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News you can use
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May. 7th, 2008 @ 11:28 am
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If You Could Change One Thing About Your Metabolism, What Would It Be?
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May. 3rd, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
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Me, I think I'd like to have back the tolerance to caffeine I had when I was in college. I could drink a gallon of sweet iced tea and sleep like a baby that night. These days I have to be careful about even having a diet coke with dinner if I want to avoid insomnia.
Current Mood:  tired |
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Audio stream of the All Things Considered story I was in today
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May. 3rd, 2008 @ 08:57 pm
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90160617
I didn't get as much airtime as I expected; my half hour of interview was edited down to, oh, 45 seconds? I dunno. Part of that was my fault; when they asked me for suggestions of who else they should talk to, I recommended a few other people, and they DID interview those people, and hey-presto, I was just one of several voices. And they edited out the part that actually linked my quasi-amusing anecdote to how I came to actually *apply* the term 'spam' to mass posting via discussion group and email, but hey, I doubt anyone at home really cared that much. It was fun anyway.
Current Mood:  accomplished |
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BBC link
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May. 2nd, 2008 @ 11:16 pm
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All Things Considered
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May. 2nd, 2008 @ 07:20 am
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If anyone cares:
I will be part of a segment on the history of Internet spam this Saturday on the NPR radio program, "All Things Considered" (which generally airs around 5 pm local time on your local public radio station).
http://www.npr.org/templates/stations/schedule/index.php?prgId=2&showNav=1 takes you to a website where you can look up your local NPR station.
I may get a decent chunk of time. The interviewer told me the story would be presented in a "let the subjects tell the story in their own voices" format, as opposed to a Q&A format.
Hopefully I won't sound like a nut; they produce their programs to take out a lot of the ers, ums, and long-winded rambling, so with any luck I'll sound like I know what I'm talking about.
Current Mood:  amused |
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NPR
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May. 1st, 2008 @ 07:43 pm
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An interviewer from NPR Weekend All Things Considered will be interviewing me for a short segment on spam. She'll be calling me tomorrow morning. Whee!
Pro: NPR segments are cleaned up, edited, and produced with anything that would make the interviewee sound like a complete babbling moron taken out. (I once heard them play an interview's "before" and "after" version as part of a segment on how they make the show. Night and day.)
Con, or in any case less Pro: I'll probably get twenty seconds, if that, actual airtime. But hey. It's NPR!
Current Mood:  geeky |
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Durgin Park
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May. 1st, 2008 @ 07:12 am
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Tuesday evening I walked from my hotel in the Back Bay section of Boston over to the Quincy Market/Faneuil Hall area. It was drizzling and very very VERY windy; I can't tell you how many ruined, abandoned umbrellas I spotted lying around on sidewalks or dumped next to garbage cans. When I got to my destination, the Durgin Park restaurant at Quincy Market, it was CLOSED.
CLOSED I tell you.
Given that it was founded in 1827 and has been there through thick and thin, I didn't think they'd close for anything short of an ice age. But posted on their door was a sign informing one and all that they'd had to close due to a gas leak.
No kidding; I went around to the other side of the building and there was a huge hole in the sidewalk, a smell of rotten eggs like you wouldn't believe, and about a dozen police, fire, and utility vehicles all getting in one another's way as the workers around the hole tried to patch the leak.
 
 
I wound up walking from Quincy Market over to the North End and Little Italy and walked morosely around, pondering whether I felt like going in to one of the dozens of nice Italian restaurants in that part of town, but in the end, slightly damp and on my own with no one to eat with, I sighed, caught the subway at City Hall, and wound up getting soup and a sandwich at the Au Bon Pain in the Prudential Center, near my hotel. So much for my venture out into Boston culinary life.
Current Mood:  restless |
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Okay, I Suck
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May. 1st, 2008 @ 06:55 am
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No more memes for me. I post an ask-me-questions meme and NO ONE responds. Probably no one's reading this. I should go away and eat worms.
Current Mood:  rejected |
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Seven Questions of Cibola
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Apr. 30th, 2008 @ 10:44 am
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From ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) saxikath:
Ask me seven questions. Not just any seven questions though. No, to keep it interesting, use the seven questions as per below - just copy and paste the following, replace the blanks with something you want to know/ask (e.g. 3. Donkeys or sandcastles and why?), anything you want, personal, silly, surreal or deep, comment away and I'll answer honestly as I can! Then post this in your own LJ and see what kind of things people want to ask you!
1. What do you think of _____________ ?
2. When did you last ____________?
3. __________ or ___________ and why?
4. What did you ______________?
5. What's your favorite ______________?
6. How would you ______________?
7. Who would you most like to ________ ?
Current Mood:  contemplative |
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Bahston
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Apr. 29th, 2008 @ 06:33 am
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I'm in Boston, back at our offices at 116 Huntington. Flew in yesterday. Annoyingly, there are no longer any any direct flights from Burlington to Boston.
When I started at IDX (before we were bought by GE) ten years ago there were two competing airlines, US Airways and Business Express (which got bought by Delta) that BOTH offered about eight flights daily to Boston, and they were always pretty full.
Post September 11th, we've generally only had one airline offering direct flights, and recently whichever airline had been doing it shrugged and said "oh, forget it, not worth our trouble." I don't know if the fuel prices have made it unprofitable for airlines to do Burlington-Boston flights. I do know that the passengers were there; the last time I flew the flight routinely they were always packed and people were waiting on the standby list.
So I flew Burlington-to-La Guardia on a tiny little US Airways prop plane that was just loads of fun to be on in a thunderstorm, then La Guardia-to-Boston on the US Airways shuttle. I would have gotten here far faster if I'd just driven, but I hate driving in Boston traffic. And I hate paying $48 a night for parking. Even if I can expense it. Sigh.
And then I realized that when I'd hastily packed on Sunday night that I hadn't packed a rain jacket. Meaning that a vigorous cross-Boston walk for 3-Day training purposes would have to be conducted in a short-sleeved t-shirt. Stupid me. I've packed for so many trips that once in a while I just plain forget something.
Then I had an idea. There's a great Eastern Mountain Sports store a block away from our office, on Boylston Avenue, and you can shop their website and then have them hold your order for you. I looked and found that they were having a sale on Techwick wicking shirts, so I ordered a couple long-sleeved, good for a brisk outdoor hike in chilly weather, and one short-sleeved (the sale was best if you bought three) and picked 'em up last night. Provided it's not pouring tonight I'll go out anyway.
Maybe I'll walk from the Marriott at Copley Place, where I'm staying, over to Faneuil Hall for dinner or something. Round-trip, that'd be a hair over four miles. I used to do that sort of thing all the time when I was in Boston but then it got old and I started doing a lot of "oh, maybe I'll do that tomorrow night." (And that's why I'm overweight these days.)
Current Mood: apathetic |
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If It Was Any More Fun, It'd Be Illegal
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Apr. 27th, 2008 @ 08:38 pm
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Manatees!
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Apr. 27th, 2008 @ 07:57 pm
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A month ago Carole and I went snorkeling with manatees.
Whee! It's finally out. Of course, my Livejournal userpic has been me swimming with a manatee for the last month so the secret's not been kept all that well, but nonetheless, we've been in that ugly state of mind where we've done something really neat-o but don't want to post about it until we can select from the hundreds of photos and dozens of short video clips we took and put up a page summarizing how awesome the experience was.
I think I'd have probably had it all up lang syne, but I had that wretched cold that lasted for two weeks.
Anyway, we went down to the west coast of Florida, to the town of Brooksville, for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. While we were there we went drift diving in the Rainbow River near the town of Dunnellon. We'd been told by the most-recommended local dive operator that his manatee snorkeling tours were all full up for the days we'd be in the area, but happily, after we got back from the drift dive it turned out that they'd had a couple spots open up and we got to go manatee snorkeing after all.
Manatees, it turns out, are like big kitties. They love having their bellies scritched. Carole wanted to take one home.
See the photos here:
The drift dive: http://www.furrs.org/images/rainbowriver/default.htm
The manatee snorkel: http://www.furrs.org/images/crystalriver/default.htm
I'm sure Carole's going to have a lot more to say, so I'm going to let her read this and comment.
Current Mood: happy |
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3-Day
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Apr. 22nd, 2008 @ 08:33 am
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I started my Breast Cancer 3-Day training, such as it was, yesterday with a 2.5 mile walk. I'd meant to do more this past weekend but I was still battling the aftereffects of that horrible cold, and so was Carole. So no walking.
Be that as it may, I doubt that many casual readers of my livejournal are really going to be all that interested in daily or thrice-weekly posts about my training log. (And besides, I still feel a bit silly about 'training' to walk sixty miles when I have co-workers 'training' to run a marathon on Memorial Day. Always deprecate my own efforts, that's me!)
So I've created a custom friends group that all subsequent (or most, anyway) training-relating postings will be posted under. If you want to be in that group, let me know and I'll add you and you'll be able to see them. Casual readers, however, won't.
Current Mood:  calm |
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Lake Champlain Is Rising, Man, and I Don't Wanna Swim
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Apr. 19th, 2008 @ 11:08 pm
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With apologies to the Tragically Hip.
Lake Champlain is past flood stage and is still rising, albeit slowly. If we'd had our usual April rains, we'd be looking at some serious high waters and closed local roads. As it is, the Burlington waterfront is awash in lots of places. Carole and I felt well enough (we're both almost completely over our horrible, yucky, persistent colds) to go out today in the nice unseasonably warm 80-degree weather to get some sun and take some photos of the flooding.
See 'em here: http://www.furrs.org/images/risingwater2008/default.htm
Current Mood: tired |
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Catboy
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Apr. 19th, 2008 @ 10:29 pm
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Obscure Grains
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Apr. 17th, 2008 @ 06:33 am
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Lately I've been reading a lot about alternate grains, the ancient grains still used in parts of the world, such as amaranth, sorghum, and so on. There are lots of ancient grains out there that we Americans don't ever eat but which serve as staple crops elsewhere on Earth. Broadly speaking, there are cereal grains that are closely related to wheat (spelt, kamut, triticale) and there are cereal and pseudocereal grains that aren't closely related to wheat and which don't have gluten. For the obvious reason, this latter category is what people with celiac disease use.
The thing is, as many of you may know, that without gluten, it's very hard to make bread that looks and feels like wheat bread. The stretchy gluten protein you get from the glutenin and gliadin in wheat flour is what gives bread its texture and structure; it's what keeps the cells in the bread intact as the bread rises due to the leavening. Without something to help the bread form structure you get a dense, flat bread. Thus, people who try to replicate the look and feel of wheat bread for celiac sufferers tend to use certain gums (like xanthan gum) and starches to help the non-wheat bread form structure.
I don't suffer from celiac disease. Not in the slightest. But I am interested in baking with non-wheat grains, partly because I'm curious what they wind up tasting like and partly because I'm curious what you have to do with them to get them to form usable bread. I haven't tried doing a lot of completely wheat-free breads but I've done a lot of loaves lately that are half-wheat, half something else. King Arthur Flour makes a twelve-grain flour that has just about everything under the sun in it, and Bob's Red Mill makes amaranth flour, sorghum flour, you name it. Even coconut flour. I've really enjoyed the wheat/amaranth yeast bread I've made; it has a bit of a nutty, sweet taste to it that I find appealing. I've also tried using sorghum flour in combination with wheat in yeast breads and again, found the results very promising. I've had to add a bit of vital wheat gluten to get them to rise the way I like, but that's no big deal.
Last night I tried something a little different: I took an absolutely ordinary cornbread recipe, leavened by baking soda, and simply substituted amaranth flour for the cornmeal. Since the amaranth flour was ground much more finely than your typical yellow cornmeal, the resulting product was very different in texture, but good. I also substituted brown sugar for the white sugar in the recipe since, annoyingly, I'd let myself run out of sugar. The end result was a very light, mildly sweet table bread, not heavy like cornbread can sometimes be. I think it might have benefited from a little bit of vanilla extract, but on the other hand, adding vanilla extract would have masked the amaranth taste.
One of these days when I've got the time and I'm feeling good, I'm going to try to make an a completely wheat-free yeast-leavened loaf. The only thing that's stopping me is that your typical celiac-friendly non-wheat loaf recipe calls for six or seven different flours, like tapioca flour, rice flour, garbanzo bean flour, and even almond flour. I don't know enough yet about the chemistry of each of those flours to know which are really essential and which are just the result of fussy bakers wanting something to taste a particular way. I don't really want to buy a bunch of $8 bags of obscure little flours if I can achieve some sort of worthwhile results simply using a couple of grains and some xanthan gum (which I do have) to form structure.
Stay tuned.
Current Mood: contemplative |
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Virginia Tech
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Apr. 16th, 2008 @ 07:17 am
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Today is the anniversary of the brutal killings that took place a year ago at Virginia Tech.
If anyone reading this wants to watch the official remembrance ceremony, it starts at 10:30 AM Eastern time. There'll be a webcast of this evening's candlelight vigil as well.
Not a day has gone by since last April 16 that I haven't thought about what happened. And not a day has gone by that I haven't reflected on why this event, horrific as it was, has stuck in my memory in a way that the September 11 attacks did not, in a way that the killings at Columbine did not. It seems wrong in a way that, narcissistically, I've spent so much time glooming over the deaths of 32 people and the woundings of 25 others when every day thousands of people starve to death around the world, when every day untold numbers die in car accidents, when every day cancer and other diseases claim the lives of loved ones. I feel stupid, lame, and selfish thinking so much about the charnel house on the second floor of Norris Hall when there's so much tragedy around me in the world -- and I don't even notice it.
But nonetheless, I lie awake at night visualizing what it must have been like to be in one of those four classrooms while a madman stalked the rows of desks firing, firing, reloading, and firing again. I think about the statements that a mother of one of the victims made, noting that when she arrived in Blacksburg the day of the shootings and asked if she would have an opportunity to identify the body of her daughter, she was told by police that there would be "no point"; Cho apparently took sadistic pleasure in shooting the faces of his victims. I visualize the lakes of blood in the classrooms. I visualize the nightmares of the wounded victims, lying among the dead, wondering if Cho would be coming back to finish them off.
I was six hundred miles away at the time Seung-Hui Cho wreaked his bloody havoc on the campus of Virginia Tech. I can't claim to have been affected in the way that someone who works next door to the scene of a shooting can; I can't say "If he'd only looked in the next office, he might have killed me too." But nonetheless I can't stop thinking about the 32 who died and the 25 who were wounded.
In the end, though, I guess it comes down to this: We all have protective filters, erected by our subconscious minds to keep us from thinking about everything's that bad and wrong and tragic around us; it's either that or go crazy. If I didn't have those filters, if I thought about the Twin Towers and Columbine and Northern Illinois University and Oklahoma City all the time you'd find me curled up in a fetal position in my basement.
But my filters aren't working to keep me from thinking about Virginia Tech. I lived in Blacksburg for my whole childhood. I attended graduate school at Virginia Tech. My father worked at Virginia Tech as a professor for pretty much his entire career. Those limestone buildings and the Duck Pond and the Drill Field and the mountains around the town and the look and and smell of the trees and air on a fall afternoon are as much a part of me as anything, anything you can name. No matter how many years I spend living here in Vermont, no matter how old I grow, no matter how much Blacksburg evolves and changes over the years, Virginia Tech and Blacksburg are always going to be first in my thoughts when I think of "my hometown."
And I can't bear the thought of my hometown as the scene of a mass murder.
Current Mood:  sad |
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Charlton Heston
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Apr. 7th, 2008 @ 07:25 am
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I will never be able to think of Charlton Heston without thinking of the one time I laid eyes on the man in person, sometime in 1997.
He'd just authored a book titled "In The Arena: An Autobiography" and had set out on a book-signing tour which brought him to the Borders in Cary, NC where caroleotter worked. A huge crowd had showed up to see him; I'd never seen the store so packed. My wife was delegated to assist with the event, standing at the table and handing him a new book to sign as each person came up. I had nothing better to do that day so I planned to just hover around the edges of the crowd and enjoy the spectacle.
When Heston arrived at the store they had him come in through the back entrance and led him over to the table set up for the signing. He murmured to the store manager that he needed to visit the restroom but when the manager pointed and said "um, it's all the way over there" on the far side of the huge crowd Heston sighed and said something along the lines of "Never mind." He took his seat at the table and started greeting customers and signing books.
He took the time to graciously chat with every single person who came up, most of whom had a favorite movie they wanted to comment on or just wanted to say how much they admired him. I was mildly surprised that no one brought an NRA cap up to have him autograph. Perhaps the store manager had made an announcement that he'd only be signing books.
The signing was scheduled for something like an hour or ninety minutes, I forget what, but instead of just standing up at the end of the scheduled time and saying "that's all, folks" Heston dutifully kept on signing as long as even one person was still in line. He was probably there at the table for a good two hours before everyone had been attended to.
As the event was wearing on and the line had diminished somewhat, Carole couldn't help herself any longer. I'd gotten her to watch The Agony and the Ecstasy a few weeks earlier and she'd been dying for a chance to ask Michelangelo himself a particular question. When there was a momentary pause between one signee leaving the table and the next one coming up, she leaned over and said, sotto voce, "When will you make an end?"
Heston didn't bat an eye. He took the book she was holding, looked up at the next person approaching the table, and muttered, "When I am finished!" Carole all but did a little jig of happiness.
Finally the last person had gotten their book signed and wandered off toward the registers to pay for it. Then Heston stood up, stretched, and quietly told the store manager, "I need the bathroom." They led him across to the bathroom on the far side of the store and waved him in -- and seconds after he went in two kids, around college age, came out looking wild-eyed. How often do you go into a bathroom in a bookstore in Cary, NC and have Moses himself come in after you?
Current Mood:  sick |
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Argh
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Apr. 5th, 2008 @ 08:23 pm
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I hate being sick.
Came down with this on Thursday. Felt awful all day yesterday. Felt awful all day today. At 8:00 PM, took my temperature: 100 degrees.
I don't think I'm on the mend.
Sigh.
Current Mood: sick |
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What I'm Currently Reading
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Apr. 5th, 2008 @ 09:19 am
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Our Man In Havana, by Graham Greene
Current Mood: sick |
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full
