Category: del.icio.us

Anyone know if there’s a way to have the widgets fetch information before I open the Dashboard? Maybe an hourly refresh or — wait for it — a learned refresh rate depending on when I open Dashboard? If I commonly open it

• at 9
• at midday
• at 2:30
• at 4

then update info 5 minute prior to that time (maybe that’s asking a lot: I’d be happy with hourly updates). In all seriousness, I can load a webpage with temperature/weather details before the Weather widget can refresh itself. I realize I am on an underprovisioned machine here, but surely I’m not the only one who doesn’t have a Dual Core with 2 Gb of RAM?

• In Obesity Fight, Many Fear a Note From School – New York Times
  [sputter, koff, gurgle] I hardly know where to start with this, it’s that bad.
  (tags: food education values)

I actually hope these are bogus, but I fear not. I know the number for TV watching was 7 hours/day 10 years ago, so that seems consistent.

We live in a sad time when you consider the following statistics:

§ Only 14 percent of adults with a grade-school education read literature in 2002.
§ 51 percent of the American population never reads a book over 400 pages after they complete their formal education.
§ 73 percent of all books in libraries are never checked out.
§ The average American watches 32 hours of TV every week.
§ The average American reads only eight hours (books, newspapers, magazines, Yellow Pages, etc.) every week.
§ The average American annually spends 10 times more on what he puts on his head than what he puts into his head.

Consider the following:
§ If you read just one book per month for 12 months, you would be in the top 25 percentile of intellectuals in the world.
§ If you read just 15 minutes a day — every day, for one year — you can complete 20 books.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “The doors of wisdom are never shut.”

Mackay’s Moral: Life is like riding a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you stop pedaling.

So what are you reading? Give me some ideas in comments of things I can try.

I Don’t Understand Mass Culture:

Is mass culture really about aggregate opinion, for example?

Yes.

What’s interesting about this — How to Change the World: A Review of My First Year of Blogging — is how Guy claims to have gotten into this to prove that you don’t have to be an A-list blogger to make it into the the top 100. But how is someone as well-known in technology/marketing as he is not an A-lister?

And this isn’t just sour grapes at his Adsense revenue being 100 times mine 😉

A number/fact I am jealous of is:

262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.

My totals are 4,033 posts and 2,218 comments.

Since I was able to resuscitate that old heartrate monitor, I decided today was a good day to see if it worked. The chestband transmitter that I thought was dead works, if you ensure good conductivity by wetting the skin under it. So off to do the walktest, to determine just how lousy of shape I am in.

In a word, poor, as the results were measured. I’m not sure how accurate it is, since I didn’t do a measured distance of 2km/1.24 miles. I just walked hard for 20 minutes. My rate stayed between 116 and 130 with a gradual downward taper as it went on. They rate that as a “normal-brisk” pace.

I think I may re-do the test and see if this gives me a more useful result. It looks like I was pretty close to my distance, so I could do it again with more precision in a week or so. I’m sure I’ll still rate as “poor” to “very poor,” no matter what.

Exploring more of these tests, I confirm that I am two inches short for my weight, as I always suspected.

So the purpose of this new category is to chronicle the successes and failures of an unambitious, unmotivated person as he tries to lose some table muscle and replace it with the real kind. Sure, I could just “go run” or whatever I see everyone else doing but the only that is going to work is something I can enjoy enough to do regularly. Running is not that thing.

Join in, won’t you?

Tips 21:

Wintergreen oil (methyl salicylate) is the most penetrating of all penetrating oils. It is available at most drugstores at minimal cost. If you work on old machinery that is anywhere near saltwater (or salted highways) it’s an essential weapon in tackling otherwise hopelessly rusted/frozen threads. It smells good, and though toxic and not to be kept within reach of children, is intended for topical application to human skin.

— George Dyson

Many’s the time I could have used this. The nice smell is a bonus.

It occurred to me that I just crossed over 4,000 posts not too long ago. Here are some other milestones of the past few years.

Post number 100

Post number 1000
Post number 2000

Post number 3000

Post number 4000

racked boats

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

Took some pictures with the digital instamatic as well today: these racked sailboats caught my eye, more the reflections than the boats themselves.