The Major

Author: FourMajor

  • I Saw Some Crazy Ish Yesterday

    Yesterday, I was out with Mom near her place, returning with her groceries in a City Carshare car. We were waiting to turn left at Monterey and Foerster. All of a sudden, we hear several harried beeps coming from a car across the intersection to our left. We look, and there is a car flying around the corner, out of control. He swerves left, now going west on Monterey. Rather than coming to a stop, he stays on the accelerator, swerving back to the right and very soon runs into a tree.

    I quickly pulled into a nearby parking lot, got out, and started running to see if they guy was OK. Unfortunately he had backed up and drove off, car smoking.

    His car was smoking so much that I figured the first policeman that saw him would pull him over. I start on my way again, and only a block away I see him again, dirt and grass wedged in his car grill. This time I was able to get his license plate number. I pulled over and called 911. Halfway through my short conversation, I heard sirens.

    I am guessing he was caught. It didn’t look like he did too much damage to the tree, but he certainly should be held accountable for reckless driving. Besides that, there was clearly something wrong with him that I am sure he could use help for. Hopefully the police were able to connect him with the help he needs.

  • Early Motivation

    After my monster workout a couple of days ago, I am finding it hard to muster up motivation to work out. I think I need two things to succeed:
    – no hangovers. Hard to avoid on New Year’s Day, even though I didn’t drink much on NYE.
    – early to bed, early to rise. Mags just left for a week this morning for work out of town. This involved going to bed late and waking up early. This shall be fixed tonight! And I’ll still work out tonight, after I feel a bit more “with it.”

  • Today By the Numbers

    Today’s weigh-in: 159.5 lbs.
    Goal weight for February 1: 150 lbs.
    Pounds I must lose per day to reach this goal: .297
    Calorie deficit needed per day: 1,039
    Hours on the bike trainer today: 1
    Minutes biking on city streets: 50
    Minutes running: 43
    Miles run: 4

    Here is today’s running route:

    View Larger Map

    Happy New Year!

  • Cliche Fitness in the New Year

    Our honeymoon is over and so is the holiday visit to the East Coast. In between the two I got some form of the flu that was one of the worst illnesses I have had. It lasted about a week.

    With all of this comes a few extra pounds and also some restlessness – the need to move, to feel the cold air, to breathe hard, to be sore. Basically, I need to get back in touch with my body after all of this.

    I have stayed pretty fit and healthy ever since I took off about 50 pounds a few years ago. But I never did get all the way to my end goal. So that’s what I’m going to do here, cliche or no.

    I don’t have a detailed plan as of yet. But the idea is to exercise as much as I can without injuring myself. I want to run. A lot. And my buddy Peter-man gave me a bicycle trainer. So I can use that when I don’t feel like going out into the weather, or if I have limited time. I can do calisthenics in the garage and also hit up 24-hour fitness. So, I just want to make sure I exercise a lot every day, and within a couple of weeks I may put together a more structured plan based on what I know works.

    As far as diet, I want to eat healthy stuff like I usually do, allowing myself the occasional treat. I’ll probably have to set up a set of rules for this so I don’t have a slippery slope problem.

    I want a big component of all of this to be data and blogging. I want to track my runs, including their times and their routes. I want to track my weight daily. And I want to take pictures of my progress.

    Exciting times! I know I can do it, and I could use all of your encouragement!

  • Thoughts From Today’s News

    I find myself getting more and more jaded about what goes on in our society. So I felt the need to share my feelings about recent goings on.

    Juan Williams was fired from NPR for a bigoted remark about Muslims he made on the O’Reilly Factor. And, in the society we live in, we have people writing in to NPR – not just Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, but actual listeners – to voice their displeasure at his firing.

    If the remark had been made about African Americans instead of Muslims, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. All but the fringe would just say, “Yeah, OK, of course that makes sense. Dude’s gotta be fired. Why are we even talking about this?”

    Usually I don’t like NPR; their reporting is often called “liberal” but unfortunately that is far from the truth. They parrot all of the establishment assumptions about things like the moral integrity of our political elites. But at least in this case they’ve done well.

    Elsewhere…

    I am really glad to see Meg Whitman down 8 points in the polls, according to KPFA morning news. It really gives a little bit of hope for our society. She has spent $141 million of her own money on this governor’s race, and it’s not going to buy her the election. Jerry Brown, by contrast, has spent about a tenth of that and is winning. Sure, he’s not perfect – he is likely far from it – but he is also far from being as bad as Meg Whitman.

    Also, I heard today that there is a Tea Party movement in Europe. God help us…

    And, I watched a few news reports about the French protests. I personally think the protests are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Interestingly enough, the things that I have heard about the protests have included people saying “Of course, everyone knows that the pension age must be raised. However, the unions have to save face.”

    Really? They _must_ be raised? There is no other possible place in the budget that can be cut, or taxes can’t be raised?

    This reminds me of what is going on right now in San Francisco. The MUNI workers (bus drivers, etc) are being scapegoated by local politicians for MUNI’s woes, saying that their salaries should be lowered and benefits cut. I’m not the biggest fan of MUNI workers, but we’re looking in the wrong place for the source of the problem. Almost no one is bringing up the possibility of greatly cutting the salaries of managers and politicians. For instance, MUNI head Nat Ford makes over $300,000/year. How is this not a problem?

    That is all.

  • Got My Gaming PC!

    Computer games used to be just a waste of time for me. Sure, they were fun, but they did me more harm than good.

    When I heard that Civilization V was coming out in September 2010, I knew I had to play it. But these days, the only computers I have are a Macbook and an Eee PC. Both of these computers are woefully underpowered for the task. Something surely had to be done…

    I have loved the entire Civilization series. It is truly engrossing and it is really fun to build an empire from the ground up. Besides that, I feel like I am missing out on experiencing the art form of our times: video games.

    So, I set out to get a gaming computer. For a while I thought I would get a gaming laptop. But, with my budget being limited (about $600), I knew that I could get so much more in a desktop. I had a few requirements: lots of RAM, small physical size, Windows 7 (I didn’t want to use a nine-year-old OS, and I wanted Direct X 10), decent video card, low power usage, and quiet.

    Here’s what I ended up with:

    • Shuttle barebones: case, motherboard, 250W PSU
    • AMD Athlon 2 64-bit 2.9Ghz dual-core processor
    • 4GB PC8000 RAM
    • Radeon 5700 1GB video card
    • Wireless NIC
    • Windows 7 Home Premium

    For my hard drive I used an old 120GB IDE drive that I had sitting around. I also used an old DVD-ROM that I had sitting around.

    If I had another $250 to spend on it, I’d get an SSD as my hard drive and up the RAM to 8GB.

    Since Civilization V won’t be out for another couple of months, and because it won’t be the only game I’ll ever want to play, I went onto the Interwebs to see what else I should get. I perused the past few years of top games on ign.com and decided to get Company of Heroes (an RTS from 2006), The Witcher (an RPG), and Empire: Total War (an RTS/TBS hybrid).

    So far, Company of Heroes has arrived. I played it for about an hour or less last night. It seems like a pretty solid game. I like how the soldiers take cover.

    I realized this morning that I actually really like the fact that it is a desktop computer and not a laptop. We don’t have a desk at home. Well, rather, we are using my desk as our dining table. My big 24″ monitor lives, covered, on a side table in the living room. We uncover it when we want to hook it up to a laptop for a movie or some such. Because we don’t have a desk, I need to borrow the dining table when I want to game. This means moving everything over there and plugging it all in, and unplugging it and putting it away when I am done. This will result in more “intentional” gaming sessions and less gaming because it is just so easy to start. This means less time wasting and procrastinating through gaming, which is a good thing!

    Although, when Civilization V comes out, I am pretty sure I am going to have to set aside a weekend to play the hell out of it. Also, I think I should try to organize a small LAN party. I can throw an Ethernet cord down to the garage. With folding tables, I think I can get maybe an eight-person LAN party going. Ah, just like old times…

  • mysqldumpslow on FreeBSD

    Because it took me 15 minutes to figure it out, and because Google was no help… to get the mysqldumpslow command installed on FreeBSD, use the databases/mysql51-scripts port.

  • G20 Coverage Comparison

    Just a quick and dirty update… you can use Google to look up the relevant clips if you’d like 🙂

    The other day, I heard a brief piece on NPR describing the G20 protests in Toronto. The correspondent described the protests as having turned violent due to the smashing of some corporate shop windows (Starbucks, Urban Outfitters) and setting fire to a police car. One can argue whether property destruction should or should not be categorized as violence. I say it shouldn’t, but that’s not the point here…

    To say that the protests turned violent due to these acts and then not mention the arrest of 600 peaceful protesters and beating of many by police is an example of remarkably dishonest coverage by NPR, not that I expect anything better from them.

    Contrast that with the recent Democracy Now update which spent more than twenty seconds on the story. Democracy Now covered the overwhelming violence used by police as well as the property destruction. Democracy Now always puts almost all mainstream news to shame. Imagine that – actually looking at the facts on the ground rather than passing everything through a pro-authority, pro-capitalism, pro-US-government filter. It’s amazing what results from using that technique.

    To conservatives that think that all progressives look to NPR and Obama as their heroes and leaders, please know that many of us don’t.

  • Call of the Wild and Stanza

    I just finished reading Call of the Wild by Jack London. I had been wanting to read something by Jack London for a while because, of course, he is regarded as a great writer, but also because he was a radical leftist.

    Call of the Wild was a somewhat enjoyable read. I’ve definitely read better, though. The story seems a bit out there.

    I read Call of the Wild on my iPhone using the Stanza app. I got the book for free from Project Gutenberg because this book is in the public domain, along with a great deal of other books. The app was a breeze to use: just tap left or right to flip pages. And when you start up the app it remembers which book you were on and which page on that book.

    I am going to at least start reading American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky next. It was his first political book.

  • Processed Food as Poison

    Every couple of years I seem to read a book that is really influential to my thinking and my life. A couple of examples from the past six years or so are Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky and Expect Resistance. I read another book recently that also falls into this category for me: In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. It is a really excellent book that has completely revolutionized the way that I think about food. Yes, I ate pretty healthily before reading In Defense of Food. I ate a close-to-vegetarian diet, got regular exercise, maintained a healthy weight, and regularly ate fresh, organic fruits and vegetables.

    However, I am now able to think of food with a much more basic framework that makes a lot of sense. Pollen has three basic rules, which he has put right on the cover: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Of course, Pollen gives lots of background and evidence, and goes into much more depth on these rules. But he has done an excellent job of summing up the whole book into these simple rules that will make it so easy for anyone to remember.

    The key was really for Pollen to redefine what you think of as food. For all of the things that you think of as food, stop thinking of all of that processed, refined crap as actually being food. Corn is food. High fructose corn syrup is not food. The idea is to get to the basics. Think of a healthy, local, grass-fed cow as being food. Don’t think of a McDonald’s hamburger as food.

    One rule that I have thought of myself that isn’t in the book is to think of this processed crap as actually being poison. After we got back from San Diego one week ago, which is where I read the book in a day and a half (it was that good… and I had that much time on my hands 🙂 ), I haven’t drank any soda. I had been in the habit of having two or three Diet Cokes (with its artificial sweeteners and other strange things that I didn’t really know what they were) a week and one or two ginger ales (with its high fructose corn syrup) a week. That went immediately down to zero when I got back. It didn’t take any effort, and I didn’t look at it as a sacrifice. I simply realized that that crap isn’t food, and in fact it is poison.

    Yes, I am going to commit a writing faux pas, but I think it is helpful in this case. Poison, defined:

    a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism b (1) : something destructive or harmful

    This pre-packaged, processed, artificially flavored, artificially colored, artificially fertilized, unnatural crap is exactly that: poison. It kills through obesity, diabetes, cancer, and countless other ailments, not to mention the problems of industrial agriculture like global warming, poisoning of our land and water supplies, and workers’ rights.

    Here’s to a healthier life through real food.