Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Gizmodo has a story about a tape drive unit for your desktop PC. It’s basically a way to directly interface with the music on a cassette tape so that you can digitize it. It’s a nice idea for those who have piles of old tapes they no longer use, or want to import into their MP3 player, but I just wonder how good the quality is going to be from a 20-year-old tape that’s been played 100 or so times. What is probably a question I hear more often is how to get old vinyl digitized. Many more records were put on vinyl - maybe for 90 years or more? - before CD’s subsumed them. Cassette tapes were only being sold I think from the early 70’s, or perhaps late 60’s, although their sales were not as aclipsed as quickly by CD’s. I just thought it was funny that they were “bringing back” a casette tape player into a computer system! I remember for my first computer, a TRS-80 back in the late 70’s, it came with a tape player which acted as a drive that you could load programs to, or I suppose save them to as well. Of course, it was not random access like a CD or even a floppy disk, but it had to go through the entire tape to find the program. I’m not sure how much a single tape held, but it was less than an old floppy, so probably 100K or maybe less? And of course it was SLOW. Just to load a program off a tape was a very long process. My god, how far we’ve come in 25 years, it’s amazing! I think of kids these days hopping on computers and how easy and fast they are compared to that time. I suppose, though, this is how it’s been even before that (although they didn’t even have home computers, it was more ham radios or electronics kits), and how it will be in the future. Maybe my grandchildren will be playing with their own personal AI’s, or downloading/uploading info to/from their brains. Ah well, they will never know the joy of watching that casette tape play and play and play in order to load some probably completely useless program that would let you display blocky pictures or calculate some basic equation…

Atkins has responded to the suit brought by PCRM mentioned in my last entry. It does a much better job than my own commentary at punching wholes through PCRM and its motivations. I’m glad Atkins has gotten smart and tough about defending itself. In the past, when the only one who was defending the diet was Dr. Atkins himself, who was not exactly trained in good PR, the whole issue of whether or not low-carb plans were healthy was not as well served. Although some aspects about a large company with commercial interests taking the healm of the Atkins name has concerned me and other low-carb dieters who fear that their main motivation from here on in will be to sell as many low-carb products as possible, we do have some benefits of a well-funded and well-organized company that can activate its personnel to quickly come to the defense of both feeble as well as substantial challenges. And lets face it, even feeble challenges can, when not responded to, become accepted as fact.

Well, our wacky friends at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) are at it again. I’m surprised it’s taken them this long. It seems they have finally hooked a fish from the website they have had up for many, many months that has been asking for people to submit info about how they were harmed by the Atkins diet. It was, no doubt, with this goal in mind that the website was created. Although PCRM is an organization that evangelizes veganism and condemns any and all uses of animals (for food, medicine development, testing, medical training, even seeing eye dogs for the blind), they are truly predatory when it comes to attacking anything that they see as a threat to their goals.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least, and “predatory litigators” or “ambulance chasers” is actually somewhat of a step down from the more recent enlightenment of how far PCRM is willing to go to and how radical and uncompromising they are in their approach. The whole debacle over Atkins’ medical reports showed that PCRM has no professional or ethical scrupples, let alone common dignity for a deceased person and their family. But as you read more about their ties to PETA and other animal “liberation” groups, some of which are open proponents of violence, one starts to really wonder about the sanity of these people and whether they are truly dangerous to the public - “terrorists” as some people have started to call them.

As far as this suit goes, I’m not a lawyer, and sometimes the law seems to rule against common sense, so anything’s possible. However, it seems to me ludicrous that someone can claim a diet they were on gave them high cholesterol. Generally as we age, our cholesterol goes up, even with the same diet. Also, there is still no proof that high cholesterol gives one heart disease. Yes, you heard me right! I know, it sounds like an amazing statement, but it is true! Sure, doctors have played up cholesterol as the evil that must be eliminated at any cost, but there are many medically trained skeptics out there who have very good arguments against any link between the two, other than the red herring that has helped doctors push millions of people onto risky medications to the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies bottom lines and to the benefit of the doctors who prescribe them as they are wined and dined and given other perks by these drug companies as incentives to push yet more people onto the unnecessary meds.

In fact, study after study has shown that for most people, cholesterol actually gets lowered markedly by consuming a low-carb diet! HDL, the “good” cholesterol goes up, triglycerides tend to drop quickly and precipitously, and LDL, the “bad” cholesterol may rise initially only to drop back down to below the initial value. LDL is still seen by most mainstream doctors as the main component to look at when trying to determine whether someone needs drugs. Amazingly, though, this fails to take into account the fact that LDL is actually composed of different subparticles, one group that is associated with health benefits! Those healthy LDL particles seem to increase in proportion to the unhealthy LDL particles on a low carb diet even as the total LDL remains the same, thus improving overal health indicators, but of course this is ignored by most doctors who are eager to put as many patients as possible on drugs. The reason why tests to determine these LDL subparticle groupings are not done as part of the standard cholesterol test, I am sure, is that if this were done, many people might show a more healthy cholesterol profile and would then be harder to convince to take medication.

I’m hoping someone decides to sue PCRM for promoting a vegan diet, which can certainly be abused as much as a low-carb diet to where it becomes unhealthy. That is part of the issue, too, I think. Any diet can be abused. People who don’t understand basic nutrition can take Weight Watchers, Dean Ornish, Atkins, or anyone else’s plan, and creatively mutate it to the point where one is still theoretically “following” the diet, but not eating in a very optimal way. I suppose, though, in this litigious society we have, unless people are told exactly what to eat at every meal in exact quantities, diet books potentially open themselves up to suit when someone who’s followed them for all of a few weeks develops some probably completely unrelated health condition. PCRM of course, has a whole other agenda. Their single-mindedness marks them as not to be trusted in any kind of debate to get at the truth of what is healthy and what is harmful. Their tactics are sensationalistic and in no way represent the scientific sounding name they use which should indicate a body that endeavors to search objectively for the truth, not being dogmatic, aiding frivolous lawsuits, or publicizing private medical records.

I know, it’s been a while. I need to get back to posting on a more regular basis, but it is hard when as soon as you leave work you are moving, unpacking, or doing some sort of housework. I don’t think we’re going to actually going to have much free time at this rate until June! My Wife’s father, who has been staying with us this last month, just left, and he was doing a lot of the work that needed to be done both inside and outside the house. Now we have to do this ourselves and it seems my wife may be away on business a lot in the coming weeks.

I thought I’d give up my usual tendency to post about one topic, since this is often where I start telling myself that I don’t have enough to write about X or at least not enough that would be at all interesting. With that in mind, I thought I’d just ramble a bit on various things and maybe altogether they will add up to something moderately interesting to someone!

First, the cicadas. Yes, I know I just wrote about these, but I can’t stop thinking and talking about them. They had gotten really bad by a couple of days ago. I tried playing tennis at the courts near my house, but they were covered with cicadas and I just couldn’t take sharing my side of the court with several dozen at a time! It seems that when it rains, or at least rains pretty hard, the cicadas go away for a while. I am still moving some of my stuff out of storage and was dreading having to move it into the house with all the cicadas flying around, but we had a lot of thunderstorms go through the area last night and by the time I got home it had cleared but there were no cicadas out. None! I don’t think it was just coincidense and besides, at least according to Cicadamania.net, they are supposed to be out for a month, and it’s only been a couple of weeks here. My current question is if the rain did indeed cause the cicadas to not come out the way they have been, did it just postpone them, or did it actually kill the batch that would have come out today. In other words, will we get an extra day of cicadas, or not? I’m wondering this because, of course, because if it could rain for the next two weeks and prevent cicadas from coming out, and then that would be the end of it, well, I would be all for it raining hard for two weeks streight!

Meredith, who happens to have the same commute as I do, gave me the idea to change my route a bit and I was able to shave at least 25% off of my commute, which is definitely helping with the transition to the new house. Meredith had pointed out in this entry that Route 50 actually goes coast to coast, which I didn’t know about. One of my daydreams since we honeymooned in Key West was to leisurely travel the coast via Route 1. But now that I know of a East-West route, I now have another daydream. I suppose there are much more scenic roads to take, but it would be neat to say you took one road accross the country…

I’m finally trying to get my old site, dvdmon.com, back into shape. I recently switched it from my old host, Interland. Interland was the first hosting company I had become familiar with, and I have no idea how, but it was many years ago before they were bought, and they may have been bought more than once. They are pretty huge at this point, and their prices are not cheap, but they are a premium service. I had a Cold Fusion account with them, which they later decided to make into a special type of account that costs way more than others that allow you to use ASP or PHP. Luckily I was grandfathered in, but that also meant that they couldn’t switch me to a faster server, and I’m not sure whether they were actually upgrading the server I was on. I wanted to just transfer everything to another host I had been using for other things, called Brinkster. They are a lot cheaper, and you get a lot more in some ways, and they just provide a lot of tools and resources. Yet, some things you don’t get and their support isn’t quite as good. On the other hand, when we used Interland at my old company, we often would run into problems that would take days or weeks to resolve with them. I think ultimately it is probably just the lack of really good tech support folks (or at least relative to the incredible number of people to support) that causes problems for a lot of these types of companies. Anyway, I did some preliminary work to convert my site from Cold Fusion to ASP and then transferred it, but it’s still pretty rough. I’m hoping to make this an opportunity to redesign the database backend which I had previously made overly complex when I created them 4 or 5 years ago, and to just redesign layout to make things more readable, use stylesheets more and even integrate in some 508 stuff.

Brood X, these guys are called. I’m sure you’ve heard of them on the news, if you haven’t actually seen them in person. They come out every 17 years to breed, and thank goodness it isn’t more often. We don’t even have it as bad as some other folks I know. A friend of ours has piles of dead cicadas or their molts on his curb, like fall leaves! Nothing like moving into a new house only to be inundated by huge bugs. At least they don’t bite or destroy your plants, but still! There is also the sound they make. To me it sounds like an old Star Trek phaser. But it is constant. They seem to make this sound only in the mornings and maybe early afternoons, but not at night. It can get a bit much especially if there are a good number fairly close by.

I definitely have thought about eating them, because they are likely to be excellent sources of protein, vitamins, and minerals, but even though I can be somewhat adventurous, somehow I can’t see actually bringing these things into the house. Some guy tried some and ended up in the hospital, but unless you have food allergies, the worste you will probably get is nausea or indegestion.

Last night we went out into the back yard and the grass was literally crawling with the things, which were heading toward the nearest tree. It was too dark to take any good shots last night, but I finally got around to taking a few this morning. I’m going to try again tomorrow maybe, since these were taken in a hurry, and are not the best shots. Also, I don’t have the software here at work to get anything other than the imbedded 640×480 jpeg, whereas most of the shots I have available for viewing are 800×600, so once I get the chance I will get these replaced by larger shots.

This weekend I went with a group of buddies to The Preakness. These guys know I’m a big low-carb follower and tease me about it sometimes in a good-natured way. I have heard stories from others who get lots of flak from their friends or coworkers about eating low-carb, but I suppose this is probably happening less these days with the popularity of such plans.

For the first time I can remember, though, I did get into somewhat of a debate about the efficacy of such plans. I don’t mind debating about this stuff, but I always feel unprepared because I don’t have actual studies that I can pull out to prove a point. What I did get out of this discussion was that there are studies purporting to “prove” or at least indicate a connection between low-carb eating and health benefits as well as low-carb eating and health dangers. Without looking at these studies individually, and reading them carefully and fully, you can’t use them for any kind of ammunition. You can punch holes through studies which on the surface seem fine, but when you dig deeper you find that they don’t account for some important variables, or that they use animal models instead of human models, or that they are flawed in of a million different ways. Unfortunately most studies are funded by a company or even a government institution that could be considered somewhat to obviously biased. These groups have agendas, and whether they are blatant about theirs to the scientists they give money to or not, theirs at least a subconscious understanding that one should bite the hand that feeds you. Look at what’s been revealed in the medical industry with the Neurontin debacle. Cynicism has lead me really to not believe anything I read in the papers reporting the benefits or dangers of any drug or diet. I don’t have the time or energy to read all these studies word for word, so I suppose I will just reserve judgment until I have cause to do so.

Anyway, we went to Philips for lunch on Sunday. Philips is a regional chain of seafood restaurants around here, and like many other chains, they have started to include a section for low-carbers. It was nice that with their low-carb entrees they offered both a veggie and a salad, whereas on other entrées if you wanted to add a salad you had to pay. So, I ordered a broiled salmon and when the waiter came and started handing out our plates and saying what was on them, he said for mine “low-carb salmon.” Ok, well, maybe it’s not that bad, but Salmon is not low carb or high carb, it is NO carb! Ok, so maybe he’s just referring to the plate and not the fish, but I still thought it was funny.

I’m taking a break from this arduous process of moving to a new house which we just bought. It’s not so much an intentional break, but something that was planned. A bunch of friends have been going to The Preakness at Pimlico Race Track in Baltimore for years. Last year was the first time I went and it was fun, but pretty exhausting! We never made it to the notorious “infield” but maybe this time. Last year it was rainy and gross. According to the weather.com report, there are thunderstorms predicted, but not until the evening and the temps will only be going up to the low 80’s. We have nice indoor seats, but it sounds like we might have to make some foreys outside. One of the problems is going to be convincing some others to go. These guys have actually stayed in the infield many times and so probably got their fill and have grown out of it. But I am somehow still morbidly curious about the spectacle. I’m sure after viewing it for a little while I’ll decide “well, been there, done that” and move on, but until then, I can’t move on, damnit! Ok, well, maybe I can. Here are some shots I took at last year’s event:

At our new house we have a quarter acre, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, and doesn’t even look like a huge amount of land, but let me tell you, when you are obligated to mow a quarter of an acre, even subtracting the areas that have no grass like the house, the driveway, etc., well, it’s a lot!

I spent the first 30 years of my life in either a New York City Apartment or various dorms, townhouses, and such, none of which I had to mow a lawn at. I actually mowed my first lawn when I was maybe 22, when I went to visit my brother and he threatened to make me mow his lawn. Having never done this, of course, I decided it would be fun, and for a 22-year-old kid who had never lived outside of a midtown Manhattan apartment on the 15th floor, it was!

I did live in a house for a couple of years when I was in my early thirties, but somehow managed to mow the lawn only once, perhaps because roommates and our landlord was nice enough to do it before I had the chance (or realized it should be mowed).

Of course both my previous experiences with mowing were from gas-powered self-propelled mowers. We decided that we wanted to be more ecologically friendly and buy an electric, which is not self-propelled. Not only do you have to push the thing continuously, but you have to be constantly on your guard that you are not going to run over the power cord, which has to reach for up to 80 or more feet at points at the far end of our yard! It basically took me the entire day on Sunday. Now, granted this is my first time mowing on this lawn and with this mower and I should become more efficient, but I’m a bit doubtful at doing much better than halving the time, which means I will probably be looking at two or three hourse! I will say that it was great exercise, but on the other hand, I am feeling like I was roughed up by some bodyguards today!

I’m sure the 80% or so of you out there who grew up around lawns and having intimate experience with mowing are laughing at the poor city slicker all of a sudden realizing what buying a house means! Although I would never call myself a “slicker!” Isn’t there a term for a guy who grew up in a city apartment with all it implies as far as lack of skills in home-related areas, but who never took advantage of all the things that a major city like NYC is famous for, with the exception of restaurants? Of course we went to a museum every once in a while, but many of these trips were via school. We went to tourist attractions like the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, etc. when we had visitors from out of town. We saw a few plays throughout the years, including Death of a Salesman, Fences, Cats, Biloxi Blues, The Wiz, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. But nothing a visitor who came once a year for a weekend couldn’t have experienced. I grew up a nerdy introverted guy and so never even considered going to any of the bountiful clubs in the city. So in a way I feel like I missed out not only on the world that I wasn’t exposed to, but even to the one I was. Oh well, at least this gives me stuff to be excited to learn about later in life and to write about here!

As I’ve chronicled recently, we baught a house in Vienna, VA. On saturday we got posession of it and moved over a few essentials. We also sold my wife’s condo this week and thankfully it went for enough for us to cover the downpayment for the new place which we had borrowed via an equity line.

My father-in-law has graciously agreed to stay at the new house and help us get settled for the first few weeks. He has been doing all kinds of house stuff that I am pretty clueless about, having grown up in an apartment where the “maintenance man” did everything for you. He’s replaced the locks, added a railing/banister for the front steps which is required for our insurance, weeding, bleaching fences, the deck, the walkway and a side of the house that has some mold or algae or something like that growing on it. I really wish I could take these three weeks off from work so I could actually see what he’s doing so that I have a fighting chance of continuing it after he’s gone!

We are supposed to be out of the condo by the 24th, which means that we really have to get moving on all the packing. But I’m torn because I want to spend as much time as possible at the new place figuring stuff out there. Luckily, proabably 50-75% of our smaller stuff (anything that can fit in a compact car), has already been packed and moved to a storage unit so that the condo wouldn’t look “cluttered” when we had the open house. So I’m hoping that we can pack the rest of the stuff this weekend and then we just have to cart it to the new place along with furniture. Since the condo is only 750 square feet, there’s not a whole lot of stuff you can fit in it, so the “big” furniture consists of a full-sized bed, a smallish entertainment cabinet, a dresser, a small (two-person) couch, some large bookcases, and a desk.

Unfortunately, the desk is really the biggest problem. My wife got it custome designed for this little alcove in the living room. It cost a lot of money, but we initially thought it would add value to the place. The buyer ended up allowing us to keep it, though, but I wish he hadn’t! First of all it’s big, and the room we have for it at the new place is not exactly that spacious, so it could take up 2/3 of the space! Secondly, the guy who built it is no longer in the area and can’t help us deassemble and reassemble it, but said that it is not a simple task and really deserves professionals! It’s also, I believe, very heavy, even unassembled, so this is going to be our major hardship I think with the move.

There’s also other stuff going on at the new place. We are trying to get some things done there that would be more convenient when all of our stuff is still not there. One is painting, the other is getting some of the floors refinished. We are getting some new appliances because there are some that either don’t work or are pretty old, inefficient, and probably will be dying in the next few years. Then we have the other stuff which we haven’t done yet but are thinking about like getting new furniture for the place, and maybe even remodeling the kitchen!

Trying to contemplate all of the logistics around this stuff and working full time is enought to overwhelm you! I just want to fast forward 3 months, or, as I mentioned, take some time off work. Of course this is impossible. Even if I went without pay, I’m involved in some somewhat critical projects. Actually, I almost had the opportunity to take 2 weeks off and get paid for it, as luck would have it. Just weird contracting technicalities which I probably should not go into in public, but anyway, the fates would not let me get by so easily and extraordinary measures were taken to keep me from this dream.

We have been going to the condo the past couple of days to pick up some additional essentials, and so by the time we get to the new place, get the report from my father in law, and then try to go out and grab something to eat, we end up getting to sleep pretty late and so we are not getting enough sleep, which just adds to the stress. I realize these “problems” are nothing compared to health issues, financial issues, etc. and that we are extremely fortunate, but it does just get a bit overwhelming at times.