Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last weekend, I couldn’t get to a bulletin board which I’ve spend ridiculous amounts of time over the last 4 years. It’s the official Protein Power Bulletin Board, linked to the official Protein Power website. Protein Power is the “diet” that I’ve been on for four years running, the longest I’ve ever eaten according to more or less the same configuration.

It is, as many of you know, one of those dreaded “low-carb” plans. But while it shares many things with the much-maligned Atkins Diet, as well as others with that brash startup South Beach, it first was published about 9 years ago. How I wish I had read it then, but that was still at the peak of the low-fat movement and reading something going so much against the grain (no pun intended) at the time, would have been unthinkable. I was not about nutritional rebelliousness quite yet. As I’ve probably written here and elsewhere on numerous occasions, Protein Power, or “PP” as the aficionados call it, is a rational, scientifically based set of guidelines for eating the most optimally nutritious diet, one that promotes improvement in critical areas of health. Weight loss, although a part of this, is not the end-all and be all. The authors explain the science in a fair degree of depth compared to any other diet book out there that I know of. They even go so far as to say that they don’t have all the answers, something you will never hear from the “diet docs” who scream and yell both in their books and on tv or radio talk shows.

But one of the key reasons I think I have stayed with the plan so long is that the Eades (the doctors who wrote Protein Power) where nice enough to provide a bulletin board for those wanting to talk about the plan and anything related. They don’t really participate themselves except on a few rare occasions, but a nurse that assisted them in their practice does show up from time to time and also does regular chat sessions. Aside from her, an extremely knowledgeable microbiologist is an administrator and there are many folks on the boards with a great deal of knowledge concerning nutrition, health, fitness, you name it. Going between this board and other diet-related boards is like going from night to day. Instead of the incessant banter, bickering and useless “me to!” messages with gazillions of unicorn pictures, animated smileys and other detritus, most threads are gems of information and perspective, well thought-out and well-written. Discussions are simply on another level. Sure there are debates, but even when people disagree, they do it in such a mature and reasonable manner, it’s like a breath of fresh air compared to the constant flame wars that make up, sadly, much of the history of internet discussions.

I am actually one of the moderators on one of the Protein Power boards and when I tried accessing them last weekend I was bet with a page not available error. Occasionally technical glitches happened, so I did not think much of this. When I tried on Monday I found the same thing. Last year there was actually concern about losing the board and so we set up a “backup” Yahoo! Group to handle situations like this. Soon there were messages from others that they were also worried. I contacted the administrator who was able to get in touch with one of the authors, Dr. Mary Dan Eades, who allayed fears that the board was going away. It turned out that it was the hurricanes in Florida, where the server is hosted on which the boards exist. Now going to the main website one is greeted with the following message:

“Due to power outages and downed communication lines
caused by Hurricane Frances, eatprotein.com is temporarily off-line.
Technicians are working to restore connectivity as soon as possible.”

Hopefully this will not last that much longer, as many people get support and a great deal of useful information from these boards, and simply enjoy chatting with our friends that we have developed over years of discourse.

While this hurricane season has been devastating to much of Florida (and now Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi), it has also at least indirectly affected others not only around the U.S., but in other parts of the world.

One of the other members of that board has a blog but hasn’t commented yet on the board going down. I’ve gotten emails from other members and I would just say that any members reading this post a comment and say hi. At least maybe we can keep somewhat of a conversation going while the boards are down.

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XM, the more successful of the two satellite radio companies that began transmitting a couple of years ago, has decided to expand its reach to internet broadcasting. I used to own an XM radio, and while I enjoyed the better-than-FM quality of XM, and the freedom to keep listening to my favorite station no matter where I was (as long as I was outside that is), I eventually decided to get rid of it because I didn’t feel like I was using it enough to justify the $11/month they charge. I can certainly see it being worth that much or more for people who listen to the radio more, but for the most part I tend to listen to audio books or NPR, and XM does not carry NPR (Sirius, XM’s competitor, carries a very limited slate of second-tier NPR shows).

This new method of broadcasting I’m not so sure about. I’ve never really been that into internet radio, believe it or not. Even with a DSL connection at home, streaming audio to where it’s actually somewhat equivalent to FM quality usually slows down everything else. Doing anything else on the computer that requires uploading or downloading large files makes the connection flakey. Aside from this, I live an area that has two NPR stations, and of course a fair variety of musical genres to pick from, although I can see where having a college radio station or a station that played a more eclectic mix of genres (zydeco, Caribbean, African, Brazilian, etc) would be nice. The nice thing about the XM radio I owned, the Delphi SkyFi, was that I could use it in the car, then unplug it and hook it up to a boom box made specifically for it in the office or at home. It was “portable!” Since then Delphi has come out with other modular XM radio devices that don’t even require a proprietary boom box. Maybe once Wimax enables constant 70mbps connections to the internet for any enabled mobile phone the internet radio broadcasts may finally become truly portable (at the huge expense of these phones’ battery life!), but until then it’s simply another way to listen to the radio when one has a higher-speed connection. If XM simply offers this as an added feature to current XM subscribers, great! Then they won’t have to deal with modular devices like the SkyFi. I supposed it’s also a remedy for those who don’t want to spend $100 or more on a satellite radio itself (let alone installation fees for your car, etc.), but still a nice array of channels to listen to at the office. Then again, aren’t there already a whole bunch of completely free internet radio channels???

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My wife, who has my old Sidekick, got an email from T-Mobile last night that the Sidekick II $100-off upgrade offer for current Sidekick owners is on hold. Apparently there was such a huge demand from these owners that they had to shut things down while they make plans to get more in stock. I just wonder whether models will be selling to the general public while those trying to get upgrades are waiting for some arbitrary additional surplus to build up so that they can take advantage of the offer again? Who knows, but somehow I doubt T-Mobile will be asking potential new customers to wait while they give their entire inventory to previous owners. That seems like too much of a 180-degree about-face from their previous “let’s worship the new guy at the expense of the loyal customer” attitude. No word on exactly how long this new wait will be. One would think that with Sharp as the new manufacturers for the device, they would be able to churn out new units pretty damn fast!

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In the professional Digital “compact” (meaning sensor sizes up to 35mm but not larger) SLR market, Nikon, Cannon, and Fuji have been battling it out for a few years now. Earlier this year, Canon took the lead, some would say, with its EOS-1D Mark II, which matched the 8+ frames per second of Nikon’s D2H, but doubling the resolution to 8 megapixels, plus a CMOS sensor that yields much less noisy images. The highly anticipated Fuji S3 Pro, supposedly coming out next month, will up the anti with a more advanced sensor that alledgedly pushes dynamic range a lot closer to the capability of film. Nikon’s D2H, which came out prior to the Mark II, has been Nikon’s top-of-the-line DSLR for professionals since then, but its 4-megapixel sensor has been superceded by most DSLR’s in the past year, even those costing a fraction of the price, and even most prosumer models as well. The Mark II is a much more expensive camera, but for newsrooms, that’s not much of an issue considering cameras with much less capability were being purchased not very long ago for $25,000 a pop!

So finally, Nikon has come out with the predecessor to its D1H and D2X – the D2H. It now incorporates a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor for less noisy images and three times higher resolution. At the full 12MP, it will only do 5 frames per second, but it has a special 6.8MP mode that pushes the frame rate back up to 8, so in this sense it is both better and worse than the Mark II – able to take higher resolution images, albeit at a slower frame rate, and lower resolution images that the Mark II can take at the same 8 frames/second.. Nikon is also touting a new advanced image processing system that is supposed to enhance white balancing accuracy. Another new feature I haven’t seen in any DSLR yet is a multiple-exposure option. One other neat feature is compatibility with GPS devices, which one can connect via an optional cable and which will encode meta data in the image file that not only says when you took it, but exactly where! Finally, one of the other big features that Nikon is talking about is the D2H’s wireless capabilities, which include support for an older WT-1 wireless transmitter as well as a newer WT-2, which is able to communicate at the higher speeds (54mbps) of 802.11G. Nikon also just announced a new wireless file transfer protocol called Picture Transfer Protocol over Internet Protocol (PTP/IP), which will make these devices much more plug and play, as well as increase their transfer speeds. We’re not quite at USB 2 speeds of 480mbps (let alone firewire 800’s 800mbps), but this is a good deal better than USB 1.0, and is bound to just increase. So far, though, Nikon is leading the way. Hopefully other camera makers will take notice not only for digital SLR’s but prosumer models as well.

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According to mytreo.net, PalmOne is now giving away 3 free accessories (valued at $80) with new Treo 600 purchases. In other words they are trying to clear out inventory by enticing new customers to jump on this special offer. They are only available through September 30, so my guess is that the next Treo (the 650 or “Ace”) will be available shortly thereafter. In my opinion, this is not a big incentive to buy the Treo 600 when the 650 is so close at hand. $80 is just not that much when you’re talking about an $800 phone – or even $300 when highly discounted. In order to buy the 600 now instead of having to wait a few weeks or even a couple of months for the 650, I would think Palm would need to give at least a $200 mail-in rebate! Also, although it doesn’t prove anything at this point, the fact that this deal is on accessories and not the phone itself leads me to believe that the rumors of the 650 being incompatible with 600 accessories. After all, in addition to wanting to clear inventory of the old phones, if they need to make new accessories they need to get rid of the old accessories as well!

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Those who’ve read my blog for a while will know of my long-time membership with Audible.com, which provides audio books in the form of digital files you download from their site, kind of like MP3 files, but with copy-protection. Initially, one could sign up for a subscription that would give you five audio books per month for $30 or so, only $6 for each book! Nice deal except that unless you spend most of your waking time listening to the stuff – maybe if you’re a truck driver or something similar where you always can listen while doing other things – eventually you’ll probably get behind on your pile of books!

Eventually, as Audible grew, they dropped the book total down to where it is now – two (alternately you can get one book and one “subscription” to a radio show, magazine or newspaper transcript), for $20 per month, or $10 per book. Still not bad compared to the exorbitant rates you see for books at a Borders or Barnes and Noble – anywhere from $15 to $100 depending on how long the book is and whether it’s abridged or not. Books you buy via your subscription at Audible are based off of your monthly “credit” meaning the equivalent of $10, no matter the length. However, the problem is that you are limited to those two books. If you want to purchase more in a given month, you can, but you have to pay the higher Audible price, which is just a more discounted version than what you would pay in a bookstore, or what the book is listed for. So it’s still a savings, but you can also end up paying $50 for one book, if not more.

Once in a while, Audible has sales, and today Audible happens to be having a type of sale that I’ve only seen once before, maybe twice, in the last year or two. This sale entitles any Audible.com member to buy as many books as they want at a flat rate of $10 per book. There are so many great books on Audible’s site, that I have a hard time keeping my wish list under 400 titles, so this will help me out. Later today I’ll probably by a bunch of titles I’ve been eyeing for a few months now. Trust, me, though, it will still be a tiny fraction of my wish list!

Apparently, you can sign up for Audible.com count today and take advantage of the same sale for customers – this according to Audible.com customer support. One can sign up without a yearly contract, but what I have done in the past is take advantage of a deal that Audible has that gives you $100 off of a whole series of devices that can play audible files, including iPods, Treo 600’s, and many others. A third option is to sign up for a year and get a free Muvo MP3 player to play your music on.

In any case, if this entry does end up motivating you to start an account with Audible (“leviwallach”), all I ask is that you enter my audible ID as the referrer, as this will give me an extra book credit or two. Again, this sale is only for today – September 15, 2004, so if you are reading this even a day after, you’re already too late, sorry, but Audible is still worth a look if you like Audio Books and don’t want to deal with the hassle of tapes, the expense of retail price, or the inconvenience of library borrowing.

Update: Oops! This sale is not one day as I mention above! Maybe the last one was just a day and that’s what confused me. This one turns out to be 10 days! It lasts throug September 24. Sorry about that!

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T-Mobile has finally heeded the screams of its Sidekick community and thrown them a bone with a special $100 off the Sidekick II, making it $199 for previous Sidekick owners.

The only problem is that it seems like most of the tens of thousands of current Sidekick users want to take advantage of this offer. If such offers were more common, there might not be the frenzy, but unfortunately T-Mobile is JUST starting to realize that not pissing off current customers by giving preferential treatment only to new customers.

Because of the frenzy, people have been having a very hard time getting through to the number you need to call. I myself tried and first got a fast busy signal, but eventually got a recorded message saying there was huge demand and that they couldn’t currently take my call. I guess putting people on hold for two hours would just make them abusive to the poor reps taking the calls.

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According to several articles posted last night, High Tech Computer (HTC) just started shipping the next Treo model to PalmOne in large quantities. HTC is apparently the company that is manufacturing the phone, and they probably best known for PocketPC phones. Consumers will probably still have to wait till at least some time in October to buy one of these, and undoubtedly not all carriers will have one immediately. There was no word on whether these models were all CDMA, GSM, or a mixture. GSM and CDMA are the two competing digital cell communications protocols in the U.S. GSM is the internationally dominating format. In the U.S., AT&T/Cingular, and T-Mobile provide GSM service and Sprint and Verizon provide CDMA.

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DPReview.com just posted a hands-on preview of the new Fuji Pro S3 that I’m aware of. Fuji has become one of the top makers of digital SLR’s (and prosumer models), and many professionals are using Fuji S2’s. Fuji has been innovators in CCD technology, so that there DSLR’s as well as some of their prosumer models use what they call “super CCD’s.” The individual picture elements in these are not the standard square shape but octagonal, and the extra surfaces are touted to increase the image’s accuracy.

The Fuji S3 was originally announced in February with a release date of the second half of the year. However, Fuji hinted at releasing the camera in August, then September, and finally October, so it is nice to finally see at least a preview of this camera which means that it is hopefully very close to mass production.

The S3 is an 8 Megapixel camera (the S2 is 6MP), but this step up in resolution is not why many professionals have been eagerly awaiting this camera’s arrival. There is a quality of digital cameras which until the S3 has not really been addressed in all the upgrades from one camera model to the next. In the consumer/prosumer models, you see bright decals on the camera proclaiming “6 Megapixels!” or “10X Optical Zoom!” But no matter how high the resolution (and actually if you keep cramming more onto the same size of CCD you run into increased digital noise), one of the big limitations of digitals over film is something called “Dynamic Range.”

Film can capture many fine levels between the blackest black and the whitest white – around 11 stops to be more precise. Each stop in photography is twice as luminous or half as luminous as the last, so 11 stops means the 2 to the power of 11 or 2048 – light is 2048 times as bright as black. Current digitals have only 6 stops at most of dynamic range, which comes out to a piddly 64 times brighter. The S3 is the first camera to directly address this issue by another CCD design innovation that actually already exists in one of its prosumer models, but has been enhanced for the S3. The newer CCD actually has a separate set of picture elements specifically for handling the highlights (brightest parts) of an image, with which digital normally has a hard time avoiding overexposure. The claim is that this new technology adds a couple of stops of dynamic range, so the brightest parts can now be 256 times brighter than the darkest.

For those who aren’t big photography hobbyists or professionals, dynamic range may not seem that important. But for those in the know, it makes a huge different because it means that one can take a much wider range of images without fear of overexposing or underexposing. Any image with a huge amount of contrast is currently very difficult for digitals. An event as common as a wedding will see groomsman in dark suits and the bride in a white that can turn out to be hundreds of times brighter than the dark suits. Without complete control of lighting as in a studio, it become extremely easy to get one of those extremes off enough to where either shadow detail is lost or highlight detail is lost.

Unfortunately DPReview did not actually take any images, so that was disappointing. I really want to see that difference in dynamic range in a photo – and it would be easier to understand to see it visually for most people. A few other things I noticed from the preview: The S3, while able to take continuous pictures faster than the S2, still is no match for my D70, a camera that costs only $1000 compared to the S3’s $3000 or more. Also, the S3 still does not take a rechargeable lithium ion battery, something that many prosumer and digital SLR cameras have at least as one option. I’ve always been partial to these over multiple AA’s, as they are easier to handle as just one piece and tend to give much longer battery life. Other than these two items nothing really caught my eye. There are some interface improvements, but since I’m not intimately familiar with the S2, I may not pick up on some of the new stuff that S2 owners will.

There still is no word on exactly what the price will be for the S3. It was originally going to be $4,000, but since prices have come down in the digital SLR Market over the last year or so, it seemed likely that this price would drop to $3,500 or even $3,000. Also no further word on when the camera will hit the streets, although the latest quoted date as far as I know is “late October.”

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Got this out a day late, so I apologize. I thought it appropriate to reflect on September 11, not only due to its inherent significance to me, the U.S., and really the world, but also because it seems to be what pushed blogging into the forefront as a real media outlet.

I’ve never actually written about 9-11 mostly because I only really started blogging about 16 months ago, and I generally don’t blog about major current events or politics, etc. I thought I’d just put down for the record how I remember the event.

I was not in New York, but I was not too terribly far from the Pentagon – about 7 miles to be precise. I woke up that morning and was getting ready to leave for work when my mother called. She still lives in New York City (Manhattan), and is both an early-riser and a news addict. She said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Still not quite awake, I turned on the TV and CNN was showing live footage of the north tower in flames. My mom mentioned something about terrorists, but I just thought it was a small plane and didn’t think it would amount to much. I was in denial. I said I had to go, hung up, and made my way to work as normal. I don’t remember if I put on the news on the way, or just listened to an audio book.

My drive to where I worked at the time was pretty short – maybe fifteen minutes at most. I came in the back way and knocked on the locked door for one of my coworkers to let me in since my hands were full and didn’t have my keys handy. No one came to the door even though by that time normally at least a couple of folks would be there. I head a phone ringing inside and after a minute or so of knocking and hearing the phone ring with no end, I finally fumbled around for my keys.

When I came into the office, all the lights were on, the phone was still ringing, and not one person was around. That was a little unnerving! I picked up the phone to hear the wife of a coworker. She asked if her husband was there and I said no. She said she’d been trying to get hold of him. I don’t think we talked about the plane.

After a while I realized there was the sound of a TV in the distance. I didn’t realize where this was coming from as I’d forgotten there was a TV in the conference room one floor above us. I finally made my way upstairs to find two other coworkers sitting and watching. At this point I think the other plane had already hit the tower and another plane had hit the pentagon. One of my coworkers said in his drive to the office he saw a plane flying very low in the direction of the Pentagon, and he was sure that was the plane that crashed, although he didn’t actually see it.

The rest of that day, we were all just glued to the TV, Work essentially stopped. After a while when all the false alarms started coming in about other planes or bombs going off in or around DC, we started getting nervous, despite not being that close to DC or any other national symbols, buildings, etc. We all started calling friends and family who were in the DC or New York areas, or even across the country. I was having a hard time getting through to my family in New York due to the cell phone traffic, but eventually found out that my brother in law, William, who sometimes worked around Wall Street but lately had been working across the river in Brooklyn, had walked across the bridge and along the river up to where my mom lives in the east 30’s. Everyone was ok, thank goodness, or at least everyone we knew. Later I learned that a woman that I had gone to study abroad in Russia with had been evacuated from her office building which was only nine blocks from the towers. Thankfully I don’t know anyone who died in the towers that day, and about the closest I came to knowing a victim was that my current roommate’s coworker’s brother was killed at the Pentagon.

Because of all the bomb scares, DC was shut down and it was very hard to get in and out. People had to walk out of the city to find a friend in Virginia to stay with or to drive them home. Luckily most of my friends at the time had email accounts and through email and some phone conversations we were able to make sure everyone we knew was ok.

We came to work for the rest of the week, but no work was done. We just listened to the radio or watched TV the whole week. Flags and impromptu memorials popped up everywhere. There was a profound sense no matter where you went that something BIG had happened and that things had changed in a big way, even though in the DC area only one small area was directly affected by the crash – whereas in Manhattan the dust from the towers falling was everywhere for weeks and of course the biggest reference point to the city that could be seen from a large percentage of it was now missing.

I tried to give blood that week, but hearing that the red cross was overwhelmed, I signed up on their website so someone could contact me as to where to go. I never heard from them. I wish now I had gone home to my family in Manhattan at the time, but things were still so uncertain then and attempting a trip might have met with a 15-hour drive only to be denied access into the city. Plus, after the initial day, I knew that everyone was safe.

I didn’t end up going until two or three weeks later. Even then they weren’t letting people go below maybe Canal Street unless they could prove they lived there. I had no big wish to see ground zero at the time. It was enough to see it on TV! Plus one of the morgs the city was using for 9-11 victims was right next to where my mom lives, and seeing all the police presence and our neighborhood kind of taken over for this purpose was quite enough as well. Walking through the streets and seeing the home-made flyers people had printed up asking people if they had seen a son, a wife, a cousin, were heart-breaking. The police were everywhere.

The weekend after 9-11 there was a planned party at my friend Kit’s to celebrate his girlfriend moving in. While we were in no mood to celebrate, we all agreed it was important to get together as a group of friends, to talk about what had just happened, and just to be with each other in such a disturbing time. At this party, talking with many of my friends and friends of friends, I came across a woman I had talked to before at these parties, but this time we ended up talking for two hours. She worked fairly close to the White House, which, as is now known, was one of the targets that day but was spared either because the plane that eventually hit the Pentagon couldn’t get a good approach, or because the third plane was commandeered by its passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, thus sparing many more lives on the ground. We didn’t just talk about 9-11 that night, of course, but that served many as a moment in our history where we were able to share our experiences, even emotions with perfect strangers. As for this woman, she is now my wife.

That is one good that came out of the attacks, that at least for a while we were a cohesive people and not two (or more) warring camps. Unfortunately, we’ve backtracked quite a bit since. Things are still different now, but not in any immediately obvious way. Sure security checkpoints in general are more beefed up, but in my day-to-day travels, I don’t see any big difference between now and say three and a half years ago. The flags and other emblems on people’s cars have largely disappeared. While 9-11 is still vivid in many people’s memories, for most days of the year it fades into the background. Not that I think we need to be mourning this moment every day of the year, but I do think making this the only real national holiday dedicated to a tragedy may allow some people the room to reflect on the time when as a country we were without politics, where strangers comforted each other even in New York City, where Jews stood guard over mosques for fear of hate crimes. Yes, there were hate crimes as well, but they were isolated and condemned by almost everyone immediately, despite what was an immediate, easy, and obvious target for the anger and pain that was inflicted on the nation.

While 9-11 will always be a wound in the soul of the nation, and a source for pain, we can actually use it for the good. We use it for good by not exploiting it for political purposes, or purposes of condemning an enormous percentage of the planet. While innocent people need to be defended from becoming the victims of hateful groups, governments, or individuals everywhere, supporting or even turning a blind eye to such victims because they are far away, are culturally, racially, or linguistically different from us, or because their attackers provide some small strategic or economic advantage for us, really is inexcusable.

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