Intellitarian: The New Pink; The New Brown; Eating 2.0

I'm going back on the wagon.  It was four awesome years of meat and dairy free goodness.  If you read this blog (which you don't) then you may have read my post earlier today Coal: It's What's for Dinner. 

Lately (6 months or so) I've been eating some of the shit that I swore off.  It was under the guise of an editorial I read (or thought I read) in Saveur Magazine some time ago.  The gist: an old Chinese grandmother who was on her deathbed and she was craving all the foods that she had sworn off: meat especially.  That struck a cord with me - sure maybe I could live to be strong and healthy, and live to 200 years old - but if all I get to eat  is sand and grass, what's the point.  I like food - a lot. I mean, look at me.  :-o

Well I'm jumping back in head first - inspired by what I read and wrote about coal above; the awesome reads of Diet for a New America and Fast Food Nation that still haunt my brain; and my general lethargic shitty feeling lately.

What dose this mean?  Well, Intellitarianism (or Intellarianism - I haven't decided what to call it yet) is coming.  It's not a fad, it's not a lose-weight-quick-scheme. It's eating smart, eating for you, eating for life.

Want to know more? Keep your eyes peeled.  If you are anxious, inquire within.

No wait, Mercury: It's What's for Dinner

UPDATE: Apparently someone has "said in ain't so".  My update here.

Someone please tell me that this is not accurate.  Woman buys compact fluorescent light bulb for $4, breaks it while installing it (we've all done that) and spends $2k cleaning up the mess.  The article goes on further to do math:

As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.

Are CFL's a really bad idea?  I know Mr. Gore reads this blog, so please shoot me a note across your internet (when you get a moment) about what we are supposed to do with this paradoxical environmental conundrum.

Coal: It's What's for Dinner

Are you kidding me??  Coal?  In my pet's food?  Good work China America!

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance [made from coal], called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

It's made from coal!  Fucking coal!  How is this acceptable - to anyone! Cut out the middle man and feed Fluffy some good ol' Kingsford Briquettes.  They stay crunchy in milk at least.

Ya know, for the past 6 months I broke a promise to myself.  I've been eating all the shit that I know not to eat.  Smart guys like John C. Robbins and Eric Schlosser have told me what's in that meat / dairy bullshit that you are about to stuff into your face, and it disgusted me.  If you can't keep a promise to yourself, who the hell can you keep one too?

10 Stunning Facts About Microsoft’s Profits

I haven't "checked the math" but seems plausible.  So is $55M per day enough to start a true-to-form Windows rewrite?  I surely hope so.  I'm pretty sure they can get it done, they just need the reason. 

Microsoft today announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In other words, Microsoft’s daily net income is about $55 million. That’s $55 million in pure profit every 24 hours. Do some quick math and you’ll learn it takes Microsoft only about…

• 10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
• four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
• four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
• one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
• two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
• two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
• 18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
• 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
• five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
• 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.

Source: 10 Stunning Facts About Microsoft’s Profits

War on Terror Board Game Tournament in Los Angeles this Weekend!

War on Terror Board Game Tournament at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood.

Anyone interested in going to this with me this weekend? They will be selling and playing the War on Terror Board Game.

It is between La Brea and Fairfax on Sunset:

7522 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046

I was thinking Saturday late morning / early afternoon (depending on NHL playoffs) and then grab lunch afterwards. Thoughts?

60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For

This was a fun article in Esquire.  My two favorites: 

5. Black Cat espresso from Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.
A triple. Note the exceedingly heavy body, with chocolate, caramel, and dried-fruit notes. Also note that you're vibrating. That means it's working. intelligentsiacoffee.com.

37. Speaking truth to power.
Thomas Becket. William Wallace. You.

Possibly the World's Best Super Mario Bros Video Evar.

Nerd makes world's hardest Super Mario world.

Chinese gamer plays world's hardest Super Mario world.

Asshat finds video on the Internet and adds frustrating, yet amusing, commentary.

Hilarity ensues.

.: QED

If you have 24 minutes of your life that you would not like back, enjoy this video courtesy of our boingboing friends.  I got a good chuckle out of it.

How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons

 One of my favorite people on the planet, Mr. Bruce Schneier (of Crypto-Gram and Facts fame) wrote a commentary piece on Wired today:

I see this kind of thing happening over and over in computer security. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were more than a hundred competing firewall products. The few that "won" weren't the most secure firewalls; they were the ones that were easy to set up, easy to use and didn't annoy users too much. Because buyers couldn't base their buying decision on the relative security merits, they based them on these other criteria. The intrusion detection system, or IDS, market evolved the same way, and before that the antivirus market. The few products that succeeded weren't the most secure, because buyers couldn't tell the difference.

How do you solve this? You need what economists call a "signal," a way for buyers to tell the difference. Warrantees are a common signal. Alternatively, an independent auto mechanic can tell good cars from lemons, and a buyer can hire his expertise.

I concur with his overall point (as I eat most things out of his hand).  I do not have a solution to this problem, but would like to help create one.  FWIW, most security products that I've seen seem to be the worst security products.  To date, I still use PasswordSafe - because at least this way only myself and Bruce can get to my pwlist.

Thanks to boingboing for pointing this out. 

Technorati tags: tech, security, schneier, fud

The World’s First Desktop Cloaking Device - Hide Yer Pr0n

This is bloody fantastic.  The StealthSwitch is a foot controlled peddle under your desk.  Click it and it will minimize all your applications, or all except a certain couple.  When the unwelcomed boss visitor leaves, click it again and go back to your never ending Never Winter Nights saga.

I want to mod this for my 360. :)

Netscreen Woes

So I have this WRG614v1 (the original - aka WGR614) that I just won't let go of. It's not that I like it, to the contrary, I actually hate the damn thing. But I refuse to get rid of it for one primary reason - bandwidth.

I have a fairly cheap and reliable internet connection that runs at about 8Mbps sustained. That's pretty awesome. The WGR614 is an 802.11g router, which should do 54Mbps. Since all I really care about is the Internet (and not LAN traffic) from this access point, as long as my connection speed (usually 54Mbps) is greater than my internet connection (usually 8Mbps) I'm happy - and in this case 54 > 8. So I don't want to go by the latest POS that will simply fail on something else. Now perhaps when 802.11n is finalized and supported I'll upgrade for better video and intranetwork LAN support (read: I'm waiting for a 360 adapter). Until then, I'm keeping the damn WGR614).

So two things that I'd like to point out to you if you are using a WGR614.

1. Disable Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) from the "WAN Setup" tab.
2. Disable Packet Burst Mode from the Wireless Settings tab.

These two things were tricky to find, and were the result of trial-and-error. But once I turned them off, the WGR614 stopped acting so damn weird with my Dell Latitude 610. I guess now I'll stop raping bandwidth from the other local access points. :)