Year: 2006

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3.5 decades…

That’s how long I’ve been around as of 7am this morning. To celebrate my 35th year on earth I’ve decided to highlight some of the other significant historical events that occured on this date (courtesy of Wikipedia).

None of this is as important as the fact that on this day in 1971 I was born on my grandfather’s birthday.  He would have been 100 today.

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Gullible Info

Sometimes the Gullible Info RSS feed I have set up on my Google personalized homepage spits out some astonishing facts. This just popped up a minute ago:

“If all the diamonds stored by major diamond companies were released, a perfect two-carat diamond would be worth about three dollars.”

Wow. Here’s another one:

“The computer mouse was almost called a “dongle” until researchers with Xerox had a last-minute change of heart.”

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The Zebra Bus

zooLast Saturday my mom and I took Connor to the NC Zoo while Amy was in insurance classes all day. He liked the animals but all he talks about now is riding on the “choo-choo” (aka – the tram) and the zebra bus which take you back and forth from the American to the African side of the park. The thing about the NC Zoo is that you seem to walk FOREVER to get from one exhibit to the next and when you get there, the exhibit is either closed or non-spectacular. The polar bears and elephants were the only animals really close enough to get hyped about. But even they looked bored to be alive. Connor would look at them for about one minute then say “bye, bye elephant….ride the choo-choo now?”

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Specific Carbohydrate Diet – SCD

I hope everyone in our house is ready for a serious lifestyle change. I’m about to blow a hurricane through our refrigerator and pantry. I want to be clear that this is about Connor. He has a father that has trouble spending the weekend with him because of chronic digestive problems and disease. And despite this Connor had donut holes and vanilla pudding for breakfast before going to daycare.

Enough is enough. We are treating our bodies like garbage cans. Our daily meals consist of fast food, junk filled with high-fructose corn syrup, and soda by the two liter. Well guess what Amy, the laws being laid down and we’re ALL sticking to it. No more soda for Connor. He isn’t going to want it because it won’t be around that often. The garbage pre-processed foods we eat are being thrown away. This includes fast crock pot stuff from a plastic bag. Our food’s going to be prepared the slow, old fashioned way and it’s going to be free of gallons of sugar.

Obviously this is going to be huge. I’m going home tonight and throwing out all of the crap. We will probably be left with a bag of carrots when I’m done. Then we’re going to start spending two times the money on groceries as we currently do. And it’s going to be spent at the organic level (i.e. – Whole Foods). I don’t care what it costs because our current household diet is killing me, literally. In just a few years surgery will be required for my Crohn’s if I don’t do something right now. And it’s becoming a proven fact that people with the genetics to have Crohn’s ultimately develop the disease because of THREE TIMES the normal sugar intake of other people. So I’m also fighting to make sure Connor doesn’t have this problem in the future. Lollipops should be a rare treat, not a daily pacifier. They’re getting thrown away tonight.

We will adjust to this new lifestyle and we will exercise. To do otherwise is completely irresponsible. I will gain back the weight I lost during my recent remission and go for an additional 20 pounds as well. This is war and the reward for victory is health and happiness (thanks to lower medical bills).

Specific Carbohydrate Diets detail exactly what you can and can’t eat in the form of carbs. It’s not a “low-carb” or Atkins diet. It’s a diet specifically designed to remove carbs from your diet that the body does not easily deal with or absorb. The only sugar allowed is honey. Nothing else – period. Amy might keep some around for coffee but it’s not going to be in our food. Almost every starch is forbidden as well. And milk is off the radar for me. Obviously Connor can’t be on such a restricted diet but he won’t be stuffing himself with Coke and cookies anymore.

This all sounds kind of hard to achieve but it won’t be as bad as it seems because I’m essentially ripping of the band-aid. So it will only hurt for a second. And I’m also sending notice to all grandparents: extreme deviation will not be tolerated. I’m going to have to go to my mom’s house and hide everything visible in the kitchen.

SCD Allowed Foods for Crohn’s Disease

Quantities are not restricted.

Sugars

Honey is the only allowed sugar product. Not everyone can tolerate it, so use with caution.

Veggies

Most vegetables, fresh or frozen and raw or cooked, are allowed including: asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, beets, Brussell sprouts, cabbage, carrots celery, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, rhubarb, peppers, garlic, lettuce, spinach, mushrooms (unless you have candidiasis), onions, turnips, and watercress. Be careful of raw vegetables when diarrhea is present.

Legumes

Dried navy beans, lentils, peas, split peas, unroasted cashews, peanuts in a shell, all natural peanut butter, lima beans, and string beans.

Meats

All unprocessed meats such as: beef, pork, chicken, turkey, quail, ostrich, fish, shellfish, lamb, venison, rabbit, and eggs.
Some processed meats are allowed, but many require writing letters to manufacturers to verify the absence of restricted foods. Many processed meats contain sugar, starch, corn products, and other disallowed foods

Dairy

All natural cheeses except those listed above are allowed: cheddar, colby, swiss, havarti, dry curd cottage cheese, etc..
Homemade yogurt that has been fermented for a minimum of 24 hours is allowed and encouraged.

Fruits

Most fruits are allowed such as: avocadoes, apples, tomatoes, olives, apricots, ripened bananas, coconuts, dates, berries, cherries, citrus fruits, peaches, pears, tropical fruits, and grapes.

Nuts

Almonds, Brazil nuts, walnuts, chestnuts, filberts, and pecans.

Misc:

The following foods are allowed: olive oil, coconut oil, soybean oil, corn oil, weak tea, weak coffee, unflavored gelatin, mustard, vinegar, saccharin, and juices with no additives.

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WRAL.com – News – Raleigh City Council To Revisit Changes To Curbside Trash Collection

WRAL.com – News – Raleigh City Council To Revisit Changes To Curbside Trash Collection

I am so glad I don’t live in Raleigh anymore. The City council is sticking by the hours MANDATED that you can put your trash beside the curb or get a ticket (i.e. revenue generator).

Who in the hell do they think they are requiring people to take specific actions within 24-hour intervals of their lives?  Two years ago trash men came and got the trash can out of your back yard. But NOOOO, that’s too much service for the people of Raleigh. So let’s rack up some new taxes, build some bad roads, open some old ones to congest downtown a little more, and build an unnecessary convention center AND GET VOTED OUT OF OFFICE!

Vote them out. The whole city council. They want to leave a legacy of greatness, I say we let them leave in shame. Or they can start telling you when to go to bed, get up, what to have for breakfast, no cars in the driveway past 8 am or get fined….

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I heard Skype sucks anyway.

This article was slashdotted today and is undoubtedly getting a bazillion hits:

AMD’s Lawyers call on Skype

Skype is claiming that AMD’s dual cores aren’t sufficient to handle 10 way VOIP conference calls and Intel’s are. What a crock of SH….!!!

Maybe Skype didn’t do their homework before building corporate bias into their software (the “GetCPUID” function). Let me help them. Skype read this:

Dueling Cores: AMD vs. Intel

Or this:

CNET Prizefight: AMD vs. Intel Dual Core (cut to the chase: AMD won all 7 rounds).

And here’s a very thorough test by ExtremeTech:

“While Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition 840 acquits itself fairly well in a number of benchmarks, there are also some disturbing trends. In some tests, such as Cinebench 2003, AMD’s X2 sees greater gains in performance than the Intel CPU. In more theoretical tests, such as Passmark’s Performance Test, Intel generally holds its own—except in floating point, where it loses by a wide margin.”

Everyone who’s done this level of testing professes that while the Hyper threading helps Intel at running multiple applications simultaneously (like 12) the AMD chips smoke Intel in single instance apps because they handle the floating point better. And when AMD invokes on-board diagonal memory addressing Intel is doomed because AMD will have a solid solution for handling 4 cores. Intel doesn’t have a chip with architecture to begin handling it so they might go to market with a 4-core chip in 2007 (Clovertown) that won’t have an on-die memory controller. “This bandwidth problem will be exacerbated by the fact that Intel still won’t have an on-die memory controller, which means that memory traffic will be flowing to all four cores over that single, dated FSB.” What’s Intel gonna do when the day comes that we want to use all flash memory without a FSB? Personally, one day I want a 19″ flat panel calculator with 200GB of flash memory and 256MB of video ram plugged straight into 8 cores. In my spare time I’ll get in Pcad and Pro-E and get it rollin’ for us.

So Skype can try to pull off a corporate partisan move and sell out to the marketing monoliths (they won’t even admit they’ve tested their software against AMD chips) and unfortunately they may succeed. This level of technology is beyond the argument of the justice system in that there is not judge or jury capable of analyzing performance results of multi-core processors to a level capable of discrediting a bogus claim such as this one made by Skype. The science and tech sector must rely on a platoon of lawyers outgunned by a lack of technological competence in society at large. Their task is monumental; to find a jury of “peers”. Does this mean everyone at Micron, Honeywell and Motorola should prepare for jury duty?

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Just another Friday.

I made it through my first week of a new job. There’s a lot to be done and a lot of planning required but nothing is broken requiring constant, emergency attention. We’re building, not fixing. It makes for a enjoyable environment. Some of the things that I’ll be doing soon include transitioning a 2003 Small Business Server to individual domain server components, building a new 2003 Exchange server and migrating the existing mailboxes, installing new AD servers and terminal server licensing servers, and putting some new 3Com TippingPoint VPN concentrators in place to bump up the VPN tunnel count while integrating SNMP monitoring. No rocket science, just some straight forward tasks that if planned correctly will be simple and painless.

On to other topics since the new job info’s getting stale: Amy loves her new job at Jefferson Pilot Financial. We went out to lunch today an discussed the timing of our next baby. She may want to work into next year before getting pregnant again. It will help if Connor’s a little closer to kindergarten too. Connor is the big man now. He really thinks he’s about 16 now that he’s in a big boy bed and getting potty trained. He can actually sit at the kitchen counter in the morning and have a little conversation with us. Every morning he tells me about the dreams he had. It’s so cute it’ll almost make you cry. But he’s still suckin’ his thumb and carrying around his blanky. He won’t go to day care without it. And lollipops and Elmo are the most important things in the world.