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I’m trying this diet where I avoid sugar and most grains, especially wheat and corn.

Things I’ve noticed:

• dropped about 10 pounds right out of the gate. This is after cycling and swimming like a madman all spring and not losing an ounce. Don’t know how to explain this.
• The diet is surprisingly easy. One reason is that you don’t need to restrict your portions.
• A good name for this diet might be “Fuck-ton o’cheese”
• No more sleepiness after meals or in the mid-afternoon. I mean none, no matter how little sleep I’ve had.
• No more suddenly scouring the environment for snacks. My appetite is like, tamed
• Non-sweetened food tastes surprisingly sweet. Almonds, carrots, raisins, plain yogurt.
• No particular desire for sweets. of course, if a plate of chocolate cake passes under my face, all bets are off.
• Became very sensitive to sugar. On Sunday, I had a glass of Kefir. I had a profound reaction to all that sugar. My heart started racing. I drank the rest of the bottle and then fell asleep in my chair. When I woke up, I went into this zomboid Ambien state and just started eating Cheetos.
• Diet can get a little boring without pizza and pasta and toast. This requires experimenting with recipes. Yesterday, I cooked a bunch of chicken and nuts in peanut oil. Nobody could eat more than one McNugget-sized piece. It absolutely killed my appetite.
• Find myself hiding my diet so I don’t get mistaken for an Atkins idiot.
• Cobb salad is the greatest human invention. Bacon and avocados. Who knew?
• Full of judgment towards others. Those who are obese, those who require fucking pneumatic lifts to get around, those who are on the wrong diets, those who still believe in the food pyramid
• On the other hand, this mysterious, intermittent force we call “will-power” is such a crock. Our biology has to be tricked and/or reprogrammed to really change

This might be the best blog post ever.
It starts with a great quote.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
–Richard Hofstadter

( Hofstadter is the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics)

I’ve heard of that title before but never read the essay. It is a great read. I’ve been trying to come up with something like this for 20 years:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

The post applies Hofstadter’s ideas to the tendency to blame oil companies or other, more obscure actors for high oil prices. He argues that instead of some conspiracy to make money, there is actually less and less oil readily available.

I will add a seventh element of my own. Oil conspiracy theorists can only think in terms of the social world, not the natural world. In this regard they are cornucopians. Therefore, agency must come from the social world. Someone is responsible for what is happening, not something. It is simply not possible that the world is really nearing a peak in oil production. Someone is only making it appear so.

standing in a crowd of teenagers in front of their school on the last day, another adult explained to me that we were watching a “sound like a wookie” contest.

a budding geekwad overheard and turned to me to ask, “Do you know what a wookie is?”

And I said, “They’re the cute little guys on the forest moon of Endor, right?”

He and his friends sniggerd at my cluelessness and corrected me. “uhhh.. those are Ewoks?” They did not realized that I WON in so many ways, the most important of which is that I look like someone who doesn’t know what a wookie is.

I’ve been reading a lot about Glycemic Index and was disturbed to find that according to some measures, bagels have a higher Glycemic Index than coca-cola. I find that hard to believe. I can eat a dozen bagels per day if they are available. If each one has 300 calories thats…. well, you do the math.

Cold cereal is another culprit. Even so-called healthy cereals (granola, special-k, grape nuts flakes, oat bran) have GI values through the roof. I love cereal. I finally found a cereal I can eat without sugar that has a reasonable GI. And, no its not Colon-blow.

It is, in fact, Uncle Sam’s, darling of South Beach Dieters and diabetics. The taste is… subtle. Some people don’t like it, but the flavor of the grain comes through. For variety I throw in chopped up apples, blueberries, raisins, or bananas. I like that I can pour milk into it, walk the kid the bus stop and come back and it is still crunchy. I’ve only found it at Rainbow, but you can buy it on Amazon, probably because it’s fiber content closely resembles that of a book.

A copy of A Woman in Berlin showed up in my house with a note on it: “This is my favorite book. Please read it before June 12.”
When I get a note like that, I get to it. This is the story of a woman in her 20s in Berlin in 1945 when the city fell to the Red Army. The Soviets ran around pulling women out of their bomb shelters and raping them, young, old, rich poor. This anonymous woman noted every detail in her diary. Her first rapist takes care to pry open her mouth and spit a hug gob in when he’s done. She ends up in sex-for-food arrangements with a Russian officer for a time. Rape is just the half of it, though, and conversations by the water pump are dark. “Better a Russian on my tummy than an American dropped on my roof” is one of the jokes of the time.

One of the themes of the book was the author’s view of German men. They often had to cower in the next room while the rapes were taking place.

These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward men- and the feelings of all the other women - are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man.” In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today we woman, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.

The world of men hadn’t quite crumbled, though. When the initial anarchy settled down, the work of covering it up began. The Russians didn’t have to do much covering. The German men didn’t want to be faced with the truth of what happened in Berlin when they were off on their grand adventure. When her boyfriend comes back she wants to tell him parts of her amazing story of survival, but it is beyond his ability to listen. He leaves her. The citizens of Berlin were forced to wash soviet uniforms and load all metal and usable machinery into trains for shipment to Moscow. It was German men who were put in supervisory positions for this forced labor and the women who did the work. This book itself pissed people off when it was first published in the 1950s. Not the kind of pissed off where everyone read it and discussed it, but the kind of where the author was vilified and the book was ignored. It was shunned and was not republished until after the author was dead (in 2001).

The other striking thing about this book is the author’s voice. She just drops these casual observations about people struggling for their lives in a ruined city: “When it comes to heating, other people’s furniture burns better than your own”. It describes in everyday detail how people behave when everything collapses around them.

I wrote a careful review of DBVisualizer at my java blog.

We are having a rainy week here. My feet were wet after riding in this morning. I sat in my wet shoes for a couple of hours, not really noticing my feet. Then I found some dry socks and shoes in my drawer and put them on. What a mood-altering experience!

Footnotes in Gaza is probably the most powerful graphic novel I’ve ever read. In it, the author uses his journalistic skills to tell the story of an event in 1956. In the meantime, he illustrates important things about journalism and memory. This book will inevitably be compared to Maus. It has the same kind of outsider comix feel to it as Maus and uses some of the same conventions. (talking to a cranky old man in the present about events that happened 50 years ago). I’ve read Maus about 17 times and it gets to be like a missing limb I’ve been living with my entire life. Reading Footnotes is like getting a brand new spear hole in the chest. It has a lot of older people remembering seeing their loved ones get shot for no reason. It is a story told side by side with current atrocities that we can’t seem to do anything about. That is, Gaza, with all its problems is where the author has to search for witnesses to Israeli atrocities from 1956. People react like he is crazy. “Israelis are randomly killing people and tearing down homes and here he is asking about 50 years ago?” The current reality seems even more hopeless than the atrocities in ‘56. Here they are in the present putting their collective hopes on Saddam Hussein. I had to read it twice to understand the sequence of events and how they fit into the bigger picture. Basically, the people in the story were pawns for the big powers, England, France and Egypt. Israelis were reacting against Egyptian operations against Israel launched from the Gaza strip. By the time they decided to punish Gaza, the soldiers had long gone and the only ones to punish were the young men of Gaza. They lined the young men of one town up against the wall and shot them. This is collective punishment like Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, and Kortelisy. The story was then buried. Nobody is interested in unearthing these memories. Even the Palestinians would rather talk about their current troubles.

Is the medium of the graphic novel too prone to emotional manipulation? Perhaps. The book certainly sent my emotions spiraling. Proper history books don’t let you see the eyes of children after seeing their fathers beaten, humiliated and murdered. Maybe they should. The author’s journalistic integrity had him pointing out all the inconsistencies in the memories of participants and providing extensive documentation from both Israeli authorities and UN observers.

If you are concerned about internet privacy and security, try the NoScript Firefox extension.
NoScript’s main business is shutting down any javascript that you haven’t specifically allowed. It also provides many other features such as shutting down flash, java and unsafe web requests. One thing that scares off new NoScript users is the constant harping yellow alert bar. You can turn this off. The other thing that scares off new users: It makes the web less convenient. videos don’t play, buttons don’t work, pages reload and lose data when you enable scripting on them. These things are largely a matter of practice.
I’ve been using NoScript for about 2 years and have recently learned a bunch more about it. So here is stuff I learned from the hackademix weblog, the NoScript faq, and playing with NoScript options.

1. NoScript by default reloads all tabs affected by a new entry to the whitelist. This can cause people to lose work if, for example, they have partially filled out a form and then opened a new tab to look something up. to stop this, open a new tab, type in about:config in the url. Look up the noscript.autoreload.allTabs setting (or event the noscript.autoreload setting) and set it to false.
2. Hidden in the appearance tab is an option to display full domains. This is helpful because many ad sites have specific urls for specific websites. For example, if you want doubleclick to work on google-ads, “display full domains” allows you to whitelist googleads.g.doubleclick.net instead of allowing the entire doubleclick.net domain.
3. The “opaque” setting (options –> embeddings –> opaque embedded objects) makes embedded objects on pages opaque so that you can’t click on some invisible button by accident
4. Force secure cookies. A poorly configured site might have https but forget to mark cookies as secure. NoScript allows you to force encryption of cookies for https sites. This is off by default because it is relatively new and because some sites break if they can’t have insecure https cookies.
5. A good idea is to export your NoScript whitelist that you have built up over time so that moving to a new computer does not force you to build it again. An even better idea is to use no-script’s bookmark feature to publish your whitelist to a bookmarking system. Each instance of NoScript you use keeps track of the changes to this bookmark and updates its own whitelist accordingly.
6. Google chrome’s evolving extension framework does not yet allow for enough control to let NoScript work
7. NoScript blocks lots of stuff that are not script related. As an example, it blocks html ping elements by default.
8. Finally, some neat NoScript-specific inventions that help make you more secure:
   • ABE: Application Boundary Enforcer (ABE). Among other things, ABE prevents sites from POSTing to cross-domain resources. It strips the contents out of cross domain POST requests and turns them into GET requests.
   • ABE: If you have a specific site that needs access to LAN resources, you can publish your own ABE ruleset as a file in the root of your domain.
   • NoScript also has an invention called clear-click, which protects against click-jacking by comparing the thing you clicked with a screenshot of the page you are on. If the pictures are different, it won’t allow the click to work.

Update: Noscript also improves battery life!
Save Laptop battery with noscript

The web page above, which has its delicate bits blurred out, was left unprotected by a contractor from Texas who underbid everyone else and got work from Minnesota’s DHS.

Here is the MPR story, where you can find out the name of the contractor who is now suing everyone over the issue.
I’ll just refer to them as “Sookout Lervices”.

I appreciate that MPR found this out, but Sookout Lervices doesn’t, as they seem to be building a criminal case against MPR.

After this incompetence was discovered, Minnesota agencies were instructed not to work with them. So, Sookout Lervices is suing our state as well.

Seems like a scary company to work for. It has lawsuits open against several former employees, including one of their own developers. That is, a customer complained and Sookout Lervices hired an outside party to look at their own developer’s code and then sued the developer for fraud. This tells me they have too little hands-on involvement with their own projects. That is, get a contract, throw a developer at it, and collect the money without investing in:

1. Senior level developers
2. “Hands-on” Project Managers
3. Code reviews
4. training
5. Testing

An interesting question is if the MPR reporter who found the breach can get punished. From what I understand, she didn’t just follow a link and find the data in the open, she messed with request parameters in the URL to get to unprotected data. So, what is the line between changing the URL to navigate around a site, which I do on a regular basis, and committing a crime?
There must be a precedent for this. What I need is a big “computer crimes” chart of actual cases where the technical details of the incident, the charges brought, the evidence offered, and the sentence are laid out.

When I got home on Friday, there was a rug doctor sitting in my living room. The eager-beaver handyman with Popeye forearms featured in the ads was nowhere to be seen. We moved all the furniture in the living room and set the kids to work vacuuming and cleaning the filthy molding. I gave Mo a soapy cloth to wash the woodwork, and she did a fantastic job up to about 3 1/2 feet.

Then we shampooed the rug, pausing every other row to empty the dirty water. Dumping this water was the most satisfying activity ever. The water was black and it felt like I was exorcising all the bad spirits from my house.

Now I can lay face down on the carpet to do the cobra pose and not have a sneezing fit.

Wow,

They are getting all up in Best-Buy’s shit at standforchristmas.com.

Employees always have been polite, friendly, and helpful. Too bad the corporate decision to ignore our Christian heritage & holidays,instead demonstrate their willingness to recognize a Muslim holiday tells me where Best Buys loyalities lie. I will find an independent Christian business to purchase my new home theater system.

I think I’m gonna get on there and complain about the cleavage on the virgin mary statue that I saw at JC Pennys.

Me: Mo (temp = 100.2), do you kind of want to be sick?
Mo: (devious smile) yeah.
Me: I know about that. why do you want to be sick?
Mo: Ginger Ale

I saw Dan Geer speak a while ago. Here is the video. It was a good “10,000 foot” overview of working and learning in the security field.
He said he had this on his office wall:

1. Work like hell,
2. Share all you know,
3. Abide by your handshake,
4. Have fun

from Wikipedia:

Graceville, Minnesota, was originally granted to Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Wishing to settle the Minnesota prairie with Catholic Irish-Americans, he actively promoted settlement in Graceville and the surrounding region. The town was named for Bishop Thomas Grace and a special line was built across the prairie from Morris, Minnesota.

In summer 1880, Archbishop Ireland paid for the passage of a ship filled with Famine refugees from Connemara in County Galway. Arriving in Graceville too late to adequately prepare and having little grasp of English, the Irish language speakers were ill prepared for the massive blizzard which descended in the winter. As both the Protestant Freemasons of Morris and the English speaking Irish-Americans of Graceville both schemed to manipulate the situation for their own ends, the sufferings of the Connemara refugees became an international scandal.

With the future of his entire Catholic Colonization Bureau in jeopardy, Archbishop Ireland offered up the “Conamaras” as a sacrifice, condemning them as shiftless, lazy and drunken. In the early months of 1881, all but three families were evicted from their claims and resettled in a shantytown in Saint Paul which was instantly dubbed The Connemara Patch. Meanwhile, back in Graceville, the name “Conamara” became an insult, a pejorative term for a lazy, drunken failure.

Here is a slightly different story about it, from an apologist for Bishop Ireland. To me, it seems like a rush to make the countryside Catholic, and when it turned embarrassing, rather than examine his motives, the church hierarchy blamed the victims. Thus it is with everyone with religious motives. Their own righteousness simply cannot be questioned.

To be fair, that wikipedia page has had very little vetting.

If you want to save about a month per year, quit using your mouse and learn keyboard shortcuts for your most common tasks.
What if your most common task is Facebook?
Facebook sucks for keyboarding. There is, fortunately, a script for Firefox called Facebook Fixer that improves keyboarding in Facebook (along with a bunch of other great features).
Keyboard Shortcuts that come with Facebook Fixer:

From any page:
A - Albums/photos
B - Toggle buddy list (online friends)
C - Facebook Fixer configuration
F - Friends
H - Home page
I - Inbox
L - Start/stop Facebook Fixer from Listening for page changes
N - Notifications
P - Your profile
T - Translate selected text
- Close pop-ups created by Facebook Fixer

From the home page:
f or l - Live feed
i - Posted items
n - News feed
p - Photos
s or u - Status updates

From profiles:
i - Info
p - Photos
w - Wall
x - Boxes

From pages with pagination (previous, next, etc)
- Previous
- Next
+ - First (when available)
+ - Last (when available)

While viewing albums/photos:
a - Load all thumbnails (when available)
b - Show big pictures
c - View comments
k - Back to album
m - Photos of (person) and me

While viewing recent albums and uploaded/tagged photos:
a or r - Recent Albums
m or u - Mobile uploads
o - Photos of me
p - My Photos
t or f - Tagged friends

It requires greasemonkey. I lost interest in Greasemonkey because juggling versions of Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the Greasemonkey script is a huge headache and trusting maintainers to keep up with it after they graduate from high school is a bad bet. I’m giving it another go in hopes that the Facebook fixer will stay maintained.
Facebook fixer shortcut code is butt simple and probably won’t break between versions. If it does, it would be easy to copy the shortcut code by itself and make my own add-on.
Line 3 shows how to ignore keyboard shortcuts if the user is trying to type in a textbox.

if (prefs['Shortcuts']) {
window.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
if ((e.target.type && e.target.type!='checkbox' && e.target.type!='select') || (e.target.getAttribute('contenteditable')=='true') || e.ctrlKey || e.altKey || e.metaKey) { return; }
function clickLink(filter, root) {
var link;
if (!link) { return -1; }
click(link);
}
if (e.keyCode==191) { if (e.shiftKey) { window.alert('Facebook Fixer Debug Info:\n\nid: ' + id + '\ntimestamp: ' + version_timestamp + '\npage: ' + page + '\nlanguage: ' + language + '\nlistening: ' + (listening?'true':'false')); } } // ?
else if (e.shiftKey) {
switch(e.keyCode) {
case 37: clickLink('First'); break; // Left Arrow
case 39: clickLink('Last'); break; // Right Arrow
case 65: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/photos/?ref=sb'; break; // A
case 66: click(document.getElementById('buddy_list_tab')); break; // B
case 67: showConfig(); break; // C
case 70: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn'; break; // F
case 72: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home'; break; // H
case 73: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb'; break; // I
case 76: if (listening) {
stopListening();
window.alert($l('ListeningStopped'));
} else {
startListening();
window.alert($l('ListeningRestarted'));
}
break; // L
case 78: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php'; break; // N
case 80: window.location.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/' + (id.match(/^\d+$/) ? 'profile.php?id='+id+'&ref=profile' : id); break // P
case 83: e.stopPropagation(); e.preventDefault(); document.getElementById('q').focus(); break // S

etc....


This brings up the question: Am I going to learn a different set of key strokes for every website I use? I’m pretty good at Gmail and Wordpress, I’ll probably adapt pretty quickly to SHIFT-a when I want to stalk some friend of a friend on Facebook, but this isn’t very scalable. That’s is why mice were invented! Universal interface! So, mark me down as NOT a believer in web-app specific keyboard commands. That stuff should be in the browser, except with google apps, which are honorary desktop applications.

The single most powerful keystroke for browsing is the single quote key in Firefox. It lets you find links as you type. Adopting this habit alone will free up enough time to have up to 8 more Facebook friends.

Internet Explorer doesn’t even try to offer keyboarding. There is no “find as you type”. No “find links as you type”. No text selection via keyboard.

Besides saving time, I’ve noticed that people who can do everything by keyboard make me think, “now that’s an expert’.

http://www.coderanch.com/t/467031/Meaningless-Drivel/gmail-account-virus-spam-attacked

I just learned that Brenda Buckley, Maggie’s Irish Dance teacher, has died of cancer. I’m shocked and saddened. She made such a huge difference in so many people’s lives, including Maggie’s and by extension, mine. I know we hear this about damn near every person who dies, but her spirit through her illness was truly inspiring.

It is hard to find someone who demands excellence like she did. It takes a lot of energy and confidence. I think the last words she spoke to Maggie were, “If you don’t practice, don’t bother coming to the Feis”.

The confidence and growth that Maggie gained through Brenda’s instruction are invaluable.

We laughed about Brenda’s last words to Maggie, but I know anyone who has ever worked hard at something or helped others work hard at something that takes endurance and skill (swimming?) can get behind those last words.

Now that most internet users have adopted ways of clearing or limiting regular cookies, many sites now use sneakier cookies that are harder to prevent and clear. The Flash plugin in your browser, which you chose to install so that you could watch YouTube videos, for instance, allows operating system access and enables web site owners to store “Flash Cookies”. This lets Flash store information in the file system outside of the browser sandbox. There is nothing built into your browser to control them. Flash cookies do not have the same constraints as normal cookies. One use of Flash Cookies is to rebuild traditional cookies after they are cleared by the user. Flash Cookies are cross browser. A cookie set in one browser can be read by another browser.

Privacy Mode in Firefox 3.5 (as well as Incognito Mode in Google’s Chrome and In Private in IE 8) do not block Flash cookies.

This information is stored on a per-site basis on your hard drive at %APP-DATA%\macromedia\flash player\#shared objects\. If you look in that folder, you will see many, many folders with names of sites you might have visited ages ago.

The existence and contents of these folders are interesting to forensics investigators, spouses, employers, and marketing professionals.

The BetterPrivacy Firefox add-on effectively wipes out the Flash cookie contents. It also wipes out the Flash cookies set by other browsers.

It does not, however, wipe out the folders containing those contents by default. You must open the Tools–> BetterPrivacy –>More Options dialog and check the “Delete Empty Cookie Folders” button. Otherwise, clues to your browsing history remain.

You can also set your flash plugin settings at the following page: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html Many people just set their LSO storage space to zero. Note that each browser you have will maintain its own flash settings, so you would do this for each browser.

Better Privacy by default disables click pings. “ping” is an html 5 attribute that notifies a third party when you click a link. While this sounds like a huge breach of privacy, keep in mind that a website owner can and does put all kinds of tracking code to watch which links you click on. The Ping attribute in html 5 is an attempt to unify this and keep click tracking out of the normal stream of web interactions. (as read on Workbench) Anyway, it is an HTML 5 feature and I haven’t seen it used much.

Similarly, BetterPrivacy by default disables DOM Storage. Dom storage is another HTML 5 feature that provides a large space for name value pairs as client side data storage. They are different from normal cookies in that they are much bigger, they never expire, they don’t get transmitted to the server with every request, and they offer more granular control as far as scope. That is, their scope might be limited to the browser window. An application of DOM Storage might be to allow web application usage when offline, with the expectation that work would be synched up when the user was back online. This is a similar goal to, but completely different implementation from Google Gears.

Bruce Schneier made a post about flash cookies back in August. The comments on his post are really good.