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Monday, October 5th, 2009
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I would have put in Borderline by Yoko Kanno instead of my original number 10. *sigh*
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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One must spend a lot of one's night dreaming about toilets. I was obsessively cleaning one with lemon-scented cleaner when the alarm woke me.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Featuring Woody's madrigal group (still unnamed :P)
Kaleide Theatre, RMIT city main campus, enter via Swanston Street near Commonwealth Bank.
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I had a skin reaction last night (boo!) which I attribute to the amines in the chicken. So I can't do any more skin tests currently until that settles. Other than that, I think the salicylates are doing no more than giving me a runny nose.
Today I tried honey. It is actually quite low glycemic. I had no glycemic-related problems with it, so I'm now seeing how well I tolerate it from a carb perspective. According to the "Specific Carbohydrate Diet" it should be fine, but I'm also fructose intolerant and honey contains fructose, albeit in reasonable ratios with glucose. It's probably an ideal testing ingredient for me for fructose tolerance, since, unlike fruit, there's no acid content or fibre to confuse things. All this provided I continue to tolerate salicylates reasonably. Honey is a very high salicylate food, but the level of salicylates varies widely with the brand and possibly the batch.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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I have a love/hate relationship with carbohydrates:
lactose intolerant, fructose intolerant, problems with starchy foods etc.
So I have on occasion given up on carbs altogether. The first time I did this I was pleased to discover my brain functioned much better - no carb-induced brain fog. Also I noticed that I lost weight, leading me to jokingly refer to it as my "lamb-chop diet". I would joke about it with colleagues and friends, how I lost weight by eating lamb chops. This was before the Atkins Diet was in the news and became popular.
People argue this way and that about why the Atkins diet does or doesn't work. It is quite clear to me (and probably anyone involved in glycemic index-related research) why it works. By avoiding carbs, the dieters are avoiding the high-glycemic carbs that cause insulin-induced blood sugar variation. Eat high-glycemic food -> get increase in blood sugar -> body produces insulin in response -> blood sugar drops a bit too far -> person gets hungry and eats something that is probably high-glycemic.
You don't need the Atkins diet to get the same effect of lowered apetite. Exclusively eating carbohydrate sources that are low glycemic gives the same effect. Whenever I've been doing the strict carbohydrate control there are a couple of days of withdrawal symptoms (headaches, hunger, nausea), then it all settles and I don't feel any hunger pangs at all. I do tend to feel a bit lower in energy for a few days though as getting to the body's fuel seems to be more difficult than in a high-glycemic cycle. I've also noticed in the past that I've needed less sleep when eating this way - though that hasn't happened yet this time around. Initially I needed more sleep - though that could be because I wasn't actually eating enough.
I can see why this approach would be the least difficult way to diet, as you don't have hunger getting in the way so you can choose how many calories to consume without feeling like you're desperate to eat more. However, you can't really "cheat" on it. If you consume something high-glycemic you then get the hunger spike and can lose control of things.
Anyway, currently I'm eating my usual eggs, lettuce, canola oil and cashews plus I've added in some more vegetables and chicken. I really had to add chicken because I was a bit low on protein from eggs and cashews alone. Some symptoms have cleared; others are stable but not fully gone.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
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“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.”
Gertrude Stein
This was on another Christmas cracker filler. Typing a segment into Google got me to a site about following your dreams.
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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
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After the last testing phase I concluded that I wasn't tolerating lentils anymore - at least not in the quantities that I was eating them. I am still ok with cashews thank goodness.
Anyway, after a recent lot of skin reactions that didn't get better with strict amine control while not controlling anything else, and got worse when I started eating lots of almonds (low amine but high salicylate) I'm wondering if high quantities of salicylate affect my skin. Previously I only thought it affected my respiratory system.
so I'm currently doing a test: low everything, then exponentially increment the salicylate.
I really miss lentils at this point, as my calorie intake is really low, which also causes problems. I also really noticed that pumpkin is high glycemic. I was using it as my salicylate source but got terrible glycemic-related symptoms this morning (hunger spike followed by nausea and general unwellness). So tomorrow I'll start to use carrots, which should give me fewer problems.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
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I had kept a bunch of pieces of paper containing quotes that had been in Christmas crackers. I finally tossed them. Here's one quote that I like:
"To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." - Anatole France (1844-1924)
Also a pair of quotes on change:
"Things do not change: we change." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"You can't step into the same river twice." - Heraclitus (535-475 BC)
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
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I've been trying to transfer video footage from S-VHS tapes to computer. I finally surmounted various problems: got VCR fixed when it got wedged, solved the format problems, solved the audio levels/quality problem as best as possible and a few other issues. However, two problems remain: I have a couple of lines at the bottom of the image that I can't get rid of, and the image and audio end up out of sync after a few minutes. I can fix the second one manually by realigning the audio with the video whenever it ends up out, but it's highly annoying. I think it'll take me a year to deal with all my tapes at one per day. Not all of them are important to do, but some are impossible to buy and others are my own footage.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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As usual I'm spending some of my leisure time playing with stats. Here is the summary of junk disposals for the first 3 months (90 days) of the year:
| Category | Quantity | Percent |
|---|
| Food/Drink | 31 (23 food, 8 drink) | 34 (25,9)
| | Clothing | 25 | 28
| | Stationery/Media/Office Supplies | 9 | 10
| | Personal Products | 7 | 8
| | Furniture/Appliances/Houseware | 5 | 6
| | AV/Computer Hardware | 4 | 4.5
| | Other Consumables | 4 | 4.5
| | Books | 3 | 3
| | Toys | 1 | 1
| | Medical/Health | 1 | 1
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Compared to http://tigerdenbodu.livejournal.com/131345.html clothing discards are up, as is stationery. Books and personal products are down - I've used up or discarded most samples I had in the personal product category, so the rest disappear more slowly apart from new samples. The "other" category accounted for 20% of stuff so I divided it into appropriate small categories.
I'm well ahead on clothing disposals versus acquisitions now, so things are slightly less cramped in my wardrobe.
In other news: having used up 3 lipsticks since the last batch, I also had fun making up a new batch of lip goo. This is batch number 4 - and since I accidentally melted my plastic lip goo container, this batch has gone into one of the lipstick containers.
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Apparently hydrogen fuel-cell cars are already in production and out on the road. The main thing slowing down their introduction is the lack of availability of hydrogen fuel stations.
http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/drive-fcx-clarity.aspx
There's even a prototype "home energy station" (for refuelling at home) in Australia somewhere. I've sent Honda Australia an enquiry about the availability of the Clarity and the home energy stations in Australia.
In WA (and several other cities in the world) there was a pilot run of hydrogen fuel-cell-based buses. It ran for 3 years and was very successful. Their conclusion was that the infrastructure required for getting the hydrogen was too costly at the moment.
http://www.dpi.wa.gov.au/greentransport/19529.asp
Wouldn't it be nice if the Australian government put money into this infrastructure instead of handing it over to a car manufacturer to build old-style cars.
Provide the hydrogen stations and the buses and cars will come. If we can speed up the use of this technology it should help put a big dent in greenhouse gas emissions.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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I committed to writing in my blog about a tech fem that I respect in honour of Ada Lovelace, who is considered to be the first computer programmer.
I have chosen Suzie the sysadmin. She no longer works for our school but she had great respect from everyone in our school, which is saying something in a computer science field consisting of academics that have an ingrained tendency to criticize everything and everyone - especially in an area that is part of their expertise.
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Saturday, March 7th, 2009
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| You Are Blissful |  You are passionate about life and thrilled with the world.
You aren't just feeling good... you're feeling great. Happiness comes easily to you.
You are a truly radiant person. People feel your warm, jubilant vibes.
You truly make the world a happier place. And a better place too. |
except when I'm not.
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Sunday, February 8th, 2009
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I'm currently in the process of transferring any video footage of value from my VHS and S-VHS video tapes to computer. Then I'll have to get rid of all the video tapes.
Does anyone know of a good place to recycle this stuff? I had a bit of a look on-line and there are some places in other states where you can pay to have them recycle stuff, and that's about all. While I'd be tempted to knit/crochet up all the tape into weird and wonderful things, I should probably find alternative solutions where possible.
Do any of you want second-hand video tapes? Some of the S-VHS ones should still be in good nick even if the old VHS ones aren't. If you do want tapes, let me know how many.
Same for audio tape, which I'm also working my way through...
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Sunday, January 18th, 2009
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Right, so I have mac stuff from the late 80s that I'd like to be able to access.
So I grabbed the mac classic we had in our ceiling (donated from a friend), borrowed a mac classic keyboard and mouse from a colleague and proceeded to transfer stuff from my 20 odd floppies to the classic. So far so good.
The data files are fine, and some 80s apps such as macwrite and superpaint work on the 91 vintage mac classic. Also the excel v1.x files are readable with the v3 Excel on the classic. This mac isn't set up to deal with DOS format diskettes however, so another solution was needed to get the files to current machines. A friend had a PowerPC (mid 90s?) and sure enough it reads old mac diskettes as well as writing DOS format diskettes. Hooray, a conduit exists! So I bundled up my files onto a diskette or two and transferred them to the PowerPC and from there to a DOS diskette and then into the Windows PC, then from there onto the hard disk of a FreeBSD unix machine :)
However... My Excel v1.x files don't load in modern Excel. No problem, I can save as on the Classic to Excel v3 and that does seem to be readable on current versions, phew!
Now for the graphics files. Hmmm, PICT format seems to be a standard. I can use Superpaint to convert all macpaint, fullpaint and superpaint files into PICT on the Classic. However, going from PICT to some current format is tricky. Unix has a utility picttoppm which I tried, but it complained about the file format of the pict file. So I next see if the PowerPC software that reads and writes pict files can generate something more to the converter's liking. So I run ClarisWorks, which is about the only software on the PowerPC, and create a new pict file. This is dutifully copied to the PC diskette and from there to the unix box. picttoppm can make more sense of this file, however it core dumps before writing anything. *sigh*
I should try another file though as it may have been the peculiarities of that file that caused the problem.
Some things are likely to be goners though. Most 80s mac programs don't work properly on the Classic, sometimes causing it to hang. I can no longer run Pro Composer which was one of the first programs I used for generating sheet music. Naturally I don't have midi or anything else of those files as that just didn't happen back then on the mac. Now the Amiga was another matter. They had standard file formats such as SMUS that were used across music apps.
The saga continues...
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
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Excerpts: If you're happy and you know it, thank your friends\227and their
friends. And while you're at it, their friends' friends. But if you're sad,
hold the blame. Researchers (...) have found that "happiness" is not the result
solely of a cloistered journey filled with individually tailored self-help
techniques. Happiness is also a collective phenomenon that spreads through
social networks like an emotional contagion. (...) researchers found that when
an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three
degrees. One person's happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not
only their friends, but their friends' friends, (...).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205094506.htm
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tigerdenbodu's journal
nervous.
calm.
resigned.