the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I thought I had heard all the lawyer potshots but my wife found a copy of Lawyers and other reptiles and told me about the lawyer who stepped in cow dung and thought he was melting . . . . .
The perfect addition to our nephew’s bookshelf as he begins his career at a prestigious local law firm . . . .
What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.
According to this article, the medical community has, for 30 years, denounced the Atkins Diet (eat all the protein and fat you want with no carbs), but has lately begun to realize there may be some validity to it. I was concerned that I was digging my family’s graves with a wooden spoon, with my pasta and potatoes. But then I refreshed my memory about what the Atkins Diet consists of.
To me, it sounds a lot like a “name your poison” argument. Eat cheeseburgers three times a day and have a heart attack, or eat a variety of foods and have one.
The underlying question for me is why has the medical establishment been so shrill in its denunciations of these ideas? And why should we accept their endorsement now, assuming they offer one?
A quick Googling tells me vegetarians like myself are doomed to apostasy in Dr Atkins world: fruits and vegetables are bad, bad, bad. This all runs counter to any nutitional information I have ever come across. A balanced diet and common sense — eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and lay off the Twinkies — would do more for this problem than all the books ever written on the subject.
The few extra pounds of evident prosperity I carry could have been avoided by managing my hankerings for various nutritionless goodies. Good old willpower goes a long way.
Courtesy of Frank.
I took advantage of the downtime and the fact I have a spiffy new power screwdriver to rebuild some of the furniture all the machines sit on, hang all the power strips up off the floor (they have hanger holes so I got happy with the screwdriver), hung the KVM switch up where I can actually reach it without scrambing under stuff, and otherwise straightened things up. Tie-wraps were even employed at one point.
if you make new entries in a weblog with no internet connection, is that akin to one hand clapping?
My AT&T Broadband link went out last night at 07/Jul/2002:21:57:45. Their tech support acknowledged there was an outage when I called this morning.
We did have a hard rain last night, with thunder and lightning (rare for Seattle). Perhaps there’s a link.
UPDATE: the outage ended about 1600 PDT.
This time from around 07/Jul/2002:06:05:58 to 07/Jul/2002:10:53:20. Apologies to anyone who stopped by and found nothing. Initially, it was a network (ie, AT&T Broadband) problem, but I took advantage of the downtime to upgrade from FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE to 4.6-RELEASE. That process may have made things a little slow (the machine was pulling a load average of 4+).
Service was restored at reboot but the process of building and installing the world had the box pretty well utilized. I didn’t realize the reboot to load the new kernel had restored service: ideally, buildworld and installworld are supposed to be done at the quiescent single-user mode.
Something was unhappy with the network interface (the xl/3Com Etherlink XL and Fast Etherlink XL driver) and the cable interface. This happened before, at least something symptomatically similar: that time I reset the cable interface by removing the power for awhile. Hmm, almost exactly a month ago, too.
That will be the last upgrade until 5.0 comes out.
Google Search: related:www.paulbeard.org/movabletype/
I somehow seem to have weaseled my way to the top of Google’s results for the word ‘quotidian.’
And look who Google thinks this blog resembles. I’m flattered.
Not sure of the benefits of reading this while trying to figure what I was thinking when I coded what I’m working on.
Seen on the back window of a car today:
Grateful to my country
Proud to pay my taxes
Someone else sees taxes as the dues they pay for the privilege of living here. Not everyone sees it that way . . . . .
So if people don’t want to pay taxes, here’s an alternative. Instead of paying in cash, perform some public service at the current hourly minimum wage. Highway cleanup, painting, park maintenance, graffiti cleanup, washing police cars, that kind of thing.
Members of the skilled trades could pay off their dues at their local school: I’m sure there’s ample projects waiting for willing hands.
The simple fact is these tasks need to be done by somebody: either pay for someone to do it or do it yourself.
vitanuova.loyalty.org: July 3, 2002
Think about this: if you move the file (and, if you like, the entire software operating environment!) to another PC, the application can no longer decrypt the file. If you modify the operating system (which you are able to do), the application can longer decrypt the file. If you run a different operating system (which you are able to do), the application can no longer decrypt the file. If you modify the application (which you are able to do), the application can no longer decrypt the file. This is a technically impressive capability! After the meeting, I kept realizing more and more interesting features of this design.
Technically, this is quite interesting stuff, but I don’t know that I’m all that crazy about being locked out of my system because of some hardware being changed or the security mechanism being convinced that it’s no longer in a “trusted” environment.
When computers you can use any way you want are outlawed, only outlaws will have them, I guess.
There’s more on this here.
