Ert

Cleansing time again - eating healthy for two weeks at the beginning of January

2009-12-15T23:13:14Z

As we do every January, my wife and I will cleanse out our systems by eating uncompromisingly healthfully 24x7 for two weeks, give-or-take.

Our diet pretty much becomes vegetables, tofu, fish and whole grains, with an absolute ban on refined sugars, alcohol, caffeine (except green tea), dairy products, wheat, mammals and birds. She won't be particularly following the bans on those last four or so because of the whole pregnancy thing. I'll also drink all kinds of yucky-tasting herbal solutions purported to help flush the system (generally these ones). (Maybe more than usual! This year I'm drinking yucky-tasting herbal solutions for three!) By the end of it we always feel a lot better -- more energy and less in the way of cravings.

This season we'll be starting Tuesday January 5, and going through to MLK Jr. weekend, stopping sometime in the January 15-18 range depending on what we all end up doing for the long weekend.

You're welcome to join us, either by trying the diet yourself (with or without yucky herbs) or by implementing your own healthy diet and saying "well, at least I can eat more than Ert!" While we do this a couple times a year, I feel the most desperate for a period of healthy eating after the holiday indulgences (and, looking at this year's party schedule, I'm sure to be full of truffles and pinot noir heading into the new year.)

If you're down with the plan, drop me a line.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Every once in a blue moon my MP2 of a 1983 Duran Duran song comes on in shuffle play and it makes me

2009-11-24T04:56:43Z

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Oh, dear, I think I've found a bug in Posterous

2009-11-18T14:27:10Z

Posted via email from Bibliobaby

Kelo v. City of New London overturned by The Great Recession

2009-11-12T21:36:03Z

Everyone remember Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case wherein a closely divided court ruled that the city of New London, Connecticut could use eminent domain to take privately owned homes and give them to Pfizer to encourage economic development that would benefit the entire town? Pfizer wanted the homes so it could expand its New London research facility. The ruling sparked a wave of local laws restricting eminent domain as homeowners feared their houses could be taken and given to corporations.

Turns out the Boston-based developer was never able to secure financing to do what New London and Pfizer wanted to do with the area, while Pfizer has had to cut its R&D budget in the current economic climate. So, on Monday Pfizer announced they would be shutting down their New London facility, leaving the land that they obtained via Kelo and subsequently razed as the urban prairie it is today. The jobs and tax revenue promised as the original catalyst for Kelo never materialized.

This is going to make a great movie starring Julia Roberts.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

iPhone maps epic fail

2009-10-22T13:11:25Z

Our check engine light has been glowing persistently for a couple of days, so this morning I hauled myself out to the car dealership at 6am instead of sleeping like a sane man. (This is the car's check engine light I'm referring to. Mind you, my own has been illuminated a lot this season, too.)

Because we're staying in Waltham during our home renovations, it's more convenient to go to the dealership in Natick instead of the one that I usually go to. So last night I Googled the place, made a map, and mailed it to myself. This morning when I awakened I got my mail on the phone and called up the map as I left home.

A few minutes later, car in motion, I discovered the map was taking me on a different route than the one that I generated last night. Hm, that's funny, I thought. But I could only see the area right around where I was driving on the map, and I figured that for some reason the phone had routed me along the freeway instead of the surface streets that Google Maps had selected. Sure enough, the route took me to the freeway.

Having completed my merge onto the freeway, closer examination of the map indicated that my 19 minute journey was now predicted to be a 31 minute meander. Hm, that's funny, I thought. Still yet closer examination indicated that I was being routed to an entirely different city.

Everyone remember the episode of Doctor Who where people's GPS nav units start murdering them by telling them to drive into rivers, etc.? My phone thought that my sleep depped brain wouldn't notice the switch. Westborough! Who knows what treachery was in store for me if I hadn't spotted the subterfuge?

What followed was a 45 minute laugh riot involving repeated attempts to plot the unplottable spot and right the unrightable wrong. The guy who answered the phone at the dealership wasn't from the area and couldn't give me clear directions. The street address he eventually gave me would've helped a lot more if I'd remembered I was heading to Natick and not Framingham. Repeated attempts to start from the beginning by Googling the dealership insisted that if I would just investigate their suggested destination in Westborough I wouldn't be filleted by Sontarans, not even a little.

Eventually I just threw away all the maps and drove in the direction of the hazily remembered destination on the laptop screen the night before, and that got me here.

In the future, I'm just going to follow Polaris, thank you very much.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from ert's posterous

The universe is testing me

2009-09-18T14:35:22Z

After an overfull week, I'm now home sick for the day, working on set lists for the few weddings I'm DJing in this next month.

Last night, I dreamt that I was in a large group at some kind of nerd camp in the states, where challenging questions were being asked of each person. I was asked to "name three Canadian songs with awesome guitar solos." I struggled, and and couldn't do it. I came up with Canadian songs with excellent accordion solos and tin whistle solos and bagpipe solos, Canadian songs with great lyrics and vocalists. Rush and Neil Young were hazy, slippery memories. I blamed it on being sick. The others looked sadly away.

The shame, it still haunts me.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Nigerian gold!

2009-09-05T01:11:25Z

Looking at sublets, I am now corresponding with someone from Craigslist who says she is unexpectedly out of the country with an "important job", but can rent me her (surprisingly cheap) apartment short-term with rent.com as a broker. Her process is outlined below. Does anyone see any way this *isn't* a scam? There is additional weirdness not outlined in the following missive. Do you just throw this stuff away or send it the FBI?

...

To start the renting process i will be needing your full name and address, to pass it onto Rent.com. They will send you an e-mail notification shortly after that, which contains all the instructions about payment and delivery.
Regarding the payment, you will be instructed to deposit 3 months rent in advance, to a Rent.com account. They will hold and insure your money until you check the apartment and decide if you want take it or not. If you decide to rent the apartment, 2 months rent payment will be sent back to you and one month rent will be sent to me. That is how their renter protection policy works. If you will decide to pass and start looking for another place,Rent.com will return your money, and i will be supporting the service fees.I require the payment in advance at Rent.com for security purpose, also I don't want to end up paying Rent.comfor this service without any result.
Upon payment is received and verified by Rent.com, an Agent will deliver the keys and rental contract to you in person so you can inspect the apartment.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Cleansing time again - eating healthy for two weeks at the end of this month!

2009-08-14T23:47:14Z

As we have so often done before, aerynne and I will cleanse out our systems by eating uncompromisingly healthfully 24x7 for two weeks, give-or-take.

Our diet pretty much becomes vegetables, tofu, fish and whole grains, with an absolute ban on dairy products, refined sugars, alcohol, caffeine (except green tea), wheat, mammals and birds. I'll also drink all kinds of yucky-tasting herbal solutions purported to help flush the system (generally these ones). By the end of it we always feel a lot better -- more energy and less in the way of cravings.

This season we'll be starting Monday, August 24, and going through to September 4.

You're welcome to join us, either by trying the diet yourself (with or without yucky herbs) or by implementing your own healthy diet and saying "well, at least I can eat more than Ert!" While we do this a couple times a year, August is totally the time to try it because of all the fresh produce around.

If you're down with the plan, drop me a line.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Jogging in a rainstorm

2009-07-30T14:27:18Z

Prescription goggles, baby!

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Credit card fraud. Credit card cancelled. At least the process is efficient.

2009-07-29T21:09:25Z

Someone in Dublin buying groceries with my credit card, the one that's in my pocket here stateside. Minutes later I'm on the phone, canceling my card.

*#@$. I'll miss that card number. Had it all nice and memorized, and just finished updating my recurring payment people with a new expiry date, which I was also fond of. It's nice that they seem to catch this sort of thing rather easily nowadays, though.

The strange annoyances of the 21st century.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Posterous does work, but lifestreaming has the pros and cons of raising a mongrel

2009-07-22T18:09:42Z

Having now chased my first über-crossposted posterous-sourced entry across my little blogosphere, I note that I needed to look a little more closely at the tagging syntax, but overall I'm pleased to see the right bits plugging into the correct slots.

However, watching posterous cram a single little post into Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LJ, Delicious, WordPress, Posterous itself and anywhere else I had configured would be more amusing if I wasn't actually trying to use this as a real posting vehicle. Each site has varying features, but the lifestreaming thesis, if there is one, is that blogging/microblogging/photoblogging/statusizing/etc. has been around long enough now that an essential set of core features has been identified and can be boiled down to a pretty straightforward interface. Content is either long text, short text, pictures, or movies, and those all theoretically have a 'correct' place to go on any particular service.

After a single post, though, you notice that it's not inherently obvious where to put each of those pieces, nor that those are all the pieces that exist. Posterous turned my post into a link that went up on Delicious (which I've been neglecting for so long I hadn't realized that they'd regenerated from their del.icio.us incarnation), when I would've probably preferred it to mine links out of the post itself and keep them, perhaps (?) tagged with the link text. In fact, I turned off Delicious "crossposting" when I saw how it is implemented. Twitter, meanwhile, was correctly tweeted (ert proudly abusing neologisms since 2010) with the subject line of my source email, but then I've got the post.ly link to the whole text, which might be what I want and might not.

Still, it is just dead simple, and that's what I wanted.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Playing with my posterior - uh, I mean, my posterous

2009-07-22T17:18:46Z

My aforementioned lifestreaming conversions are now more-or-less complete, and Posterous has won out as my main input to the whole morass, even though Sweetcron's inventor singing Sweetcron to the tune of Bravestar was adorable. We'll see how long this lasts.

Posted via email from ert's posterous

Lifestreaming

2009-07-04T01:20:54Z

So I've been giving a lot of thought recently to the tangled web that has arisen from the organically trimmed aging world of my online presence. Blogging, microblogging, photo sharing, video sharing, comment posting, social networking, and all the other ways I appear here and there on the web have sharded across a couple dozen different services, fallback usernames, and decaying caches of former haunts. My friends, professional colleagues, aquantances, and admiring spambots are haphazardly connected to me via one service or five, and I'm less and less sure where I want to post my missives. I've spent some time thinking about the various usernames I use -- 'ert' is certainly preferable but often taken -- and the services where I have some level of presence -- LJ, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr -- and been trying to boil them down to the essence of what I want to do with them and what experience teaches me that I'll be able to do with them.

The catch-all neologism for the idea of getting this all under one roof is lifestreaming, and I've been looking at some of the services that purport to help you get on top of everything. I'm someone who wants to continually take what was yesterday's bleeding edge - in this case blogging, photoblogging, and the like -- and build on it as nothing more than a well-understood platform. Having a central service that tries to give me a main interface to this morass of online socializing is a very attractive idea.

I gazed at Sweetcron for a while, dreaming of an infinitely customizable online presence and seduced by its Appleesque icons, yet worried about the installation and maintenance effort required. Current signs point to Posterous and its delicious no-registration-required interface as the way forward.

At the end of it all, I expect there will be some serious rebooting of this blog. Stay tuned.

Hang gliding

2009-06-20T22:35:38Z

Down in North Carolina for a family reunion, a couple of miles south of Kitty Hawk, and on a whim yesterday I tried hang gliding for the first time.

Really really fun. Much more fun than I expected it to be. If I found snowboarding more natural than skiing (or waterskiing, for that matter), I found hang gliding more natural than snowboarding. The thing that you've strapped yourself to wants to fly, getting off the ground is easy.

Landing a bit trickier, mind you. I fell unceremoniously out of the sky a couple of times in a heap and have a few bruises to show for it. It's now very clear to me why the Wright brothers chose this part of the country to try their famed experiments: Falling on a sand dune is relatively pleasant. By the end of the afternoon, though, I'd managed to come down on my feet and not fall over in the attempt. I'll probably be trying this again.

Google Wave

2009-05-28T17:20:51Z

They just finished the Thursday morning keynote here at the Google developer conference which was mainly the initial presentation of Google Wave, which is a well thought out communications engine. Think GMail + LJ/Blogger/Wordpress + IM + Subversion + Basecamp, all with Google Maps and YouTube and Flickr etc. all built in and lots of realtime zippiness.

Rosy, the auto-translating plugin, is incredibly cool. An obvious application of Google Translate, but I think it's really going to change the world. The ability to do online collaboration with people who don't speak the same language is the awesome.

Google I/O 2009

2009-05-28T02:59:23Z

I'm out at the 2009 Google developer conference, and you can totally see the effect of Google's $1M+ per employee per year revenue. They have money to throw at the attendees, so they do so. And, honestly, they've done an amazing job making a conference that's aimed at software developers:

They assume that most people here have laptops and/or smartphones with them, but no paper or pens. All of the sessions have power strips every few seats, the wifi is free (and heavily utilized), etc.
They gave everyone free Google Android smartphones and encouraged them to activate and use them at the conference. Taking pictures of the barcodes on attendee's badges or session title slides sucks the contact info into your phone.
Dress code is pretty easy-going. Overdressed East Coasters such as myself are not just wearing button-down shirts but also failing to wear jeans. There are two women wearing skirts, and I suspect that everyone here knows that number precisely.
I've never seen so much source code in a keynote speech before.
Video games everywhere. I'm currently sitting in a bean bag next to a couple of guys playing five-year-old Modest Mouse songs on Rock Band.
There are warning signs that end "...There may also be robots armed with cameras so if you don't want to be captured on camera, please don't walk up to or talk to the robots." And they're not kidding.

Unsurprisingly, the M:F ratio is somewhere between 20:1 and 50:1. It seems it's become more balanced as the day has progressed, and I'm not clear if that's deliberate. It makes my hormones scream "reproduce now or you'll never get another chance!!"

You never call, you never write

2009-03-24T21:24:30Z

So I just stopped by Quantum Books in Kendall Square, only to discover that it closed a year ago this week. I suspect this is just desserts for too much shopping at Amazon. Even Quantum's online shopping operation, which was supposed to continue functioning, is gone.

So, (1) where does one now go to browse technical books in Cambridge, and (2) who has solid recommendations for a starter Python book for someone coming from Java and Perl?

Spring!

2009-03-24T17:18:35Z

Back from Montréal

2009-03-23T18:29:53Z

Back from Montreal where aerynne, alethia_juturna and I visited waylay (with a nod to a completely insane travel schedule on alethia_juturna's part, but what else is new?) We saw Spirit of the West open for Great Big Sea, with the highlight being the two bands on stage at the same time, including a performance of "Political" where GBS's Alan and SOTW's John alternated singing the leads on the verses.

Skin of Evil

2009-03-12T19:47:32Z

The U.S. government continues to wrestle with the idea of setting up a "Bad Bank" -- a place to put all the evil "toxic" crap that banks have amassed over the last few years, thereby leaving what remains of the titans of the financial sector clean, unsullied, and ready to do business. Sweet, sweet business.

Haven't we seen this before, however? Sure, there was the Swedish bank rescue in the 1990s, but I feel somewhere earlier I heard about a race of titans collecting all of their evil into a single entity for easy disposal. Anyone remember how it turned out?

A little experiment

2009-02-09T05:13:34Z

aerynne and I are trying an experiment this year: We scheduled this week off for skiing, but didn't decide where we were going until Thursday night. The general idea was that with really really short notice we could go to where the snow not only already was, but was predicted to be over the next week.

So it turns out, after briefly flirting with Norway (and the Norwegians, oh, the Norwegians!), that we're now in Lake Tahoe as we have been so many times before. But this time it's all based on meteorological science 'n marshmallow fluff.

I can't say that I've convinced myself that the weather is actually as predictible as we need it to be, but at the moment I'm sitting in an easy chair between a fire and glass of wine, the snow is pouring down outside, and aerynne, her brain still in the eastern time zone, has at 9 pm fallen asleep for the third time today. I have exceedingly high hopes that we'll arise before the dawn and make it out for first tracks, and they'll be in back bowls on deep fresh powder.

Climate wars

2009-02-02T16:25:54Z

CBC Radio has a program called Ideas that is currently airing a three-part series called "Climate Wars," hosted by military historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer. Here's part of his intro:

About two years ago I noticed that the military in various countries, and especially in the Pentagon, were beginning to take climate change seriously. Now, it's the business of the military to find new security threats. It's also in their own self-interest, since they need a constant supply of threats in order to justify their demands on the taxpayers' money, so you should always take the new threats that the soldiers discover with a grain of salt. You know, never ask the barber whether you need a haircut.

But I did start to look into this idea that global warming could lead to wars. It turned into a year-long trek talking to scientists, soldiers and politicians in a dozen different countries. I have come back from that trip seriously worried

I've listened to the first two parts and it's got that Canadian calmness projected onto the incredibly frightening scenarios and certainties that Dyer describes. It's also really interesting to hear climate change from a military-threat perspective (with some new-to-me bits of science thrown in -- I hadn't previously heard about the permafrost-methane problem, for example.) It's also pretty terrifying.

For the rest of this week all three parts are available on their website and podcast. Highly recommended.

Obamarama

2009-01-20T22:12:26Z

aerynne and I are in D.C. for the inaguration. Crowds are unbelieveable. Got up at 5am to make our way in 7 miles. But there's a cool president in the white house! Well, next to the white house at the moment.

End to U.S. Imperialism!

2009-01-18T19:04:31Z

So, if one is to believe the egreeting card vendors desperate to spead flash animations of teddy bears far and wide, today is Metric System Day.

All signs point to continued U.S. support to Myanmar and Liberia in the imperial axis-of-leaguel, but the riff-raff are getting uppity. Revolution soon, hide your yardsticks.

Are there marks for effort?

2009-01-07T04:34:58Z

Tonight's Cleanse-friendly meal: Pan-Seared Ahi Tuna with Balsamic Glaze, Japanese Steakhouse Style Zucchini and Onions, and Garlicy Rice.

Well, the "seared" became "cooked", the glaze was over-reduced, and the zucchini and rice were slightly overdone. But it was all reasonably tasty and next time I'll make that left turn at Albuquerque.