8 foods to eat everyday (with alternates)

1. Spinach (kale, bok choy, romaine lettuce)
   
2. Yogurt (kefir, soy yogurt)
   
3. Tomatoes (red watermelon, pink grapefruit, Japanese persimmon, papaya, guava)
   
4. Carrots (sweet potato, pumpkin, butternut squash, yellow bell pepper, mango)
   
5. Blueberries (açai berries, purple grapes, prunes, raisins, strawberries)
   
6. Black beans (peas, lentils, pinto, kidney, fava, lima beans)
   
7. Walnuts (almonds, peanuts, pistachios, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts)
   
8. Oats (quinoa, flaxseed, wild rice)
   

(adapted from Best Life)

The Dalai Lama’s instructions for life

Here's what some friendly person had to say about how to live life. I can't remember who said this; might have been the Dalai Lama, or Jesus Christ, or Mark Twain, or Oprah, or Allah, or Buddha, Abe Lincoln or my Grandpa, or a British World War II veteran, or somebody like that.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three R’s: Respect for self,  Respect for others, and Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and  think back, you’ll  be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your  love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Happy new year from Le Blog Exuberance!

San Francisco's lunar eclipse, August 28, 2007: the view from the street

From San Francisco, the proud capital of the great state of Northern California, observations about the lunar eclipse of August 28, 2007:

3:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in San Francisco: no cars around, so I'm standing with my tripod in the middle of the street. I'm excited by the shot I'm seeing, next to this giant orange glowing orb at a petrol filling station, at the same time I'm psyched out and terrified to be standing in the middle of the street, dressed in black, at an ungodly hour. I could get hit by a car, mugged, smacked by a bicyclist.

A tall black pimp and his tweaking white trash crack whore walked by; when I heard their steps and looked up, the pimp said pleasantly, "Hey, what's up man," and I replied, "Lunar eclipse — check out the lunar eclipse!" He looked up in the direction I pointed, smiled  and said "Oh yeah, that's cool!" They sauntered on into the dawn.

A few minutes later a more sketched out looking black homeless man came walking by. I was on full alert; he stopped on the sidewalk to ask me for change, a weak plea he repeated three times.

A few cabs came by. A Mexican guy walked by. A couple of cars came by; each time I moved to the side then walked back into the middle of the street to line up the shot — the eclipse and the 76.

More good stuff:

• My photos of the lunar eclipse of 20 February 2008
• My lunar eclipse photos on Flickr »

Technorati Tags: eclipse, lunareclipse, MissionDistrict, moon, PotreroHill, Unocal76

How to STOP junk mail: get off mailing lists, save the environment, and get your life back!

(UPDATED JUNE 15, 2007) Every month, your home mailbox probably gets a bunch of catalogs, credit card offers, AOL discs and CDS, and all kinds of advertising. We call that “junk mail” and it's out of control! Look at all that paper, and think about the energy that goes into making and sending it —  a huge waste.

You can actually stop junk mail. It's easy.

Use this online form to get off mailing lists. Trust me, it's worth it. 

You can also call the toll-free 800 number on the junk mail catalogs and ask to be removed. They usually have that option built right into the telephone menu system. Be patient when you make the call, because the “stop sending catalogs” option is usually at the end of the call menu. But really, it only takes a moment and you will be doing good — do not give up!

After you make the effort, it takes about 2-3 months for the mail to actually stop being delivered.

Be persistent. You know as well as I do that most of the crap coming in the mail is useless and unnecessary. It's all just pushing you to spend more money, to buy more stuff that you know won't actually make you any happier. So quit it already.

Kill your junk mail, and have a good time doing it!

Remember: every time you subscribe to a magazine or buy something from a catalog you usually get signed up to junk mail lists. If you notice in a year or two that you're getting more junk mail, then do it again - pay the damn dollar the stop that damn junk mail.

Do your part to reduce waste and  energy consumption. And while you're at it, cancel your cable TV,  eat more fresh vegetables, and walk instead of drive. Shut off lights and computers when not in use. Be proud to care for the Earth. Say no to reckless consumption.

And most of all, remember that you alone possess the power to stop junk mail. Do your part now and go over to the Direct Marketing Association's DMAchoice.org website and get yourself off the lists. It's the right thing to do.

* * *

You can read more about stopping junk mail at these sites: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Do-it-yourself: Stop junk mail, email and phone calls.

50 most interesting photos

From my Flickr stream ~ my 50 most interesting photos:

America's most dangerous drug

Technorati Tags: America, democracy, drug, media, television

How I'm keeping my edge

They say all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy.

In praise of simple kitchens (life is real good)

My kitchen is the best kitchen a man could have. For over ten years, deliriously good food has been prepared and consumed in my kitchen, sustaining life for me and scores of friends thousands of times. My kitchen has served a party for 60 people in my 12' x 18' room. Countless drinks have been prepared on the counter, snacks have been snacked, spills have been laughed over.

I am a wealthy man.

{Anybody who tells you that you need more from a kitchen — they're wrong.}

{Love makes the kitchen.}

Technorati Tags: ecologicalfootprint, gratitude, happiness, kitchens, life, love, peace, SanFrancisco

IBM Punch-card to HTTP Mechanical Translator

SAN FRANCISCO:  The last living IBM punch-card programmer in the United States has invented the Ingenious IBM Punch-card to HTTP Mechanical Translator. Mr. Harold Williams, currently of the Island Sands Retirement Community of Pensacola, Florida, worked for International Business Machines for 45 years, up until 1996. That was when the rise of the Internet made his specialty — punch-card programming — as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

It was in 2002 when two young Internet entrepreneurs, Mr. Dave Collegian and Mr. Jared Marlburr, came up with their idea to meticulously hand-write the HTML behind their web site building business. After years of using WYSIWYG HTML tools (such as the nightmare-inducing Dreamweaver), the two business partners, who work under the name Curdled Iron Design Dot Com, decided that computers had taken the fun out of writing code.

“At first, it was enjoyable to use WYSIWYG tools to build web sites. After hand-coding the 'first draft' of the web from 1994 through 1996, I was eager to use a tool that made HTML coding less onorous. But that schtick grew old,” says co-founder and art director Jared Marlburr. “I wanted to get back to our grandfather's craft of computer code, to when you could still smell the pixel ink on your fingers,   when 'WYSIWYG' still translated as 'motherly love' in Yiddish, and   when striking a character still meant something more than tapping the delete key.” Mr. Marlburr paused here and turned to the typewriter on his desk, and added, “I guess I just wanted the simplicity of that golden time in our past, when computer code wasn't just another high-tech endeavor.”

Mr. Collegian broke in to add his view: “It's sort of like the late 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution changed the way people related to work. Instead of producing something for yourself, like raising food or being  a blacksmith, everyone became a worker in a factory, mass-producing goods on a huge scale, which everyone then consumed uniformly. It was dehumanizing, and in reaction to it, you had people like William Morris and Gustav Stickley, who spoke out against the new industrial society at the dawn of the 20th century. They led a movement away from industrialzation and toward hand-craft. From that, we got the ever-popular Arts and Crafts Movement, which produced a ton of good architecture, furniture, publishing, glass work, metal craft, pottery, et cetera, et cetera.”

So it was one evening in the fall of 2002 when Mr. Collegian and Mr. Marlburr, at the time both employed at a large web development company in downtown San Francisco, decided to bring handcraft back to writing HTML code.

To do so, they   went to a dusty stationers supply store in the gritty South of Market area in San Francisco, where, caked in dust, sat the detritus of the previous decades' office equipment: big metal file cabinets, mimeograph machines, paper organizers, and typewriters. They purchased two 1952 Royal Typewriters (“and a huge box of ribbons,” Mr. Collegian said). 

Taking these typewriters back to the office, they tossed out their recent-model PCs and  got to work, typing onto page after page the HTML code that would generate their web site.

Mr. Collegian at work, writing HTML code by hand.

“It was really liberating, you know, to just throw off the shackles of tech convention and go back to this really organic and real way of doing things. My friends thought I was crazy, but after I wrote my first page of code on the typewriter, I knew I'd never go back to coding on a computer. It's just... it's almost beautiful, really,” Mr. Marlburr said.

The business partners spent the next few months coding a web site for a medical non-profit agency into their stacks of onion paper. Then came the next challenge: getting that code onto the internet. “Well, honestly, at first, I wasn't sure how we were going to deal with it. I mean, coding by hand is all fine and good, but you're pretty much stuck if you can't get that beautiful hand-crafted code into the hands of the end-users, right? You have to basically get that code onto the computer at some point, because that's the only place it does any good,” according to Mr. Marlburr.

John Schwarzen, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the author of the influential “Pearls of the Internet: The 100 Best Web Site Ideas That Haven't Yet Been Done (And That Someone With The IQ of A Mason Could Get Rich On)” [sarah - insert amazon link here - thx], wrote recently about the two hand-coders. “What they did is really remarkable in the history of computer science,” Mr. Schwarzen told us.

Mr. Schwarzen with one of his inventions.

“Still riding on the optimism and innovation of the web's glory days of 1998-2000, these two guys committed  to a whole new way of writing code, with an emphasis on hand-craft that was largely ignored in corporate America at the time. Sure, it was unusable unless you could get it into the computer, but the zeitgeist was wildly optimistic. We licked the Y2K bug, right? Tivo, broadband, free e-mail, OS X — great ideas and innovations were coming at a furious pace, and they figured it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a good code translator.”

That was where Mr. Harold Williams, the IBM punch-card programmer, came in. Since he retired, Mr. Williams enjoyed passing his ample spare time by noodling in the proverbial woodshed, where he had a Linux cluster running on a T1 line. “I actually don't pay for the T1, but don't write that,” he joked. Mr. Williams showed us around his shed, which is in the back corner of his medium-sized lot in suburban Florida, next to a mulch pile and not far from the swings his grandchilden were playing on. “I've got a Linux cluster running here, about six blade servers too, a couple of UPSs, here's the 6 terabyte RAID thingy, a couple of old SCSIs I still use, that's the tape backup, I keep the whole thing running from this Powerbook — make a note there, it's the alu-minimum version, not that titanium thing — and yeah, a couple of flat-screen displays, yeah, it works pretty good.” This was Mr. Williams's hobby ever since he had left IBM.

What caught the attention of Mr. Collegian and Mr. Marlburr was the new machine Mr. Williams had written about on his blog, “I Dream of Selectric Sheep.” [sarah - i tried to google this but couldn't find it - firewall or something ? proxy server? ask tim in i.t.]  Mr. Williams had done something remarkable with his so-called “anniversary” punch-card machine. (It has this name because it was the 10,000th punch-card reader/writer made by IBM, which was given to Mr. Williams by the Aetna Life Insurance and Casualty Company of Hartford, Connecticut upon the machine's retirement from service in 1985.) “I figured out a way to take the mechanical information off of these punch cards, and convert that into a binary signal which I could then pipe into my Apache web server.”

To the untrained ear, Mr. Williams may sound like he's verging on gobbledegook, but what he did was no small feat. Through an intricate series of connections, involving hundreds of components, Mr. Williams was able to convert the data encoded on old IBM punch cards into modern binary computer data. His machine uses parts including:

• a series of 64 glowing glass tubes, which he salvaged from a sequential run of unsold RCA Victor television sets manufactured in 1966
• over 600 yards of copper wiring
• 16 different 24-karat gold connection points
• 14 sizes of plastic gear wheels
• 30 feet of metal rod of various diameters
• over 300 individual solder points
• over 500 transistors
• and over 1,000 capacitors

Some of the components in the machine.

After finishing his machine in 2003, Mr. Williams blogged about it online but found no-one interested in his achievement. “I really felt like I had reached the end of the line,” Mr. Williams soberly remembered. “I had spent the better part of 4 years working on this thing, and had sunk most of my grandchilden's inheritance into it, too. I couldn't afford to fail, either economically, or emotionally.”

But Mr. William's invention came to the notice of the young men at Curdled Iron Design Dot Com. “We knew Hank's machine would be the perfect compliment to our hand-craft ambitions,” said Mr. Collegian. Curdled Iron paid Mr. Williams to bring his machine to San Francisco on a U-Haul truck, where they set it up in Mr. Collegian's Cow Hollow-neighborhood flat. “That thing hummed to life the second we plugged it in. The feeder tray, right here, is where the conversion process started.”

The Punch-card to HTTP Mechanical Translator, set up in Mr. William's studio.

Because the punch-card machine is both a writer and reader of punch cards, the team was able to feed in the sheets of hand-typed computer code into a special tray that Mr. Williams jury-rigged. “It wasn't a big deal. Basically, here's the in-box,” Mr. Williams pointed to a slot on the top of the machine. “You drop in your hand-written code here, one sheet at a time, and it converts that sheet into a series of holes in the punch-card blanks, right here.” He pointed to a stack of cards waiting for their data holes to be punched. “The machine then punches the holes in the card according to the technique which I had backwards-engineered, and then the card is shuffled over here.”

Mr. Williams then pulled up a lid on the back half of the machine. “Here's where the translation to binary code happens. Part optical, part mechanical, part magnetic.” He paused. “And maybe a little bit of magic dust, I suppose.” Coming from the machine was a single Ethernet cable, which fed into a blinking router and into the main system. “And here's where it all comes together, on the web.” We stopped to look at a slowly-advancing status bar on his computer monitor. “That tells us that the HTML code is being re-assembled and is checking out OK.” Mr. Williams punches a few keys on the computer keyboard. “Yep, that's it. Beautiful hand-crafted code, straight from the typewriter to the internet, with a little help from an ingenious  IBM Punch-card to HTTP Mechanical Translator.”

 

Traffic school blues

Recently while driving one morning in San Francisco, I didn't yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and got a moving violation. I paid the fine, and chose to enroll in online traffic school. Today, I did just that, at SkilledDriver.com.

After spending four hours reading through 36 long pages of traffic education and taking multiple quizzes, I completed that course, then was sent (via Web browser) to the National Traffic Safety Administration (https://secure.ntsa.us/) to take the final exam.

Immediately, things got ugly: virtually all of the questions on the exam had no precedent in the traffic school course. After hours of studying at SkilledDriver, it turns out that I was barely prepared for the official government exam.

I had no choice but to use Google to find the answers to questions like “If you are convicted of driving with drugs or alcohol in your body, the judge may give you 48 hours to ____ months in jail” [possible answers: 12, 6, 2, 3, 9]. There were some questions for which I couldn't find the answer at all, even on the California DMV's Web site. Some exam questions weren't even hinted at in the traffic school course — e.g., “A vehicle that is stopped, parked or left standing on a freeway (even if disabled) for more than ____ may be removed.”

Things got even uglier when I clicked to complete the exam and have it graded: every single question came up as incorrect, because somehow the question/answer correlation got screwed up by their software. For example, “Proof of financial responsibility must be maintained by ____. [Incorrect answer:] 0.08%” Now, obviously, the “.08%” answer was in response to a question about blood alcohol levels, but somehow it got attached to a question about proof of financial responsibility.

Exasperated in this colossal failure of such a simple software routine, I took the exam again, and for my efforts — I got a blank page. In desperation, I hit “Reload” on that page, and finally things improved: “You have passed the final exam with a score of 87%.”

Here's a screen shot of the final exam results (click to enlarge):

What a supreme waste of my time. SkilledDriver.com let me down, and the NTSA let me down. And now I'm left wondering — did the Frisco cop who cited me also jack me around? I'm an exceptionally cautious driver and I was surprised when I got pulled over for supposedly not yielding to someone in the crosswalk — something I'm highly conscious of here in crowded San Francisco. Maybe that cop just randomly pulled me over and figured, correctly, that I wouldn't question his judgement. Now I've paid over $220 to the County and the traffic school people, I've wasted most of my work day dealing with bad instructional software, and I'm suspicious of even the premise of my “violation.” What a sham!

SkilledDriver:

800-559-8766
customerservice@skilleddriver.com

National Traffic Safety Administration:
800-539-8188
cs@ntsa.us