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I’ve spent quite a bit of time pro­cras­ti­nat­ing this week­end, surf­ing the Internet when I should’ve been fin­ish­ing clean­ing my apart­ment. Of course, in addi­tion to total time sinks like Facebook games (Yahoo games for peo­ple who like assist­ing spam­mers), I’ve watched a shit­load of TED talks… So far the most inter­est­ing by far are the Idealab founder who built a mir­rored solar col­lec­tor and this guy:

explain­ing some­thing extremely inter­est­ing (I won’t spoil his punch­line, you’ll have to spend the 18 min­utes on it).

I’ve inad­ver­tently stum­bled onto the calo­rie cycling method of weight loss. Two days of rad­i­cally low calo­rie intakes (1300) fol­lowed by two days of “nor­mal” intakes for my desired loss (1850). I’ve seen vary­ing num­bers, but the rec­om­mended course is to use this method when your weight loss flat­tens out, I was using it because I couldn’t keep up the 1300 calo­rie day for more than a cou­ple days at a time. The goal is to con­dense your calo­ries into waves over the course of a week, so you trick body into keep­ing your metab­o­lism up even though you’re eat­ing less — short-circuiting the “star­va­tion” mechanism.

I also dis­cov­ered, finally, one rea­son why my lap­top has always had trou­ble sus­pend­ing: if Rhythmbox is play­ing when you shut the lid it won’t prop­erly sus­pend. IMO, this is a tremen­dously evil behav­ior, and I’ve stuffed my lap­top into a bag and let it nearly cook itself to death many times because of it.

Reading the utopi­anism of world​chang​ing​.com after watch­ing a TED talk from the founder of it, I tried cal­cu­lat­ing car­bon foot­print more accu­rately than I had pre­vi­ously. Catching up on missed blogs, I’ve got­ten myself going on dopplr a moment ago, fol­low­ing a Lessig commenter’s idea to use it to cal­cu­late car­bon for off­set dona­tions — which is a pretty cool, IMO.

I’ve been using Tasque for a cou­ple weeks now and it’s extremely use­ful for keep­ing myself orga­nized. The only down­side was the lack of instant-access to it unless I’m sit­ting in front of my lap­top. Trying to rem­edy that I signed up for RTM and got their MilkSync to work with my Crackberry, so the tasks I enter on my lap­top end up on my phone and visa-versa.

Sigh. Being impressed with sync is very ten years ago…

I was sort of on the fence about the count­ing calo­ries thing, at least until I saw the WeightBot screen­shots, which sold me on the idea: eat­ing healthy to look bet­ter and live longer? Meh. Eating healthy for the sake of a new toys? Win.

Unfortunately WeightBot is only for the iPhone, which I don’t (want to) own, so that rule that out. Instead I googled for online tools and came up with live​strong​.com, which has a “MyPlate” thing that keeps track of all this, along with “X food has N calo­ries” and such. It also has a Blackberry thing for enter­ing all that as well that’s on the “Blackberry App World”.

The upshot? App World is a gigan­tic ripoff of Apple’s App Store, and some­thing they should have had from the beginning.

I notice I tend to start blog posts like an awk­ward attempt to jump-start a stalled con­ver­sa­tion: “So, I was look­ing at…” or “So, I was doing X…” It’s a lit­tle cow­ardly on my part, afraid to just jump into some­thing with­out some sort of warn­ing — in this case, the word “so”. Either that or I dump some ran­dom self-referential crap.

I was panned by IBM for an acces­si­bil­ity posi­tion last sum­mer because I didn’t have a col­lege degree. Their loss/that’s OK, since they dropped all that work this June. A few months later I was cold-called by Google for a posi­tion in New York, but I umm-aaah-huh (flubbed) a ques­tion on the sticky bit so that fell through. (Within a month I could recite from mem­ory the appro­pri­ate sec­tion from the chmod man page.)

I didn’t take the inter­view com­pletely seri­ously, since I was to the offer stage with a job at a startup in down­town Chicago. I put up with the four-hour/day tran­sit time for a cou­ple months before mov­ing to the North Side with a co-worker from my campus-paper admin days and one of his friends. Our liv­ing room looks like a tor­nado hit on a dat­a­cen­ter, but since I’ve some­how man­aged to avoid step­ping on the numer­ous case screws, that’s cool.

I’m well into SA ter­ri­tory, filled with all the stan­dard hoari­ness of a layer-zero build-out — BTU/hr, VA, UPS — thrown atop our won­der­ful Xen setups, OpenVPN, etc. On the down­side, we’ve had a min­i­mal layer of man­age­ment intro­duced, com­plete with weekly sta­tus meet­ings and “action item lists” (a term I had fig­ured would be shamed out of exis­tence well before I got out of col­lege based on Palaniuk’s star power alone).

Life is good, but I re-discovered today that read­ing pgo is still more fun than all the social demo­c­rat blogs combined.

[I’ll prob­a­bly end up deliv­er­ing this onstage either tomor­row or next week.]

It’s 9:28 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Slaving away for machines
Which do our think­ing for us
Which is what this is all about…
Evolution…

It’s 9:32 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be board­ing
A motly crew of the dam­aged
Is crowd­ing me in the wait­ing room
What if I stay per­fectly still,
Can they see me?

It’s 9:34 PM
Commuter train of the damned
The mech­a­nized night­mare
We’re all wired in now
Did I say that out loud, or just think it?
Sloppy cadence.

It’s 9:37 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be headed out
To places bor­ing as fuck
Thou art dam­aged and still with me
Thy Rod and thy staff…

It’s 9:39 PM
Commuter train of the damned
It won’t be long now, man
Atomic bat­ter­ies to power
Turbines to speed, ready to go
Doors are closing

It’s 9:45 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Fascists ain’t run­nin’ shit.
A small god for small mir­a­cles
I knew they’d be invad­ing damn
Iran on nine-twelve.