An international team of researchers has concluded that the incidence of diabetes will double by 2030 if something isn’t done to address the increasing adoption of a western diet and the reduction in physical activity that accompanies the western lifestyle. Eat your green veggies and stay away from prepared foods folks, so you don’t end up as a small piece of this statistic.

I need to create a separate ‘health’ topic, I’ll take care of that this weekend.

In honor of the recent remake of the Dawn of the Dead, here’s some quick silly fun to be had staving off an attack of zombies. The movie was much better than I expected it to be and much better than the typical hollywood horror flick. Which is not to say that it was a great movie, but if you were a fan of the original and are partial to zombie flicks like I am, there’s some fun to be had watching the new movie.

So for about 2 years now my body has been a walking science experiment. Every three months I go in for bloodwork and on the basis of the results I adjust the drugs and vitamins I ingest and tinker with my exercise regimen. The goal is to get as close to normal HbA1c numbers, which are a measure of the average amount of Plasma Blood Glucose coursing through my veins. An average healthy person is generally around a 4.6 (glucose of 86). When I was initially diagnosed I was at a 7.4 (glucose of 186). The American Diabetes Association advises one to keep it under 6.2 (glucose of 143), and more progressive physicians will admit that the lower that number the better - even the ADA is hinting that they will be lowering their recommended numbers. For the second time I hit 4.9 (glucose of 97) on my numbers, and this time I did it without any prescription drugs. I seem to have experimented my way into a solution to my condition that makes me almost human normal, without the use of pharmacueticals. I’m actually immensely proud of this, hence this post. Even better though, while going over my numbers with me my doctor told me that I was the number 1 diabetic in the Intermed health system which services southern maine, in terms of my numbers and approach to managing my disease. He went on to talk me out of going back on statins to handle my cholesterol situation, on the basis that from his perspective I’m basically kicking ass and should stick with what I’m doing now - it’s working.

So. Yee fuckin ha! I can’t cure myself but I can manage it in a manner that makes me basically normal. I’ve concluded that they key contributing factors are:
Diet: low carb and low fat, lots of soy proteins, TONS of green vegetables. I generally eat less than 10g of carbohydrate per meal, with the exception that I don’t count the carbs in ’safe’ green veggies like brocolli. Since low-carb and low fat means very hungry, I eat some fats, but mostly ’smart’ healthy fats like those found in nuts (I possibly eat more nuts than any other human being - I calculated recently that I eat about $3.50 worth of almonds alone every day, and I eat walnuts and pecans as well).
Physical activity: I exercise 6 days a week. The most important piece of this is weight lifting - I do 30 minutes of fairly intense weight lifting 3 times a week.

That’s basically it. It took me almost 2 years to figure this out. A couple of folks have asked me to post more in depth examples of the kinds of things I eat, which I’ll do over the coming weeks. But one more thing I’ll add - another key thing I’ve learned - there’s no magic pill. This is not a disease the doctors can cure for you by giving you a few pills and sending you on your way. You need to get off your ass and work. There’s just no exception to this. Weight lifting is more important than cardio-vascular stuff, building muscle mass is what eats the sugars out of the system, but the cardio is important too for the longterm situation so it shouldn’t be neglected either.

Ultimately it’s my own fault for not understanding the consequences of my diet, but occasionally when I read articles like this covering the food industry and the incredible amount of high fructose corn syrup they’re putting in foods, I get pissed. A sample quote:

A study of nearly 100 years of data on what Americans eat show a huge increase in processed carbohydrates, especially corn syrup, and a large drop in the amount of fiber from whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
It parallels a spike in the number of cases of type-2 diabetes, caused by the body’s increasing inability to properly metabolize sugars.

Was I genetically predisposed to come down with type 2 diabetes? It’s hard to say definitively but there’s a strong possibility the answer is yes. Did the food industry push my metabolism over the edge with their over-reliance on high fructose corn syrup and focus on high-carb foods? Again it’s hard to say definitively but there’s a very good possibility the answer is yes. Am I pissed? That I can state definiitively - yes!

The lesson here once again is to watch the food labels and avoid foods laden with high fructose corn syrup. You’d be shocked how much is in the everyday foods you eat.

Remember the old ‘what if microsoft built cars’ joke that came out of a COMDEX show a number of years ago? Sometimes real life is more amusing that the jokes meant to satirize it. Hint for the impatient - look carefully at the photo of the dashboard of that car in the third picture down from the top. Get it? God help us all if MS does succeed in getting the car manufacturers to adopt embedded windows as the OS for our cars.

…do I go back on Statins. I have my three month doctor’s appointment tomorrow. There is a seemingly overwhelming body of evidence that basically all type 2 diabetics should be taking statins. The problem is that I was on them for about 2 months and I had unbelievable pain issues. I’ve never had pain as bad as when I was taking them. This is a known side effect for the drug with a small percentage of users. It’s possible that other factors were contributing to the pain issues with me - I was on a collection of drugs at the time - but man, the risk of returning to those pains is making me very leery of going back on them. On the other hand, my continued existence ultimately seems to depend on my use of them. Do I take the pain now so I can dodder about an old folks home in my late 70’s? Or do I live a less painful existence now and have my heart pop on me in my 60’s? What would you do?

One of my favorite movies from the past couple of years, Master and Commander, ships today on DVD. It’s well worth grabbing this week while it’s cheap, especially if like me you’re a fan of the novels the movie is based on. The books are just awesome - if you enjoyed the movie and you’re looking for some great summer reading, give the first book a try. It takes a little while to get comfortable with O’brian’s style, but the payoff is more than worth it.

Yahoo has been upgrading their mapping feature. Recently they added the ability to find wi-fi hotspots - map an area, then click the link at the bottom left. If you search on Brunswick Maine and do this, you’ll find the link to the location I’m typing this in from (Bowdoin College Library), including some login details. Fortunately my home network link, which is only lightly secured, isn’t in there yet. Is yours?

A month or so ago I talked a little bit about what a 21’st century VCR might look like - combine RSS with BitTorrent and you get a system that automatically collects the TV shows you’d like to watch on your hard drive for you while you sleep. The problem with the implementation I mentioned a month ago was it only runs on Radio Userland, which most of us don’t have. Folks are working on this stuff though, and now we have a python based tool that will run on any platform that will run Python, ie almost anything ;-). It’s rough around the edges and probably only for geeks right now, but the premise is sound and the implementations are getting there - I strongly suspect that soon enough this type of tool will be refined enough that the same pool of folks who jumped all over Napster will be jumping all over broadcast television. What do you suppose the chances are that the networks are even thinking about this type of stuff?

Aside from refining this such that joe and jane consumer can run it, the next step is to get other media types integrated. Everyone seems to be focused on broadcast tv, me meanwhile, I would prefer to be able to grab Fresh Air off of NPR in an automated fashion. If anyone stumbles across these types of systems being applied to radio or print, I’d like to know about it.

I’ve mentioned in the past how my current favorite solution to the crisis surrounding electronic distribution of content is to use a version of the model in canada - taxes flow into a fund that is shared amongst the artists. In Canada’s case they’re currently doing this with recordable media - my suggestion has been to apply the taxes to everyone’s internet connection. Now an economist has run some analysis on this model and concluded that for $6 a month ‘consumers would pay less for more entertainment’ and his conclusion is it’s a sustainable economic model.

The biggest impediment to something like this coming to pass, assuming the analysis is sufficiently accurate? The content companies stranglehold (through campaign contributions) on our elected officials. Once again, a plea to vote responsibly - we need campaign finance reform and we need to make it clear to our legislators that we want the copyright dillema resolved not through criminalization of P2P and DRM on everything from our TV’s to our toasters, but through an approach that extends the concepts of fair use.

A friend’s request for information on page layout on the cheap led me by chance to Inkscape, an open source illustration tool. Is it ready to dethrone Illustrator or Freehand? Well, no. But it is good enough to be worth playing around with. Plus it’s cross-platform (no Mac binaries available, but if you’re clever you can use fink to compile it for OSX) and supports SVG as its native file format. Kudos to the development team, this project is shaping up really well.

It appears the fallout from comcast acquiring techtv has begun. Leo graciously deflects blame from G4/Comcast, but basically this wouldn’t be happening in the absence of the ownership changing hands, so I’m less gracious. Leo is a bit of a clown and that would occasionally interfere with the flow of the show during his time on the Screensavers, but despite this he really was the best the show had to offer. I was sorry to hear he was leaving the Screensavers and sorrier to hear he’s going off-air entirely. Here’s hoping that once everything shakes out with the ownership transition the new management brings him back.

Back on the RSS meme. Check out ebalylistings.net’s ebay search RSS feeds. If you’re on the hunt for something specific on ebay, refine your search, submit it, and get an RSS feed you can paste into your fave aggregator. No more daily ebay prowls - just wait for matching items to show up.

This is another example of the kinds of stuff I think google ought to be adding - refined, vertical search with RSS feeds. Hopefully someone working in google labs is paying attention to things like this and newstrove.

I was a little sorry to see that Trellix was shut down as of the 15th. Really you could tell for years that it wasn’t going to make it, but longtime readers of this blog might remember that the original publishing system for it was the first version of the Trellix web publisher, and even before it could publish to the web I really liked Trellix. It came out somewhere around 1994-1995 and was initially a novel text editor that combined some notions of nonlinear/hypertext editing with aspects of powerpoint style presentation stuff. I loved the original PC only version. When they made absolutely no dent in MS Word’s dominance of word processing the tool morphed into a desktop web publishing tool geared towards the novice user or someone who wanted ease of use over features. When that didn’t work out the sold that product to Globalscape, where it lives on as CuteSite Builder. Unfortunately they haven’t been updating it for years and it’s basically not worth much now. Meanwhile Trellix the company worked as a middleware vendor selling to web hosting companies, taking some of the ideas from the original Trellix and incorporating them in a browser-based web content editor. They seemed to be doing ok, selling their services to big hosting companies like Tripod and at one point bailing out Blogger, but I guess that business plan didn’t work out either and they were bought out by another hosting company, which let the last of the original Trellix staff go a couple of weeks ago.

It’s really a shame. Trellix had some interesting ideas about how to approach data management and publishing in the original Trellix app, and with Dan Bricklin behind it (he developed the first commercially successful spreadsheet - Visicalc - among other things) it seemed like they had they potential to build an interesting and useful new toolset.

If anyone knows how to acquire a copy of the original Trellix word processor I’d be interested. I watch ebay for it and while the website stuff shows up regularly, I’ve never caught the original Trellix for sale.

If you’re interested in the subject, Dan Bricklin himself keeps a weblog which he updates regularly and which has a lot of background material on the software he’s worked on and the companies he’s been involved with.

I’ve mentioned in the past how much I like theFeedDemon RSS reader from Bradsoft. One of the reasons I am so fond of it is the ‘watches’ feature it has - you can set watches on a collection of terms and phrases (say ‘New York Giants, NY Giants, Giants Football, Giants NFL), and it will automatically build you an RSS feed with links to any items it finds in all your RSS feeds that match on those terms. It’s extremely useful and makes it possible to much more quickly refine your RSS feeds for specific topics you’re following.

Unfortunately FeedDemon is Windows only and so far I haven’t encountered a mac or Linux RSS client that has a similar feature. If anyone knows of one please comment. Anyway, enter Newstrove.com. The site is a search engine that tries to one-up news.google.com with a massive index of news from around the world. The site also has a very handy feature similar to FeedDemon though - look to the right side of the page near the top for the build your own topics link. Build your custom RSS feed, then copy it into your favorite RSS reader. You’re good to go with the same sort of news ‘watches’ that FeedDemon provides.

The downside is that this is a server-based system. Personally I’d prefer it be client based for performance reasons, but on the positive it does expose a lot more feeds to your search terms than the client-based one does.

Google needs to get on top of this stuff. They could do a masterful job with this. And while they’re at it they should add beysian analysis to the feeds, so that instead of seeing 120 links to posts covering whatever the media buzz dujour is (8 dead in iraq!) I see 1 aggregate feed for that topic. This is the next step in the evolution of browsing information space in my opinion, and it’s actually critical - even with RSS the situation is a total overload in terms of the voulme of content I would like to be able to look through compared to what I can reasonably manage.

I’ll return to this subject again, as I want to touch on email and usenet as other components in this information space, and I want to return to the visualization systems liketouchgraph and some of the tool prototypes like MIT’s Haystack and the OSAF’s Chandler. None of these is hitting all the bases yet but folks are working on this stuff. I feel like a drowning man waiting for a life preserver, and they haven’t cut a hole in the middle yet But at least as I said, there’s progress.

Bought music at the iTunes Music Store and want to move it to a machine you haven’t blessed with a key? Now you can. Or more precisely, it’s now a lot easier to do. I wonder what it will take to convince the content companies that DRM simply does not work. There has never been a lock that can’t be picked is the short and simple way to put it. This fruitless quest to engineer the impossible is wasteful and it makes the consumer experience with the products using it suck, with a bewildering array of specifications and a lack of interoperability. Anyway, at least for the time being there’s another lockpick to bring to bear. You can grab the actual software here, mac and linux only, though apparantly if you’re clever you might be able to get it working under win32 using cygwin.

Ok, we all know of air and passive cooled computing, it’s what’s in the majority of the machines we use every day, and if you’re slighlty tech-savvy you might have heard of water cooling (and if you haven’t, you soon will - the next generation of cpu’s are too hot for traditional air cooling. Rumor is Apple’s G5 laptop will be liquid cooled). Anyway, even I hadn’t heard of rodent cooling until today. Imagine the little fellow trundling along on his wheel, wafting a cool breeze across your processor as you game. Food pellet powered too, which is about as efficient as it gets
[link from the almost always excellent decafbad.com]

If you grew up playing zoomie games on your Atari 2600 or Intellivision, then Classic Gamer Magazine is for you. 2 issues are available so far as downloadable PDF’s. Get your nostalgia groove on

If you’re on a pc, check out this suite of audio utilities, including a conversion utility that will transcode between most audio formats. It’s one of the few that handles FLAC, SHN and Monkeys Audio. Until I found this I was using a host of small utilities to handle the live music I am always grabbing, it’s a huge time saver. Plus the portable audio tool is great if you’re using a portable MP3 player but don’t like the software that’s needed to move music onto the device (but check to see if your device is compatible first). All of it is free to try, some of it requires licensing in the $20 range after 30 days.

This actually happened to me last weekend but I was to chagrined to post about it. Time heals all wounds though so it’s time to fess up.

I needed new sneakers. 2 years on the old timberlands and they were ready to give up the ghost, so last Saturday I headed off to the mall. After trying a couple of places I settled on a pair of Merrell’s . The only problem was I needed a pair in size 9.5, and the only pair in that size was way up on a high shelf above the shoe display, at least 5-6 feet over my head. I did a couple of laps around the store trying to locate a clerk but the only one I found was engaged with a family with kids, tracking down shoes for at least 3 kids and the Dad of the family. I’m not a patient man. I had noticed where the clerk stashed his stepladder so I snarfed it and headed back to my aisle. Unfortunately even on the stepladder, the shoebox I wanted was still just slightly out of reach. I decided I would try yanking quickly on the column with my pair of shoes in it, the idea being to grab the whole column, maybe 10-12 boxes of shoes. As I did this the whole wall of shoes started teetering, about to fall on my head. My instincts took over and I slapped both hands against the wall of shoeboxes, which settled them back in, all but the column of shoes I had been trying to pull out that is - this proceeded to fall in a jumble. Worse, though, was the fact that I fell off the ladder, landing awkwardly on my ankle and spraining it badly. I did manage to catch over half the falling boxes of shoes, but the rest made a huge clatter as they fell across the aisle.

Amazingly no one noticed this aside from the clerk, who came over in a rush from an adjacent aisle after hearing the crash, but by the time he got to me I had managed to push the ladder out of sight behind a rack, and had stuffed the fallen shoeboxes under a bench. I escaped without public humiliation at least, though a week and a day later my ankle is still sprained enough that I can’t run on it and it’s swollen up the size of a baseball. I do like the new sneaks though, so that’s something