Archives for February 2008

MacNotes

February 29, 2008 1 Comment

Well I just went out and purchased a Time Capsule and it’s working just fine & dandy. Time Machine is doing its thing backing up. This is quite cool. Any and all Mac computers in the house (two currently) will fully back up their drives automatically, completely, wirelessly, in the background. I have an AirPort Extreme Base Station, purchased months ago on the assumption that the USB drive one can plug into it would work with Time Machine as a shared drive. Well, long story short: that was Apple’s plan; but it didn’t work reliably, so they ditched it right before Leopard’s release. I didn’t bother to research before buying, and, oh well; the integrated hard drive is a cleaner solution anyway.

I’ll take the AP Extreme up to the cabin where I installed an Apple TV last weekend. We rented, downloaded, and watched three movies in HD. HD downloads take hours on a 1.2 mbps dsl connection, but it did its thing overnight, so everything was ready to watch the next morning. However, I’ll probably just rent in standard def up there from now on. It’s just not worth the money for the higher dsl speed when it’s used so infrequently. Standard def movies ought to be ready to watch pretty shortly after being rented and download commences. Another alternative would be to decide what we’re going to rent before leaving San Jose, rent on one, other, or both of the MacBooks and then just move them wirelessly to Apply TV for viewing, which takes only minutes.

Back to Time Capsule. When I got it home I opened the AirPort Utility in order to copy down all the configuration info, just to be sure. Then I went about setting up the Time Capsule, and guess what? The utility essentially says, "hey, you’ve got an AP Extreme here; ya wanna join that network with the TC, or replace it with the TC?" Replace. So it copied all the config info over, told me to unplug the APE, and everything worked right off the bat without even having to re-connect the notebooks to it and enter the wireless password. Slick. As usual, they thought of everything and what you’d probably want to do. Sure, I didn’t have to spend hours "teching around" so I could impress friends and neighbors with my troubleshooting skills; but I’m secure in that way, after 20 years of teching around with MS clients and servers.

Speaking of MS, I am really ~~disappointed~~ in pissed off at their Office 2008 release for the Mac, and I really hope Apple comes up with a good alternative that’s compatible with Office docs moving forward. My main reason for getting it (I had the previous one which was fine) was for Entourage, because one thing I’ve always liked is Exchange Server with Outlook and that’s what we run at the office. Long story short: its Exchange integration was crappy, so I got 2008 in hopes it would be better (RCP over HTTP, perhaps?). Not changed at all (uses OWA, and that gets you email, calendar, contacts; but no tasks and notes, and I still can’t get LDAP working so I can access Active Directory for internal office email addresses and other shit), and even more offensive is that the email client still won’t display complex HTML properly and even when it does, won’t forward it; you still have to save the email as a file and then include it as an attachment to a new email. Can you believe it? Pathetic; and Gates and MS can just go fuck themselves for that.

Hear that, Bill? Fuck you and your Office Mac 2008 scam.

So, I switched over to Mac Mail and I’m coming to love its simplicity. For email, the IMAP works fine, and it organized my .Mac and Gmail IMAP better than Entourage, so with three email accounts the overall experience is simpler, better. Mail is of course integrated with Address Book and iCal, and those each sync with Entourage, so all I really need to do is open Entourage each morning and it will sync any calendar or contacts changes with Exchange Server.

Later: Almost forgot; I also dumped all my feeds into Mac Mail, using it now as my default RSS reader. There’s a feature or two I might like added, but it’s simple and I like it.

Land of the Free Update

February 29, 2008 4 Comments

Good news for conservative, law & order Republicans:

New High in U.S. Prison Numbers
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads
the world in both the number and percentage of residents it
incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

Got that? We’ve more people in jail than China, which has over four times our population (more than a billion more people than us). In terms of percentage in jail, China isn’t even on the map, while we exceed but keep such illustrious company as Russia, Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Cuba.

America #1!

(Balko link)

The IF Life

February 28, 2008 1 Comment

Here's another blog for you intermittent fasters out there. Just started, looks really well done.

Into my RSS reader it has gone. Oh, I found out from Chris.

Recession?

February 28, 2008 Leave a Comment

Bush says no. So what? He’s no better at predicting the future than anyone else. There is a formal definition of the thing: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. We haven’t yet posted a negative quarter.

Now, setting aside all the shenanigans that comprise the broad makeup of our rather fascistic economy, by which I mean lip-service is given to the concept of "private" property but the State overseas and regulates virtually everything, do you know of many relationships amongst complex inputs and feedbacks that goes in one direction forever?

If you try to loose weight, do you expect every step on the scale to be less than before? If you’re building a business, do you expect any setbacks? Ever found you needed to change your approach in your personal finances because of problems, unforeseen difficulties, mistakes?

Recessions, whether caused by the State’s meddling in economics and markets, normal feedbacks from markets needed to adjust themselves to various factors including new technology, or simply self-fulfilling prophesy, it seems to me that what would be strange and dangerous is not to experience economic recession. We’re probably in for one, if I had to guess. The Democrats need it to ensure the election, and really all that’s needed is for people to believe they’re minutes away from standing in the soup line and that’ll probably be enough to set one in motion. Of course, whether we’re in really in for one or not, or even whether the economic conditions are bad for most people or not is entirely beside the point. There’s no honesty anywhere in the election process, or in the voters themselves. It’s an exercise in tribal ritual where everyone is on the warpath for the most plausible lies to believe and tell others, so as to most effectively promote their tribe and its leaders. It’s how facts get "utilized."

I suppose it’s "evolutionary" in a sense, in that it’s just as primitive as ever on principled grounds; only the trappings, glitter, and sophistication have changed.

What You’re Up Against, Again

February 28, 2008 1 Comment

Everybody knows that "good cholesterol" is good, right? Well, actually, none of you probably know that. You've heard it reported, your doctor has told you so, and so you believe that "good cholesterol" is actually good. Pay attention, because that's not a trivial distinction and it has broad implications in all manner of knowledge.

So, on the heals of my summary of the Cholesterol Con, there's this:

High Levels of "Good" Cholesterol May Be a Bad Thing

A Dutch research study suggests that high levels of "good" HDL cholesterol are
not so good – in fact, they may actually increase the risk of a cardiovascular
event.

Peter, the UK veterinarian of Hyperlipid runs down the details (thought: could veterinarians in general be smarter than doctors for humans, having to deal with the biology and metabolism of multiple species, thus having a more generalized — indeed principled — approach to medicine?). I think he gets to the bottom line.

Are you seeing a pattern here? It all comes down to particle numbers,
sizes, contents. What controls all of these? Not statin deficiencies,
as in IDEAL.
Forget your cholesterol. What marker predicts heart attacks and total mortality without all of the paradoxes?
Follow EPIC and HbA1c
(yes, same that same EPIC study as this one) to get some sort of clue.
Control what you are doing wrong diet/lifestyle-wise to glycosylate
your haemoglobin and your liver will sort out whatever cholesterol
particles sizes/numbers it needs for health.

Be sure and follow that link in his quote, above. And here's another word of advice. It's a good idea to educate yourself on how to read these studies and understand them, or at least get a general idea. It takes a little time and effort, but it builds on itself, just like the more you learn of a language, the more you are equipped to learn even more, faster. The information is out there, and much of what I've been posting about is how this stuff gets misreported — or not reported at all — when it conflicts with the received public catechism. Ultimately, nobody is really going to care about your health. But you can, and the information is out there.