybe I'll post an example of the working soon.

Project 52: Weeks 17-18

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:57:44 CDT

MinneBar 6 summary

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 08 May 2011 00:20:27 CDT

Today I went to MinneBar 6, which seems like it was the most populated one I've ever been to. It wasn't as crowded as the first one that I attended, which was in a much smaller space with less people. This year went off pretty much without a hitch as an attendee. I attended some good talks with some great discussion.

At the start of the day Garrick van Buren gathered a bunch of people in a room and we talked about the Do Not Track thought space. I haven't really been paying that much attention to the area, but it's getting more and more nefarious from the tracking side it seems like. Mykl Roventine brought up at the end a whole new tangled ball that I hadn't thought about in the form of affiliate programs - where sites are giving your purchase information to all of it's affiliate partners in order to have them flag the items that they are responsible for. They'll probably both be interested in the fact that I am running awstats for my own server, and I was previously going to re-add Google Analytics but have decided against it. The server logs are all I really need, at least for this site. There is an interesting trade-off here though, because many users will bring traffic to your site by putting on Facebook's Like button or the Tweet This button, and the advantage of the extra traffic should be considered.

Next there was a good session about getting started with Android, that was in the largest room, which to me seems the least "MinneBar"-ish - the smaller rooms make discussion and question asking a lot easier. Donn Felker of QONQR did a great job of making the room work though, asking for topics before he started and handling most of them. It was not a lot of coding but a lot of focus on tooling as well as the details about monetizing your idea. One thing that I took away from this session was that people should start with the minimum viable product. If it's going to be paid, start it out cheap and people will buy it anyway if they think it's useful. I should have asked about what the change from a 24 hour to a 15 minute refund policy has had on sales of paid apps, especially on the small functionality MVPs.

I didn't see anything all that interesting for the third session, so I fixed a couple of bugs and handled some emails, and talked to Garrick for a couple minutes while the directly before lunch. Grabbing some pizza, I talked to some students from St. Cloud who are just finishing up, and then walk around looking for some other people to talk to. John Chilton found me and we chatted a bit. I'm rubbish at networking at MinneBar. I don't feel like I can sit down at a table that already has a group of guys at it and make connections - it could be that I'm just not great at it, or something about the tables or that there is always wifi available. I see a lot of guys from my twitter followers but I don't tend to actually chat with them.

In the afternoon, Charles Nutter won the award for the most technical presentation of the day, going over almost all of the JVM bytecode operands while going over a short explanation of the stack machine that it runs on while encouraging everyone to learn a little bit about the bytecode that so many of our programs compile down to. A completely full room really indicated to me that there was untapped audience at MinneBar this year who would have accepted some more technical sessions.

Directly after that, the most entertaining session went to Charles again, this time assisted by his son, with an ad-hoc session about Minecraft. I'm a big fan of the game, but I haven't played it in a while so I saw some of the new features, and had a good time chatting with some other gamers in the crowd. That's also another audience that I think could be approached at the next MinneBar - something for the leisure time.

In the remaining sessions, I attended one on gathering your data about your users and plotting it in a useful way, mining the data that you already have in order to get good analytics. This was somewhat technical but quite cool because they sliced and diced the creative commons StackExchange Data Dump to show some interesting things. I seriously consider implementing some of these for my consulting work, they seem like the kinds of data that would be very appreciated to show growth to investors and the like. The last one I went to was more of a discussion about how designers and coders should cross-pollinate a bit when they are learning. Designers should learn a bit of code, coders should at least know a little bit of Photoshop / Fireworks... at least enough to get the job done.

I was pretty tired at the end of the day, so I didn't stick around for much of the beer, also I was driving home and actually had to get some stuff done in the evening. I also just wasn't feeling up to the networking aspect just then, partially discouraged because of my earlier failure to get into it around lunch time.

Overall, I would say that MinneBar 6 turned out to be a great BarCamp, with some wonderful sessions. The ones that I attended were all worthwhile. I didn't "vote with my feet" and switch sessions in the middle of any this year - if I remember correctly I think I actually did that last time. I came across with a couple of thoughts - I'd really like to do a presentation next year about something. I feel like I should be able to contribute something to a conference like this, especially because there is such a wide range of topics presented on. Also, I feel a lot more comfortable getting my networking on in a smaller, more focused group - something like Ruby Users of Minnesota meetings, where I know that any person there is going to have more in common with me than one of a thousand. I'll look forward to going to this next year if I don't have a conflict though, and I encourage the same to anyone else in the tech community in the Twin Cities.

Doing the easy hard thing

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 07 May 2011 01:03:50 CDT

I've written recently about Health Month and the fact that I am trying to do things on a more habit basis. Last month I had a twelve rules, more than in March and a lot of things to track whether I was doing every day. At the same time, I wasn't getting the important things done. Two of my rules were consistently not getting done. The rules were of course the most important ones - "Make progress on the thesis" and "Read papers for my thesis". These are very likely the most important things that I need to get done, and they were getting drowned out by insignificant rules like "Floss every day" and "Only drink 4 cups of coffee a week".

This month I've decided that my rules are doing to only be the important things that need to change and are actually difficult. This might mean that I have less of incentive to get the small things done which will be a good improvement, but I don't think so - I've been doing those things for two months already and I don't think I will be dropping them any time soon. With this in mind, the rules that I've chosen for May are more difficult, but also fewer:

Do thesis work 5 days a week
Read an academic paper 5 days a week
Stay under my calories every day
Write blog posts 4 days a week
Exercise 40 minutes 5 days a week
Go to bed before 10pm 5 days a week

The "gimmie" rules on this list are still pretty hard, but they are the easy hard things. Exercising 40 minutes a day is easy for me, since I've been doing it a long time, but it's still hard to get myself down to the room every time. It's the easy hard thing - the thing that impacts my day enough that I don't want to do it all the time, but once it's started, it's going to get done. Losing weight is hard. Almost anyone who has tried, successful or not, will tell you so. It's also easy though, because the steps to complete it are straightforward - exercise and eat less calories. Most of my rules have been the easy hard thing in the last few months.

Blogging is the third easy hard thing on the list. It's trivial to write blog posts once I make the decision to get it done, but it's still difficult to wedge it into my schedule for some reason. For me, calorie restriction is also easy hard.

Going to bed is an example of another easy hard thing, but unlike the other two ones, I'm not getting it done. It's extremely difficult for me to go to bed so early, even though I'm waking up earlier I still tend to be awake until at least midnight. Normally I would expect myself to have a hard time waking up early when I do that, but it seems like I don't have that problem.

Unfortunately, the easy hard things aren't the most important things. The rest of the rules are the hard hard things, that I have difficulty getting myself to do. They are the ones that I am really sad about not finishing, and the reason that I cut the insignificant rules this month. Now to actually get some of them done.

Two Ideas About Electric Vehicles

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:51:43 CDT

I have a serious interest in electric vehicles. I pretty much read anything that goes across my RSS reader about the subject, and am fairly convinced that when I have the wherewithal, I will be getting an electric vehicle at some point. I understand that they are somewhat controversial about how much waste they create due to their batteries, I think that using the same energy for everything will eventually bow to the economies of scale. I've had a couple of interesting things that I've been thinking relating to electric vehicles lately.

The first is me trying to estimate how much money that the United States Postal Service would save by replacing all of it's neighborhood trucks with electric vehicles. I think of this whenever I see one of those tiny trucks that are filled with mail and seem to stop about every thirty feet in order to deliver the mail. It seems like having these use gasoline is a big waste. They are basically the ideal vehicle for electrifying - they are forced to be the most stop-and-go because they need to stop at every mailbox. Gasoline or Diesel engines would need to stay on at these very short stops, but no electricity would be used for these. They are always refueled at the post office that they are based at and usually have routes that are shorter than 40 miles in total. That means that they wouldn't have any problem recharging and that they would not have an issue with range. The vehicles are owned by the postal service, so they have the say on replacing every one of them, which they can roll out slowly if it has a large up-front cost.

The second is a startup idea, which would be good for the current climate. Because electricity is available everywhere, it effectively democratizes the supply of fuel for these vehicles. Electricity is available pretty much everywhere, but people willing to let you recharge your electric vehicle are not everywhere. It would be fairly easy to put a meter on your charger, and then let anyone who is within a certain range recharge their vehicle using your electricity. Using some type of phone application which determined what places within your range were available, and they could also connect with the meters in order to automatically transfer the money. This would solve the "drive and dash" problem that some gas stations would have. I would be interested in how people end up pricing the premium over the electricity.

I'm excited to see what electric vehicles will do to change the way transportation works.

May Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:30:10 CDT

It's been a month since the last diet update. I've been doing pretty well. I started in April doing what would be considered an extremely low-carb ketogenic diet in the last month. The weight is somewhat steadily coming off now, and I'm starting to get a little better on ignoring the scale while still getting on it every day.

I mentioned the ketogenic diet, and I went all-in on the diet for the last four weeks. I've been following a subreddit which has a lot of people trying out the same thing, discussing recipes and how to stay on the diet, and what is possible to eat and the science behind all of it. I'm doing it in combiantion with keeping track on my calories, which is pretty easy to do. One of the major advantages to eating a lot of protein is that I'm not hungry nearly as often anymore. I'm usually having a some type of breakfast meat and eggs in the morning, about 500 calories with real butter, and then I have a snack or two at lunchtime at work, then a big dinner and maybe a snack. This keeps me within the 1800 calories which I have set for myself.

I've been good with the exercise, although it's cut back from last year, I'm slowly ramping up the time. I'm normally doing 40 minutes and a little more - 42 or 43. I like to walk on the treadmill machine which lets me watch an hour long TV show while I'm exercising and complete it without the commercials. I would like to start working out more outside than I have been, especially because it is much warmer outside nowadays. I'm more likely to go farther and also maybe start running some, which is something I'm seriously considering for May or June.

I took a couple of cheat days, once on my birthday, and once in the last week. The birthday one was of course planned out, and I went all out getting donuts in the morning and wonderful homemade cake that I couldn't stay away from for the next three days. It seemed like I took a very long time to recover from it, more than a week over my trend line. After being back on track, I went another 16 days between my cheat days and I broke down in the middle of the week, after there was a lot of days in a row where I was condidering taking the day as a cheat.

I think the cheat days are important because they're keeping me on task. They also remind me that there are a lot of things that I want to eat that I shouldn't really eat and that aren't that great. I tell myself that I'm going to go overboard on the cheat days, but I usually don't. Now it's actually just kindof strange because I am on the low-carb things, I'm considering things like grilled cheese and pizza as cheat day treats, because they are so high in carbs. Even on the cheat days I'm finding myself keeping moderation, because I don't want to have cheat day food around on the days after - for example I'm not going to buy a big package of cookies because it's almost impossible for me to eat them all on one day, and just a single cookie is enough to get me out of my diet parameters in the days after.

One more thing is that I haven't been doing the practice days. They're not compatible with the low-carb diet, because eating "normal" will constitute having some normal amount of carbs, which will make my body stop burning fat for energy. I think that I might take a look into it after I meet my long-term goal.

The last thirty days show me doing fairly well on the scale. Most of the days are under the line. You can clearly see the days after the birthday and the more recent cheat days where I went over, they are the only one over the trend. I am happy with my progress here. It says that I should be cutting about 200 calories out of my diet, but I am not really comfortable with cutting that much more out right now. The weekly loss doesn't look as good as last month, but I don't mind.

The year to date looks wondeerful to me. Mostly green, and the trend line is basically straight. It's interesting to note that there hasn't been a really big change in my slope over the whole thing, especially since I was using two different diet plans in this. I am wondering if by the end of May I will be able to see some type of difference in the two diets.

My goal in the short term is still 250, although I will most likely move the chains to 240 when I get there, because I want to be able to say that I lost 100 pounds. When I get to there, I will re-evaluate and see how I feel. I'm wondering if I can take a breather for a month or two and focus on maintaining the weight. If I can maintain it, then I will feel a lot better about what I've been doing in the last year and a half. When I meet my 240 goal, I promise before and after pics.

Pet Peeve 3: Password Restrictions

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 01 May 2011 00:23:06 CDT

Passwords on websites are one of the worst things that the distributed internet has come up with. I have to have logins and passwords for hundreds of sites that I need to keep separate and ideally, different in order to be completely secure. I've decided to use a password locker for that purpose, which makes it much easier to remember all of them, because I only need to remember one very secure password.

One of the best features of using a password locker for passwords is that you can generate a new unique password for every site that you need to make a login for. My default setting makes every password something that I could probably not remember if I was doing it on my own: 30 characters, with a mix of upper, lower, numbers, symbols, and special characters.

Of course now we get to the point of this post. Almost every site out there has some type of restriction on the passwords that they allow. Usually I need to drop the number of characters, and sometimes I need to drop the sets of characters to something less secure. I don't really have a big problem with that, although it's completely stupid (in most cases, the underlying technology can support all of them).

The problem that I have is that they have these restrictions and then don't tell you about them, until you've already completed the whole form, generated the password and submitted it. Then it comes with an error that says something like "password must be less than 12 characters" (which I've seen in variants as low as 8 maximum). Another variant is "you have entered an invalid character for this field". That is not helpful. Which character was it? What ones are allowed?

The worst ones are the ones where there are multiple restrictions, but it only tells you about one at once. Three or four times I have to submit the form with more and more insecure passwords. It is not making me want to use your websites, and it's just pissing me off.

Of course the solution to this dilemma would be to have some universal login for the entire internet, but that's not going to happen any time soon. OpenID gave it a good shot, but it didn't work very well overall. Facebook and Google are giving it a sporting chance, and Twitter is a close third, with a number of others who are trying to use OAuth to become a user silo. I'm not happy with any of these, but they're better than having a login everywhere.

An idea to differentiate github forks

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:28:41 CDT

Lately I've been getting a little more into github. Lately I've converted the blog to jekyll, which has been doing me quite well, but I wanted to add just a couple of features that I couldn't do via the plugins interface, like I did with the amazon liquid filters. The first was adding support for haml, but in a more integrated fashion.

I've used a plugin for haml, that I can't really remember where I got, but I did have to change the jekyll source. Of course the way to accomplish this on github is to fork the repository, make the changes, and then push it back to github. I thought that there might be some of these already on one of the 521 forks of the original source to jekyll, but I couldn't really tell if they were.

The changes I on my jekyll fork are minor in general and not really of note, but I was frustrated with looking through the forks that looked active on the network. Most of them have basically no indication of what has changed at all that is readily apparent. Of course with git you can make a diff of any two branches, but with such a heavily forked source, it is particularly hard to work out the differences.

So for my fork, I made one more change than the functional ones - I've added to the very top of the README file a couple of lines explaining what I did.

It's something that I propose for other people who have forks - adding to the top of the README, which is one of the easiest things to see on the github default repository, what has been changed from the upstream that you forked from. Other advantages would be that you get some type of idea of how many changes there are from the upstream, as well as some idea of the 'generation' of the fork - if you've forked from a fork, there are two sets of changes, for example. The only downside that I can think of is that these are separate changes that you don't want to have pulled to upstream. Because of that, it would be good to keep these changes on a different branch.

I'm going to be doing this for all of my forks on github in the near future.

Allocating Time

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 22:13:21 CDT

Lately I've been thinking a bit about how much time I have for projects, and how I will have to decline anything new in the near future until I get some things off of my plate. One of my former colleagues used to be fond of saying that his time sums to 1. It was kind of callous when he was saying it, but it is true that time is a zero-sum game. Multitasking is possible but not efficient usually. I did some calculating today of how much free time I can expect to have with all of my commitments.

168 hours exist in a week. Starting with the basics.
56 hours for sleep, 8 hours a day realistically. Usually I only sleep about 4 hours a night during the week, but I like to give myself the 8 hours anyway. My strange sleep patterns are a subject for another day.
40 hours work at ReconRobotics, Inc.
5 hours are spent commuting to and from ReconRobotics, Inc.
20 hours is how much time I try to spend on my thesis.
15 hours in consulting commitments for Base Zero.
5 hours in administration for Base Zero.
5 hours in time set aside for exercise.
3 hours in time set aside for meditation.

All of these points together mean that I really only have about 20 hours left after it all. That is not a lot of time, only about three hours a day on average. In that time I have to get most of my personal professional development, errands and groceries, household work, blogging and anything else.

I think that the time left is a little low, and I really can't commit to anything more than what I'm doing right now. Usually I have at least a couple hours available for consulting, but I can't look for new work. Some things that I would like to get done just don't get done - sometimes I only get caught up on finances every other week instead of every week like I have wanted to, and lately I have been skipping meditation entirely.

Right now I don't really match all of the planned scheduled time, and some of the more personal goals, like Base Zero work, meditation and thesis work get shorted. One of my goals for May health month will be to spend my time properly.

Project 52: Weeks 15-16

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 05:10:16 CDT

shorturl_routes: rails multiple-model url aliases

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:40:56 CDT

Earlier this week I wrote about my frustration with setting up short urls for rails routing to two models based on attributes, something that I have seen on a bunch of websites, but haven't found a good solution to in rails. Let me describe it in pseudo-cucumber:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

In addition to the two scenarios above, I would like all of my other routes to continue to work as expected, with the priority as normal falling from the top of the routes to the bottom.

My previous solution externalized the disambiguation of these routes which are dependent on the models in the database to a controller. I really wanted this to be in the routes, because that is where I feel like it naturally should be.

So I'm introducing today a solution. shorturl_routes is a gem which will give me what I want. Here's the routes that will accomplish the functionality that I explained before.

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

It's that simple. With the routes above, if you visit the location /foo, then it is checked against both resources first, but since it's not /groups or /users or any of their generated routes, it falls to the shorturl rule, which checks User.where(:name => params[:name]).first for existence, and if it doesn't exist, then falls to the next rule which checks for Group.where(:name => params[:name]).first. If either matches, it sets params[:id] to the id of the model found, and then routes to the given parameter.

It's more what I was looking for. I've packaged it up as a gem for your convenience, so you can just add this to your Gemfile:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

You might notice the distinct lack of working tests in the gem if you have a chance to try to run them. The method that I'm using for making it work in the Routing model works for the real thing, but I can't figure out how to make it work in the tests. For now, the functionality is simple enough to test by myself.

It also doesn't solve the inverse problem - user_path(@user) will still resolve to /users/:id. I'll be looking at improving the DSL syntax a bit and tackling the no tests and this problem as well in the near future.

Let me know if you find it useful, or want to ream me for bastardizing the routing infrastructure.

Duplicating Heroku on Linode

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 05:46:45 CDT

Well, as of this writing, there has been a major disruption in what you might consider to be the cloud infrastructure of the internet. Amazon EC2 has been having issues in one of it's major data centers for almost a day and a half now, which is what you would say is something of a catastrophe for a service that's only supposed to be down for 4 hours in an entire year. Reports are spotty, but most people should be seriously looking at other options at this point.

The reason that you can be reading this right now, is because I'm not running my blog or most of my other sites on anything that depends on EC2. However I do work on a couple of sites that use Heroku, which is one of the services effected by this downtime. Heroku is what some people would call a PaaS, or Platform as a Service provider. They work with mostly Rails applications and make it dead simple. Just to illustrate, the process for deploying a new Rails application to Heroku is something like this:

Run heroku create appname
git push git@heroku.com:appname.git master
Run heroku rake db:migrate

That's it, there is no step 3 if you don't have any initial data. Heroku handles all of the web serving, the gem fetching, and the database creating and configuration for you. It's such a great service that I really want to have something like it around for ever. Until yesterday, I was content believing that Heroku would be around to provide that purpose. There are a couple of other PaaS providers out there, but Heroku is the model that I want to emulate.

Today I am contemplating what exactly you would need in order to duplicate the easy-deploy functionality that you have on Heroku on personal dedicated or VPS server. So far the services that I know that you would need are:

Apache + Passenger (or Nginx + Passenger) for serving rails applications
Gitolite (or maybe gitosis) for handling the git repositories
Postgres database
RVM for handling the possibly different environments that each application needs.
sshd setup on the server
A fairly complex git post-receive hook.

It wouldn't be too hard to create a simple script (or one of Linode's StackScripts) to set up all of this software with a single click / bash command once you have the basic server setup. In fact, this script is probably a good starting point, as it sets up nginx, passenger, postgres and Ruby Enterprise Edition.

The tricky part is the post-receive hook of course, which needs to do the heavy lifting of forking what was just pushed, setting up rvm correctly, running bundle install on the application, and resetting the server.

There are a bunch of features of heroku that aren't duplicated by this type of a setup, but I think that this would cover the 80% case. It also has some advantages like having persistent local storage available that aren't available on heroku. If this outage goes on for very much longer, I might end up setting up this stack just for one of my current clients. If I do, then I'll probably share the setup instructions here.

One wrong way for rails multiple-model url aliases

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 05:38:25 CDT

In a couple of the projects that I've been working on in the last few months, I've wanted to have a set of aliases that I can't really set up with the Rails routing DSL. The main problem is that I can't route a path to two models based on a property of the model.

In order to have a cogent example, let's say that I have a User model, and a Group model, each of which have names, that I guarantee is unique based on validations. I want both of them to be able to access their pages via the url http://host/(name).

The pseudocode that I really want in routing is:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

This is, as far as I know, not possible with the Rails routes that are available in either Rails 2.3 or 3. To complicate matters, I don't want to redirect the URL becuase I want the browser to show the http://host/(name) as the canonical URL. Getting user_path(@user) and group_path(@group) to return this shortened url path would also be very nice.

I've so far solved this problem in two ways, both of which I'm unhappy with. The first is through routing everything through a controller where I can then check each of the models for existence of the correct property:

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

I'm pretty unhappy with this. For one, if I put anything into the actions for User#show or Group#show (counting hits or something) then they need to be also included in Home#disambiguate. I haven't had to do that so far. Also the 404 is being rendered here, where I would really rather just have it at the bottom of my rails route just like my other rails apps.

I've used another solution that I don't like for this problem that solves these problems, but I'm still unhappy with. I'm thinking of a third solution, which I might code up and present later this week. Have you solved this problem in a different, better way? I would be interested to hear.

Amazon liquid filters for jekyll

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:52:23 CDT

One thing that I really enjoyed when I had a short stint blogging with s9y was the great Amazon plugin that it had. It would work with the affiliate program and put links to the items and put them in a nice table. I wanted to try to get that back when I switched to jekyll for my blogging engine just a month or two ago.

I spent some time thinking about how to accomplish that, and I came across Ruby/AWS which looked like exactly what I was looking for. It's ruby which means it's a good fit for a jekyll plugin and it puts in my affiliate link without too much work. It takes a little to set it up.

Originally I was going to do something dumb and modify the liquid syntax or something, but I realized pretty quick that it's much better as a liquid filter. So you put something like { { "B002I0JIQW" | amazon_link} } into your post, and a link like Portal 2 comes out. It's quite handy. The magic number sequence there is the ASIN of the article, which can be found on every page in the URL. It's pretty easy to spot. There's also image links of various sizes:

Also I've included some other random metadata that you can grab. Right now I'm using it for the reviews layouts, which puts the title and the actors and director, like you can see on the review of Paul I recently did on the blog.

The rest should be pretty easy to figure out. Here's the code, just drop it into your _plugins directory on any recent enough version of jekyll and you should be good to go.

Liquid error: undefined method `join' for #

Project 52: Week 14

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:57:30 CDT

According to ISO-8601 week numbers, I'm one week behind right now. I'll try to take two pictures this week.

Five podcasts that I listen to

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:00:51 CDT

Ever since I got my Android, one of the first things that I used for it was to listen to podcasts. The touch interface is perfect for selecting podcasts and it was one of the major advantages of the Android platform that you were allowed to write podcatchers. I've used DoggCatcher as my preferred podcatcher since the beginning, dabbling with Google Listen every once in a while just to see if it works any better.

Over the last few years, I've been listening to mostly the same podcasts, introducing some and removing some as appropriate. Since I am running out of ideas for good blog posts, I figured I could write a list of the ones that I listen to and why I like them.

	This is the first of two podcasts which overview the week's news, and they also make it funny as well. I used to watch the Daily Show regularly for some news and funny in the same package, but I started falling behind and it wasn't very interesting. I really like the Friday Night Comedy podcast because it rotates between The News Quiz and The Now Show. One gets old and then it's over and the other begins. It also covers different news than all of the US-centric outlets that I would normally get my information from, which makes it a little more interesting.
	Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is NPR's answer to the BBC radio quiz show, and it's sometimes funny and sometimes not. A lot of the people that I seem to converse with online think that it's a bit pretentious and not very funny, but I find myself laughing every once in a while. The questions are way too easy and most of the stories are way too easy to spot or figure out. I might stop listening to this soon, but it's only once a week and it's still somewhat entertaining.
	Back to Work is the second most recent addition to my podcast list, and the one that I look forward to the most every week. Merlin Mann is consistently funny as well as giving useful advice and important insight for people in the creative field. My day job isn't exactly in the situation that I would need all of his advice, but a lot of what he talks about on this show seems like it speaks to me regularly. Dan Benjamin is a good co-host to Merlin and does just the right amount of keeping on track and steering back to the topics that they were talking about. If you check out only one podcast from this list, check out this one. It's the only one on this list that I've recommended for other people to listen to. The quality of this show is actually making me think of trying out some other shows managed / co-hosted by Dan.
	If you see me listening to a podcast and you ask me what it is, the most likely answer is going to be Buzz Out Loud. It's not because it's all that interesting or funny, but it has five shows a week, which means it's the most frequent of the shows that I listen to. It covers tech news, and it's usually aligned with my views, and sometimes they cover news that I haven't noticed before. It's nice to sometimes hear the news, and if I'm busy at work during the day, I will catch up on all of the big stories of the day.
	Economics is a tricky subject, and it's hard to understand under the best of circumstances. Planet Money is one of my go-to sources for explaining what's happening in the global economy in terms that I can understand, educating myself on the various terms and viewpoints that are being talked about when people are discussing economic matters. One of the nice things about Planet Money is that the episodes don't really have an expiration date. I've listened to episodes many months later than they aired and the information was still quite useful to me.

I have a few more podcasts that I listen to, but not as regularly as these five. I'd recommend checking these out once, and see if they're something you like.

Everything's Waking Up Something

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:23:10 CDT

I've kind of stumbled onto a habit recently, which surprised me because usually I have to work at my habits for a while before I can really make them work for me. Overall, it's been a positive thing in my life so far, but I would probably not say it's for everyone or even for me unless I keep it up for a while. Lately I've been getting up early, and going into work early as well.

It started last week when I had to travel down to lower Minnesota for a trip for my work. The trip down takes about two hours, so usually when people go down they leave at 7am in hopes of getting in a full work day or close to it and getting back into the cities at a reasonable time. There isn't anything wrong with that for me - normally I would be getting into the office around 7am anyway. However this time there was some confusion about whether we were going to visit at all, and because of that confusion I had to finish up some things at the office before we departed. That meant getting into the office at 6.

So I set myself for getting in at 6am, and put my alarm back another hour from where it had been set before. I was happy to find out that my whole day went a bit smoother when I got up around 5am instead of 6am: my commute was easier, my work got done quicker than I had planned (although still not done on time, I had to code on the trip down), and there was very little distraction. I decided that if I could get up so early for a single day, then it was possible that I could do it for everyday. I resolved to make it a daily thing, and I've been getting to work at 6am since.

The benefits magnified when I wasn't under the pressure to get everything done before 7am as well. Being the first to get into the office meant that I had to make the coffee, but that meant that I could make it and get the first cup, and enjoy a bunch of uninterrupted time. As many people have noted, programmers like myself abhor the interruptions of a normal office environment, and it as been stated that it might even be a 15 minute setback every time someone asks a "quick question" because you need to get back "into the zone".

Another benefit is leaving earlier from work, because I still usually stay for my prescribed 9.5-10 hours, which leaves a decent chunk of time between leaving time at work and the time when most things are scheduled at night. Having those two hours between "get home" and "social time" makes it a lot easier to work on my thesis, or get some consulting work done, making my day more accomplished even when I do have something to do in the evening, instead of having to set aside whole nights of my schedule for those activities.

There are a couple of things that could threaten this early wake-up time. If Diana doesn't like it in the long run, or it's too disturbing to her sleep cycle for me to get up at such an early time, it's a no go of course. If people at work start complaining, I might push back a little bit saying that I get the uninterrupted time, but if they are a little insistent I'll probably cave and switch back to a 7am show-up time. It might start grinding on me differently than it is now, and I could decide to change my habits on my own again. For now, it seems like I've stumbled into an early riser habit.

11111

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:36:35 CDT

So today I seem to have survived another cycle around Sol, so now I'm one year older than last year. It hasn't been a bad year overall. In the last year I've done a bunch of things:

Quit my job at Honeywell, and went to work full-time at a startup that I helped co-found. I'm a programmer there doing basically all of the programming they need to do. It's much more rewarding to me than the other job was.
Put some of my hobby work on my github, Gatherling, a php project that I inherited and then put a bunch of work into which helps track free tournaments on Magic Online, and unsilent-assistant, a bot written for hosting those tournaments.
Hosted 37 free tournaments on Magic Online, providing prizes and having a bunch of fun playing virtual cards with real people.
Made over 500 commits to various git repositories, touching a ton of lines of code, that I can't be bothered to count right now.
Started an LLC (Base Zero, LLC) to contain my consulting, which has made me some side money that is nothing to scoff at.
Wrote 51 blog posts, including this one. Most of these were made in 2011 as part of my challenge to write more blog posts. There are more than 20,000 words in these posts.
Lost more than 50 pounds, which is supposedly a good thing, but I can't really quantify changes in my life other than a diet change and clothes fitting looser.
Bought a new (used) car for us, and gave away the old (broken) one for charity.
Took a trip to Portland with my beautiful and wonderful wife and had a great time.

There is a bunch of stuff that I'm sure that I've forgotten and will remember later, or I just don't have the time to find the stats on right now, or I'm leaving out because I just don't want to be that public with my life story right now.

Of course, there are still things that I wish I would have done better, including getting my thesis completed and a Ph.D under my belt. I am still planning on finishing that, and hopefully this year. There is a lot of work still to be done for it, including the writing of it all, and the experiments that I need to complete. I need to get working on it more seriously.

Overall I think that the last year has gone decently. There were some ups and downs, but I am still for the most part happy and healthy, and making the money that is required to keep both of those on the right side of things. I'm hoping that part of my blogging this year will give me a better idea of what is going on when I start looking back and thinking about years past. I've got what could be termed a horrible memory for things.

For now however - What day is today? It's Michael's birthday! What a day for a birthday! Let's all have some cake!

Movie Review: Paul

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:36:53 CDT

I went to see Paul this weekend with Diana, and we were treated to a completely empty theater. It seems kind of strange whenever this happens, like everyone else got tipped to a really bad review or something. To add to the confusion, during the previews the vertical stabilization or something went off on the projector, and it was jostling up and down giving me a headache. I missed the opening titles. Despite these hiccups, the movie was quite enjoyable.

Paul is a movie about a couple of english guys played by the often seen together Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also did Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead together. They play classic sci-fi geeks who are going to comic con and then taking a extended RV trip to all of the famous places in conspiracy culture, like Area 51 and the black mailbox, While they are on their way, a mysterious black sedan crashes in front of them and they are introduced to Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), a little green alien who is rude, unexpected, and has mysterious powers. He is also running from the law.

The rest of the movie follows them running from two sets of mysterious and funny agents, played quite well by strong supporting actors Jason Bateman, Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio. A chase across the country and some zany situations follow, and a couple of twists near the end keep the whole thing interesting.

I felt like Paul got a slow start, but it really worked it's way into a groove and soon the laughs were coming regularly. Cledd and Pegg play against each other well, and the situations they get a little into the unbelievable, but the alien addition to the cast make the whole thing work really well. There's also a lot of callbacks that are funny to the die-hard sci-fi fan, but out of the way to the person who wouldn't notice it. An example is the cantina band song from Star Wars being played in a country-western manner in one scene. It enhances the movie for those in the know but the whole scene is still hilarious without being tipped off.

Going out of this movie, I found myself unhappy that we were the only two who were seeing it that night - it certainly deserves to have an audience. I'd rate it at a 7.

Two RSS Reader Features I Would Like

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:20:36 CDT

More than a year ago I wrote a couple posts about Cullect, currently the best RSS reader that I've ever used. Since it's shut off, I've had to make due with Google Reader for all of my RSS needs, since it's the next best thing. Since then, I've been thinking about building my own reader and thinking about features that I would love to have in a reader.

The first is OPML subscriptions. For a while now, I've tried to follow a number of blog aggregates, including Planet Debian, Planet Ruby on Rails, and a couple others. Many of them include a OPML download of all of the feeds in the planet, in order to make it easy to subscribe to all of them at once. The model for this would be a number of source feeds going into a single node, and then a single RSS feed coming out. You can follow the planet's RSS feed and see all of the items from all of the feeds, or you can use the OPML list to subscribe to all of the sources. I would like to have a reader that would periodically poll the OPML download, and add or remove the feeds that were added or removed from the planet. Ideally it would also tell me what I was subscribed or unsubscribed from.

The second is Link collections. I've been following the Hacker News Firehose Feed, and a number of other tech blogs. Because it's the firehose feed, there are a lot of links submitted, and a lot of them are duplicates. Some of these links are pointing to items that I will see later, or have seen before, or items that I have already read. The feed reader should be smarter about the items that it shows to me, analyzing the links that they point to and grouping them together. Ideally it would try to find the end of those links, and show me the most relevant feed item, along with hiding the ones that just point to the most relevant one, and marking them all as read when I read the item. For bonus points, it can mark new items as read if all they do is point to the item that I've already read.

I am fairly sure that Link collections are more useful than OPML subscriptions, and they would actually also provide some important data about which items are the most important. It's also possible that this type of analysis is not being done because it requires too much processing power. If we look at the importance angle, it suddenly sounds very similar to PageRank. I am not sure if I will ever get around to making that RSS reader, but if I do, it will definitely have both of these features.

Project 52: Week 13

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:46:30 CDT

Experimentation

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:05:31 CDT

Astute readers of my blog might have noticed a change in content in the month of March. Five times a week I was writing short fictions and posting them here, for all of the 10 readers to see and read and enjoy. I wasn't really doing it for any reason except for experimentation.

Lately I've been playing a game online with a few online acquaintances. It's a website called Health Month, a little site by Buster Benson, the same guy who did 750words which helps people write words every day. The website makes a game out of doing things every day which might improve your health. At the beginning of the month you choose your rules and you're placed into a level, organized by how many rules you have and how hard they are. Rules are hard or difficult based on how hard you say they are as well as how important they are for you.

Over the last three months I've been playing with about 10 rules. As an example my rules for March were:

Creative Writing of at least 250 words at least 5 days a week (the fiction posts)
Take a multivitamin every day
Floss at least 5 days a week
Allow 1 soda a week
Eat breakfast every day
Allow 4 cups of coffee a week
Read a book for at least 30 minutes 3 days a week
Exercise for 30 minutes at least 5 days a week
Drink at least 58 glasses of water a week
Meditate for 30 minutes at least 5 days a week
Stay under my recommended daily calories every day
Do meaningful work at least 3 days a week
Study Human Robot Interaction papers at least 5 days a week

(You might notice that last rule is a little specific to me. It's a custom rule, everyone can put in a custom do or don't rule.)

Health Month is the gamification of habits, which is why I like it. You start with 10 life points, and you lose a point for every day that you don't do one of your things - for every one of your things. If I went over calories, didn't read, and missed meditation, I would lose three life points. People can give you life points if you plead for leniency, and you set rewards and penalties if you end the month with less than 1 life left.

I have really been enjoying playing, there is a group that I am in and we all encourage each other when we get down and also help each other out with healing each other's life points.

I think that I enjoy Health Month so much because it makes it easy to set up month long experiments, like last month's fiction writing, as well as focus on things that you should be doing every day like the flossing or limiting my cups of coffee.

I've been prone to doing these month long experimentations to myself in the past - for example last year I spent a month recording everything that I did in Field Notes notebook, and I switched up the exercises monthly before that trying to find a good route for walks, or finding a way to entertain myself in the gym. Experimentation is just part of my nature in this way, and it's one of the ways that I strive to make my life more happy. If I try something for a month and it makes my life happier, then I will keep doing it. If it doesn't work out, I only did it for a month, and I can say that I've really tried it and it wasn't for me.

This month's writing rule is to keep updating this blog, this time with meaningful blog posts instead of random fictions from my head. Let's see if I can keep my points.

April Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:39:41 CDT

So the diet has been going pretty well this month, I've been keeping to my calorie counts more and also not having as much of an issue with keeping the weight off. There are less ups and downs and that is a good thing. I still have some days when I weigh mysteriously three pounds more than I did the day before, despite only eating the prescribed amounts. I'm doing pretty good at just letting it go by though.

My daily diet has changed a little since the last time that I wrote. I cut all of the carbs out of my breakfast about halfway through March, partially to lower the caloric content of the meal, and partly because I was planning on trying a low-carb diet starting this month. I've started and been on the diet a week or so right now, and it's been pretty good. Most days I'm trying to figure out how I can get to my calorie limit instead of seeing how I can get under it. Especially on days when I am exercising, I usually have to down an ounce or three of peanuts to make my calorie deficit goal.

Speaking of the exercise, it's been pretty good to get back to it after taking the month of February off. I'm going five days a week for thirty minutes now, and that seems to be a sweet spot for me in terms of time taken and enjoyent. One of the things that I was really unhappy during exercise in the winter was the hour long sessions really dragged on my psyche. I always would be thinking about what I could be doing instead of exercising. I re-started with thirty minute sessions instead which was a great call - they are much easier to fit into a day because if I only have an hour free I can still fit in a workout, and I don't have an issue finishing them. I also feel a lot more accomplished when I go a little extra, going 40 minutes or 45 minutes.

I don't remember the exact cheat days that I took in March, but I'm sure that I was on form. It took a little bit longer to institute the "practice days" that I talked about last month - I had my first one last weekend as I was on a short day trip out of town. I ate like a "normal" day and ordered off the menu as if I wasn't on a special diet and wasn't sweating the calories. I think I came in just under the amount of calories I wanted.

I've been thinking lately that it's more important how you feel about how you ate on the practice day instead of how you actually did on the calories. I know that when I was having too much food at lunch and then again having too much food at dinner, I was actually not happy with myself when I was finishing the meal, but I would keep on going because I wanted to finish the food that I had ordered, and I didn't want to waste something. Alternately I was unhappy an hour later or later in the day when I was eating my dinner but realizing that I wasn't actually hungry and I was just eating because it was good to eat with my wife for a dinner. It is most important to me on those practice days that I don't have those feelings at all. Secondary feelings to avoid would be the ones where I feel over-full, like I have had too much to eat. I used to have that feeling all the time, and I barely ever have it now except on cheat days and practice days.

The thirty day graph looks good from here. It's the best weekly loss number since I've started making these posts monthly. I'm dangerously close to the two pounds a week that I've been trying to hit since I've started logging my weight again. I'm also doing it by hitting my calorie goal now and not shorting it by 200 like I mentioned last month. That's fine. I only had a day or two above the trend line, although I got closea few times.

The yearly chart looks pretty damn good as well. You can really see the trendline take the dip that I was hoping during the end of March. There is a nice number at the bottom of the y-axis too, I'm hovering around 270 now, making the mini goal that I had made before. I'm hoping to be hovering around 260 when I make the next report. I'm still aiming for 250 by the middle of this year, and then I will be making the big decisions about whether I'm stopping at that number, or if I will keep going. I never really had some solid goals when I started this whole thing, except for being a healthier person in general.

Twenty Two

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:22:23 CDT

An arrow whizzed by his head as he ran the other direction. Usually there is a warning before they start with the shooting. He bounded around the trees and down into a hidey-hole. A couple of constables went past his head and kept going down the path he was on before. Carefully aiming with his pistol, he fired and one of them dropped.

The other one couldn't locate the source of the shot for a couple of seconds, and that was all that he needed to bolt in a new direction. Left, right, and quickly down the side of a hill. The ground was soft and he barely made a sound as he went across the creek.

He needed to go to the other side. The longer that he stayed here, the more people would be looking for him, and the more people would be hunting him. Everyone on this side wanted their kind dead. He couldn't find a place where he could jump though. Pulling the device out, he listened intently while he waited for the search to finish.

300 yards almost due east. Putting the device away, he gazed toward the sunrise and started on the direction indicated. The forest got thinner here, and he would need to be careful. Surely they had the forest surrounded by now, and the general alert would be out letting the villagers know that they should be dropping everything and looking for him.

Fifty more yards. He had to go out there, there wouldn't be another jump for half a mile, and the more that he waited, the greater chance of losing his life here. He grabbed some courage and sprinted toward the spot. As he ran, he prepared for the journey, and he could hear the guards notice him. There wasn't anything he could do but run as fast as he could toward the point.

Twenty One

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:57:52 CDT

She pulled the car up to the lot, pushing the button to get in to park the car. Normally she would have had the valet take the car, but this was a "see and be seen" event, which meant that there was a paparazzi line, and that means that her Honda Civic needed to be parked and she was sneaking in the back entrance.

In the back of her mind, she was happy that she got to drive herself everywhere, and didn't get pampered with limos - if it meant that she didn't have to deal with standing on a red carpet in front of some backdrop filled with logos to her her picture taken. At least she didn't have to worry about the tabloids wondering why she has some random guy on her arm instead of a up-and-coming boy toy.

As she walked across the skybridge to the theater, she felt an intense out-of-place emotion. She was decked from top to bottom in a gala outfit, with a smooth shiny red strapless designer dress and the shoes to match, and carrying a handbag that cost more than most of the cars that she passed on the way. There was a guy kind-of mingling out here, looking profoundly normal. She reminded herself that she had both her taser and mace on her.

As the door opened to backstage for her to sneak in, she wondered if she could have skipped this event entirely. Someone would probably notice if she didn't show up. Then she wondered if she could sneak out during intermission. Probably not. She sighed and put on her best smile as she walked into the lobby, with all of the rest of the stars.

Twenty

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:45:14 CDT

He stared at the screen, not believing his eyes. They were just numbers, he told himself, as the screen read "trade complete". Earlier today he was just a guy who was down on his luck, and now he had.. he counted the zeroes.. 5 billion dollars.

Two weeks ago, Manny sat at his cube and processed papers. He stared at the inbox pile that never seemed to get smaller, and the outbox, which just happened to be the shredder for his current job. Data entry - it was one of the lowest jobs on the totem pole that he had been forced to take since getting fired from his cushy union job.

The union wasn't exactly the best place to work, but he thought that he would be at least secure and have a pension to look forward to after some grueling time fixing the presses. Then everything went digital and there suddenly weren't any poster presses to fix anymore. Xeroxed out of a job.

As he grabbed another of Form R-11-USV-01 from the pile, and brought up the terminal, he couldn't think of anything but how he would be spending his lunch break on the roof, in the wind and the sunlight. It was the only good thing about this job - the amazing view on his lunch break. He looked at the clock again. 8:05am, only 5 minutes in.

Just then Jeff came around and tapped on his half-high cube walls, and asked him to meet with him in his office. It was the first, and last time that he would be in that office. Ten minutes later he looked toward his cube, realized that there wasn't anything personal at it, and just headed out the door.

After walking the half mile off the bus, he kicked the sign. "Make money at home! Call 610-555-1201." He had seen it three times before, and kicked it down. Someone was putting it up. He decided to give them a piece of his mind, pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

Project 52: Week 12

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:39:50 CDT

Nineteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:33:06 CDT

The sign on the door said I was on my lunch break, but she walked in anyway. I had my feet up on the desk, I was trying to take my traditional afternoon nap. When she walked in the door, I tipped up my hat and took a look, then sat up and situated myself.

"Are you a detective?" she asked.

"That's what it says on the door, doll" I replied. I got a good look at her. She was all curves with a white blouse, a black skirt and silk stocking legs that went all the way down to the floor. She was definitely a working girl - I could see the black from the carbon on her slender hands as she took a manila envelope out of her purse.

"I need help with my husband," she stated, "I think that he is in some trouble."

Looking at her, I couldn't imagine why he would ever jeopardize himself. If I was going back to that, I would definitely be looking both ways when I crossed the street. I grabbed the envelope and let the contents fall right onto my already messy desk.

"What do you think he's into?" I asked, but there wasn't any question. I could already see that he'd gotten in with a bad crowd. The receipts on the desk were hand-written and of the kind that would cost you your kneecaps if you left them unpaid.

"Gambling. I was worried when he started coming home late from work that he was cheating on me, but then I found these." Her voice was like a well-tuned clarinet, intoning the melody straight into your heart.

"I'll see what I can do."

I gathered the papers back into the envelope and grabbed my notebook and a pen from the drawer that was permanently stuck open.

"Tell me the whole thing from the beginning."

Eighteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:08:29 CDT

Vernon wasn't the kind of person who would normally go on a game show, but he really liked watching this one. When he got the letter in the mail asking him to be on the pool of contestants he was extatic. There was even tickets to the event center that the show was filmed in. He was going to get to see the actual set and talk to Manny Moola!

When the day came, he took the bus down to the city center and got a new suit just for the day. There wasn't a big chance that he was going to be selected to play, but he wanted to be sure that if he was on the show, he looked good. The bus ride to the game center was a bit tricky because he didn't want to get anything on the suit that would ruin his appearance.

The game center was a massive complex, that held not only Mad Cash, the show that he was going to be on, but a number of other shows at the same time. Game shows had kindof exploded after all scripted television was outlawed. People liked to see the good fortune of others and reality TV was always suspicious because of the scandal last year, so the networks filled their programming with hosts giving away prizes.

The set was exactly like it looked on the TV, with the flashing lights and the clear cubes that the contestants sat in before they were either chosen or not chosen. As he climbed into the cube before the show he couldn't get it out of his head that it was his destiny to be on this show today, and he was going to go away with the big bucks.

Seventeen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:31:45 CDT

She sat at the bar and sipped on her red wine. It wasn't spectacular, but it was the best that this wine bar had, and after all she wasn't here to sample the alcohol selection. The white daisy sat in her hair and displayed her intention to whoever was doing to walk through that door and recognize her.

Online dating wasn't going that well for Lisa, the problem being that most of the guys who she met on the site were either losers who weren't worth her time or were just cruising for some simple casual sex. Not that she didn't enjoy herself with some of the latter kind of suitor, but it wasn't her final goal anyway. After six months of nothing serious, she was about ready to move on.

Jeremy's profile wasn't different from the rest of the ones that she had set up with before: typical active guy picture with him throwing some frisbee in a park, interests like sports, gaming, and comedy TV shows. The thing that set him apart from the rest was his communication. She couldn't put her finger on it to begin with, but it was somehow more sophisticated that the rest of the people she had conversed with.

It started with the usual "you're cute" type of message but quickly progressed until he was talking about philosophy, the universe and human nature. She started checking her email in the mornings before work just to see if there was something there. It was the highlight of the day when the email noise dinged and she saw that it was more words from his mind to her.

The little bell rang, and the door to the wine bar opened, and Jeremy walked in to her life.

Sixteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:47:13 CDT

The lights blinded him instantly. He knew in his mind that they were only dim bulbs, but after a week in total light isolation, he couldn't stand them at all. Usually the transition was better for him, this time it was a little bit harder. He wondered if the administrators were hurrying him out. Must be a tricky capture.

He was only outside of isolation for two reasons: monthly checkups, or the hunt. There wasn't a checkup for another two weeks, so he knew that a hunt was waiting for him once he could stand the environment. The administrators paid his family quite well for him to stay in isolation for the rest of the time.

After an expedited adjustment process, he sat in the third stage room and waited for his instructions. They should be coming on the screen any moment now. He was already sharp and ready for another trip out into the wilderness to get the fleeing suspect. They were always called suspects until he captured them.

Suspects usually turned out to be guilty - there was only one that he captured and wasn't brought to justice swiftly. He could still hear him sometimes, pleading for his capture after the hunt. It was a grueling five days that time, by far the longest capture mission he had been asked to complete. When he was finally captured, he couldn't walk and had blood all over his body from the harsh environment.

The instructions came shortly. He didn't pay that much attention. Usually they were basically the same. Suspects had escaped from confinement, or while they were on a transfer from one facility to another right before trial. Sometimes they were aided by accomplices. Not this time.

As the hatch opened, he wondered how long it would take to bring this one down.

Fifteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:37:27 CDT

He blacked out during the impact. At least, that's what he thought happened. There wasn't any memory of the impact or just before it, just the people hurtling towards him and then his teammates hovering in the air, asking him how many fingers there were. There were two. There were always two. You would think with a couple hundred times of doing this, they would think to hold up some different number of fingers.

The coach and the injury team soon followed, concerned about his health, and then the referees came over and asked nicely for them to cart me off the field so that they could continue in the game. He didn't have much memory of the trip to the sideline or the check-up there, but sure they happened because they always happen.

Now he was in the locker room, clutching his head and trying to remember the events that led up to all of this, hoping that he didn't have to sit out too many games, because he honestly couldn't afford to now that he was living the extravagant life of a professional player. He thought about his wife at home, and the new house by the lake that they just got in order to celebrate the promotion from backup to starter.

His head was throbbing, and didn't seem to be getting any better. Why weren't there any doctors here? Why was no one checking him out now and seeing if he could go back onto the field? He had to be able to go back on to the field. Trying to stand, he stumbled to the next bench, and then to the room with the recovery and health beds. The game wasn't even on the TV. The game was always on the TV.

Then he saw the clock. Apparently he had blacked out longer than he thought.

Fourteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:49:33 CDT

One. Four. Six. Ten.

Good, it is climbing again. Things were touch and go there for a while. I wasn't sure if things were going to start over again or if they were going to be stuck at zero for a while. Last time it was stuck at zero, lots of bad things happened all at once - the storm, and then the quakes, and the zombies.

The zombies were the worst of the zero-day tragedies, because they effected the most people in the world. People still are talking about the days when their children, husbands, and brothers were taken from them. Only males were zombified for some reason. It wasn't noticeable as much at first, because men by nature can kind of have a low vocabulary to begin with, but soon the signs were unmistakable.

The first attack came after eighteen hours into the zero day. From then on, it wasn't too bad. Only one half of one percent of the men on the planet were zombified, so it was pretty easy to quarantine. Some were eradicated of course, just because people didn't know what to do at first. Then the rest were quarantined because we didn't know if they would turn back when the meter went above zero again.

It finally did, but they never did turn back. Now they have their own island in the Pacific. Once a year a visual survey is taken to see if they are still surviving, and once a year we see them still thriving.

This time we were only at zero for a couple minutes though. Hopefully nothing went wrong.

Oh crap, the phone's ringing.

Project 52: Week 11

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:54:46 CDT

Thirteen

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:18:38 CDT

He stood on the edge and wondered if he should take that final step into the abyss. He wasn't sure how he got here, and really wanted to continue on and succeed like the others. They said that there was nothing like standing at the top and seeing the world for what it was. The only problem was, he wasn't sure he wanted to.

Of all of the people who should be making the journey of the initiation, he wasn't the likely candidate. He was much older than the normal candidate, and there were much stronger and younger people in the pool. He was hoping that he would not have to go this year, and therefore be spared of it forever.

He was also pretty happy with his life. As a baker, he was well respected in the community and got his fair share of credits from the sale of his goods to the other cities. There weren't any other bakers in the county, and he wondered how much his neighbors would have to pay this week for their bread to have it shipped in. A good job and bringing in some money for the city all added up to a pretty good life from his point of view.

He was chosen though, and he wasn't halfway through the journey that would change his life completely. If he gave up now, then he could die without having to deal with both the rest of the journey and the epiphany. He sighed, and kept trudging on.

Twelve

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 01:17:15 CDT

It didn't mean anything. He just went out and will be back soon. At least that's what I'll tell myself for a while. It makes it easier to deal with the reality when it does finally settle in. The whole time I'll really know deep down that he is gone, just like the others.

It is dark here, and safe. The darkness is strong and cold, but it was the known, and there wasn't anything that could hurt me here. The light is blinding, and is encroaching on the darkness more every single minute. Soon I may have no choice. For now, I stay where it is safe and cold though.

All the others have left now, because of each of their reasons. They all had different reasons. The first left because none of us knew any better. We all watched him go and then dissapear in the light. There wasn't anything anyone could do about it. We waited a long time for him to show up again, but he never did.

The second left because she was brokenhearted. She was the one who came to the Arena with the first, and didn't last too long until she couldn't stand going on without him. We all said goodbye and she walked the same way that he did, and dissapeared in almost exactly the same way.

Slowly, the rest went for their reasons. Three and four decided to go together, after almost a week of surviving in the darkness. They were weak, compared to the rest of us. Five ended up being thrown out in anger. Apparently she got in a fight with Seven - I was on a sleep cycle at the time, but Six and Nine told me they disagreed about, well, the only thing to disagree about here, the light.

That was a week ago. All nine others had gone now into the light.

I am alone.

Eleven

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:52:54 CDT

Mark sighed as he walked down the driveway. There wasn't anything he could really do about it. His boss was about to fire him, he was sure of it. Smashing the other bags down, he wedged the trash into the oversize can and rolled it out onto the curb in the right spot for the automated truck to pick it up and dump it out.

The project was not going well, and it had been not going well for a very long time now. He was about to have to actually show some progress, and there was almost nothing to show. He had made up some bullcrap about progress with research into the field and the evaluation of their different options, but he was pretty sure that the truth would come out.

Mark wasn't a particularly good manager. He was typical when it came to dealing with people, which meant that he really was just jovial when he thought that they were indifferent towards him, and attempted to reciprocate when there was some extraordinary admiration or loathing involved. That didn't make him a good manager because you had to be mean to people who actually liked you. At least that's what Joe told him.

The team consisted of a couple of programmers, a designer, and himself, so it wasn't even particularly large. Meetings had taken up the first couple of weeks, but when the spring break hit - a particular curiosity of the company they were all working for - they didn't really pick up on the planning when they returned.

The blame rested on Mark, of course, for not whipping the team into shape. So now he was going to be fired. Just another Monday.

Ten

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:13:57 CDT

It was very loud in the library. Kids were running around and screaming, and there was nothing that she could do about it. She sat there just staring at the horrors that were happening to her sacred space.

Just three hours earlier, she had heard nothing about the beasts. She was working at the reference desk, one of her favorite jobs in the library. Books needed to be re-sorted and people needed help getting on the internet as well as working on papers or looking up some interesting things online. Every once in a while someone needed help looking for a book.

Libraries weren't really common nowadays, but this one would be around forever as far as she was concerned. It was used by most of the city at one time or another, and thanks to an anonymous grant that showed up on schedule pretty much every February 14. No one knew who the benefactor was, but it was apparently very important that the library continued.

At least that's what she thought two hours ago. Now, the entire fourth floor was burning, with all of the periodicals and the maps going up in flames. Still pausing incredulously, she turned and ran. There wasn't anything she could do against flying, fire breathing.. things.

Ironically, the dragons plowed through the fantasy and sci-fi young adult fiction, and lunged up the stairs, knocking the brass railings on the sides as they continued on an upward rampage thorough the books. They were gaining fast on her, so she took a quick turn, hoping that they wouldn't be able to turn with the large wings attached to their backs. The wings that were even now tearing out light fixtures in the hung tile ceiling.

They kept going on their path to.. what, the roof.. for now, while she hid. She hid for hours.

Nine

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:02:07 CDT

The wrench floated weightlessly as he worked on the console, trying to get the computer to actually spark to life. These things were always breaking down, and the idiots who made these modules put them on the outside so that they couldn't be worked on without doing an EVA.

EVAs were the worst part of the job. Not because of the concern over safety - that had been handled a long time ago by the universal tether. It was marginally more dangerous now than doing run-of-the-mill repair work on a newer model of sattelite. The problem was the suits. He didn't have his own suit yet, so he had to use the loaners that were on hand with the company. The loaners were always in disrepair, and smelly.

He gave the panel a little smack and surprisingly the lights blinked on. DIagnostics swam across the screen as the targetting and navingation systems started up again. He waited for them to finish and then ran a couple of tests specific to the actual work order that he had. Everything seemed fine, and the fins moved to the commands from his universal remote as well, so he grabbed the wrench which was floating next to the panel and started replacing it.

He was almost back to the work ship when he saw the light flash. It was brilliant in the sky, and strangely red in it's nature. Then the others started flashing all around him. He wondered why they all got set off for a couple seconds, looking around to see the ship that they were firing on. He quickly located a mhato cruiser that was slowly being turned to dust. In a spin now, it wasn't going to last much longer.

A blip on the panel came up warning him that there was defensive activity in the area, and he remembered that he was in a bad place right now.

Eight

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:47:57 CST

"Damnit!" He screamed as the screen blinked out.

There wasn't anything left to do, though. The server was dead and his hopes went with it. He was hoping that he would have gotten at least a couple more hours out of it, as a shield to the onslaught that was going to come down on his head in short order.

Management wouldn't be happy about the failure, especially when it only lasted a couple of months. Then again, they were the ones that wouldn't splurge for a proofed firewall. They can't have expected it to last that long. He tapped on his bonecomm and called up his direct superior.

"Thomas here," the man replied after a couple of rings. It sounded like he was in a tornado.

"It's down," he said. "Only lasted about three hours once the hive found out about the open jack. What do you want me to do?"

"Crap. Miles isn't going to be happy with that. Hold for now, I'll comm back in a bit."

He started pulling the cables out of the rack, knowing that there was going to at least a replacement put in place, and if not that, a scrap order. There wasn't anything to do with a server that had been hived out. Any time you connected it back on the 'net it would be seeking out the hive and joining in whatever plan they had going on at the moment. His head buzzed.

"Okay, plug it back in, they say," Thomas's voice rang loud and clear.

"Huh? Are they crazy?"

"Well, apparently this was the plan from the start. They weren't that happy that you actually tried to defend it in the first place. Put it back online."

That sealed it: they were nuts.

Project 52: Week 10

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:19:30 CST

Project 52: Week 9

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:17:33 CST

Seven

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 18:16:03 CST

He worked very slowly, not wanting to disturb the process and ruin a day's worth of work. There wasn't anything particularly hard about the process up until now, when the sigils required got very complex as they interworked with the rest of the anchors that he had put down in the preparation for this moment. If the spell succeeded, he would have full control over the fortress, and things would be safe for another year.

Every year he had to repeat this spell, the renewal of his control over the living stone that made up his tower. Preparation was very specific and time-consuming, but it was a small price to pay in order to ensure that his studies were not interrupted for the rest of the seasons. Plus, it was in the winter, and he didn't have much else to do anyway.

The floating gem pulsed with a dim light, growing stronger and stronger with every passing minute. There wasn't much left now but to finish with the force of will imbued into the preparations. He closed his eyes and felt the anchor points that he had placed: six points outside in even spaces about 30 yards out, five cornerstones of the tower itself, the four defense gems which hung magically in the window, an emerald, ruby, and sapphire surrounding the room that he was currently in, and of course the pulsating diamond that centered the entire spell. With all of these points in his will, he started pulling at the Source.

Power started coarsing through him and the anchor points, reaffirming the protection of his home until he would repeat the spell. The center gem erratically started rotating on one axis, and then two, and then all three in a flat spin, accelerating until it was just a translucent orb of white light. As he was connected, he could feel the power cascading down to the other anchors from the cornerstone.

Done with the spell, he checked the now orb-like floating energy ball in the middle of the room with his meter. Fifteen fourty five. He was pleased, that might even last until the summer after next.

Six

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:46:16 CST

She walked with a determination that would be altogether unfamiliar to her friends on the other side. What would they think of her walking down this hallway, with pillars of marble and a floor inlaid with actual, real metal? It seemed so far away from what she was doing now and yet the problems of there seemed somehow intertwined and familiar to the ones that she had here.

Nothing worked the same over there of course, and the orbs lighting her way were a constant reminder, being as they were all over this world. As she joined her troop, she steeled herself for the coming storm. The windows showed the battle that awaited them, and there was no turning back now.

As a group, they headed down the helical stairway, wondering how many of the thirty would come back, if any at all managed to survive the day. Everyone else seemed to be in the same mood. She slowed as she approached the door at the base of the tower, and took a breath before turning the handle that would signal to the other side.

Clanking of steel and a smattering of gearworks filtered through the heavy iconclad door before it swung open without a sound of it's own. The roar of the rain and wind seemed to set the mood practically perfectly.

Charging out and standing aside, she counted their numbers silently as they marched onto the rocky plain which surrounded the rampart and lined up to the final pause before steel met flesh in the coming hours.

"It is dangerous out there today. I want you all to remember your training. It is vital that we hold the enemy, because there is little resistance that the others can offer. You were not all hoping for this, but it is now time to put your skills into action. Let's move."

The battle had begun.

Five

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:09:50 CST

Joe wasn't all that great of a guy, but we all liked him okay, so when he left for his usual Wednesday lunch to the coffee shop across the way, we all sprang into action.

I was the lookout, which was fine because I wasn't very active anyway, and everyone else ran around the office putting streamers over the exposed rafters, and putting signs up on the walls. Joe's cubicle got the worst of it - it was packed with balloons that someone was hiding in a nondescript box in the back. I don't know how they expect him to get any work done for the rest of the day - but then again I suspect that no one expected him to get any work done anyway.

It was hard enough to get him to come in for the day. We had to schedule an impoertant meeting that everyone needed to attend when we found out that he was planning on taking the day as a vacation day. I made a mental note to self - take a vacation day for my birthday and don't listen when there's an important meeting that you need to go to.

I sat at the receptionist desk, making sure that Joe's car didn't start down the long drive to his reserved parking lot and absentmindedly surfing the latest world news. A balloon must have gotten too close to the staple remover or something because a loud popping noise came from Joe's cube and all the pastel balloons shuddered a little as Mark was putting the clear tape over the entrance so that they wouldn't all pour out.

"Any sign yet?" Harriet asked when most of the decorations were done.

"Nothing yet, but it shouldn't be long now, he's almost never more than a half hour." I replied. It had been 25 minutes since he left. Most of the office was quiet now, and people were just kind of milling about, except for Beatrice and Paul who were cutting the cake and putting out the disposable silverware respectively.

I spotted the gray sedan and gave the signal. Everyone in the front of the office returned to their normal working position, and I scooted off to the back.

"Have a good lunch?" Harriet asked, just like every Wednesday.

"It was very relaxing, thanks." Joe said without stopping.

Four

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:47:14 CST

Click.

I couldn't keep track of things anymore. They got a little too.. busy.

Click.

The car was a mess now, and it was maddening because it was just detailed a week ago. It was all shiny and new before, and it would barely pass for a demolition derby failure at the moment.

Click.

The gun was empty. I'm not really that angry, but shooting always puts me in a sort of meditative state. The range was unusually quiet for this time of day, so noone noticed when I went off into my own little world of concentration and thoughts. I looked at the target. I wasn't a good shot when I was zoning out.

It's a really bad idea to be unaware of your surroundings when you're handling a firearm, but when you're covering your ears with muffs that are specifically designed to block out 120 decibels and focusing on hitting a target 50 yards away, it's a daunting task. I released the magazine and considered loading up again for another 17 rounds. I counted the bullets left in the box. Probably not.

I crawled into the passenger door before sliding over the gearshaft, since the driver's side was fused shut now. As I rode across town, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to get in any accidents. There was only so much a guy could take in one day.

The full moon was out, which meant that there were more critters out than usual. Bunnies and squirrels scampered across the road at a red light. Too many bunnies in the neighborhood.

Someone was tapping on the window. I looked out and down the barrel of a shotgun.

"Freeze, just get out of the car," the masked man said, "I just need a ride away from here."

I rolled down the window.

"Buddy, you picked the wrong car."

March Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:50:11 CST

I've been thinking a lot lately about food, which is unsurprising because I'm on a diet or whatever you would like to call it. I'm calorie restricting, which means that I am eating less calories than my body needs in order to force it to use the fat reserves that it has accumulated over the years. It occurs to me now that I don't exactly know how many fat reserves I have in me, which would be calculated using some type of body fat percentage. I should probably get it measured in some way - possibly as a reward for hitting an intermediate goal (270?) I should go to a local place that has a Bod Pod and find out exactly.

The feel of myself has been better in the last month or so, which I've been happy with. I don't know exactly when I started noticing it, but I've been gradually getting too small for my pants, and I should really go out and buy some new ones. I really want to wait until I am at least one more size down though, because I will then be out of the "extended sizes" that are offered by the retailers and clothes will actually be cheaper. I got some new work/casual shirts a few weeks ago and they fit well enough, and I was happy about that. I also recently bought a new belt, not because the old one was too large (although I have one of those), but because it had broken and lost a screw or something holding it in. The new one should last me while.

There is a question which has been on my mind quite a bit recently, because of the steady progress over the last few months. What happens when I am done losing weight? I know the correct answer to this question is that nothing happens - you are meant to have changed your life forever by losing these pounds, and you will need to be vigilant about your diet for the rest of your life. The problem is that I am unhappy with that response. Seriously, I'm not even at the point when I need to think about it yet, and I am actually depressed. It almost feels like I will be cheated out of all of the hard work that I have put in to making myself thin, because there will be no end -- it's just the button, you have to keep pressing the button, or you will gain weight again and your life will be shit.

To that end, I've been thinking of supplementing the "cheat days" that are built into my diet plan and alternating them with a new type of cheat day: Practice Days. On practice days, you should not keep track of the calories that you eat throughout the day. Try to eat "normally". Eat when you are hungry and then stop eating when you are full. Order the amount of food that you think is appropriate for how hungry you are, not because of how many calories you think are in the meal. This may mean that you actually avoid eating at places that you go to frequently because you know how many calories are in the sandwich.

After the practice day but within 48 hours, you should go back and think about how you did on your practice day. Attempt to estimate how many calories were in the food that you ate, and compare it against your metabolic rate not your diet calorie target. You want to be right around the number that would keep you at the weight that you are now, or maybe lower. For me, that means that practice days I can eat 1000 calories more than I would normally eat on my diet. Sit and think about what diet decisions that you made that day, and how you would make them differently in the future - but would still keep you happy with the day as a whole.

I think for psychological eaters or people who have a mental imbalance that made them fat in the first place, this will be very hard. I'm planning on doing it for a month or more, with the goal of them to have to not be in constant vigilance about my diet when I am "done" losing weight. If I succeed, I'll be able to just eat when I want, because that's what my body will tell me it wants, and what my mind will tell me it wants too.

My chart for the last 30 days is looking pretty good. I am happy with my progress. There was one day where I was above the trend line, but I am still on a steady decline. I would like to be closer to 2 pounds per week, but I can live with the numbers that I'm putting up now. The calorie deficit means that if I want to hit the 2 pounds per week goal, I should short what my calorie counting website is telling me by about 200 calories. I'll try that for a few weeks.

This time, the yearly chart is telling me that I am losing faster than during the month. It's pretty nice to see this one, that I have lost 15 pounds since the beginning of the year. The fitted line shown, if I keep it up, means that I will be at my goal of 250 around July. That is my next major milestone, and I want to actually re-evaluate my decisions around weight around then, and actually think about where the "done" point is.

Three

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:24:20 CST

Standing in front of the door, he thought over the events of the day so far, and pondered whether he should continue. The day wasn't exactly going swimmingly, but at least it would be extremely unlikely for it to actually get worse than it was - or at least he thought that was the case. It was, in fact, a bad idea when he rapped at apartment 405.

"One minute!" said the girl's voice from inside. He could hear the steps approaching and straightened himself up a little, nervously, and stood back. He could tell when she looked at him from the dimming of the interior light through the peephole. Locks worked themselves and then the door opened to reveal a dark blue dress, blonde curls, and a beautiful pair of legs in stockings.

"I was just about ready.. running a little late. Wait here." He stood nervously while the door closed again, and he heard the girl moving around again inside. About half a minute later the door opened again, and the whole outfit was completed by a handbag and a set of matching blue heels. She locked the door and tossed the keys in the bag.

As they walked down the hall, he wondered if he would be returning to the same place later. Then he thought it was probably better to not be thinking about it the entire night, so tried to put it out of his mind. The distance from the apartment to the elevator was long, and the silence was awkward. The silence continued to the car.

"So, what do you like to do," he asked when they were on their way.

"Well, I really am enjoying this, and I seem to be doing it a lot lately," she replied, "but I really don't do much of anything. I guess I just like watching TV and chick flicks. I used to do a lot of stuff with my ex, but he's out of the picture now."

Just at the end there, he chanced a glance away from the road, and thought that he saw an evil glint in her eye. Probably just my imagination.

Two

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:44:46 CST

The supernatural isn't always as picky as they have been today. Usually they want something shiny, and are willing to take whatever is lying around and maybe return it later. Tonight was different though, they needed specifically something for their machinations. I was still in their debt, so now I'm awake at three in the morning.

How I got in debt with the sidhe is a long story that I'd prefer to not get into at the moment. The result is that now I'm their errand boy whenever they have a need for something that's out of their reach, which means it's on an island or behind some type of iron gate. They are for some reason repelled by these locations. I thought about moving to an island, but the real estate in the center of the city isn't exactly in my price range.

Today it was both at once - some fancy mansion on the island that I would definitely never be able to afford, and probably would be turned away for just loitering around the outside for too long. As usual for these "missions", I'm dressed in dark clothes and have a dark ski mask on so that I can avoid the surveillance that is omnipresent nowadays.

Strangely there isn't ever a problem when I am successful at one of these even though I'm sure that I've been caught on some cameras a couple times. Maybe my contractors are messing with the evidence or something so that I am available in the future.

Somehow I don't care as I finish picking the locked double French doors and quickly grab the small golden gnome statue that was requested. I'm in and out less than a minute from when I knelt down by the door to pick the lock. As I flee across the garden, I think about how I'm actually getting good at this.

Project 52: Week 8

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:45:53 CST

One

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:27:22 CST

She sat on the bench in the park, enjoying the lunch that she had packed that morning. There wasn't anything special about it. Chicken salad, chips, juice. The juice was fresh-squeezed, but it was always fresh-squeezed because the got it from the cart just thirty feet away from the bench that she sat on, munching on the sandwich that she packed last night and stowed away in the fridge so that she would be able to spend this very moment.

She liked to take her lunch hour in the park. Parks were fun places, places where it was almost impossible to be sad or lonely. Even when it was a cloudy day, or if it was raining, somehow the park took it all in and made things okay. People would sometimes ask her questions about where something was, like the ampitheatre or the carousel. Usually it was just a nice quiet time with herself and her lunch though.

Today seemed different, though. She couldn't put her finger on it before she sat down, but she was fairly sure even before she was crossing the street, waving goodbye to her coworkers who would head to the Subway or the Pizza Shack. She could feel it in the air. She had decided to enjoy her lunch anyway.

It was just normal park things, going on, so there wasn't anything to be alarmed about. A dog was running around in the grass across the path, and there was his owner, tossing a ball and waiting for the faithful return every time. A couple runners making their way through the circuit training course, skipping the ones that they deemed not worthy of their attention. The trees were swaying in the breeze and it was warm but not bright outside.

It happened so quickly that she almost didn't notice it at all. Then a bike sailed past her at an alarming speed -- with no rider. Carlos at the juice stand was gone. The dog was gone, and it's owner too. The ball tossed smacked her bench, splaying her chips all over the sidewalk.

It was quiet, and they were all gone.

Project 52: Week 7

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 23:29:07 CST

February Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:55:49 CST

Okay so this is a little later than it should be. In fact the charts are about two weeks old at this point, but I thought that I would write about it anyway. My diet has been going pretty well. January was a pretty successful month on the diet front, and pounds are coming off. My plans for exercise were working well and there was nothing really to complain about. Normally I have a pretty hard time keeping on the diet in the early part of the year because of all of the things that seem to coalesce and keep me from doing what I want to do.

This time it was no different, but I was more determined to stick with the diet because of all of the progress that I made all of last year, and so that I can make my goals this year, to be a smaller me. The things that all pile up in the beginning of the year are mostly just one big factor, and that's people who are trying to lose weight. I know that it's kind of hypocritical to be annoyed at people who want to trim the fat just like I do, but the problem is that they take up a lot of the space in the exercise room and make it too busy for the rest of us. I think that I am going to try a different tack in the next month.

Another thing that frustrates me about the new year is that there are a lot of holidays that come up and you want to eat at them. Usually the one that I have the most trouble with is Valentines, because there is so much chocolate around, and also I really like to spoil my sweetie with a big dinner and some candies and other gifts on Valentines. This time I will be scheduling a "cheat day" with the outage, so it won't be that big of a deal I hope.

I've been a little less frequent on the Loseit group recently, mostly because I have been busy with client work that I hope that I will probably be blogging a little about soon. The stories there are still very inspiring and honestly the thing that I was bitching about last month with people who just want to lose a few pounds isn't that bad. Reddit is a pretty good community, and loseit is an excellent example of that.

This chart is my triumph for the beginning of the year. An entire month with no red marks at all! I have been losing for the whole month according to my stats at PhysicsDiet, and that makes me happy. The calorie deficit is pretty nice, too, and the average weight lost per week is exactly in the range that I've been setting for myself. If I can just keep this up, I will make my goals nicely.

The yearly chart is a little more conservative on the account of me having those days at the beginning of the year where I was above the trend line. It's still pretty nice though. I am not going to include the all-time chart except at major milestones from now on.

For February, I'm doing a new experiment with my diet. I'm forgoing the exercise completely in order to get a good gauge on how many calories I need to be eating to lose weight. That means that I'm going to be counting calories pretty religiously, trying to figure out how many calories are in things that are home-made (and estimating high when possible). I've been going on net calories right now, which means calories in minus calories exercised, and I have suspicion that the machines may be telling me the wrong amount. We'll see how the graph looks later this month.

Because of a trick of how often I'm updating now (whenever one of my columns runs out in my weight log), I will probably update again in February on the diet. See you then!

Project 52: Week 6

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:40:30 CST

Project 52: Week 5

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:10:51 CST

Project 52: Week 4

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:39:59 CST

Project 52: Week 3

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:35:14 CST

Not sure what I want to do with these posts yet. For now I'll leave you with just the picture.

Project 52: First two weeks

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:06:22 CST

I've been reading Planet Debian and noticed David Watson, Michal Čihař and Evgeni Golov are all doing a thing called Project 52. I've been trying to get myself to do something like 365 project for a while now, but I have failed every time I tried to start. Well, one picture a week seems a bit more reasonable to me, so I'm throwing in as well. Here's the first two weeks of pictures. I took them on the weeks I was supposed to, but I just haven't gotten around to posting on the blog yet.

Week 1

Week 2

I'll be posting every week. Should be fun.

January Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 03:11:00 CST

It hasn't been a whole month since the last update, but I am going to try to make these updates when I finish a column just to make it easier for me to remember, and so that there is less clutter in my weight log book.

Since the last time that I updated on this, the year has ticked over. Usually, there is nothing that is worse for a diet than the holidays. There are is a lot of food around, and in the office there are lots of candy, cookies and chocolate which are sent around from other companies or brought in from home. It's pretty difficult to maintain in these circumstances. As a bonus, usually you're on the road for the holidays, making it more difficult to exercise or go to the gym. I was strong throughout this time, and only had a breakdown a couple of times. When I did end up eating some sweets or having a bunch of free food, I was careful to keep the calories counted, and either extend my workout or just eat less (which was the more common option, and easier). As a result, I didn't make any major backslides. I also gave me free reign when I was off the reservation so to speak, which made me just enjoy the holidays instead of having to worry about how many calories were in the cookies or the turkey that I was noshing on.

I've still been frequenting the Loseit reddit group, and profiding some advice and encouragement when I feel like I can contribute. Sometimes there are progress pics on there, and I was thinking of adding my own after a year of diet and exercise. Usually I am not too thrilled about the posts that have those in them though. Sometimes there are people who are only trying to lose a few pounds - a guy at 160 or girl at 140 or something, and it is a little annoying to think that they are literally half my weight and they are still not happy with themselves. I'm slightly worried that I will get to my goal weight and just be unhappy with myself still, and continue down. There's no real problem with being lighter than I am and still unhappy, losing half of myself is a multi-year goal. However, there are also the people there that are my weight or more and it increases my feeling of camaraderie there.

This update's 30 day graph looks better than the last few updates by far. I'm getting closer to the one pound per week goal that I want to be at for a minimum. I am guessing that counting my calories with myfitnesspal is making the biggest difference, because I can't kid myself about the calories that are in the food that I end up eating. I'm happy with the amount of green on the chart, but still dismayed at the red lines. I have the excuse of the holidays this month, but it would be nice to have a whole month of green.

Here's my whole year of weight loss. The final weight on December 31 was 296lbs, making me 44 pounds lighter at the end of the year than at the beginning. I'm pretty happy with that progress, and want to have another year with that speed or better. This graph looks great to me though, I would be just as happy if next year's graph looked the same.

Here's this year's budding graph. Progress looks pretty good so far. As new years resolutions go, I'm not really making one for the weight. It should be a lifestyle change and not just for the new year anyway. I am switching up the exercise for 2011 - I've been thinking about weights for a while, and I've decided that I want to work on getting a little more strong while I lose the weight this year. I think it will also be better for two reasons. The first is obviously that I will get stronger. The second is that I will be exercising off less calories on the days that I am doing weight lifting. I've noticed lately that I work off about 700 calories at a time, and that basically amounts to a whole meal's worth of calories. This means that I am really eating more than I should, and if I am going to do less cardio in the future, I will need to get used to eating less. Hopefully I will just be less hungry too.

Are you making any weight loss goals for 2011?

48 hours with the Cr-48

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:07:46 CST

About a month ago, I was happy to hear from Google that they were finally going to release their Netbook OS, Chrome OS. They held a press conference to announce it, and invited people to sign up to be lucky and receive a laptop which would be loaded with Chrome OS to try out. I thought that was a pretty awesome deal, so I jumped at the first chance I heard of it, filled out the form with my information, and basically thought that I was still too late, until I got a package that I wasn't expecting from FedEx, and I opened it up to find this:

That's right, whatever magic process that they used to pick the people who were getting these laptops picked me. I was pretty stoked about it, and went about setting it up and playing with it for a few hours right after I got the box. After a couple of days of playing with it, I went back to using my normal laptop for almost all of the things I used my laptop for before, and the Cr-48 is used for guests and is sitting waiting for some movement on a project.

There are plenty of reviews on other sites about the laptop, but I thought I should write about it anyway, since it's a neat thing that happened to me and that is ostensibly what this blog is for anyway. Also, my sister played with it while she was in town and gave me some feedback.

Let's start with the things that I viewed as positive. The OS is basically only a browser, which means that you can do anything you want to on the web about 10 seconds out of the starting gate. I didn't have any trouble connecting to my wireless AP. The keyboard is one of the modern keyboards that you would get on a MacBook or one of the Apple Keyboards that I really enjoy. Lots of people are talking about the keyboard missing a CAPS LOCK key, which I was happy about, because I've replaced that key with a Control on every OS and keyboard that I get my hands on. Really, it's overdue for being replaced with something useful anyway. I don't know that the default replacement of "new tab" is a great replacement because it might be even more jarring to be typing along and hit the key and suddenly be typing in a search bar instead of the field that you were composing your email or comment reply or something in. Another nice touch is that the keycaps have lowercase letters on them instead of the upppercase ones.

The rest of the hardware is a bit sparse. I don't really know what CPU is in it, but there's a SD card slot, one USB slot, and the charger plug. Next to the plug is a little light that is green or amber based on the charging status of the battery. The included battery lasts a long time, even when surfing on wifi I got about six hours out of a full battery, and the battery came half-charged just like a Li-Ion battery should, so I didn't even have to plug it in until late into the first night.

The screen itself is just gorgeous. I want to remove it and put it in my main laptop, because it is matte and bright and I never have any issues reading on it. I am now convinced that I want a matte screen for all of the laptops I have from now on, because there are no glare issues at all, and from what I can tell, colors are still just as bright and colorful as on my normal laptop. I also discovered that it has a light sensor right of the camera, which means that if you're in a darker room, it will automatically turn down the brightness of the LCD so that it's not super bright, or if you go into a lighter room, it turns it up so that the screen stays about the same brightness compared to the surrounding environment. I thought that it was a nice touch - I was worried that the camera was on all the time in order to do this for a while, so I covered up just the camera but that didn't do anything - the sensor is in the black section around the camera just to the right when you're looking from the front.

It's not all roses though. This being a beta test, I am willing to let some things go, but as many others have noted, the touchpad is possibly the most horrible mouse replacement known to man. After changing some settings, it is passable but still not as good as the fairly basic one that is available on any laptop. The whole touchpad is a button, which would be fine with me, except if you try to use it like a normal touchpad, then you want to click in the lower left corner, and if you do this, then you move the pointer before you click. This means a lot of misclicks. The way that I ended up fixing it is turning off the tap to click, and pressing on the pad with the "active" finger then I want to click. It works okay, but the middle click is still tricky because you need to press two fingers down. I just avoid middle clicking on the Cr-48.

The CPU is the other hardware problem. It's not really beefy, and while it keeps up normally, I have some pretty heavy browser use. Just as an example, right now I have 17 tabs open, and it's not uncommon for me to have more than 30 tabs waiting to be read when I am going through my RSS feeds. After about 15 tabs in Chrome OS, there is a noticable lag switching the tabs, and anything with some javascript use will be lagging a bit. This is mostly due to the CPU I am sure.

In terms of software, I decided to try something that should be supported by a Cloud OS: uploading my photos from a SD card that was in my camera to Flickr or Picasa. Unfortunately I discovered rather quickly that while the SD card mounts automatically, you have to trick the browser into letting you use it. The normal file browser, for uploading photos for example, is replaced by a temporary area which is on the hard drive. The browser is a little flaky though, so sometimes I could get the real OS file open browser up. I ended uploading a bunch of pictures to Flickr, but I couldn't get access to the SD card when I was going to upload to Picasa. You definitely need to be able to access that memory card if you want to be able to have a Cloud OS. I hope that some upgrades of the OS in the near future might handle this differently. It also doesn't work that well when you are at an open access wifi spot that requires an agreement clickthrough. You need to login as a guest, then clickthrough the agreement, then log back out so that you can access your normal profile. It doesn't take that long, but it is a couple extra steps.

It's about the perfect loaner laptop for a guest though. I gave it to my sister for use while she was visiting, and she didn't have any issues logging into her google account from the start, and playing with Facebook, updating her status, and messing with some book reading site that she was signing up for. It was javascript-heavy and the pages lagged when there were 100+ books on a page and she was doing something, but I didn't look too much into it. She echoed my concerns about the touchpad, and was pretty insistent on making sure that I actually note all of these things so that I could post them and maybe Google would pay attention. Honestly everything that I've said on here was said before somewhere else.

Overall, I would say that it is a usable netbook, and most people would have no problems getting on the internet. I use it when I'm too lazy to go to the other room when I've left the laptop somewhere else and I'm watching TV, so I can check into miso or tweet about something. I want to cannibalize the screen, because it's damn nice, but otherwise it's a fine netbook. It does have a 5.2GHz 802.11n client on it though, which made it the first 5.2GHz device in my household and tested out that band on the router (it worked fine). One of my projects for this year will be to use this laptop in some of my research, so it will be interesting to see what some of the subjects will think about it when they try to use it.

Big Bang Theory Intro #5: Fern or Tree

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 23:30:30 CST

Let's restart these, shall we? Today it's kind of boring though.

This image is the second in a row that is just tangentially related to history. The source image is in color of course, and it has been put into black and white to make it look like it's from.. about 30,000 BC here. It's of some random tree in a jungle somewhere, honestly the original is a lot easier to see what it is.

Because we're talking about prehistory here, the producers were probably trying to refer to prehistoric ferns or plantlife. Paleobotany is the study of plant remains in fossils. I remember finding some of these in parks when I was a child - they seem to be some of the most common type of fossil laying around when you're on a school fieldtrip. It would be pretty easy to find some of these ferns around my neck of the woods right during the lava from the last scene. Of course these fossils are pretty important to figuring out that evolution actually happens, since it takes thousands of years in the best cases.

December Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:17:24 CST

This month I have gotten back on track in terms of actual metrics. Keeping on track is making a difference. Last month I was trying to find a community to keep me motivated and to share my experiences with, and I think that I might have found something similar, I've started following the people in the loseit reddit group. There are a lot of people there who are also trying to lose weight for good, and while there are a lot of before and after pics, there are also a lot of people who are seeking advice about dieting and exercise, without focusing too much on the exercise and with just some sensible advice for dieting. Along with that there are some other nifty things like a spreadsheet tracking the weight loss of everyone. I think it has been a good thing so far.

There are a couple of changes that I've made in my diet the last month. First, I've started counting my calories more closely, owing mostly to the fact that I carry my Android phone with me all the time, and I have signed up with the myfitnesspal app. We're getting very close to the proverbial eat watch which is postulated by The Hacker's Diet. I put all of my exercise and food into the application, estimating when necessary, and it gives me a number of calories over or under the target. Based on that, I can tell whether I can eat a snack at night or not. I use the estimates from the treadmill, which is where most of my exercise is coming from nowadays. The second more recent change is to cut out all of the soda that I've had. This change was more recent, but I think it has caused the change that you'll see in the last couple days. I've switched to coffee for my caffeine intake, but I only really have one large cup a day. I think that the reduction of sodium from my diet might make a big difference.

According to the graphs, I'm accelerating my weight loss. Weekly loss is the highest over any 30 day period since I've started blogging here. After the basically zero progress for the last two updates, it's really encouraging. I also think that I am solidly below the 300 pound mark now. Also the precipitous drop at the end of this month is also great, but of course I don't expect to keep the rate of >1lb per day up.

This month also looks really good on the yearly graph. And the weekly loss over the year is up as well of course. Reading a lot into both of the graphs, you can kindof see a weekly repeating raise over the trend line. It's probably one of my days off.

Exercise hasn't been too bad - I'm still doing almost all of my workouts on the treadmill. For entertainment, I've started watching the UK Top Gear, as well as watching the US Top Gear as it comes out. The UK version is much more entertaining. I've increased the intensity of the workouts recently by raising the incline to 8. I don't know what 8 means, but it's a lot more difficult in the hill sections of the workout. Diana and I have also started with classes on dancing from the Arthur Murray school. It's been really fun to do, as well as being some good exercise while practicing and during the lessons. I've been a bit worried about my sweat issues while doing the lessons, but I have some handkerchiefs now that will help me keep the wetness to a minimum.

Goals for this month are to make sure that I keep sure I don't have any diet soda for a while, and also keep tracking all of my calories. If I can keep up that, I believe that I will stay on the slow, steady progress. Hopefully I'll have more good news in my 2010 roundup which will probably come sometime early in January where I will be mostly looking forward.

November Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:37:37 CST

It's time for yet another update on my progress in losing a bunch of pounds off my hulking frame. This month I have been frustrated at the progress just like last month. I have been seeking some motivation in the form of a community for a while now. I've looked at SparkPeople and Traineo as well as places like dailyburn and dailymile. They were all places which were useful for recording what types of exercise I did and following along a bit more. Some of the later ones like dailyburn and dailymile are more like "twitter for exercise", which were better but not very good because I don't know anyone local who is exercising, and also I am usually exercising alone.

Sometimes I wonder why I exercise alone. My usual excuse is that I don't know anyone who exercises in the same way that I do. Actually I fear that it's because I'm not as good as others at exercise. I'm a quite large guy, so that means that it doesn't take as much to get my heart rate into the fat burning, or aerobic range. Usually just a brisk walk will get me into it, although I've been told that I walk at faster than most (usually 4 miles an hour). Sometimes I wonder if I had an exercise buddy, if I would do better. The problem now is that I have worked into my exercise a number of solitary activities. like listening to podcasts and watching television or anime. Even if I had a partner to do exercise with, I feel like I would just be exercising alongside them, not really as a group activity.

Anyway, let's look at the progress over the last month, shall we?

This month I really got into the stagnation as you can see. In the last month I've actually GAINED almost a quarter of a pound on average. It looks like a rollercoaster but it felt like a bad time every time I was weighing myself. Part of me wants to let myelf off for this month, because during a good part of it, I was on vacation and totally skipping my exercise, but it means that even if I just give up on exercise and stop watching my diet as closely as I am, then I am going to be gaining all of the weight back. I was hoping that at some point, my body would adjust to the changes and I would naturally want to eat fewer calories. I'm not going to be happy if I can't make some permanent progress.

The yearly graph looks better, but it now looks much worse at the end of course. More red at the end means that I should work even more at my exercise. This month I'm going to keep track of my calories as well, trying to maintain the calories in / out deficit that has worked well for me in the past. I really want to go below that elusive 300 mark. Seeing the first digit of the scale change would be a big motivator for me.

I'm also thinking of switching up some of my exercise for the winter months, because of course I won't be able to work outside anymore. There is a exercise room in my complex, which I used when I was exercising and it was raining outside or when there was something that prevented me from exercising until it was some ungodly hour and didn't want to go outside. I don't want to exercise in the snow, although it might be a bit of fun. Maybe I'll try it once or twice. Does anyone else exercise in the winter? What gear would I actually need?

The new Macbook Air and my alternative

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:12:48 CDT

I was actively avoiding watching the "Back to the Mac" event that happened recently, because I usually end up being non-productive when it is going around. Apparently that was a good thing, because the event was super long and was boring for me until the end part. I'm not interested in the Lion stuff because I don't run OS X anymore - and I didn't run it even when my MacBook was working. At the end there was some new hardware though, which was very interesting to me.

New Macbook Air line is very interesting because usually Apple has excellent build quality. On the face of it, they are netbooks which are built by Apple. 11 inches and 13 inches, with a SSD hard drive but otherwise normal hardware for a netbook of that size, including a Core 2 Duo processor. Camera and USB ports, but as a trusty netbook it has no DVD drive, and only USB ports. They are super light, starting at 2.3 lbs. These are all great things, but they are basic things that you would get in any mid-range netbook. Unibody design is a little less common, most of the netbooks are made of plastic now.

It's not all rainbows and lollypops though. The battery is sealed in the compartment, not user replacable. This might not be such a downside nowadays, since most users won't be replacing the battery anyway and the previous iteration of Apple laptops didn't have replacable batteries either. It's still nice to have the option though, and all of the other netbook manufacturers seem to have figured out how to make the removable battery work. Also, because the SSD isn't in the shape of a normal hard drive (in order to save space, Apple says), you can't replace it with something larger on a whim, but you will need to purchase special parts which will of course be more expensive than the normal SSD cost when the price goes down (and it is heading down in that direction quickly). Then of course there is the Apple tax on hardware, meaning that you will pay at a minimum $1000 for the cheapest 11" model, and more for the larger. That kills the whole thing for me. I understand that Apple needs to differentiate and doesn't want to cannibalize from it's $500 iPad, but it is just too expensive, and I'll tell you just how I know that.

I bought the perfect netbook which rivals and surpasses the new Macbook Air, and I did it almost half a year ago. I bought an ASUS UL30VT-A1, which is a 13.3" netbook. My modified version has specs to rival the Macbook Air:

Thing	UL30VT-A1	Macbook Air
Screen Size	13.3"	13.3"
Processor	Core 2 Duo 1.3GHz	Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz
Hard Drive	128GB SSD	128GB SSD
RAM	4GB	2GB
Weight	< 3.7 pounds	2.9 pounds
USB Ports	3	2
Graphics	NVidia G210M + Intel GMA 4500MHD (switchable)	NVidia 320M
Battery Life	11 hours	7 hours
Total Price	$1035 ($706 + $329)	$1299

It's a little hard to believe that I bought this computer five months ago, and it beats or matches the Macbook Air in all of the categories except for the processor and the weight. It came in at $200 less total cost, and I have an extra 500GB 2.5" drive sitting around that's nice and useful with a cheap enclosure. The UL30VT also has a HDMI out and a VGA out instead of one of those idiotic mini displayport connectors that noone except for Apple uses. With the VGA and HDMI I can connect it to any presentation system on the planet without needing to remember an adapter at all. The double memory is also very nice. I don't mind the less than a pound of extra weight. The processor is not as big of a deal as you would think, usually you aren't processor bound when you're using your computer, you're memory bound or disk bound. I don't know the specs on the SSD that Apple has included, but the one that I have in my laptop is a performance one and it lets me go from totally off to a graphical login in about 15 seconds, including the 5 second wait at GRUB for it to timeout. It also came with a copy of Windows but I'm not using that of course and just running Debian on the thing. I can vouch for the 11 hours of claimed battery life, as I've gotten about that amount while off of a battery and actually working on the machine. You can't be recompiling a kernel or anything, but if you dim the screen and aren't too crazy with the processor I easily get 11 hours out of the thing. It has a long enough battery life that unless I'm leaving for a very long time, I don't even put it to sleep, just opting to close the lid - even if it's not plugged in. Oh, and it has a removable battery so if I wanted to be off the grid for a whole day I could easily just get another one to swap out.

Everyone is raving about how fast it boots and how fast programs run, but I've been having that experience for about half a year now and while I can say yes it is a great experience it is definitely easy to get with a PC that you can get for a cheap. I would recommend the option that I took to anyone - the machine that I ended up getting is great for everything that I have wanted to do on it, including games and flash video, 1080p videos from disk and even simulations I've ran for my thesis work.

October Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:48:45 CDT

Okay, so this is a little late. Almost a month late actually. I figured that I should get it out before I have to make the next month's post and explain the mysterious missing section of my logging. Last month I was struggling to have the weight come off, stagnating on the scale even though I was working just as hard. I'm happy to say that that trend has continued to some extent. I'm still doing exercise, but I am moving it around some more, doing it in the mornings and sometimes in the evenings depending on when I get time. Morning is what I did mostly in September, which was a lot easier because the evenings are free more often.

Football has started, which means that I have a good workout time for Sunday, or Monday, or Thursday, depending on what day of the week the Vikings play. Usually I make it an "endurance" day, meaning that I try to walk for an hour and a half at least, at a lower pace. It works out well because I am actually burning more calories (according to the machine) and I get to watch more of the game without having to bother Diana. If I only cared more about some of the other games, I would have a structured time three times a week instead of just one. I really don't care about other teams' football though, so while sometimes I will watch the Sunday game and exercise if the Vikings play on Monday or Thursday, I won't watch the Monday or Thursday games without my favorite team.

Outside was really nice in September. There were a lot of beautiful trees with leaves falling down and turning colors all over the neighborhood. I didn't vary my route that much and I still got to see a nice progression of the fall colors in because of the differing types of trees while I walk. Entertainment was usually audiobooks again. I started and finished listening to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and started The Girl Who Played With Fire. I got a little bored with it, and started to lean on the podcasts some more.

Let's take a look at the graphs, shall we?

PhysicsDiet.com is working again, which is great news, because I don't need to figure out another way to get these graphs. This graph really is what amplifies my frustration. The loss of less than a quarter pound a week is about a fourth of the weight loss that I'm hoping for. There is a lot of red meaning I was over my trend weight, essentially gaining points on those days. Strings of three above the line are not what I am aiming for. At least the linear trend line is still going in a downward direction.

This graph is my savior. It shows that even after a significant plateau, I can continue on the exercise and make progress again. You might notice that April looks disturbingly similar to September. In fact now that I am looking for it, you can see somewhat similar trends right before April and right before September as well. It's promising.

There are a bunch of breaks in October, including a trip to Portland where I wasn't exercising or tracking my weight, and probably some time around that. The next post in this series will only be in about a week though, since this one is so late.

September Diet Update

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:15:50 CDT

My slow decline into a smaller me is continuing nicely. I've been exercising five times a week, skipping usually thursdays and sundays. Sundays are nice because I can spend more time with Diana on the weekend, and Thursday is good because of the free tourney I run online every week. I don't know how I would exercise otherwise. Because it's the summer, I'm taking more time outside lately, which is improving my morale, even if I do end up taking the same route every day there is enough variation just because it's a living, breathing environment than otherwise. I still end up doing at least a couple days a week inside though - some days it's just too late to walk outside, and I'm just not that comfortable with the neighborhood even though it is a very low crime area. Usually when I am inside I am walking on the treadmill so it is basically the same exercise though. I have been thinking of splitting inside workouts between a couple of the machines lately - 30 minutes walking on the treadmill and 30 minutes on the crosstrainer, etc. I used to do the crosstrainer regularly and was fairly proud of it because it seems like it kills a lot of people but I seem to have the endurance to just tough it out.

I'm still having issues with sweating a lot. Doing the walks outside has helped a bit, because it evaporates some more than when I'm on the treadmill. I still have to hang my shirts before putting them in the hamper, lest the sweat infect the other clothes with it's smellyness and wetness. I was hoping that when I got into the exercise routine that something would change in order to reduce the sweating but it hasn't happened. I have a sweatband, but I forget to wear it a lot and the sweat gets in my eyes.

What I do to keep me entertained has shifted a little bit. Originally in my workouts I was listening to podcasts, and then I shifted to watching anime on the flat screens in the exercise room, and from there I ended up alternating between watching TV on my phone and listening to podcasts again. Then I got into reading and started listening to audiobooks, which I have been enjoying a lot lately. In the last two months, I ended up listening through all of the Dresden Files, from the first to the latest book, and now I am most of the way through Daemon. Audiobooks have a lot of advantages, it's pretty easy to follow along with the fiction books and I can also continue listening to them on my commute if I want to. I joined Audible briefly but decided it wasn't worth the money when I could just get these books from the library.

On to the charts:

The monthly chart shows my progress getting a little better this month, although the weekly loss is still at a single pound per week. I'd like to work on that so that I can get it up to two pounds a week which is a little faster and will get me to my goal quicker. I've been trying harder to stick to a pretty low calorie diet lately, which has been working as you can see quite well at the end of the month. I'm getting pretty close to my original goal of being under three bills, so I will have to set myself a new goal soon in order to keep me on this path.

I also have been having a problem ignoring the daily weigh-ins, being sad when I am for example suddenly three or four pounds heavier when I weigh in. It has an interesting effect on my mood, keeping me vigilant of my diet - that could be a good or a bad thing though. I've been trying to keep my progress on a website called Dailymile as well, but lately I have not been adding my workouts there, because I don't seem to have anyone that I know in real life, and also the people who are on there seem to be more of a fitness crowd instead of a weight loss crowd.

This is the graph that makes me want to keep going. Seeing the weight just go down, down, down is really strengthening. I just need to keep going and soon enough I will be a much healthier and smaller person.

Magical, Revolutionary, Evolutionary, Upgrade

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:30:26 CDT

Lately I've been thinking about getting a new smartphone, so I went to survey the landscape. I'm keeping track of the Android phones and of course it's impossible to ignore the iPhone 4 as a contender in the Arena. Apparently the difference between holding these phones in your hand and seeing them on a video is considerable, so I decided to take a look when I had some time to kill at a local mall which has both Apple and T-Mobile stores. I had already decided to look at the iPhone 4 because it has the retina display which is far and above better than everything else. The other phone I went out of my way to get 3-5 real-world minutes with was the Samsung Galaxy S series, specifically in this case the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant.

Let me give some perspective on the whole "review" angle here, because I think that a history with smartphones and phones in general might tint the experience a bit. I was late to the cellphone game by my normal early-adopter standards, getting one when I first moved to the Twin Cities in 2002. My first cellphone was a Nokia brick which I could basically run a truck over and have no trouble with. After a few years, I was getting a bit more advanced, I got a Samsung SGH-509 which was my first camera phone. It was super thin which I was happy about.. people were commenting on the thinness of it a decent amount. I think I had another phone in between but it was just a basic flip phone from AT&T. I went from my super thin phone to a G1 when it came around, my first jump into the smartphone area. That was 2 years ago (actually a little bit longer now) and now I am up for a renewal of my contract, which means some serious subsidies on a phone.

I picked up the iPhone first, and it was immediately awkward in my hand. It felt about as thin as my SGH was, which is pretty damn thin. I know it isn't because the specs don't match up, but the G1 is a weighty phone in your hand, you really cup it. I have also been told I have reasonably sized hands, so maybe bigger phones are just for me. The other thing I noticed was that it was all glassy. I usually don't like glassy, because I do tend to drop my phone about once a week. My G1 has held up admirably to the drops, landing mostly on it's back but sometimes on the screen. I've seen some horror pictures of the glass on the new iPhone breaking but wanted to hold judgement. It may hold up to more abuse than it feels. I took a look at the screen, and it might just be because I am nearsighted, but I didn't really see an immediate difference from the G1 that I am currently using. I went to the browser and zoomed in a bit just to see a smooth curve or something.. then I zoomed out and I kindof saw what people were talking about with the higher resolution, but it wasn't immediately like "wow this will make my life better". I'm also a guy who likes to code with Profont 9pt on a 1600x1200 or better screen, with coworkers regularly coming by and asking how I can even read the code that I'm writing, so it's not like I don't like me some high density display. It just wasn't something that I was going to drop $200 on. On top of these, though, I can't seriously consider the iPhone 4. It's not because of AT&T (which is atrocious here) or because I'm an Android fan, but because if I'm going to buy an phone that's practically a computer, I want to be able to program stuff for it, and the last Apple computer in my house got sold a month ago when it broke down.

So I walked around the corner (no really, the stores are about 50 feet apart) and picked up the Samsung Vibrant. It was much weightier in my hand, but it is still thin. It wasn't as much hefty and large in my hand as it was just weird to hold the phone with the crazy security device that they had on it. I'll give something to the Apple store, their security straps really don't get in the way of you checking out the phone. The iPhones were held down with a small, silver sticker thingy on the back. All the phones in the T-Mobile store had the old stand-type security devices, meaning that if you want to hold it, you have a 1.5" pipe sticking out the back of the phone. Not exactly the best way to see if it's the right size for your hand. I wasn't serious enough in my designs to ask a clerk if I could hold one without a security thingy on it. It still seemed large. The other thing about this security device thing was that it made it seriously hard to find the hold / on button on the phone. It's on the side, in a not so bad place actually because you could activate it with one hand and still be able to swipe your pattern in, but it was almost covered by the security thingy.

Enough complaining about the phone display quality. The Vibrant itself was quite snappy. Faster than my G1 by far, and the screen was bigger, but it doesn't seem to be the same increase in resolution as size. I browsed to some of the same sites on the Android browser and did the multitouch zoom to the same curve as the iPhone 4, and it looked just as curvy as I had seen just minutes prior. The Vibrant display was more... well.. vibrant as well, it seemed like the colors were brighter and the backlight a bit brighter. It wasn't any easier to read, mind you, just brighter. I'd probably turn it down in real life to save battery. It looked a lot like an iPhone 3, with a curved back and a nice big screen covering everything. It's a good style, and I like it possibly more than the iPhone 4's solid lines and such because it makes it easier to cup it in the hand. There was one big turnoff for me about the Vibrant though, and it was the useless tinkering that Samsung did with the launcher / home screen thing. It wasn't overbearing or anything but it was obviously different. The most jarring was the browser, which had a new "home screen" which I wasn't pleased with, and the browser was renamed "Web" which I have nitpicks about. Anyway it was a good phone, but it was also above $100 (there's a deal for $150 that I know about) and I wasn't ready to drop that kind of cash for what amounted to an upgrade.

That's the deal with these phones now. The jump for me from a Nokia brick phone in 2002, to a flip phone in 2004, to a cameraphone in 2006 were just small steps in cell phones for me. Each phone had just a small difference that was completely approachable compared to the previous one. This one is easier to carry. This one has a camera. This one is thinner. They were all basically the same device though, a phone. The switch from a cameraphone to the G1 was such a change in how I conduct daily life it isn't even comparable. It was a revolutionary change in my computing style. I carry a single device that handles my email, music, reading, todo lists, and on-the-go browsing. It's a small computer, and that's the problem with the new phones I was looking at. It's just an upgrade from what I have already. Switching to an iPhone 4 now is not going to change my life again, even if it has a screen with 300 dpi. Switching to a Vibrant now isn't going to change my life again, even if it is two times as fast. Those changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary. An upgrade is much less appealing.

Eventually my G1 will stop being upgradeable. (I'm currently running the 2.2 software on it, and it's pretty snappy) Or maybe I'll drop it and it will actually be broken one of these days. Then I'll buy a new phone. Until then, I'll continue having a great experience with a truly revolutionary phone, at least for me.

Losing some pounds

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:10:36 CDT

I've been classified as "overweight" for most of my adult life, and people who follow my blogs very closely may remember that I was on a diet for a while called the Hacker's Diet, using a running average. The diet focused on caloric intake, trying to figure out your basal metabolism based on counting calories and weighing yourself daily, using a running average to determine the calorie surplus or deficit, so you could make decisions to change your intake accordingly.

I had an issue with the program, because I like to go out to eat with my lovely wife fairly frequently. This means that I am constantly trying to calculate the calories in meals, constantly overestimating or underestimating. Fast food is generally okay, because as a company gets larger in size more people will start asking for the nutritional facts. Of course marriage actually adds a lot more problems with the scheme because Diana likes to cook (and she cooks delicious meals), and those also don't usually come with calorie content.

It wasn't working out, so I ended up basically quitting after a while, because of the frustration with both the calorie counting, and I didn't have an accurate scale. A scale that you can depend on across the weighings is very important. Luckily I fixed the second part of the equation. I still haven't figured out how to fix the first part, so I ended up giving up and modifying the diet.

My current plan is reliant on the weighing system, but doesn't deal with the calorie counting. So I weigh myself every day, and keep track of the average just like on the original diet. Additionally, I'm adding an exercise component, in order to burn more calories off and make sure that I am calorie negative. Of course, exercise has other benefits beyond just burning calories. Getting out of the house and walking around helps me with listening to the podcasts that I want to, as well as some audiobooks.

I started the exercise at the beginning of the year, exercising on the treadmill and on the crosstrainer in the newly installed exercise room in the apartment complex. My normal schedule was an hour five days a week, with a break day Thursdays and Sundays. That was great and helped with my determination by having the days off. Everything was working for a while, but I think I started unconsciously eating more calories, compensating for the exercise, and I started to see stagnation. To give my diet a kick, I started watching my intake as well, and that seemed to have the intended effect.

From the last month:

So just like the last time, I am using the tracking tools on physicsdiet.com to generate pretty graphs and give me the trend lines. Actually, I'm keeping track of my weight daily in a Field Notes memo book that I got on special and which is about the perfect size to keep right next to the scale, and then I transcribe them to the website about once a month. You can see here the time where I was stagnating at the beginning of June, and when I started watching my intake where the trend line starts going down more smoothly.

Entirety of the diet:

Here the stagnation is a lot more apparent. I was still making progress, but it was much slower from mid-April to the start of June. Overall though I like this rate of weight loss. One pound a week is what most people would call sustainable weight loss. My short-term goal is to be below 300 pounds, which looks like it will occur this year. I don't know what the long term goal is yet. I'm hoping to make a post about once a month, if only to keep myself reevaluating myself.

Cullect.com: Part 2 - Skitzophrenia

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:40:29 CST

I recently praised Cullect.com for being a pioneer in the feed reader arena. The Importance metric made sure that you were reading things that were interesting to read. It all but eliminated the 'tl;dr' syndrome for me. Unfortunately, it was not always rainbows and lollipops with Cullect.

Cullect was very focused around sharing your list. It had a number of options for sharing to services like twitter, del.icio.us, facebook, whatever you could think of. That is fine for sharing individual items, but the real gain would come from sharing a whole list. You see the importance rank can work for you: it will make the best items from all time come to the top. In this way, you put Cullect to work as a curation tool, hiding things that are irrelevant, and recommending items that you would like more of. As a bonus, you can have multiple people who are curating a list, recommending and hiding items as they see fit.

Now we get to the skitzophrenia though, because a list couldn't serve two purposes at once. If you have a reading list, you would hide items as soon as you had read them, because you've already seen the information. Even if it's the most important item tomorrow, you won't want to read it again. If you're curating a list however, you never want to hide the most important items, making it a pain to skip past the ones that you've read every time. Even on the most active topics, the most important items are static for hours or days. If I'm curating a list, I always switch to the latest feed, so that I can look at the newest items and bump them up by recommending them if they are good. Multiple curators make this an issue though, because my fellow curators may hide items that I could recommend.

You have two tools: a great reader that you can just sit down at and read for 10 minutes and know you're reading new, interesting, "important" things, and a excellent tool for showing the best content in a particular area. You can't have your cake and eat it too though, which might be a feature that could push it over the top. You can fix this by splitting the "read" and "hidden" flags in the database, so that curators can choose between the "important and not read" view and the "important all time" view. You might even extend the concept to allow a user to decide how to time-limit the importance view. This type of time-limiting is a powerful tool - you could build feeds that only show a single item from each day (or week.. or month), just the one that is most important.

This "concept problem" has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but it's still not fully formed for some weird reason. It could indicate that I'm just not seeing the forest for the trees, or that I'm getting a little too hazy on the problem because there is so much which was done right with Cullect.

Next, I'll talk about a feature that I've been wanting for a while in any reader, that seems like a slam dunk for Cullect.

Cullect.com: Part 1 - Importance (and Google's Magic)

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:40:47 CST

This is a series of posts that I've been meaning to write about the site Cullect.com, which is currently on "extended hiatus". For those of you that don't know about cullect, it was an interesting beast of a website developed by Garrick Van Buren, a local developer. It was plagued by downtime near the end of it's life, and I think it was right to take it down for a while and work on it. Garrick may have abandoned it for now, but I'd like to explain some of it's features, because they are innovations which I wish I would see more of the aggregators take a look at. It was one of the few feed readers out there which had some real innovation under it's hood, and I was thrilled to be using it.

The first of these features, and the one which was most visible and that I want the most, was the way that it made reading a lot of feeds a trivial task. This was because it included a recommendation system that would rank the stories that you hadn't hidden (which is somewhat, but not exactly analagous to "read", a topic I'll take on in a later post). It used the fact that you liked some feeds better than others to put those at the top. I don't know the whole algorithm, but there was a hidden social aspect as well - if some other people "recommended" the story, then it would get more importance. This was brilliant, because you could spend ANY amount of time looking through your feeds, sorted by importance, and be sure that you weren't missing the big story of the day. When you got bored with the stories, you would just leave, knowing that you wouldn't be missing anything that was more important.

Some other aggregators would like you to think that they have something similar, sorting by something like times recommended, or amount of comments, or votes, but they are not the same. Importance score was tailored to each post, and to each Cullection (a set of feeds). This made it personalized to you, and presented the things that YOU wanted the most. Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons Cullect ended up shutting down was because recalculating all of the importance scores was very CPU consuming, and it was taking too many resources.

Since the takedown of Cullect, I've been using Google reader as a passable replacement. Recently (as in, like the last year?) they added a bunch of new features, including "liking" a story, sharing stories with friends (another thing which Cullect excelled at), and "Sort by magic". It's not exactly the same as sorting by Importance I am sure, but it is the most likely the closest thing out there. It seems to have a little more in common with the "popularity" indices that other aggregators are using, but I was happy to see something at lease somewhat similar show up in the reader that I ended up using as a replacement. Still, I hope that Cullect can come back in some form in the future, as it was hands down the best reader that I had ever used. That's not to say that there weren't problems with the site, though. I'll cover some of it's disconnects in part 2.

Garrick is still making cool new properties. I'm using kernest on this site to get fonts that I like out to every modern browser with little effort.

Random thoughts on the iPad

jamuraa@base0.net (Michael Janssen) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:11:53 CST

If there is one thing that has caused quite the stir, it's the announcement of the iPad last Wednesday. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and of course I have mine as well. Apple fans are saying that it will change the paradigm of computing, including splitting people into two worlds. There are of course a lot of grey areas here. People are tying major issues to the lack of flash, which isn't really a big deal if you ask me. Eventually Flash was bound to fall, because it's a closed system at it's core. You can make some Flash things without Adobe, but they can always change the game on you. Of course, the Apple App store is just as closed as Flash. You can't put anything on the iPad without the magic bits from Apple saying that it's kosher. There are already a bunch of invalid reasons that they have for rejecting apps, including the very anti-competitive practices of rejecting anything which will be competing against their own apps. Will they reject word processors for the iPad which compete with iWork? How close does something need to be in order to be rejected - will OmniGraffle's outline making tools be too close?

Because I love the iPad, it's such a great piece of tech. I can even buy into the "new world" of non-multitasking (noone really multitasks anyway) and non-filesystem world. I can see building apps for it, but I don't want to work in the closed system which is the Apple universe, where everything is gatekeepered by a process which has been opaque at best. It's all of the arguments against the iPhone's development model, except on a larger scale. There were companies who wanted to develop software for the iPhone that were niche apps - things like warehouse inventory systems. The iPad is larger, it's about the perfect size to walk around with and read stuff off of. 10 hours of battery life means it lasts through the whole workday.

Of course, there is a back door into most of the new apps - the web browser. The best part of this may be that you can use it perfectly as a portal to a web app that can build you anything you need. Apple may be getting what they wanted at the start for the iPhone with the iPad. We all remember the few months before there was an SDK when the party line was that you could do everything with web apps? It's much more likely with a nine inch screen and a blazing fast browsing experience. Web apps are also the end-around of all the restrictions that Apple places on their "approved" apps. You want a picture of an iPhone in there? It's just a GIF. Want to put some "adult" content in? HTML5 video to the rescue! The only thing you can't do is background processing, but you can't even do that with real apps. There's no API bugs to work around. It's not exactly the same as a real app for low-latency things like gaming.

At any rate, I'm still going to develop web apps, and I think that the iPad will be the kick in the pants that the industry needs to make a decent tablet. Android phones are getting better, and accelerating, in large part because the iPhone changed the smartphone ecology forever. If the iPad does the same to the tablet market, it will be a very exciting future.