Archive for April, 2007

Praise for Konjac Foods

Published on April 14, 2007 in Health. 0 Comments

I’ve written about Shirataki noodles before - they’re an asian food product, made from the roots of the Konjac plant. They’re a very low carb pasta which is perfect for diabetics and allow us to eat pasta dishes that are otherwise offlimits. They’re also great for dieters because they’re very low calorie. They’re rubbery and have less flavor than normal pasta but are otherwise a decent replacement, and they’ve become a common ingredient in my diet - I use them in soups, stir fry, with italian pasta dishes, and even in salads occasionally. I had been buying them from the grocery store now that many stores carry the House Foods brand, but unfortunately they only make linguini and spaghetti noodles and I’ve craved other pasta shapes. I decided to try ordering from Konjac Foods and it’s worked out great. They sell shirataki pasta in all kinds of shapes, including lasagna noodles. I haven’t had lasagna, one of my favorite dishes, in over 4 years at this point. Soon I will, along with baked ziti with meatballs, another favorite. Their noodle also has some benefits over House Foods - they’re a bit firmer and less rubbery, and they don’t require refrigeration. The downside is you have to order a large quantity, so for now I have ~10 pounds of Shirataki under my sink. At the rate I go through it this will last me a couple of months, and it cost me a bit over $40 up front to have it shipped to me.

Still, it’s totally worth it, whether you’re a diabetic trying to reintroduce pasta to your diet or a dieter looking to lose some weight.

In the days of my youth…

Published on April 13, 2007 in Vignettes. 2 Comments

…I was a fax machine killer.

I was a pretty impatient guy in my 20’s. For several years early in my career I worked for a small market media company which owned several newspapers and television stations in the northeast. For a couple of years I was helping the company develop an online strategy. This was back before the internet really existed in the public consciousness, and we were negotiating with AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and so on. I ended up having to do a ton of faxing of materials around, including numerous multipage faxes. The problem was the newspaper whose offices I was housed in had standardized on a hunk of junk fax machine brand. This was back when they cost big dollars. The thing was as large as a microwave, it was probably 10 years old by the time I encountered it, and it was utterly incapable of handling multi-sheet faxes. If you tried, it would invariably skip some of the pages and you would get a call from the recipient asking for the missing page/s. This meant you had to hand feed the thing, page by page. I was sometimes faxing 50 page contracts around, and this drove me nuts - it could take me over an hour to get a fax through on occasion. Couple this with the fact that I worked in a busy ad creation department that was constantly faxing comps around to clients, and you had a line of unhappy folks standing around the fax machine every day.

I tried reasoning with the IT department - this is hardly a cost effective use of my time, a couple of faxes taking this long would already cover the cost of a new machine - but to no avail. I pleaded with my boss - to no avail. For a while I was going to the local kinkos to send the long faxes, but my boss stopped appreciating my expense reports for that and put a stop to it.

I remembered when I had worked in NYC and a sales rep from chicago had sent a 40′ long fax to our thermal paper fax machine, and it had killed the machine and gotten her in hot water with our boss, and this set an evil plan in motion.

I waited one night until my coworkers had all gone home, and filled the paper tray in our fax machine. I  then went to the floor below ours and took a piece of black construction paper, cut it to size, and established it in a loop in the fax machine, then  dialed the number of our fax machine on the floor above. Then I went home.

I came in early the next morning and discovered my plan had worked - our fax machine was dead as a doornail - it could no longer print. It didn’t even take very many pure black pages to kill the print heads. I took the black construction paper out of the machine downstairs, discarded the printouts in our own machine, and called IT. Not long after we had a new, non-thermal fax machine which could send multi-page documents.

Yes, I’m an evil bastard, but I do think it was in the company’s interest that I did this.

I’ll also note that years later when I saw the scene in office space where they take the office fax machine out to a field and beat it to death with baseball bats, I laughed so much I couldn’t breathe. Man, could I ever relate to the scene.

Friday fun - Super Maryo

Published on April 13, 2007 in Gaming. 0 Comments

To counterbalance my other Friday post’s grim tidings, I offer up a sunny little slice of super mario, courtesy of Super Maryo Chronicles. This is a well executed clone of the classic 2d side scrolling mario action first popularized in the arcades and on the original Nintendo. It’s available for windows and linux and possibly could be coaxed to run on mac since it’s using SDL and other libraries available on Apple’s OS, and there’s a strong community building content for the engine, providing you with an almost endless collection of levels to play through.

Sobering analysis of where we’re headed

Published on April 12, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

I’ve touched on peak oil a number of times over the years. I managed to depress myself recently by reading through James Howard Kunstler’s recent speech to the commonwealth club of California over on alternet. It’s scary ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff. I desperately wish I could see through the fog to know just how accurate these kinds of predictions are. Peak oil is pretty much universally accepted at this point - all that’s left is the bickering over when exactly the world will reach it, and how precipitous the drop off the cliff on the other side of it is. I’ve spent the last several weeks reading up on this and it’s pretty depressing. Almost all of the proposed solutions to allow for a soft landing on the other side of peak oil range from unlikely to utter bilge. Biodiesel seems to be a pipe dream (with the lovely side effect of causing global starvation - we’re already seeing food riots in mexico over US corn crops going to produce ethanol rather than corn for tortillas, a wonderful harbinger of what’s to come), wind power won’t scale, solar costs more energy to produce the generation systems (silicon solar cells) than the generation systems produce over their lifetimes, and the whole hydrogen economy thing seems to be snake oil. My favorite quote about the hydrogen economy issue came from a CA university system physicist, the gist of which was to the effect of ‘even if you assume we can solve the generation issue to produce hydrogen on the scale we consume energy now, it would take us 30-50 years to get our distribution, production, transportation and other systems up to speed, and meanwhile peak oil leaves us between 10 and 20 years to get there.’

Fuckin yikes!

It’s not entirely doom and gloom. Despite the problems, solar and nuclear seem the most promising possibilities. With solar we need to attain significant advances in generation and storage. With Nuclear, it’s a little reported fact that there is an unknown total global supply of uranium, no one has been prospecting for it in decades, and we currently have no decent breeder reactor system to produce our own fuels. Plus there’s the whole ‘what to do with the waste’ issue. Also even with these possibilities, there seems to be a general consensus that achieving the same level of easy access to energy resources that we enjoy now doesn’t seem at all likely.

I encourage everyone to read (or listen, there is an mp3 link) to Kunstler’s speech. Even if he’s on the far end of the spectrum in terms of outcomes, it’s informative, sobering, and important for all of us to understand.

Newegg buys into the social

Published on April 12, 2007 in Techno Geek. 0 Comments

Newegg is by far my favorite electronics retailer. They have an extensive inventory, decent prices, super fast shipping, and responsive customer service. I’ve been using them for years now with no complaints. They announced this week that they’re going to be offering threaded discussion and forums on their site, and the forums section is up and running. On the surface this seems like a great idea, though tt will be interesting to see if they can maintain a level of objectivity. As far as I can tell they’ve done ok with their customer rating feature since it’s easy to find scathing reviews of products in them. I’ve been using the forums at places like Sharkyextreme and techreport to research purchases. We’ll see if newegg’s new system can measure up over the next couple of years.

Why no one should run Windows Vista

Published on April 11, 2007 in Techno Geek. 1 Comment

Friends don’t let friends run windows Vista. In that spirit, I offer up a link to this
exhaustively researched piece on the evils that Windows Vista does. I’m not kidding when I say you really should not run this OS - it runs counter to the whole conception of what a computer is . Rather than a machine you purchase which you control, Vista is a platform which a vendor controls, and that vendor is able to choose how the platform behaves. Imagine sticking a HD DVD in to play and discovering you can’t listen to the audio over your headphones, or discovering that your video drivers will no longer deliver video at a resolution greater than 640×480 because Microsoft has helpfully ‘patched’ them to protect against content theft - this and innumerable other horrendous ‘features’ are documented in the piece I linked to above. Anyone in a computing profession should read and consider this. It’s a lengthy but illuminating read.

It’s left with me with something of a dilemma. Gaming is my favorite pastime and thanks to the MS monopoly it’s the only real platform I can use, but there’s no way given the above that I will run Vista. I have about 2 years before this becomes a significant issue (it will take roughly that long before developers start releasing ‘vista only’ games) so I can be patient about it. I’m hoping that enough people are as pissed about this as I am that alternatives emerge. If not, maybe I’ll be a console-only gamer, or maybe a retro-only gamer, playing all the oldies to entertain myself. Who knows. All I know for certain is I’m checking out of windows-land over the coming couple of years due to this stuff.

Podcasts worth listening to: Pseudopod

Published on April 10, 2007 in Movies-n-music. 0 Comments

Fancy a tale of terror delivered to your podcast client every so often? Check out Pseudopod, a horror themed short fiction podcast. It’s very similar to Escape Pod, which I mentioned a while ago (I think they’re affiliated somehow) but focusing on a different genre.

Gothic I movie

Published on April 9, 2007 in Gaming. 0 Comments

The Gothic series of action rpg’s on the pc have been some of my favorite games over the last several years. They released the third in the series shortly before Christmas this year and they’ve confirmed that they’re working on a 4th. Some fans spent the time to turn the cinematics and some in game clips from the first game into a ~45 minute movie that tells the full story of the first game. It’s an epic r-rated fantasy and worth checking out even if you haven’t played the games if you’re into the genre. The only downside is it’s only offered in .wmv, imo the absolute worst of the video file formats. You can download it here on the worldofgothic site - it’s about a 500mb download.

I signed, will you?

Published on April 8, 2007 in General and Movies-n-music. 0 Comments

This news has been all over the net and has made it into the national news, but in case you’re not familiar with it, a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) is putting streaming radio at risk, as the rate structure they’ve proposed to put in place seems likely to drive most or even all of the independent internet radio stations out of business. It’s pretty clear that this is simply the content cartel trying to destroy internet radio. Here are a couple of resources you can review and draw your own conclusions:

An article on the Radio and Internet Newsletter

A radioparadise essay on the topic

If after examining the issue you’re so inclined, consider signing this petition

For what it’s worth, here’s what I signed on the petition:

Crafting legislation to protect the business interests of existing proto-monopolies at the expense of innovative new business development is not in the consumers’ or artists’ interest. Please reconsider and craft sensible rate structures that compensate rights holders while facilitating business development.

It’s a Lord of the Rings weekend

Published on April 6, 2007 in Gaming. 0 Comments

Today’s the day folks - head on over to the official site and grab yourself a copy of the new Lord of the Rings Online. It’s entering public beta today and everyone is welcome to play. I was admitted to the private beta and I enjoyed it enough that I pre-ordered a copy and have been playing. If you don’t have the time to check the link to my old post, I can sum it up in a few words: the game is a very competent if slightly less polished clone of World of Warcraft with a few interesting gameplay elements to differentiate itself. It’s definitely worth checking it out even if you don’t like MMORPG’s, just so you can run around the Shire as a Hobbit or help Gandalf deal with invaders in dwarven halls. Join me in the race to level 15 (the open beta level cap) on the Windfola server. I’m Siven the Hobbit Burgler and I’m still trying to help get the Shire postal service get itself back in shape.

The secret to escaping long island is…

Published on April 4, 2007 in General. 2 Comments

… use the orient point ferry. I’ve taken the Port Jeff ferry a bunch of times, and it’s great, but it drops you right on 91, and 91 is the major route into New England. It’s basically always traffic bound, sometimes badly so, and southbound they have this infuriating merge down to one lane to get onto 95 that is always congested. More generally, the Hartford ->New Haven stretch of 91 is just bad all around. If you’re willing to spend an extra hour or so in travel time in the service of a more relaxing trip, take the orient point ferry. You have to make your way off the north fork to 495 using the ~40mph route 25, which takes about an hour, but you pass through often picturesque wine country and long island coast, with beautiful old victorians, quaint old villages, and not much of the suburban sprawl that characterizes most of long island.

The CT portion of the trip is great too, compared to the 91 corridor - I used route 32, route 2 and route 395 from New London, and they were much less congested than the alternative. You end up deposited on 91 just south of Hartford, meaning you skip all the worst of the congestion because most all of the new england folks have skipped off to 84 and 90.

I’m not sure if I would be as pleased with this route if I was heading to my Mom’s place, since she’s another 45 minutes from where the Lords live (which is where I was recently, for Mike’s surprise 40th b-day bash), and I’m not sure how it will be in the summer when the city folk head out to wine country for the weekend, but I’m going to try it a few more times and see.

Fan of Battlestar Galactica?

Published on April 3, 2007 in Gaming. 0 Comments

Check out this mod of the superb Freespace 2 engine (thank you thank you thank you for releasing it as open source Volition!). It’s a three level demo and man is it great - they’ve done a fantastic job with the voicework and they’ve made enough tweaks to the engine that it feels greatly different from the default Freespace 2 combat. Right now only the PC version is out but Linux and OSX are coming soon, and here’s hoping the full game is as well. This is free, open source, and a self-standing installer.

Podcasts worth listening to: Librivox

Published on April 2, 2007 in General. 0 Comments

These technically aren’t podcasts, but check out Librivox, which has a large and quickly growing collection of fan spoken, public domain audiobooks. I grabbed an Andre Norton novel and a Jane Austen novel and added them to my ‘to listen’ pile, and there’s tons more to choose from. There’s also an RSS feed for new releases which is worth subscribing to.