Thinking Aloud

After reading the Omnivore’s Dilemna last year on my triup out to Halifax around this time last year I thought it was probably time to dive into another book on food.  I figure one a year is about the right pace for me.  Although after reading this book there were a few times where I figured that I should probably give up reading about food, outside of just getting a really cook books and going to work learning the dishes and techniques from yester-years cooking.

In Defense of Food is a really interesting look at what nine tenths of the food in the grocery store is today and how we’ve been encouraged to give up the age old habit of cooking with raw food in favour of just warming up some pre-prepared meals in the microwave and calling it dinner. One of the central tenets of the book is that when reductionist science got applied to the food we eat, they succeeded in breaking it down into a series of bits and pieces called Nutrients and everyone was really happy. Because you could focus on the nutrients and there were guidelines that indicted that if you just got the correct amount of nutrients and you would be healthy.  Unfortunately, the first pass of reductionist science missed spotting that viatmins were an important part of ones diet, and consequently some of the initial experiments with food science had some pretty bad results.  How bad? Try baby food without vitamins.  That’s not good.

The book moves on to highlight a short history of nutritionist thought since it’s inception.  How the sweeping tide of current nutrionist science has painted one nutrient the bad guy and then shifted focus to another in the hopes of getting closer to keeping us healthy and in the consequently, helping creating processed food that does in fact make us healthy.  There’s definitely a link being drawn between, the people creating processed food and the folks who are doing the studies to determine what is healthy.  If I understood correctly, one of the points which Pollan strives to make is that the science’s understanding of what makes a body healthy is incomplete and the body has worked long and hard to deal effectively with the diet that had developed over centuries before we started processing food and breaking down and remodelling our foods after the current desires and fashions.  In the face of this incomplete understanding of food and how it interacts with our bodies we are better off to trust in the food culture that has been developed over the centuries.

In Defense of Food turns it’s eyes towards practical tips for what we should be eating.  The short version of the punch line is written on the cover of the book. “Eat Food, Not Too Much. Mostly Plants”  Then goes on to list a bunch of tips for how one might do this.  Most of the tips are pretty simple, like shopping around the outside of the grocery store, actually taking the time to cook food and eating slowly.  The tips serve as good reminders for what good eating looks like, and for the most part it reminded me of a lot of tasty dishes I haven’t had in a while.  I’m going to try to follow them as best as I can.  I’m still not ready to become a herbivore, but I’m completely ready to become a “flexivore” and slow down my meat consumption to a more reasonable level.

There was tons of information in here that had me raising an eye brow, fat might not be all that bad for you, that was a big one. In spite of all the information floating around *cough* Atkins *cough*, which I generally consider to be nonesense. I have to confess going through this book that I feel more inclined to eat butter rather than margarine with its trans fat infused past.  CAn’t say I’m doing the book justice here, but suffice it to say I would recommend this book to anyone who is slightly interested in learning more about their food!

Oh summer, you are a time of such energy and adventure, relaxation and rest, rejuvenation and vitality. Here’s a little taste of what the summer has brought us so far.

Mt. Albert Edward

Jo and I had a week of holidays which we split up between doing a 3 day hike of Mt Albert Edward (PDF Map), a very HOT 3 day hike. That was in the midst of the heatwave mid 30’s down in the Comox Valley, estimates from the ranger made it sound like it was probably high 20s or low 30s where we were, sheesh, i’m not built for that kind of heat!!

The trip was great, but I really do feel like the heat made it twice as hard. Had it not been for a pond of snow melt 3/4 of the way up to the summit we wouldn’t have made it to the top.

But when we did make the summit we had a delicious lunch and enjoyed a spectacular view. One I’ll not soon forget, if only for how hard we had to work to get it.

Sunshine Coast

After that we headed over to the Sunshine Coast for a couple nights to visit with Joanna’s family at their cabin over there. Had a great time, it was so warm and with the cabin right on the water we were able to stay reasonably cool by getting two or three swims a day. We had one completely awesome night swim up in the bio-luminescence, which was completely magical. Not to mention the opportunity to go water skiing. See picture of the water skiing Joanna.

Hardwicke Island

Finally we headed up to Hardwicke Island to finish off the holiday. It was cooling off by that time, so it wasn’t REALLY hot up at Hardwicke. We had a great time up there, just laying low, reading books, going to the lake and eating great food. I had some fun fixing up a few things for the power system and really enjoyed having more than a weekend to spend being up there.

New York for Work

Finally, New York. The flight was kind of long, 5 hours after we made it from Vic to Seattle. It was pretty hot and humid the whole time that I was there. But enough about my petty complaints, this is NYC. I got to see a few of the sights, Central Park, Times Square, eat some New York Pizza, go dancing and listen to BisMarky in a NY Club, so there I can’t say there was NO time for having fun. That said, the lion share of the time was definitely spent at the Affiliate Summit East Conference, talking, talking, talking and meeting people to try and make connections for constant-content.com. I shouldn’t forget that we did have the opportunity to go to see the Yankee’s pplay the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium. Which was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the Jays lost (that I fear isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime experience ) It was certainly a worthwhile trip business-wise, but I’m glad to get home. A bunch of us got colds (on the plane I think) which was a real bummer, so Friday and Saturday this week, I was pretty useless. Just trying to keep my head above my shoulders.

And the summers not quite over yet!

Too many passwords these days. Way too many. I’ve been keeping passwords on kitchen recipe cards ever since the passwords that get handed out at work started to become completely cryptic and beyond my ability to remember them. Which may seem like a pretty insecure way to keep passwords. But, if the bad guys are actually sitting at my desk, I figure I may have bigger problems.

Finally, I’ve decided to take the risk of actually storing my passwords on my computer. I’m not real jazzed about the idea, seeing as how if the hackers get into my machine and then into my password file then I’ll really have given them the keys to the castle. But, with way too many passwords, what is the average hacker to do.

I work on mostly Debian/Gnu linux systems these days (hurray free software!!). So if you’re working on some other operating system this may be completely irrelevant to you. So, for myself and others here’s how I’ve attempted to secure my passwords.

Enter GPG

GPG is some state of the art encryption techniques are often used to sending encrypted emails. But I found a few people who have used them for encrypting password files. So, this is the technique that I’ve chosen to follow. To get started you need a private key. At the terminal command line run

gpg --gen-key

I used the defaults for the questions it asked and then entered my details and non-forgettable, non-write-downable passphrase. More specific detail on getting started with GPG. Seems too simple, yeah, to me too. That provides a private key with which we can encrypt files. And you can encrypt whatever you would like, but it requires remembering a bunch of command line stuff that I would rather not try and recall, ( more about encrypting files for personal use from the command line here). Note: Once the password file is encrypted it’s not necessary to encrypt it by hand again.

So I created a new file called memories.txt and then encrypted it by typing on the command line

gpg --encrypt --recipient 'Jeff Richards' memories.txt

This produces a file called memories.txt.gpg. Now the original memories.txt can be deleted. Great! now how to add passwords, view them easily and re-encrypt the file as needed.

Vim and GPG plugin – Making Encryption Easier

At this point, ideally I’d have an encrypted file that I can open with my passphrase, and then read, write and close in an encrypted fashion. Enter vim plus the gpg plugin. Turns out someone has handily figured all this out. NOTE: the standard Debian install comes with vim-tiny. which doesn’t support plugins so the first step is to install vim proper (package name: vim).

Once that’s installed, next step is to install the gpg plugin file.

• Grab the gpg plugin code and save it into a called gpg.vim.
• Copy gpg.vim into the /home/your-username/.vim/plugin/ directory
• If the directories .vim/plugin/ doesn’t exist, create it!

And… that’s it! try and open the encrypted file with vim, in my case

vim memories.txt.gpg

Enter the passphrase and your in, add and subtract and the file is encrypted when you exit the program.

My reading of the vim plugin seems to indicate that there won’t be any temp files created or saved anywhere. If anyone has any tips as to why if/how this is a terrible/insecure way to keep passwords, please let me know!

One thing that happens when you start using some of these new fun websites, facebook, twitter, identi.ca etc. Is that you really do end up mixing friends, from all kinds of different places. In my case I’ve got friends, from university, high school, church, work, Hardwicke Island, Victoria Social Media Club plus my parents, inlaws and pretty much everyone having the ability to look in on my status updates, new pictures, etc. It really cuts across groups that are generally held separate. In some respects, this is great, and in some respects this is taking some getting used to.

Are you all listening?

The great part of this is that everyone who is interested in what I’m doing has the opportunity to keep up with my latest thoughts and latest happenings. The bit that takes some getting used to is that, being a fairly private person, I would tend not to tell my high school friends what the latest up on Hardwicke Island is, and vice versa. It makes it a bit easy to get stuck not letting anyone know what’s up since the messages aren’t really targeted. There’s things that are obviously inappropriate, and these days it seems no election campaign will now be complete without some facebook/youtube-reveals-your-past news. Not that I’m planning to run for office any day soon…

So, it seems that there’s a few ways forward. Set up separate accounts for different people to tune into – This seems crazy, do I need more usernames and passwords… Surely not. Or the second, just get used to the fact that the world is going to know a little more about my life than they could before, and let the benefits of sharing outweigh any detriments that might occur. So, does this really all come down to “sharing is good?”

There’s a little more than that… somewhere along the lines, the idea that avoiding talking about religion, politics and money seems to have seeped into my thinking, I’m not the only one. But if you read that article you can see that things are changing. And that’s where the simplicity comes in.

Just Be Yourself, Ok?

With all the social media slashing holes in our so called anonymity, everyone gets some choices. If anonymity and integrity are important, you really can’t play. That’s the only way, just keep reading the webpages like back in 2001, don’t comment, don’t post, don’t tweet, don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t get involved. If anonymity is important but integrity is not, then you could always just fake it and be who you want online, and be someone else off line. But just like in really life, being different people in different places, means remembering your character when you step into a certain situation, and it is very awkward when those people from different situation collide, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Integrity Sans Anonymity

The last choice is if integrity is important and anonymity isn’t or at least is sacrifice-able. Then you just speak into every situation as yourself. The downfall here is that everybody get’s to see what you’re thinking; what you’re about. And it may be very different from what they expected. It offers people the opportunity to be involved in what you really are thinking. It definitely exposes a lot more territory for discussion, but I think the benefits of this way outweigh the detriments.

If you’ve seen this before, watch it again, it’s great. If you haven’t… enjoy.

In an incredible handy coincident of wants it turns out the BC government wanted to get old crumby cars off the road at exactly the same time that I wanted to get rid of my old crumby 91 Honda Civic, massive door ding and all. And while the used car prices are already pretty low, the government was willing to give us $1300 towards an electric scooter through the scrapit program. We jumped through the hoops, we got the money and now I’m riding an electric scooter around town, and I just past 100km on the odometers. Yes, that’s right, 100.

How is it?

Well, there’s a few things that I like and few that I don’t. Starting with the good stuff. It’s incredibly quiet. I mean dead silent. Zipping along about the loudest thing I hear is everyone else. Which has the nice feeling of floating on the cloud and the detriment of scaring the bejeebers out of blind people, not that I’ve encountered that situation yet. Another obvious upside is the never needing gas part. It’s a novelty that hasn’t worn off yet.

Matt told me that once you get a bike you start getting the wave from other bikers. Turns out that in some cases motorcycle riders will condescend and offer the wave to even the lowly scooterist, I appreciate it, although I do feel a sense of other-ness as I noiselessly (and relatively slowly) glide by as they quickly and powerfully eat up the pavement. Speaking of speed, my speed record is 65km/hr. I’ve done it once, on a downhill, drafting behind a car. It’s not a fast scooter. 100 kms in I’m still waiting for my first road rage incident as a motorist speeds by exclaiming how the slowness of my ride makes him want to run me down. Hopefully, sounder minds prevail.

The Downsides

On the downside, the range is pretty limited. While I’ve yet to actually reach the heart stopping moment where the batteries are exhausted and the scooter slows to a stop on some major thoroughfare, I do dread its arrival. The other downside is the size and weight of the scooter. It’s heavy, those batteries are very heavy and just shuffling the scooter around can be a bit of challenge. And it turns out that the scooter itself is a bit small for someone who is 6′3″. It’s especially noticeable with the storage compartment bolted on the back. I suppose you could say that it lends a feeling of humility to the rider to be somewhat cramped on the bike, but I would have paid a little extra to get a slightly longer wheelbase and a couple more inches of knee-room.

The Helmet

Last but not least, there’s the helmet. Yeah, that’s right it looks a lot like power ranger without the tinted shield. Do all helmets look this ridiculous? Actually, it’s very comfortable and seeing as how it came with the bike. I’m not complaining, we’ll see how it goes over when I hit my first scooter meet up. I’ve seen them in the past, line ups of Vespa’s at Ska Fest and other in town music events. I’m not convinced they’ll take me seriously, being electric and all.

Getting thing done is a constant struggle and to be honest, I’ve spent way to much time thinking about how to try and catalog all the things I want to do, rather than just doing the blasted things that need to be done. So, to share what wisdom I’ve got (if any) on this topic, I thought I’d pass along the details of all my efforts how I try and keep track of my self and what I’m trying to do. And how I’ve tried to stop obsessing about my todo lists and just do something (this post may be part of my therapy on that front).

My Tools

Both my tools are online, at this point in my life, it’s where I live, so it seems to make sense to me try and keep myself organied online as well.

• Online Calendar That syncs to my mobile phone (Google Calendar)
• Online Email accessible via my mobile(Gmail)

Separating Work and The Rest of My Life

I don’t bother. I’m just one person, work is part of my life. So, there’s just one calendar and one todo list, and one log book email with everything in it. For me, the simplicity of just having one place to look for things far out weighs the bummer of looking at work tasks when I glance at my to do list on the weekend.

How my System Works (or tries to)

Calendar

Everything that has an actual time (think meetings) or due date (think reports) hits the calendar. And that’s where it lives. This provides the hard landscape (borrowed from GTD) for my life. So, that’s pretty simple. I get an agenda sent every day to my email and I try and survey the weeks events fairly regularly so that I see the big trouble coming a little before it arrives.

The To Do List

I’ve tried plenty of online stuff that is pretty fancy (and feature-full) but I always end up neglecting it and then getting disorganized, so I’ve resorted to a draft email. I seperate my tasks by project in the email and then write the tasks as a bullet list. If I’m waiting for something I put a note in the list that I’m waiting for this from someone and when I started waiting for it.

The Log Book

Being trained as an engineer, I have it drilled into me that a log book is crucial to success, you NEED to be able to see what was done and when. Being incredibly forgetful when it comes to things that happen in day-to-day life (especially with dates) this is even more important for me. So my log book has become an add on to the end of my draft email to do list. Once I finish anything, I copy that item from my to do list to the bottom of my draft email and tag them with the project that they’re for and list them underneath the date I completed it. At the end of the week, I copy all these paste these finished tasks into a new email and send it to myself. Then I archive it and when the time comes that I really need to recall what I’ve done, three weeks from now, I’ll call it up and look at it, curse myself a little for not leaving better notes and thank my lucky stars that I left any notes at all.

The Daily Habit

All this stuff only works if you buy into the system 100%, I’m trying to buy in 100% and review my calendar and to-do list daily. During my daily review I find a few items that I really want/NEED to get done during the day and write them on a separate piece of paper that I try and put somewhere VERY prominent. Throughout the day, the really quick tasks (5 minutes or less) I do right away and then longer jobs I put on the to do list. Then I just try not to get distracted by youtube, google reader, wikipedia, my own navel and facebook and get those few items on my list for the day completed.

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There has been quite a bit of fuss around stopping advertising from coming into your home. There’s two usual routes for people to try and get their message to you, the phone and the mail. Stopping people from soliciting is getting a little easier. On the phone side there’s the national do-not-call list. And on the mail side, there is the Red Dot Campaign

Stopping Mail One Box at a Time

The Red Dot Campaign is dead simple. In a nutshell, you put a red dot on your mailbox that says “No Junk Mail Please” and that’s it. The mail person stops putting the junk mail in your box. The campaign organizers have pdf that you can print out and tape onto your mailslot and one that you can print out and put on your mailbox (it’s bigger). Or if you’re really feeling spenfy you can buy some red dot campaign stickers.

This isn’t a Crazy Environmentalist Thing, Canada Post is Onboard

The best thing is that Canada Post is totally onboard for this. They’ve said in their FAQ’s that:

Customers who do not wish to receive advertisement mail should put a note to this effect on their mailbox if they receive door-to-door delivery. For a community mailbox, group mailbox or postal box, the note should not be placed on the inside or the outside of the door. The note should be placed on the inside lip of the box. When the letter carrier puts the mail into the community mailbox, group mailbox or postal box, the door panel is open and not in view

They’ve even got a splashy little page encouraging you to do the right thing for the environment and stop the junk mail. The folks at the Red Dot Campaign claim:

The Consumer Choice database is decremented for each person opting out, and advertisers reduce their print quantities accordingly

But, I couldn’t find that on Canada Post’s site, although I reckon if enough people opt out of receiving flyers the message will travel up stream soon enough.

Results – Look Ma, No Junk Mails

Honestly, I am in awe of the fact that a small sticker stopped the seemingly endless stream of junk mail, but it did. We now get no junk mail. Big thank you to Canada Post and my mail delivery technician for making this easy.