The Dead in the Cold Dark Seas

http://www.responsesource.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=LAmTz

Ususal warning about personal body stuff that some might find gross...

A bit about my vacation in ten parts:

1. So I only checked mail about two times while I was off.  I just needed the time off.  Mentally.  That was a good thing and it felt great to not deal with work at all.
2. The down side is that I wish I hadn't lost four days of my vacation to illness...
3. Periorbital Cellulitis was very weird. I found out that Cellulitis what the media calls "The flesh eating bacteria" that you hear about from time to time when they want to scare you. The odd thing...  It really wasn't painful at all other than the delerium from the fever/chills.  But I looked like someone had slammed me in the eye with a beer bottle minus the bruising.  I suspect that's why it's a good thing I caught it early on. The skin (and apparently the fatty tissue) around my eye was all swollen.  And the outer right white section of my eye was red and wrinkled up like a wet plastic bag.  That part DID hurt.
4. I am back to normal now. Today is my second to last day of the antibiotic course.  I'm happy to see that balancing the doses with acidophillus supplements appears to have held off any stomach distress or skin rashes.  Plus it seeems like this antibiotic agrees with me (Generic form of Augmentin)
5. The doctor in the ER said I was very lucky to have come in so early with it. It can turn into all sorts of horrible things if it's left untreated. Menengitis is one of the horrible things. If it was an abscess it would have required immediate surgery for sure.  Yeah... yuck.
6. In the follow up with my regular Doctor last week, he wants me to come back in for an MRSA screening about four or more days after I complete the antibiotic course (That's the "super bug" version of Staph that you pick up in hostpitals that the media is on about all the time). It's possible that my chest pains the past few years might have been caused by MRSA. The thing that makes him wonder is that I mentioned that I've had a really big problem with boils on my leg for the past four years or so.  I figured it was just aging or something and didn't mention it in the past.  (And yeah... I bathe folks...)  But the fact that they last more than two weeks and they're very deep made him wonder about MRSA.
7. The reason I need to wait for testing is that being on the antibiotics would cause a false negative.  So I have to wait until four days after the antibiotic course is done to get a nasal swab test. If it's MRSA, that might answer a LOT of problems I've been having for the past few years.
8. I've also had a lot of trouble with inexplicably bloodshot eyes for the past few years, no matter how much sleep I get, or whether it's allergy season or not. Sometimes they'd get really damn red. After having been on the antibiotics for the past two weeks, my eyes are white.  First time in about four years... So it's possible I've been living with some kind of infection the past few years and that my body has kept it just under the surface enough to be undetectable.  But it's enough of a problem that I had all these weird symptoms.
9. Anyway... I really feel great right now.  The minor but somewhat unsettling annoyances (which is all they really were) seem to have cleared up.  Even the chest pains seem to have subsided.
10. Of course... I'm also coming off of two weeks of vaction from a pretty stressful  work environment... So we'll see if that has anything to do with it.

So my daughter came up with the name for her salon at age three: "The Ugly Shade".  I love how fixated she is on objects instead of people or animals.  She never wants to be other people, or animals.  She wants to be things, or even at times... abstract concepts.  Have to wonder what it all means.  I asked her and she said, "I already have animals and I know people.  Why would I WANT to be them?  They're uninteresting.  It's much better to be things".  Hmmm... I always wanted to be a machine.  Could it be genetic.  ;P

Well the antibiotics appear to be working. I had a follow up visit with an eye surgeon this morning and with my regular doctor in about two hours. This just appears to be a freak infection but it's going away. Eye is still a bit red... But that should be done by the end of this week.

I'm going to make the most of this last week of my vacation dammit! I am undaunted! :)

NOTE: Some gross stuff.  Skip if you are not able to deal.

...I just get over what I assumed was food poisoning and things are looking great on Friday morning for me.  Getting my appetite back.  Able to keep food down.  Fever and joint pain gone, etc...  Then, around noon or so, my right eye starts to feel a bit like it has some morning goo in it.  But I can't for the life of me, wipe it out.  And I can't find it either.  Well maybe it's just an allergy thing.  So I continue on through the day. About two hours later it's feeling even more persistent and a lot stranger.  I'm also having trouble keeping my right eye in sync with my left eye.  I look in the mirror and... my eyelid is swelling.  WTF?!

Well, it must be related to the food poisoning. So I figure it will clear up in a day or so. And since I have no chills or fever, it must be innocuous. Then around 6:00PM my conjunctiva opposite the swelling in the inner corner of my eye becomes majorly inflamed in about 30 minutes. W!T!F!?

So I call the registered nurse line that my insurance provides and tell them what happened the day before and Friday. She latches onto my allergies and suggests I try Claritin and a shower, then cold compresses. I do. To no avail. Around 10:00PM I start to feel freezing cold again. Uh oh. I try and stave it off with some hot food and tea. That doesn't work. So I call the RN line again. After talking to her, she says "Go to the ER NOW. Tell them we said we think you have Cellulitis".

So we wake the kid up, my wife drops me at ER and I go in. Personally I doubt it's cellulitis. I assumed Botulism (sp?). Drooping eyelids accompany that form of food poisoning. But they order a CAT scan and do some blood work. It's periorbital cellulitis. They caught it early enough to hopefully prevent any serious damage. It doesn't usually affect adults. My hospital actually had to write up special release procedures for my case. Worst case scenario is deep infection of the lymphatic system and possible infection of the heart lining. I didn't have an abscess so that's not likely. Apparently it only started on Friday.

Current speculation is that whatever made me sick on Thursday may have gotten pushed up into the orbital area of my facial structure when I was driving the porcelain bus. Given that adult periorbital cellulitis is usually caused by strep or staph and that food poisoning can be caused by staph, I have to assume staph was the main culprit. Swelling is going down now though. Hope this vacation gets better...

So... yesterday we head out to a nice family picnic.  Everything is great.  No problems.  I have a good night back home too.  The obly problem was that our cheapo cooler filled with ice leaked a lot of water on some righteous pepperoni bread that we had to throw out.  But my sinfully delicious fold over pizza bake seemed fairly unscathed in it's wax paper bag.  So I relocated it to a tupperware container for later consumption.

Around 1:00AM I have a bit of the munchies, so I go get it and take two small bites.  (When I eat stuff like this these days I keep the portions very small)  Then I drift off to sleep while working on one of my Gentoo boxes.  I wake up at 4:50AM with the familiar food poisoning feeling.  Headache, body aches, slight fever, stomach upset, etc...  Uh oh.  Well it's full blown when I wake up by morning.  It felt so bad at one point today (tingling legs and arms, dizziness, the feeling of a pit in my chest, etc...) I almost considered an emergency room visit.

My wife took my temp and it was dropping.  I was at 96.1F and felt like I'd just spent time in an icebox.  She called my doctor and they recommended bed rest, and plenty of fluids with electrolytes (it's what a body craves you know...).  I also took some aspirin for the headache and body aches.  But it would just figure this would happen halfway through my first real vacation in like five years.  Gah!  So frustrating.  I am feeling a bit better now with the exception of raging body aches and the headache.  Apparently that's caused by "interleukins" which are proinflammatory ("Interleukin" would be a great Slashdot troll name) and which help guide the destruction or attack on infected cells.

So all day it's been sleep, wake up and drink some Propel, maybe take an aspirin, then more sleep.  The last time I had food poisoning was back in my late teens when I lived in a roach infested apartment.  That was no walk in the park either.  But having it at 38 is about two times worse.  So I've got that going for me.

Long shot here but... Does anyone know why jazz pianist Keith Jarrett whines while he plays the most exquisite tunes? I've looked around for any indication that he's autistic or has some sort of tick. Or is it that people like the whines? In some recordings it's more prevalent than others, so sometimes I wonder if the producers try to leave them out. Anyway, just wondering if anyone else knows.

See subject...

The tone on Multiply is becoming more agressive now, so I'm out of the discussion at this point.  When sanity and rational thinking return (likely sometime post-November) I might join in again no matter who wins.  But with the recent spate of attack pieces from both sides of the aisle, I just can't be involved.  I'll make a suggestion to the people who are enjoying the political/election/campaign related smearing: PLEASE FORM A GROUP.  I don't want to hear it (and I don't think I'm alone), but more importantly I don't want to lose repect for anyone simply because they are being irrational.  I've been ignorning the posts, but that's getting dmn hard to do when you put the snarkiness in the subject itself.  Stop that.

I'm fine with people being pro-someone no matter who it is (hell even Ron Paul and Ralph Nader).  But when there are attacks from either side off the political spectrum, that's where I get fed up.  If you want to smear and attack, PLEASE don't do it here.  Gripe all you want about this being a free country/forum, but you're the ones who aren't being civil if you're the ones who are pointing fingers and laughing at the opposition for whatever reason.  I've said it before, every candidate we have this year is a joke.  A fuckning sick and cruel joke on the American people.  We are the losers this year no matter who wins.  We don't have the hopes of anything getting better for anyone based on who wins the next election.  It would merely be a slight shift in one direction or the other, but not enough to offset all the damage that's already been done.  2008: We're Fucked.

I don't hold any hope that what I've requested will actually happen, but I'm simply voicing my disgust at the tone that some of the election posts have taken recently.  Maybe, hopefully, you're just unaware of the snarky and stupid nature of your posts.  If so, please take notice.  But all this negative smearing (again, on both sides) is non-productive other than, at best, offending the supporters of the candidate you oppose.  At worst, you're spreading irrelevant and in many cases, erroneous information in an irresponsible way.  Whether you like it or not, you are impacting the choices people make in the next election.  Let people chose for themselves based on the limited and direct information they can access instead of opinion pieces by people with agendas.    In other words, don't be "that guy".  Whoever they vote for, everyone (you too) is going to get a serious ass fucking post-2008.  Without lube.  Don't tell me you think otherwise.  That is all.

Well, I haven't been posting as much on Multiply because I've been busy to such an extreme level.  The best I've had time for is the occasional reply.  But here's kind of an update of what's been going on:

1. I spent the previous two weekends before this last one... working in the attic!  (Like you haven't heard that enough)  I had to bust my ass trying to get the woodwork finished in time for the floor refinishers to come last Thursday.  Here's the good news (there is no real bad news actually), the floor turned out to be gorgeous.  Nice amber and yellow tones with a matte oil finish.  And all the physical damage the wood experienced over the past 60 years or so actually contributes to an overall even "shabby chic" look.  it also adds the missing element to the work I did on the walls and wood trim.  The room looks really nice now.  I still have a lot of touch up to do for minor dots of wood finish that spattered onto the wall here and there, but it's so minimal, that it's not that much of a concern.  I'll be annoyed by the paint that the masking tape pulls off when I remove it, but that just seems to be the way things work in this house.  I'll touch that stuff up too.
2. So since the floor was finished on Thursday and it was going to be a few days before we could walk on it, I figured: enforced vacation from working on the house.  I promised my daughter we'd be able to spend all day Saturday and Sunday together and also have some nice long evenings on Thursday and Friday.  In fact on Thursday, we even took some food from a favorite local restaurant to a park for dinner after I came home from work.  But this past weekend was ill fated...
3. Thursday afternoon while I was at work, I found out that we needed to have some tunable kernel paramter changes done on our production system (HP-UX).  No biggie, just log in from home during our maintenance window, make the changes, a quick down and up, and my weekend awaits.  I do this about 9:15PM and on the way back up the system needs to do an fsck on /dev/vg00/lvol7 which houses /usr.  Partway through, the fsck aborts with no discernible error.  The system attempts to complete the boot, and I see a ton of errors all having to do with not being able to access /usr.  Ugh.  Not only that, but I also can't get a login because the system is not able to load login or /bin/sh.
4. I reboot in single usr mode and attempt to run a full fsck.  Again, it aborts.  So I call it into HP support, let my boss know what's happened and we both head down to the office.  This is about 10:00PM.  After talking to support, it's suggested that we attempt to mount /dev/vg00/lvol7 read-only and then copy that stuff to another location.  Run 'newfs' to map out the bad blocks and reformat in vxfs.  (I don't think that really would work since we're on LVM).  We do it and then copy /usr back to /dev/vg00/lvol7.  The system is able to boot again and we're up and running by 3:25AM.  (Took us a while to get someone who could tell us about the read-only mount.  It hadn't occured to me to even try it since this isn't Linux...)
5. I know that this isn't the end of it because it's likely we have a failing drive.  But at least we're up for the next day (even though the millions of nightly report jobs are now trashed and have to be requeued to do partial work over the next few days) and maybe I can get a decent backup of the system with tar going to the second internal disk (again, don't ask about  the lack of mirroring on a production box, it's a long and unpleasant story).  I still wanted definitive proof that this was a hardware issue and so did HP before they sent out a replacement.  So support has me run a 'dd' of the device to /dev/null and sure enough, i/o errors.  Good enough, so we are then scheduled to get a replacement later that night (last Friday).  I basically spent a few hours on the phone with HP between 1:00PM and 7:00PM from home.
6. Seeing the crisis we're in, we inform our users that the system is going down at 8:00PM instead of the usual 9:30PM.  My boss and I meet at the office again at 7:55 and begin making the preparations for the arrival of the new disk.  Basically it's supposed to be a fresh OS installation, then overlay the stuff from the backup on the other internal disk.  We decide to snag the same model of disk from our test server and start before the replacement gets here.  But... while we're collecting all the info we need about what needs to be brought back from the overlay, I discover that ALL of our PA-RISC boxes are only seeing one half of the fiber channel paths back to the SAN.  WTF!?  Not only that, but after bringing the test system back up, the SAN file systems are inaccessible.  Uh oh...  What the hell is happening?
7. The HP support guy arrives with the hard drive and at the same time I'm opening a second case with HP support to find out what's wrong with the SAN/fabric.  My boss and the HP guy down the other server and start putting the new disk in and getting it prepped for the OS installation, while I'm talking to HP support about the SAN.  After spending some time trying to collect information on the SAN on our end (I wasn't involved in the set up, and no one did any good documentation) we finally log into the switches and find that there are three ports set to disabled state.  So, we reboot the switch and the ports come back, the filesystems come back.  Whew... everything is OK.  But it set us back about three hours in total.  So now we're starting the OS installation at about 11:30PM.
8. Over the course of the night we get the OS on, then manually configure the SAN file systems, and a few other things.  Finally we do a restore from the other disk.  After about two hours or so just restoring /usr, we stop the restore and we hand pick things from /var /opt /etc and the like.  Then we reboot.  This funny handbasket appears in my office with a sign saying "Hell -->".  The first indication we get that something is wrong is that the kernel itself says it's not in an executable format.  This appears to have been the result of file corruption.  I should never have copied the kernel from the backup of the dying drive.
9. We boot off the DVD and replace the kernel and fix the bootlif.  The system boots, but now all sorts of things aren't working.  The backup kernel is useless too because it was also from the same f-ed backup.  Once we're back up, it's apparent that we're just in a bad state all the way around.  Can't get networking going because the "socket" function isn't working.  Likely because we're using a minimal kernel from the DVD that is unpatched to the level of various modules on the system.  It's a mess, and I didn't know any better.  I really have never delved that deeply into HP-UX until this past week.
10. We call HP support to find out what our options are.  It's about 6:50AM now.  When I finally get through to the specialist I was talking to before, he says that basically we have a mish-mash of a bunch of modules, libraries, binaries and the kernel that just won't work.  We're better off starting over with a fresh installation.  I understand completely, and as much as I'm loathe to do so, I know I have to.  The whole night wasted for nothing.  So I start the installation, then we leave to get about three hours of sleep.
11. We get back at 11:30AM the next morning and with clearer minds complete the OS installation, and this time push the patches to the system from one of our other PA-RISC boxes using 'swinstall' in remote "pull" mode.  Since they were all patched to the same level at the same time, we're all set now.  Then I also push all the GNU stuff we use as well.  Bring up the SAN file systems again.  Then very, VERY carefully recover stuff from our backup of the original system.  This time, only configs for the most part.  Little by little we get it all back.  We have everything up and running by 4:30PM Saturday.  In reality, we only lost one weekend day in terms of users.  But it's the night time processing being missed that kills us.  So this was a BIG deal.  Thankfully, it's not my fault, I'm just here to fix the problem.  And I also, thankfully, work in an environment that doesn't really care who is to blame, they just want things working.
12. Saturday night I get home, eat some dinner and then lie down for a nap at 7:00PM.  I don't wake up until 8:21AM Sunday.  Lost my weekend.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg these past few weeks.  What with having to take care of BIND updates due to that security flaw, prepping a new system for deployment last week and this week, various meetings for stuff that just can't wait, I've been really busy.  On the good side, I finally got my music equipment moved up to the attic on Sunday afternoon.  So hopefully, my dream of doing some things I like doing over my vacation will actually happen.  I'm supposed to be on vacation the next two weeks starting next Monday.  Of course, since I'm getting comp time for the work I did over the weekend, I am probably bailing out of here Wednesday afternoon and then off Thursday and Friday.  We shall see...

Looks like logical volume 7 in volume group 00 bit the dust at the OS level.  That lvol is where /usr lives.  Had to be /usr and not something like /tmp...  Supposedly the disk that houses it is fine.  No error indictors lit.  But I expect that this disk is going to die within a few days or weeks and I'll need to do a full restore soonish.  I really hated restoring to what I believe is a failing disk.  But that's was the only option at the moment.  I'm going to look into HP Ignite (think Ghost for HP-UX) to try and dupe the system to another drive.  Don't ask me about mirroring... that's a saga all it's own that I don't want to go into.  I'm not sure it would have helped since the corruption, according to HP was not caused by hardware.  Details... I need more details.

Got the system up and running by 3:25AM.  Got home by 4:00AM.  Asleep by about 4:30AM.  Woke up at 12:30PM.  In a haze now.  No work today other than getting a good backup of everything on that box just in case...  But here's the sad thing about all of this; there is a big application upgrade taking place tomorrow evening on this very system.  Thankfully the application is housed on a SAN and not the internal disks.  Again, don't even ask me about the right way to handle this stuff.  I know it already, but can't implement it for various good and not so good reasons that I have no control over.

As a side note (and I'm not kidding):  When I left for work at 10:30PM last night, the trip indicator on the car said 666.6.  OK.  Funny.  When I got home at 4:00AM, I ws in the kitchen and checked the temp on the digital thermometer: 66.6F.  Hmmm...  If I was a different sort of person I'd be all freaked out.  But yeah, that actually happened.  I felt like I was in some kind of weird movie.

Corrupt file system on HP-UX box.  It just HAD to be /usr too.  I'll have to see if I can restore from another system.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4362950.ece  In light of what I read in the Bicameral Mind book a few months back, I think this might also be the forming of new software for the mind.  The question is... what will the result be?

Hey y'all!!!  I'm comin' atcha from the north side with a big old question!  Check it! --->

I'm dealing with a vendor who has someone scheduled to install software on a Linux box.  I asked if there will be a need for a separate file system and if so how much space. Keep in mind that this person is installing on a LINUX box. So the response is, "We generally recommend that our customers put our software on the D:\ drive".  Whooo boy.

Kind of silly to be calling this a museum of the future if it's happening now, but still:

http://www.random-good-stuff.com/2008/07/21/museum-of-the-future/

First I should mention that I just found out that you can read the book online, here. I borrowed the paper copy from my local library. It's handy to know the book is online, because of some of the information I'd like to refer back to. Second, I also have to mention that I don't buy 100% into the recommendations and that no one should try major shifts in their eating without first talking to their doctor or possibly a nutritionist. Third, one thing I think that he fails to take into account is differences in people's level of activity as well as climates and how they affect appetite. I know in the dead of winter, I don't just want to eat a salad and some fruit. My body craves carbs and fats.

I find it interesting that I've been reading books a few books about food most often over the past few years since for the majority of my life I wasn't into food at all. In fact, up until my 30s, I would sometimes forget to eat and then just skip meals. What started all of this was my experience with reflux disorder in my early 30s. I felt that I was too young to have to be on some kind of medication to maintain a disorder. Sure, there are always exceptions, but I just never saw myself that way because I was born with good health and lead a fairly clean lifestyle. So when I was faced with reflux, I worked hard to fight it with means other than medication. It worked, and since then, I've paid a lot more attention to food.

While I was reading Michael Pollan's "An Eater's Manifesto", he mentioned Kurzweil's book, and I decided to give that a go. Even though the book is fifteen years old and likely has some errors in it that have since been accounted for, I respect Kurzweil, especially when he was younger and wasn't considered by many to be "out there". I'm glad I read it since it dovetails nicely with the more recent changes I'm making for my health.

The book itself is written as a conversation between Kurzweil and someone who is completely unaware of the negative effects of fat and cholesterol in the diet. He gives his talking partner a pretty realistic personality that most people can relate to. He also uses this format to bring some humor to subject that has the potential to be somewhat dry. The book itself was loosely reviewed by his own doctor as well as some other medical professionals, but it is not to be taken as medical advice.

I suppose if you want as summary of what the book is about, it's generally, Kurzweil's recommendation to get only 10% of your calories from fat, cut down on simple carbs, and add some kind of exercise to your life. The goals of these actions are to avoid heart trouble, cancer and many other common diseases that appear to be linked to the western diet. If you follow these recommendations, and you do them faithfully, he's suggesting that you can potentially live up to 50% longer. Not only stay alive, but stay healthy and completely functional.

The book is at it's most interesting when he goes into the biology of what happens in your body when ingesting fat and why it's not really that great whether it's saturated or unsaturated. On the immediate results of eating fat: "Fat causes blood cell aggregation or blood sludging. Within hours of eating a meal with a significant fat content, red blood cells begin to stick to one another, making it impossible for them to pass through the smaller capillaries that provide oxygen to the body's tissues ... which is one reason that people often feel groggy after eating a meal rich in fat".

He also has a much clearer explanation as to the differences between LDL (bad cholesterol) and (A)HDL (good cholesterol) than I'd ever gotten from a doctor. The difference is that it seems that LDL helps the body accumulate cholesterol on the artery walls, whereas AHDL carry cholesterol to the liver for disposal as waste. Obviously, you don't want that stuff building up in your arteries and causing atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). However, he also notes that in cultures where the traditional diet does keep it's adherents around the 10% of calories from fat mark, that HDL (good cholesterol, remember...) scores tend to be inherently low.

He actually spends the first few chapters (maybe the first five) trying to drive the point home about just how bad high amounts of fat in our diet are for us. And to add to that he also explains that we also tend to eat too high in simple carbs and protein as well. In fact, there is no such thing as protein deficiency in the average American. If anything we eat up to ten times the amount of protein (likely due to meat intake) that we should. Usually at this point someone who takes issue with his suggestions would say, that if the 10% suggestion is really that good, then how come doctors aren't recommending that and instead recommending 30%? The answer is apparently: "I have talked with some of the doctors involved in setting up those guidelines. Many of them are aware that the recommendations represent a significant compromise ... the 30-percent-calorie-from-fat diet is supposedly easy to follow. Just make a few minor adjustments, remove a few items from your diet, add a little fiber, and so on. The effect ... is a reduction in heart disease risk of about 30 percent compared to (the average) a diet of 40 percent calories from fat ... But the maximum compliance argument is that more lives will be saved by having relatively large compliance with a 30 percent reduction in risk than by having fewer people (due to the perceived difficulty of the 10 percent diet) comply with stricter guidelines"...

Admittedly, the first third of the book can sound almost preachy, but this is a really sticky subject to relate to people without ruffling feathers. People are used to comfortable habits with regard to eating and possibly cooking, and here comes Kurzweil essentially saying, you're poisoning yourself with fat and cholesterol. So there's no escaping that. Unless you're interested in what he has to say, or you want to make the change yourself, you're going to have a tough time reading the book. Had I read this back in 1993, I would have said, "Yeah. That's nice. But I'm young, and I don't have the time to cook the way his methods recommend". I was getting away with murder back then regarding my diet. I was still a slim 155 and I was eating all kinds of crap. So this book would have just been a curiosity and nothing more.

But now that I've had five years of a different diet to show me that I could cure a number of ailments just by eating right and I'm getting closer to 40, and I'm a dad who wants to stick around a good long time, the book means more to me now. So I've been following a good deal of what he recommends. Seeing that I don't want to drive my wife insane with odd requirements for eating (she's being a good sport about this as always) I've been working more on avoiding certain foods that are high in fat and eating small portions. That combined with the exercise from my weekday lunch walks appears to be doing the trick. Just in the past two weeks I've lost about five pounds to get me back to 170. I was 185 back in the winter and that's about where I've been for the past few years. There are no startling revelations in cutting down on fat intake and exercising to lose weight. But holding to the 10% is quite tricky since there's a lot of foods you wouldn't think of as being high in fat.

Another little shocker for me in the book was that polyunsaturated fats (vegetable oils) are really not that much better for you than saturated fats. He recommends avoiding nearly every kind of oil except canola and olive. And even those oils can only be used sparingly. I'd always assumed that my corn oil habit was "good for me". I would use two tablespoons of corn oil to pop some popcorn several times a week and then eat the entire thing. It didn't cause weight gain, but the intake of the oil was likely no good for me. So... I'll probably be trying out an air popper sometime soon. With the thought that corn oil was good for me, I used it in a lot of cooking. Recently I read some articles about how bad corn oil is for you as well as Kurzweil's warnings. So no more corn oil. This came a few months after I finally paid attention to the warnings about margarine. So I lost two near staples of my diet in less than a year. But, I have to say it IS worth it. The feelings that I have are exactly what I experienced before when I kicked simple carbs. So I know it's doing good for my body and can back Kurzweil up in that way.

I also went through Kurzweil's process (outlined in chapter 5) of checking my frame type, and using that plus my height to determine my idea weight range and then adjust it down to 95% of those numbers for a reduced calorie target. As a result, my 7" wrist, 6' 0" frame puts me in the 158-175 range. Then I figured out the ideal daily calories from that and came up with a little less than 2000 a day. I have no idea what I used to eat pre-2003 but I figure it was probably 3000-3500 a day.

He waits until later in the book to introduce the potential life extension benefits of eating fewer calories than your ideal (no less than 95% of your ideal). His main reason being that this book is NOT about losing weight. The book is about avoiding the big western diseases: heart trouble and cancer. He suggests that these are not just normal diseases of old age or purely the result of genetics. Instead, he is saying that these diseases can be avoided nearly entirely by eating right. Some of his support comes from studies of Asian communities that still eat more traditionally and as a result have a fat intake much closer to his 10% recommendation. In these communities, lifespans of 100 or more years are 40 times more common than they are in western society. The main killer in these regions appears to be strokes caused by hypertension which is the result of high sodium content in their foods.

He also refers to another very interesting study with lab rats where they give two groups differing diets. The one group is fed in a normal diet. The other is a reduced calorie diet (80% of normal calories). The restricted calorie rats live 50% longer (1500 days) than the normal ones (1000 days) : "Typically, the control rats died from deterioration of their hearts, kidney disease, or cancer ... Of ... significance was the slowing of the aging process. Not only did the low-calorie rats live longer, but they largely avoided the feebleness, poor health, sluggishness, and grizzled appearance ... of the normal-eating group ... Long after the normal-eating rats had died, the low-calorie rats continued to have shiny coats, very low rates of cancer and other diseases, and the higher levels of energy and responsiveness associated with youth".

Even more interesting was that the researchers also tried exposing the rats to high levels of carcinogens and the bodies of the low-calorie rats were able to resist where the normal eating rats succumbed. A further study with rats specially bred to be more likely to succumb to cancer and autoimmune diseases gained significant protection while on the restricted calorie diet. This is strongly indicative of Kurzweil's desire to live long enough to be around the the Singularity (machines surpass man and then man may merge with machine). But that's a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that the studies are pretty interesting and give some weight to the idea that smaller portions are better for you (no pun intended).

I think my only issues with the book are that if you live in a cold climate, your body is going to naturally crave more calories to keep you warm. So I don't know if it's possible to stick to this kind of diet year round unless you live in a temperate location. The other point is, given that many of us start out eating poorly from birth onward, is it possible that our bodies adapt in some small way to the poor quality foods that the western diet offers, and will have a harder time with the higher quality foods of the 10% solution? I think that those issues might be some big stumbling blocks for a lot of people. The book is also dated, which I'm sure Kurzweil acknowledges. He has a more recent book called "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever". I'll probably read that at some point, but from what I understand there may be a bit of an update in there on some of what he wrote in 1993 in this book. So it will be of interest to me more than likely.

OK.  I learned a lesson.  Never confuse Minwax Stain and Finish with Minwax Polyshades (One Step).  While working in the attic, I started applying the stain and finish to the wood.  Unfortunately due to various issues regarding sanding (and not doing it when your kid is under age ten in order to prevent issue with brain development due to lead dust), I was not able to sand all the wood work.  What I did was remove the baseboards and some trim (last year), my wife stripped them outside, then I sanded them and brought them back in.  To save a little time this year, I only stripped some of the remaining wood work inside, and didn't sand.  Then stuff where it would have been too time consuming to strip and where there wasn't any paint, I just scuff sanded to provide a bit of something for the finish to soak into.  There were also some pieces that had to be replaced, so my dad and I "milled" some out of pine, which means those were new wood never touched by any finish at all.  And finally, there were the skylight frames that were put in about two years ago which also had no finish on them.

So, last weekend, I asked my wife to pack up the kid and head over to the in-laws so I could get a nice long day in the attic.  I worked from about 9:30AM to 2:30AM.  Around 9:55PM, I went down to the basement to get the stain and finish and apply it.  When I read the instructions, I noticed that the final step is to apply clear Minwax Polyurethane.  I thought, "Why?  This is stain and FINISH.  Why would I need a polyurethane coat"?  Then I noticed that this was basially only a stain.  No real finish to speak of.  So WHY call it "stain and finish"?  I think, "Uh oh... this will need to be a two step process.  I'd better see if I can make it to Home Depot before they close".  But, I remember, they close at 10:00PM now since Cleveland is in an economic slump and pretty much no one stays open 24x7 anymore...  It's now 9:58PM and the store is five minutes away.  I'm screwed.

So I decide that I will just live with the two step finish.  Even If I went with the single step Polyshades product, I usually have to put two coats on anyway.  I start applying it and it looks more brown than red (the color is Red Oak) like it does on the can.  No matter.  Everything else that could go slightly wrong in the attic has, this shouldn't be a deal breaker.   I don't have the time to get everything "right" like I used to.  (Side note to anyone without kids right now but planning to have them: GET ALL THE BIG HOME PROJECTS DONE BEFORE YOU HAVE THE KID.  If you're the kind of parent who likes to spend time with your kid, you'll never have the kind of time you did pre-kid to get stuff done in all-nighters until the kid is maybe five to ten years old.)  So I press ahead.  I only get the baseboards done before I collapse for the night at 2:30AM.

Then I figure, since I'm a bit behind now, I will try and get up there after the kid is asleep since this work is quiet, and I'll spend a few night during the week staining stuff.  I do.  And as I progress, I realize that there is not only a color difference (not that bad really), but there is a texture difference (pretty bad in my opinion) between the woods that have all had different treatment.  The baseboards turned out OK in terms in texture.  They had a bit of a gloss which was weird but not bad.  The skylight frames, being new pine, soaked the stain in and looked just a little lighter and had no sheen at all.  The drawer fronts on the morgue drawers (that's what I call them because they're freakin' huge) are a lot shinier.  In fact shinier than I want.  But... the original window frames (the ones I scuff sanded) are shining like candy apples.  Uggh...

So this past Saturday night into Sunday I was up there from 9:30PM until 2:30AM.  I got the remaining stuff stained in preparation for the polyurethane application on Sunday.  I was hoping to have all the woodwork stained and finished by Sunday night.  No such luck...  It turns out that there is a definite difference in drying times depending on how porous the wood is (ie. how much of the original finish was stripped off and SANDED).  So while the polyurethane went onto the baseboards relatively well as well as any new wood (like the skylight frames and the replacement trim here and there), as soon as I tried applying it to the stuff that went onto wood that was only scuff sanded, the stain started smearing around losing the original color.  Not only that, but it also gummed up the polyurethane so that it looked like I poured honey on it.  GRRRRRAAAAR!!!!

So I stopped.  There was one section that I stained last weekend that was shiny and it was kind of my test for how well the stain dries in a week.  It didn't smear or gum up as much, but it still colored the brush.  So even a week isn't sufficient drying time.  Looks like I screwed something up big time.  Had I spent the time sanding all the woodwork, it would have been at least another month or two of weekends to have it prepped for finishing.  But more to the point, had I gotten Polyshades single step finish, it would have simply been two coats and would have looked right.  On Wednesday, I'm going to check on the portions of the wood work that were still tacky yesterday afternoon.  If they feel a bit drier, I might try and apply the polyurethane then with a lighter hand.  I want to get this out of the way since we're getting someone in to sand and finish the floor on Thursday this week.

Next weekend I have a big upgrade I'm involved in for work, so it's likely I won't have time to work on the attic anyway.  That works out well because we won't be able to walk on the newly finished floor until Sunday anyway.  I've been trying to bust my a** to get this room done to coincide with my vacation during the first two weeks of August.  However, finished or not, I'm going to try and get my music gear and the futons up there.  I have a date with my daughter to watch Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella up there on my vacation.  NO WORK ON THE HOUSE NO MATTER WHAT.  I'll get back to it after the vacation.  At that point it will probably be "boo boo" touch ups.

Once I'm done with this eye sore, I'll be posting some before and after pix.  I took photos back in 2004 when we first were considering buying the house.  Sadly, I never got photos of it with the floor all ripped up, or the walls with big holes in them.  But... you'll get the general idea of what I've done when you see the pix if you're at all curious.  Everyone tells me I'm a perfectionist.  Maybe so, but I just like doing things "right" and I've done NOTHING right in this house due to the limited time I have to work solidly on it.

This is not safe for anywhere. Still... watch and learn. I apologize to anyone offended in whatever way that may be, but I had to share. To quote Ford Prefect: "I quite liked it really".

All spurred on by the chest pains I had in the spring: I guess four months of 30 minute walks at lunch made some changes.  My diet changed twice in the past four months as well.  First, I just drastically reduced salt intake.  Then as I was reading Michael Polan's "In Defense of Food" and Ray Kurzweil's "10% Solution", I cut out all oils except olive and canola and reduced the amount of those to minimal amounts.  I've also cut out eggs, cheese, butter, margarine (cut that out a while back actually).  So what do I have to show for it in four months?

Well, before I go there, let me explain that since my last dietary change in 2003,  cutting out nearly all simple carbs and only eating complex carbs, I discovered that I could eat more fat and get away with it.  I wasn't gaining weight even though I ate more meat than ever before and more dairy products as well.  So I got into a bad habit with things like (all home made) hamburgers, cheeses, ice cream (again home made with stevia instead of sugar for sweetening) and the like.  Over the past five years my weight ticked up a little bit at a time.  Not very high, but higher than where I wanted it to be.  I think that my "bad cholesterol" score decrease is largely because of my pretty solid avoidance of the fats I've been indulging in the past five years.  So here are the scores presented in (March/July) format:

total chol: 137/127 (needs to be between 50-200)
triglycerides: 92/118 (needs to be between 30-200)
good chol: 27/30 (needs to be between 32-96)
bad chol: 92/73 (needs to be between 0-130)
risk factor ratio: 5.1/4.2 (needs to be between 3.7-6.7)
Glucose: No change, 82 (needs to be between 70-110)

In general, my scores aren't actually too shabby at all.  I'm aware of that.  The only area of concern is my AHDL (good cholesterol).  I needs to be higher.  And apparently the only way to do that is either reducing stress (which won't be happening any time in the next 20 years) and exercising, which I can try to increase.  So there it is...