Category: General

Shapely lies

As part of my “get into a shape” project, I rode my Schwinn World Avenue One to work today. I spent a fair bit of time route planning and drove numerous routes with the Jetta during the last month. I found several good choices, all about the same distance, 10 miles. This morning I hopped on my bike and rode off into the 47° drizzling grey morning. I arrived at work in almost exactly the time I expected, 40 minutes. I based my math on an average speed of 15mph and was quite pleased at realizing my goal.

The sense of accomplishment was not to last. I had fallen prey to the greatest of cyclist delusions. When a cyclist happens to be catching a small but favorable wind, the typical response is something like, “wow, I’m feeling particularly vigorous today.” During all my exploratory drives in the Jetta and during the ride into downtown this morning, I had failed to notice the elevation changes. It turns out that riding into town is pretty much downhill the entire way. The ride home was painful. And slower. Much slower.

Psychiatry worth reading

 Man\'s Search for Meaning

Freud’s psychiatry has never held much appeal to me. When I read Freud, I labor my way through because I simply don’t see the world the way he does. I suspect that a substantial portion of mentally healthy humans feel similarly and look elsewhere for psychiatry that is insightful and meshes with their life experience.

Viktor Frankl is one such psychiatrist. I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning. Like the hundreds of other reviewers on Amazon and Audible.com, I enjoyed the book and his perspective. Viktor shares a tremendous amount of insight into humanity that would be difficult to come by without his incredibly vast amount of life experience. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the essence of humanity.

kill-a-watt

Kill-A-WattI’ve finally bought a Kill-A-Watt. Of course, I’ve been running around plugging stuff into it to see how much juice various items use.

  • 252 W: Halogen Lamp
  • 150 W: iMac 24″ under load
  •  95 W : iMac 24″ at idle
  •  80 W : Home build file server**
  •  50 W : 20″ Apple LCD display (2W sleep)
  •  48 W : 20″ Viewsonic LCD display (1W sleep)
  •  45 W : iMac 24″ at idle, display in “sleep” mode
  •  30 W : Two disk Firewire 800 enclosure
  •  25 W : Lamp with 25W Compact Florescent bulb
  •  24 W : MacBook Pro 15″
  •  05 W : Netgear GS108 8-port Gigabit Switch
** I’m very proud of how little power my file server consumes. I went out of my way to reduce power (and heat dissipation) everywhere I could. Housed in an Antec P180b case is a Core 2 Duo T5500 CPU, Corsair 85% efficient modular power supply, 4GB of RAM, Compact Flash boot disk, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of mirrored 500GB disks, and a 300GB disk. I clocked down the CPU, reduced fan speeds, run powerd to reduce the CPU speed even more, and used smartd to spin down disks that aren’t in use. 
And that halogen lamp?  It’s gone.

Lucas and the halibut

Until quite recently, Lucas has been a fairly conservative eater. His tastes are quite diverse but he has lacked the necessary teeth to masticate anything more substantial than noodles. He has recently gained a fully functioning set of grinders and with them, the desire to chew up just about everything. So, did he really like the fresh Halibut as much as we did?  Or was he just enjoying the mechanics of eating it?  Does it really matter?

It’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed fresh halibut. The darned fish was so fresh it flopped right into my shopping cart. I didn’t have the heart to toss it back. I recalled that even a day’s freshness is significant with halibut so I just had to cook it up tonight. I broiled it nearly nude, with only a few pats of butter and a light sprinkling of salt. The tender moist white flesh flakes apart after 10 minutes and it’s ready to eat. Hmm. Hmm.

a whale of a good time

Instead of more unpacking, Kayla suggested we go boating on Saturday. Grandpa Ricardo obliged and all of the Ruby children, Lucas and I tagged along. As we puttered out into the Sound, the topic of whales came up. Minutes later, I saw what could only be the exhaling of a whale. Nearby was a boat which had just motored nearby.

We continued watching for the whales next exhale. After spotting a second exhale, I calculated the trajectory of the whale, turned the boat into his path, and shut down the engines. A little while later, one, and then another whale surfaced 20 yards off the bow of our boat. The second was extremely cooperative and surfaced high and submerged showing us the classic whale tail view, much to everyone’s delight.

Taming my savage Savage

I grew up surrounded by a million acres of the Huron-Manistee National Forest. Every fall, thousands of hunters would come “up North” to hunt deer in the outdoor paradise that was my back yard. Hunting was a way of life in the world I knew. If opening day of rifle deer season fell on a weekday, schools cancelled classes and businesses closed their doors. At 12, us lads were eligible for Hunters Safety and were out hunting. Continue reading “Taming my savage Savage”

iPhone Wish #3

Dear Steve Jobs,

I am certain you have seen the YouTube videos and countless photos of children and toddlers demonstrating the ingenious simplicity of your iPhone. My two year old daughter loves getting a hold of my iPhone. She unlocks it, launches the Photo app, clicks and few times, and proudly shows us her favorite picture, “Big Daddy!”

My 1 year old isn’t quite so proficient, but also enjoys the iPhone in his own way. It turns out the iPhone is a fantastic toy for entertaining young children. I’m not normally interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a child toy but I have an idea that would certainly increase the sale of iPhones and the iPod Touch: toy mode.

Yes, that’s right. I’m asking for a way to turn my $400 phone into a child toy. The gist of ‘toy mode’ is to allow either of my babies to push buttons, navigate around, see my photos, read my email, and otherwise play. The catch is that in toy mode, they can’t change anything. No deleting Daddy’s email. No changing the minimum font size. No placing phone calls to my colleagues.

Imagine of how many iPhones you will sell when babies are teething on them and toddlers are dropping ’em in toilets because parents feel ‘safe’ letting them play with it unsupervised. The prospects of, or horror, actually having to use our old Palm or Windows Mobile phones will spur us back to the Apple Store.

Running Windows on a Mac

You have two good options for running Windows on your Intel iMac: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. I use and recommend Parallels although lots of people prefer VMware. If you aren’t the adventurous type, just get Parallels. If you are using the same thing I am, there’s a much better chance that I’ll be able to help you.

If you plan to run Windows XP or Vista, make sure you have at least 3 and preferably 4GB of RAM. Any less and you’ll have severe performance problems when your system runs out of memory and starts paging. It won’t be an enjoyable experience.

If you have an older Intel iMac that only supports 2GB of RAM, then forget about either and use Boot Camp which comes with Mac OS X 10.5. Then you can partition your drive and use part of your disk for Windows. The disadvantage is that you’ll have to reboot to use any Windows apps. But that is far better than trying to run Windows without enough RAM.