I’m writing at www.dreamingreal.com now. See you there!

So my wife and I were watching “The Truth About Food” on Discovery, and they present “scientific diet advice”. They perform ’scientific experiments’ on the show that appear to support the various assertions about dietetic health and well being. I can only assume they mean ‘experiment’ in the same sense my high school physics teacher meant it - a procedural test, repetition, verification of another experiment, the outcome of which is already known. Or perhaps they don’t tell the viewers the parameters of the experiments. The ones on the show we were watching ranged from laughable (a single subject, a single trial) to dubious (three subjects, a single trial, improper normalization).

One is tempted to say, “Well, it’s a Television show. What do you expect?” The problem with that is that the show appears on Discovery and makes constant claims to provide the scientific truth about diet. I’m not kidding - the word “scientific” was a constant staple of the narration. In one of the ’studies’, they took three people, starved ‘em for 12 hours, then fed them meals with the same caloric content, but one was predominantly carbohydrate calories, another fat calories, another protein calories. Sounds reasonable, if you ignore the small sample size. But ALL of the meals they fed to the subjects were served on pasta. So, unless there is a WHOLE LOT about this ‘experiment’ that they didn’t tell us, they demonstrated only that if you accept a sample of three random guys selected for similar body types, you will probably find yourself hungrier faster if you eat a meal that’s high in carbs and fat than if you eat a meal that’s high in carbs and protein. I would like to see the ‘experiment’ repeated, with a few added cases; a high protein/low carb (chicken, salad, broccoli, etc) and a high fat/low carb (grilled steak, salad, vegetables). To be fair, they said that the results of the test had been confirmed by large, ’scientific’ studies, but they didn’t explain any of the methodology involved.

Another ‘experiment’ involved two British girls, one extremely skinny, the other overweight - as it turned out, one was ten kilos underweight, the other ten kilos overweight. The two claimed similar lifestyles (they were best friends); they claimed the skinny one ate more (constantly) but couldn’t gain weight. Initially they expressed the belief that the skinny one had a ‘higher metabolism’. These claims tend to be viewed (IMO rightly) with some skepticism. A ‘higher metabolism’ should mean a higher body temperature and the like - the various predictable signs of more available energy. A test was initiated where there were put in cocoons and their oxygen intake monitored, while their CO2 output was monitored as well. I think this is reasonable, as it will give a total metabolic picture of calories ‘burned’. It doesn’t address, however, efficiency - more about that in a bit. The two women were given ‘doubly labeled water’ and their urine collected as a way of spying on their dietary intake. The show didn’t go into much detail about the actual operation of the doubly labeled water or the means in which it marked their consumption of food; I’m inclined to think that it only marked the absorption of food into the body. In the end they came to the conclusion that the overweight one ate 50% more than the underweight one. The subtext is “Your genetics are irrelevant. Stop eating so much, you fat tub of lard.”

Now, while I’m not saying that I think that’s false, I will say that, as stated, they didn’t have enough evidence (IMO) to convince me that such claims are ‘proven’. If, in fact, the doubly labeled water marks absorbed calories, it remains possible that one absorbed more of the calories consumed than the other. In fact, the NIH did a study where they discovered that when they had normalized for everything they could think of, there were dietary levels where similar people with similar diets and similar levels of activity produced divergent weight results - that is, some gained weight, while some lost weight. I think that a primary suspect in this result is excreted calories.

The show went on to talk about another study that cast their earlier methodology into question. They performed an experiment with one guy to demonstrate that the consumption of low fat, high calcium dairy caused one to excrete more fat in the feces than without the dairy products. In fact, over the course of the study, eating a quart of low-fat yogurt a day caused our hero to crap out 100% more fat. There’s no discussion of what percentage of total fat consumed that he excreted, only that he excreted 100% more with the dairy in his diet. Now, one guy isn’t a very comprehensive study, although this was another case where they suggested that the scientists that did the experiment were re-creating a more scientific study they’d already completed.

Now, this result calls into question, for me, the earlier experiment. What if the skinny chick merely failed to absorb 30% of the calories she consumed? We know there are people who have problems absorbing proteins, vitamins, and the like; isn’t it reasonable to think that such variances might extend to fats, carbs, and similar - and further that there are probably significant variation in the ‘normal’ population?

In the end, there probably are minor variations in metabolism - for instance, my ‘normal’ body temperature seems to be around 97 degrees, while my wife’s ‘normal’ body temperature appears to be around 99. If we find people of similar body types with similar temperature variance, we should be able to project a small metabolic difference (provided we normalize for environment, activity, etc); probably not significant, though. I think we might find FAR more variance in the percentage of consumed calories excreted than in the metabolism of absorbed calories. Until I see studies normalized for calories excreted, I will continue to consider these types of studies significantly flawed, in that they seem to be completely ignoring a major systemic output.

So lately I’ve been listening to Jethro Tull. Well, not just lately; for like 25 years or something. Jethro Tull’s music has a feeling about it that is unique, as though a bunch of musicians from the middle ages had suddenly appeared in the late 1900’s during the creation of a heavy metal album. You can almost picture the bard with the lute cavorting between the drummer and the Marshall stack, while the piper stands on one leg at the microphone and the midget with the mandolin fills in.

I can’t say enough about Ian Anderson and his band; I’ve loved their work for most of my life, and still I discover new works in the old. Most recently I was flipping through my Tull library and lit on “Songs From the Wood” - an album I had neglected previously - and I hit play. Once again, I was enthralled by our contemporary Bard, wrapped up in the melodies and lyrics in ways that not many other artists can accomplish. From the first strains of “Songs from the Wood” until the final note of “Beltane” (I’m listening to the 2003 digital remastered album), there’s not a bad song to be heard. When you listen to this album, it’s as though you’re transported into the past, when there weren’t nearly as many hairless monkeys stomping down the grass of Mother Earth, and things were somewhat simpler and slower; this in spite of the fact that you can clearly hear electric guitars and modern bass and drums. Anderson’s lyrics and musical style seem ripped from the stuff of legends, and songs like “Jack in the Green”, “Ring Out, Solstice Bells”, and “Beltane” smack of some ancient European Pagan sensibilities. You might be tempted to believe they were actually traditional songs, until you hear lines like (from “Jack in the Green”) “Or will these changing times, motorways and powerlines, keep us apart? I don’t think so; I saw some grass growing through the pavements today.”

“Cup of Wonder” sounds like an ode to pagan rituals replete with wine sacraments, or perhaps just a betrayal of some fondness for the red wines? Regardless, you can close your eyes and imagine the Lord and Lady sharing in a bottle. Pibroch (Cap in Hand) sounds like all the traditional English/Irish (general Celtic) tragic romances. “Velvet Green” is an anthem to lust and betrayal couched in metaphor so transparent that Fellini would blush and Chaucer would have bowed low.

So I’ve had that album playing on my iPod non stop for a week or more. This always happens when I listen to Jethro Tull. And now, through the magic of modern technology, I can link you directly to the music. This is where I bought the version that’s on my iPod, in fact.

Enjoy!

Just a few days ago, Amazon opened their MP3 store. My immediate internal response was “Yeah, right.” I was sure they’d be crappy MP3pro 64kbit, or something stupid like that, and all covers rather than the original artist - or maybe just six or eight artists.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the quality is high (Encoded with LAME at around 256kbit VBR!), they’re not some proprietary MP3 with DRM added, and the download application works on Windows and Mac - and it will add your purchases to iTunes! The standard song price is $0.89 or $0.99, with albums starting at around $6. This is very aggressive pricing, I admit. I love it. I downloaded their application (which you only need if you’re going to purchase albums) and the free test MP3; the process was simple and the result flawless, with high quality audio and no problems - and fully integrated with the infamous Amazone One-Click purchase.

Many have already declared it ‘the iTunes killer’ - mostly people that don’t use iTunes, as nearly as I can tell. The sole defense seems to be “I don’t like iTunes, and I DO like Amazon’s MP3 store, and the songs are cheaper, therefore Amazon’s MP3 store will kick the daylights out of iTunes.” Honestly, folks, I don’t even believe in ‘iTunes killers’. I do believe, however, in competition. I would LOVE to see someone hit the street with something that can really, honestly, give iTunes a run for its money. Well, something besides allofmp3.com - you know, something unquestionably legal in the United States. Something to make Mr. Jobs sit up and take notice, and figure out even more ways to extend and improve on iTunes and the Apple music experience.

Anyone remember a few years ago when AMD was breathing down Intel’s neck - sometimes even fielding processors that were faster and ‘better’ for most applications? What happened? I think we could see the same thing happen here. AMD gave Intel a wakeup call, and Intel responded by fielding an incredibly ambitious roadmap and advancing processor design at a ridiculous rate. I think we might see Apple respond with more content DRM free, and lower prices for that content - although it’s worth noting that the content providers pushed for the higher price on iTunes Plus (non-DRM) content; several people (notably Leo Laporte and friends) have commented that this deal with Amazon may be the first salvo in the Music Industry’s attempt to reduce iTune’s death grip on legal digital download sales. Maybe they have realized, finally, that iTunes (and Apple) are building a musician-to-consumer channel that completely bypasses the traditional media houses. If they DID realize that, it had to have scared the bejeesus out of them.

All of that aside, the Amazon MP3 store is an excellent startup. It needs some cleaning up, some integration, and more content, but it’s on the right track, and I will certainly be doing business with them when they have the content I’m looking for. And I think both Amazon and iTunes will be around for a long time to come.

So I’m watching TV - “My Name Is Earl”, I think - and a commercial comes on. At first, I thought it was some kind of benefit for anorexics or something. It’s an Old Navy commercial, and I was gonna call ‘em up and tell ‘em that the 80s called and they want their skinny back. There are four women in the commercial that look like refugees from a concentration camp, skeletons with pretty faces painted on them. I haven’t seen a woman this skinny since Freddy Mercury made “Flash”. They look like they might spontaneously fracture at any moment. They look like six foot tall ten year old boys with makeup on.

The fashion industry has employed these models for some time - women that are preternaturally tall and thin, androgynous and artificial. Perhaps it’s because the clothing looks pretty much the same on these women as it does on the the hangers. Perhaps it’s because gay men are a huge force in the fashion industry; of course they would design clothing for androgynous creatures and women who look like skinny young men.

I’m not sure why this ridiculous commercial reminiscent of the bulimic 80’s appeared on my TV. I’ve become quite happy with the current climate of ‘curve acceptance’, where women with full breasts, smooth bellies and noticeable hips are comfortable wearing midriff shirts, lowrider jeans, and sunflower tattoos. I like women who look like, well, women. I think this commercial is a reaction, and attempt to restore the anorexia inspiring standards of thinness of the past, where people were happy saying “You can’t be too rich or too thin”. An attempt to nip in the bud a burgeoning acceptance of ‘real women’, to restore a mentality where a size 9 is “plus sizes” and every woman who ever had to tug on her zipper feels bloated and obese. I think we’re just starting to accept that real people don’t have to have protruding collarbones and protruding hipbones and knobby knees and elbows in order to be attractive.

True, my definition of attractive isn’t necessarily any more relevant to the discussion than that of any person who approves of these mobile, commercial skeletons. But it’s more than just my opinioin - they’re not healthy. The fashion industry of the 80’s is legendary for its epidemic anorexia, bulimia, insulin/cocaine/amphetamine abuse - not for fun, but for weight control. It’s gotten so bad that a city or two in Europe have refused to cater to such skinny models. We’ve made movie after movie about the evils of this type of commercialization and what a terrible affect it has on the models and the women trying to look like them, but still we allow the marketing system to drive such images into our subconscious.

As long as there is beauty, there will be some that are more beautiful than others, and this in and of itself is going to be tough for some to deal with. There’s no reason to make this even more difficult for people by setting unrealistic - and unreal - goals based on marketing mock-ups of real people. Stop designing clothes for clothes hangers, and design them for people. Stop attempting to define ‘ideal’ as something that’s unrealistic, unhealthy, unattractive, and artificial. I’m not saying you have to make every model be a size 16; but let’s not pretend that a six foot tall size zero is ‘normal’, either.

I finally got my iPod touch. I ended up buying the 8gb version and keeping my 80gb 5.5 gen so I’d have some place to keep the music I’m not listening to right now. Also for use in the car. Instead, the wife nailed me to swap out the 80 for her 30gb 5gen video. Ah, well, still a good repository and uses my old accessories.

First impressions: This is the sexiest (from a design perspective) piece of hand-held hardware I’ve ever held in my hand. It’s a worthy inheritor of the design mantle that graces the MacBook pro, the Mac pro, and the iMac. The back is the familiar shiny polished metal; the slender rim is matte black brushed something-or-other, and the front is what appears to be optical glass. Two buttons on the whole thing, the home button on the front and the sleep button in the upper left hand corner.



The device didn’t respond to the buttons - either one of them - until I connected it to my MacBook Pro, whereupon it lit up and asked me to register. I couldn’t wait to see the video on it - I expected the audio to be no less than the ipods I’ve come to know and love.

So I synced my iTunes library to the device, and disconnected it. Nope, you don’t get the “Naught Naughty disconnect” dialog. I’ve not been brave enough to try disconnecting it while it was syncing, though. I’ll get around to it. I was greeted with the screen everyone’s seen - four icons along the bottom: “Music Videos Photos iTunes”, and a sprinkling across the top: “Safari YouTube Calendar Contacts Clock Calculator Settings”.

First things first: Turn on wifi. Can’t connect to the WPA2 enterprise wifi at work, so I share out my network connection from my G5. Once I get that sorted out, I hit YouTube because I wanna see video on this rascal. There’s OK Go on treadmills. Looks awesome compared to the normal YouTube video box. no obvious mpeg blocking, and the sound is excellent. The screen is large enough I can comfortably watch video from 2+ feet away - around the distance from my eyes to the top deck of the treadmill/elliptical machine. But YouTube can command my attention for only as long as the Gee Whiz factor lasts.

Off to VisualHub. This app is the bomb - they already have an update to transcode video optimized for the touch, but I fine tune it; since the touch is the primary viewing device I’m encoding for, it’s not valuable to encode at a higher resolution than the actual physical resolution of the device (480×320). I encode an episode of Eureka… Man, it’s dark. And I see a bit of the “Reverse Black” people have been bitching about. Back to the encoder - the video is too dark, anyway; this time I fire up MPEG Streamclip, re-encode with a 28% bump in brightness and a slight increase in contrast - the reverse black is gone, the video is stunning, and the video episode (at 480×280) is about 230mb. I’m impressed. I only see the ‘inverse black’ when the video is very dark and has large swaths that drop out to black. In the end, the touch is by far the least fatiguing of all the portable video solutions I’ve dealt with - and it’s damned sexy, to boot.

I have spent considerable time re-encoding lots of my music library to 128aac; I’ve done several side-by-side tests, and for the most part, I can’t hear the difference betwee MP3 at 160 or 192 and 128aac. It certainly sounds better than 128MP3, which I can tolerate in the car, but not through decent headphones. At that rate, it looks like I’m going to get close to 2k songs on my 8gb. I generally set up my library with required music (You know, Beatles, Zeppelin, Tull, Pink Floyd, Counting Crows, Andrew Bird, Audioslave, Ravelle’s Bolero) taking up most of the space, with some reserved for new music; as space gets tight, I start rolling off stuff I spend less time listening to. I lived for a few years with a 6G mini modded to 8GB, and it wasn’t nearly this cool, so I think I can live with it.

I was amazed when I hooked it up to my Sennheiser PX100s. I had to switch back and forth between my iTouch and my 5Gen 30g. Playing the same song, at the same encoding, the iTouch seems louder and somehow more defined. I think the D/A must have a higher precision or maybe smoothing interpolation or something. 128aac definitely sounds better on the iTouch - if you use the default earbuds, though, the quality difference vanishes, although the volume remains higher. I can’t comfortably listen to the iTouch at full volume, but I can the 5gen. And coverflow on this thing is stunning. If you’d seen it in a movie last year, you’d have shaken your head and said, “Too bad that doesn’t work that way in real life.”

Websurfing is scary cool on the iTouch. It’s the first handheld [ ok, the first pocketable handheld device - the N800 is handheld, but not pocket friendly ] device that is truly usable as a general purpose browser, IMO. You pay for the lack of Flash and a couple of other plugins, but in general it’s eminently usable for nearly any page you might hit. It would be nice if you could save the pages to storage, or if you could load pages (Think HTML ebooks) onto the device for offline reading - the screen is excellent for reading.

There’s been a lot of debate about the Calendar and Contacts programs. Oddly enough, you can add contacts, but you cannot add calendar events. This seems like a fairly arbitrary choice on Apple’s part. I’m not sure what motivated that decision, but I have an idea that might explain why Apple limited the utility of the device as a PIM and has worked so hard to lock out third party apps. This device is an ARM system running somewhere between 400 and 700 mhz, it’s reported. This generation of ARM processor has Matrix Math (think MMX/SSE) and other processor enhancements. To put that in perspective, my daughter’s old 450mhz G4 ran OSX very well once I put a fast video card in it. This iTouch is a full blown computer system with 128mb of ram (reported) and 8GB of storage. I’ve held other 400mhz Arm systems from prior generations, and none of them come close - the iTouch is slimmer, smoother, lighter, and nicer in most ways. So why is Apple ‘crippling’ it? Why are they condemning it to a life as a mere music player when it could be so much more? Well, I think they must have a ‘New Newton’ around the corner somewhere, and they don’t want to tip their hands or lose sales before they release it.

No matter how you cut it, even if this device remains nothing more than a music/video platform, I’ll still love it. I can’t really think of any improvements for it in that application - it’s beautiful and compact and performs ridiculously well. But I would still like to see third party apps on it… are you listening, Steve?

I’ve ranted here before on the flagrant disregard for the environment promulgated by our turn-and-burn culture, the use-it-or-lose-it mentality that’s given us supertankers, Hummers, and Global Warming. I’ve decried the global warming deniers and lambasted the energy policies of the Energy Corporations - and by extension, the energy policies of the US - since it’s the same thing.

I’ve always said that there are people who really need big trucks. You got a family of eight? I see no reason that family shouldn’t ride in a Suburban or Expedition. But it’s just stupid to do the same with a family of two. Sure, sure, here in the United States we have the right to waste our money any way we want, and I’ll support that right, but that doesn’t mean I won’t tell you you’re stupid for not only wasting profligate amounts of money fueling the beast and contributing massive amounts of fossil carbon to the already burgeoning CO2 load we’ve imposed on Mother Earth, but for no more reason than to feel important. I’ll say the same to the single guy that tells me he bought an F250 Super Duty four wheel drive four years ago, and is trading it in for a new truck with 50k miles on it and it “never hauled or towed anything”. Meaning it was a commuter vehicle, probably CRITICAL for his job as a manager at QuikTrip.

All that said, I have a confession. I bought my wife a travel trailer some time ago, thinking I would drag it around with my S10. Fat Chance. 5700 lbs is a little too much for that thing - nearly tore the tranny out of it dragging the trailer 45 miles. So this year I rented a truck to tow it - a big ass F250 Super Duty. Got it from City Rent-a-truck - great people if you ever need to rent a truck. It pulled the trailer like it wasn’t even there. No problem with the 70 MPH bits of I-70, no problem with the gravel road and steep hills where I dropped the trailer. I had to get some gas in the truck and run some errands…

And it was fun. Dammit, I like driving the big trucks, which might be why it pisses me off to see so many people driving them, apparently happily devoid of the conscience that keeps me from driving one as a daily commuter. We’ll have to buy a truck - probably an F150 with the 5.4l v8 - to tow the trailer, and my wife will use it as her commuter vehicle (4 blocks to take the daughter to school and an occasional trip to the grocery store. She put 2k miles on her car last year). She’ll get MY DREAM TRUCK, because I would feel too guilty about driving such a gas guzzler the 60+ miles per day I put on a vehicle. It just ain’t fair, my brothers and sisters.

So I’ll be stuck getting my fix once in a while when I can slip the bonds of my conscience enough to take the truck out for a spin. Ah, well. Maybe I’ll get a Prius.

The iPhone touch is the sweetest looking device I’ve seen in years. I’ve had several iPods - ranging from a 6G mini to a 1gb nano, to an 80GB Video 5.5 gen. I’ve loved every one of them, but none was quite the iPDA I dreamed of. The iPod Touch might be that device. I can’t wait to see that 480×320 wide screen in action playing episodes of Eureka.

I’ll have more info when they ship. I’m selling stuff on ebay to pay for my 16GB iPod Touch, and as soon as I have it in my hands, I’ll have a review on this site. I have actually had my hands on an iPhone, though, and I suspect the experience is similar.

I think we’ll see an SDK for third party apps next year. Of course, I think we’ll also see a 24GB or 32 GB version next year, as well. I think we’ll find out it has bluetooth, and we’ll be able to share our iPod library via Bonjour over Wifi to other people with iPod Touch devices or iPhones - probably using the same protocol as iTunes Sharing, so we’ll be able to stream the library from our iMac while we are BBQing in the back yard.

I want a Sling client. I want an ebook reader - maybe OSX’s Preview or Acrobat Reader Touch Version. I want some basic apps like a dictionary, a unit conversion calculator, maybe a guitar chord chart. I want Pages Touch, and maybe Numbers Touch. There’s probably more stuff that I want, but that would get me off to a STELLAR start.

But, in the end, I’ll be tickled shitless if I just get the best iPod ever.

I use PayPal quite a bit, for many purposes. It started primarily as my ebay cash cache, for spending and for collecting, but with more and more sites coming online that use it, I find myself using it more and more. Plus the PayPal debit card comes in handy in case I want to spend my ebay “winnings” in Real Life(tm).

I’m also a network engineer who uses a SecureID token frequently, and I’m intimately familiar with the value of hard authentication and two-factor authentication. When they announced the PayPal security token, I was all over it. So I ordered my token for $5.00 - and here’s what I got:

I registered it at PayPal’s site according to directions, and at ebay. Now, when I log in to either of those sites, I have to have the token handy. If I log in with my normal username and password, I get prompted for the security code from the token. If I log in with my normal username and my password with the security code appended, there’s no additional prompt.

So then I was listening to the Security Now podcast, and Leo mentioned that Verisign was the issuing agent, and that I could register my PayPal token at the Verisign Labs site. That led me to a place where I could create an online identity compatible with OpenID, and register my token as an authenticator. There’s also links to pages showing all of the OpenID compatible sites where I can log in with my OpenID authenticator.

I suspect that this will catch on, to a certain extent. This is a very secure process (two factor hard authentication) that could protect lots of people from online fraud. There will be those for whom it is too much trouble, but that’s a personal decision - the line between access and security. Everyone has to make that call for themselves. As for me, I give it two thumbs up, and the same for OpenID.

Well, I decided I might as well fire up the old blog again. I mean, I never shut it down, or anything, but I really should start blogging again. It’s therapeutic and cathartic - helps me keep my ducks in a row, just generally.

I’ll probably throw some adsense ads on the margin to see if I can pay for my hosting that way. It’s not too expensive - site5.com is a great, inexpensive hosting provider - so I might make it without becoming too much of a link whore.

So today I’m upgrading from Wordpress 1.5.xx to 2.2.x. Imagine my surprise when I found several users in the database that I didn’t create. Not sure where they came from - must have been a security update I missed. All in all, though, it doesn’t appear that they did anything malicious. I was gonna switch to b2e, but it’s too doggone much trouble to migrate databases between ‘em - I did it once when I set up a departmental blog at work, and it was no fun then, either.

So once I’m done with the technical stuff, look for an update post - kind of a “What I’ve been up to since I quit bloggin all the damned time”. There are a bunch of things I’m planning on blogging about - I’ve been savin’ them up for some time, I think.

Back to the tech grind…