Category Archives: Health

PAD 1/11/2013 – Book of Life

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The book

“If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.”

The answer for me is quite simple. I would leave that particular book on the shelf and I would leave it be for years and years while I lived, moved, loved, got sick, got well, and enjoyed a nice long life. Then when I am very old and very tired I will sit back with an obnoxiously expensive drink, put on some Mozart, sit back, pull it off the shelf and make it a page-a-day until I got to the end. Then I would put the book back and enjoy a life well-lived and the serenity that comes with robbing death of his surprise ending.

 

Memory Lane

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It’s always a surprise what my dreams will bring to me in the night. Tonight’s fare? A trip down memory lane. I was back in college, back at SUNY Buffalo. Walking into my dorm, Clement Hall, on the venerable South Campus. There was the usual warping of memory, some details were utterly wrong but the sense of the place was intact. Lots of memory was dredged up for this dream. Waking up carried little threads back to those memories and I woke up smiling. My time in college was probably the most wonderful, frightening, and liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.

This must be how alumni get those dents in their memories. Dreams bring them a highlight reel to enjoy and then only those memories of the good times get reinforced. You forget about all the goofy awkward junk as it fades and in time you get this antiquing patina on the best of the best of what you remember. I bet in time most alums get around to idealizing what memories remain, deny the awkward stuff and that is why when you recall college you get all warm and fluffy about it. None of the negative, all of the positive.

And this has a sidelight to a greater commentary on memory in general. Taking a trip to Lethe before you get to Styx. There is a blessing, perhaps it’s just that we elect to have it this way, that we are given things like this and go with them. Naturally allowing your memory to fade, recalling the good things, denying (nay eroding) the bad memories and then idealizing the entire structure. A life remembered of only the happiest things. Memories are the context for your present. Perhaps this is one of those keys, brought by dreams, that bears including in a wider discussion on how best to pursue happiness. Not only to live in the present and not be cynical and negative, but also to actively prune the bonsai tree of your memory and trim away the unpleasant memories until all that’s left is a highlight reel of your favorite and most cherished recollections.

Post-a-Day 1/2/13 – Resolutionistas

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Daily Prompt: Resolved | The Daily Post.

Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution that you kept?

I have been quite successful in losing a lot of weight, but I didn’t really start it as a resolution. It just started when I made up my mind and took a very long while to accomplish. I went from about 300 at my heaviest to about 230 where I am now. My goal is to reach 200, but that’s taking far longer than even the first seventy pounds did to lose.

There have been other resolutions, but again, they were made because I was very tired with living some other way and just decided to change. One of the only other things I did was to stop biting my fingernails. Once I did that, they started to grow in nicely and I no longer have to hide my fingertips and be embarrassed.

I’ve found that resolutions can be made anytime and to stick to them, all you need is an effort of willpower and to make up your mind. Not waffling around helps a lot, and not backsliding into old habits.

The War on Drugs

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A few years ago, at work, someone incinerated a surprisingly large amount of cannabis sativa behind our building. It was early summer and we had the window to the office open. At first I didn’t know what the hell the stench was, but it wasn’t strong enough for me close the window because my office was stuffy and I really wanted some fresh air, even if it had a little nasty garbage smell laced in it. I didn’t give it any thought, really, until all of a sudden I had older coworkers visiting me and just standing in the doorway. It wasn’t too long that I put the awful smell together with these people just standing there, huffing away. Then as more management types came filtering in it struck me – I am the successful result of the war on drugs. I had no idea what was going on, but the older folk, the ones that lived through the 60’s and 70’s, hah, they were there in force. They were just standing in a tight little group, in my doorway to my office, blocking my path to get my work done, huffing away.

I’ve never really been all that keen on changing my consciousness with drugs. Never really sought out anything beyond perhaps a wee addiction to caffeine and when I got older, an affection for alcohol. Even going through college, where drugs were in abundant supply, I simply wasn’t interested. Life was complicated enough. However this event at work did get me to thinking about what I missed out on. Was there something worth my curiosity?

I know there isn’t anything there. I can answer my own curiosity with what I know already. Nothing is free in life, if you are given something for free, then you are the product. This works for online bits (like Facebook and Twitter) as well as for the more seemly bits, like drug use. The first hit of whatever it is is free, that’s to get you used to it and to enjoy it, and eventually to crave it and become addicted to it. That’s my problem, I’ve got a good idea about what drugs would do to my brain if I let them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter, eventually blows out one homeostatic chemical balance system or another, leaving you with bad skin, rotten teeth, a burnt-out libido, and at the end of everything, a shorter life. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.

But this is just my part of it, what about these others? It’s truly an awkward situation when people who are supposed to be upstanding folk turn out to not be. Some people are quite cavalier about their past drug use, as if none of it was a crime. You hear them mumbling on about using cannabis, or cocaine, or heroin – whatever it is – and everyone laughs and smiles and secretly accepts it as perfectly fine. It’s truly an American thing, this duality between wanting to be seen as puritanical versus privately being just as grubby, if not more so, than everyone else in the world. I don’t get on people for what they do to their bodies as long as they keep it to themselves. As a child of the war on drugs, and I do understand about statutes of limitations, but a crime is a crime. It’s one thing to confess that you committed a crime and quite something else when you do so for applause. That gets me really bent out of shape. If abusing drugs is a criminal offense then let it be that. If someone who abused drugs uses their past as a joke to get a laugh, then the people laughing have to take a long hard look at the reasons why they are laughing. Perhaps if you clap and laugh and perhaps, just dwell in a certain doorway and huff along remembering your criminal past, perhaps it is time to decriminalize drug abuse.

This is what the war on drugs has taught me. That we really want it to be over, we all secretly want drugs to be not-illegal, and we don’t really care when someone abuses drugs. We just need to get over this whole wanting to appear pure thing that we, as a country, have this complex over. This particular thing, wanting to appear one way but secretly being something vastly (if not diametrically opposite of) to others. We want to be chaste, we want to be monogamous, we want to be drug free. What do we do? We screw around, cheat, steal, lie, and drop whatever we like whenever we like it.

I would be fine if it was one way or the other, but not both. The American mirror as one too many faces.

Julia Child Inspired Macaroni and Cheese

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Julia Child Inspired Macaroni and Cheese

Tonight I decided that I would make something that I am quite fond of,
and something that I came up with all by myself, as far as I know. This
recipe for Mac and Cheese creates a different dish than the other Mac
and Cheese dishes I’ve had in the past and it’s quite good. I’m an
ardent believer that anyone can cook, even those who do not think they
can or should. Everyone Can Cook.

Here’s how I set it up:

Ingredients:

2 1-pound boxes of Cavatappi Pasta (hollow corkscrew shaped pasta, uncut
elbow macaroni essentially)
4 cups of milk (any kind, probably good at 2%)
4 tbsp of Butter
6 tbsp of AP Flour
At least 1 pound or more of any kind of cheese you like

Procedure:

Boil the pasta until al-dente and drain and put aside. Get a deep
saucier, they are halfway between frypans and dutch ovens. Warm the
butter with low heat until it starts to bubble, just gently bubble. Then
add the AP flour in one shot. Stir like mad for about 2 minutes. Pour
milk into 4 cup plastic measuring cup and microwave for about 3-4
minutes (watch as milk can boil and take off on you and make a hell of a
mess) right before the milk boils and expands, take it out and pour it
all in the saucier on top of your roux (which is what the flour and
butter did together) and stir that for the next 4 to 5 minutes, bring up
the heat, and stare at it, boil is coming. Once the milk starts to boil,
add salt and pepper, a pinch and a few grinds of both. You now have a
finished Béchamel Sauce! Now you can augment it. You can add anything
you like to this sauce, it’s like culinary velcro. It’ll accept a huge
amount of cheese, various different kinds of cheese, whatever your
little heart desires. Start with about a pound, more if you like cheese
a lot. I wouldn’t go beyond 2-3 pounds of cheese. The sauce can also
accept any herbal additions, like Thyme or Parsley or even Sage if you
like. Rosemary is nice, but it’s really quite twiggy and resinous so
unless you got a huge hankering for Rosemary, keep that out. You could
also sweat-and-brown onions or garlic or even shallot. Keep in mind that
onion can take an insane amount of punishment but it’s cousins cannot,
garlic and shallot are very quick, say 20-30 seconds of sauté before
they are toast. You could even go with raw garlic or shallot, as they’ll
work their magic once they get to the oven. With the drained cooked
pasta, mix that with the cheese sauce in another bowl, prepare a
properly sized vessel for baking and spray Pam on it first, that’ll help
keep it from sticking to the surface later on. Get that oven up to 350
degrees and throw the mix in the vessel into the oven for half an hour.
When it comes out the top will be lightly browned and bubbly. If you
want more brown, leave it in longer. Timing is flexible as long as your
temps are right – if your oven doesn’t have an over thermometer, stop
reading, go to the market and get one right now.

It makes enough to feed two for almost a week. Four for half a week. Six
for two days. Eight to Ten well, say goodbye to it. 🙂

That’s it, that’s dinner. A little salt and pepper, maybe some garlic
salt, celery salt, or seasoned salt and you’ll be on your way. If you
are afraid of your sauce breaking (which is to say, falling apart into
oil, water, and assorted debris) don’t be. You’re cooking the entire
thing and the Béchamel has no time to fall apart. You can add various
other small amendments if this is really a huge concern for you. Ground
mustard, about 1-2 tsp is good to keep the fat and water together and it
doesn’t contribute any unusual flavors. If you are working with really
freakishly mishmashed cheese selections you might want to look into
adding Sodium Citrate to the sauce. This chemical additive can help keep
different cheeses integrated and it doesn’t affect flavor, appearance,
or edibility. Tread carefully, as sodium citrate is the path to
Velveeta. Now you know how velveeta is made, hah.

One thing to say, the roux made in the first steps is Julia’s roux. One
thing that I do is monthly or so I take a stick of butter, weigh it by
gram scale, and then cook it down until it’s bubbling and then add the
exact same weight of AP flour to that and cook for 2-3 minutes. You
don’t want to see it get any darker than white to blond to “yellow corn
kernel” color, and yes, for a roux the color is VITAL. White and yellow
are good, brown or red is good for other things, not anything like this.
Once it’s all cooked and unmercifully whisked transfer it to a bowl and
wrap it up and throw it in the fridge. You now have the worlds most
perfect thickener. It’ll thicken anything. It’s flavor neutral and very
handy. Just scrape a little out with a fork and you’re all set. The
applications are endless. You can make lump-free gravies, sauces, soups,
stews, or anything else that needs a little thickening power – just add
a little at a time and stir like mad. One thing about roux made with AP
Flour is that it only reaches maximum thickening power when the water
it’s in reaches a boil. Also, since it’s wheat flour and tossed with
water you will have a minute but present amount of gluten there. So if
you don’t like gluten, this isn’t for you.

If you try this recipe and like it, please leave a comment. I think
anyone can make this dish as it’s very forgiving if you make any
blunders. The only real OMG place is that roux in the beginning. A dark
roux will crap out on you and your Béchamel will either not form or
half-ass form and the color will be off and there will be more caramel
notes in the final dish. It’s still edible, but, just be careful of that
color.

Good Luck!

Dust a Meeting

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Meetings are insatiable productivity black holes that complicate lives and ruin workplace flow. I recently tried a collaborative online system called Basecamp in order to asynchronously develop a software strategy at work. What I wanted and what I observed diverged so thoroughly that there was absolutely no point in continuing with Basecamp as it was just in the way. The entire endeavor made me a little sad, not a huge fan of failure.

Meetings themselves are time vampires. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. They are massively interruptive and obnoxiously presumptive. You set aside a date and time and a place where people have to attend to discuss some topic. A meeting is a monster even when it’s in the cradle, being thought up by someone who desires to meet. Out of their heads pop a snarling tentacled beast with sharp fangs that serves no purpose but to interrupt flow and get in everyone’s way. Even the birth of a meeting is an arduous agony, with each participant (or combatant) the multiplexed temporal complexity grows. Two people can find a time to meet. Three people and it’s an order of magnitude harder. I was attempting to arrange a five-person collaboration and I wanted to avoid a five-person meeting with every ounce of willpower I could muster. My intentions were to establish a five-person collaboration which leveraged technology (Basecamp) to achieve speed and productivity because all five collaborators could function asynchronously. You could contribute what you felt you had to when it was right for you. It respected flow and was not supposed to be interruptive or presumptuous. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this particular road lead to the very specific hell of a worthless unwanted but agonizingly unavoidable and loathsome meeting.

So now my efforts to avoid a meeting inexorably landed me right into setting a meeting up. Of course it was obvious that right after the first few responses I could tell the tell-tale sloppy-wet-sucking-sounds of a baby meeting unfurling it’s tentacles in my midst. The first agony of course is finding a time when everyone is free for a meeting. So right off the bat, two weeks went down the toilet as we had to wait for everyone to be ready. Then assembling it was a pain. It used to be easier with Groupwise, as a meeting organizer could see the public calendars of all the participants and select the time that would be best and then send it to all the participants which really reduced the interruption of flow quite a lot. Alas, we led Groupwise out behind the barn and we did-what-must-be-done. After we were done burying the corpse of Groupwise we were back to the way it was before – so A emails B, C, D, and E. Then they all reply, and then A shakes the magic eight ball and everyone agrees that in three weeks, we’ll all have time. It’s a lot of back and forth and this and that and it creates a nasty haze of meaningless email exchanges. So, the meeting is ripe for tomorrow at 3pm. Great.

So now I wait. I have a list of all the software we currently use and instead of spending the past two weeks discussing, asynchronously, the merits and flaws and coming up with a solution in at most a weeks time, this nascent baby meeting will likely take another month before there will be any resolution. Tomorrow is just going to be the First Meeting, where we trot out the new baby time vampire and give it a good feeding.

It’s a terrible way to do work. It trashes flow, it lowers morale, and it sucks time down a toilet drain. At least people aren’t fond of the parliamentary species of time vampire meetings, where you spend the first few iterations of the meeting discussing protocol on how subsequent meetings are to be held. That form of meeting is older, and much worse. I really must count my lucky stars that we usually only have the easier-to-cope-with modern meetings where the first three get-togethers aren’t set aflame with discussions on what words mean, how we are going to proceed, or what the definition of is, is.

There is wreckage however, even with a modern meeting. The person who had a problem and started all of this still doesn’t have what they need to get work done – we’ve been waiting for that special moment to arrive when we all can pet the baby time vampire and let it ruin our working lives. I can’t really get worked up very much, as least not as loudly as I used to a long time ago when I felt I could change things. It was pretty much obvious from the start that when the discussion immediately derailed with that most hated of questions “So, when shall we meet?”, heh, that was it. I knew that asynchronous collaboration was not going to work.

What’s really quite sad is that the technology has developed quite well and very elegantly. You see the edits and the collaboration realtime, there is “What’s new” and “Catch up” features, it’s free for 45 days, all of it – right there. Ready, willing, able, and if used, the promise of reaching a solution sooner-rather-than-later can be realized. Instead of that path however, we are going to have a meeting.

Not that anyones life is on the line for the work that has to be done, just the soul-crushing dread of having to endure another time vampire meeting. Having to go somewhere at a specific time, putting everything else on hold while we all waste our time and energy. The wry humor in the idea that we could have been already in the yea/nay phase and quite possibly be sending orders out to finalize the entire project, it could have been that way.

What have I learned? That I won’t ever do this again. Part of the agony of watching a grand design fail is watching it fail in flames. Modern business culture just isn’t ready for the kind of asynchronous ease and productivity that these tools can provide. I’ve written before, tongue-in-cheek that hateful meetings are like intellectual memetic herpes. It’s a theme that we play over and over again, not because actually having meetings leads anywhere but that instead we’ve always had meetings and our peers seem happy and life goes on, so why seek out anything else? It’s an idea, a meme, that is replayed again and again. The fact that meetings are time vampires that suck all the happiness and color out of life isn’t actually a part of the deal. Nobody seems to notice. Every once in a while one of us wakes up and shakes their head and asks “Why the hell are we having these stupid meetings?” and then tries something novel. Then that detestable question, “So, when are we meeting?”

That question should be engraved on a gun. Instead of asking it, just load one bullet, spin the revolver chamber, clack it home and pull the trigger. So, in the end this is all so much bellyaching over nothing. Asynchronous collaboration isn’t ready yet, or more specifically we aren’t ready for it, yet.

Not every industry has this problem however. You see companies like Automattic, which is the parent company that manages the WordPress technology – they make use of the P2 theme which is a central driver (so they say) in how they manage their projects and such. I’m sure Automattic has meetings, but I suspect that they use asynchronous collaboration a lot more elegantly than is done in higher education or the non-profit sector. When I first started exploring Basecamp, for example, I was blown away. I could collaborate with my assistant and material would build because when we were both working on the project and working together as a team brought a kind of science-fiction cool to the dull things we were collaborating on. There is something quite breathtaking about watching an entire project morph and change and grow as you sit there and watch it. Like timelapse only in real-time. Another little bit that I really found super-compelling was how these technologies enabled asynchronous collaboration and respected workplace flow. There was no interruption, if you were in the middle of a task you could polish it off quickly and confidently because time wasn’t important. The collaboration could occur at any time. It also occurred to me that asynchronous collaboration might also benefit from the differeing themes of cognition during different parts of the day. That you are more clever for some things right after dinner than you are before tea, or if you wake up at 11:30pm with a sudden Eureka moment, you could hop on to Basecamp and share your stroke of genius.

Alas, this is all just prattle against the memetic herpes epidemic that is the meeting.

It warms my heart to imagine a world without telephones and no rooms in which to meet. It would preclude meetings completely and banish them to extinction and force asynchronous collaboration. *sigh* It’s only a dream I suppose.

Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website

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Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website.

I saw this and instantly thought of the Milgram experiments and thought about an expansion to his basic study which might reveal more about humanity. The basic Milgram experiment was to deliver a painful electric shock to an actor who was pretending to react to the shock. The person in the experiment was the subject with the control board – to see how far they’d go.

Milgram touched on so many parts of the human condition in his experiment but there are drifting outliers that bear study. Putting a sadist on the panel, or putting a masochist there for example.

Of course, tongue-in-cheek a part of me idly wondered if you were in a Milgram type experiment and you were told that there was a politician on the receiving end of the control box would that change the resistance level of the subject to escalate? I think that the experiment would display a certain measure of class warfare or even have a kind of respectability-quotient attached to it. What if you had a salesman, a politician, or a lawyer on the receiving end of the control box? How would you progress through the various levels of simulated sadism of the Milgram experiment?

I get to laughing about this entire idea. Not because torturing people is funny, but there is a part of me that would skip all the controls and go for the lethal one at the very end and just hold it down and savor the howling screams of agony – for salesmen, politicians, and lawyers.

🙂

Every Sperm Is Sacred

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So I was wandering Facebook, as I do, and I found a great image – but I can’t really link to where I found it because Facebook is a PITA. So, here’s the image:

And then of course on Facebook I left some comments, as only I could:

  • Technically life begins at spermatogenesis. If body temperature kills sperm, and men who wear clothing usually keep their body temperature high in the region where these cells are being grown, then any man who is currently wearing pants is a mass murderer?