Spaz.ca

I worked at home today. Sometimes the hustle and bustle of the office can make coding tricky. Coders do best when they are uniterrupted and can get ‘in the groove’ or acheive flow. Any interruption and BAM, the concentration is gone, and all the abstract details being held in short-term memory are obliterated. It can take another twenty minutes just to pick up the peices and hit high gear again. I was working all day on a much more scalable storage system for our hand history databases in Poker Academy.

The flow has carried on into the evening and I’m still at my computer, but for the last two hours I switched to work on the CRON-o-Meter, build 0.1.4! Well let me tell you, this is one hot looking build. She’s gotten a bit of a make-over with pretty new target bars, tooltips, and the best new feature EVER. It now keeps track of how often you eat each food item, and when you do a food search it sorts the results in order of how often you eat them, so the most common foods appear right at the top. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to enter things that I eat routinely. For instance, to enter an apple, I can type ‘ap’ and I know it’s going to be the first item to come up out of hundreds. So very very hot.

Another nice thing about working at home is I can make awesome lunches. Today for lunch I has an egg-white scramble with zuchinni, kale, onions, and banana peppers. I had roughly 1800 calories in total today.

Wow, in just one week, CBS does 3 longevity stories. Last night, an extremely well done report on the mprize and Aubrey de Grey (the video is not yet posted), and on Dec. 30th, a segment was done on Caloric Restriction, and two days before that, a peice of Ray Kurzweil. The memes are spreading.

The dance party last night was fantastic. All those little raver kids were so cute. I ache a little this morning from about 5 hours of solid dancing. We left around 3AM and were early-departees. I’m sure the thing stayed strong until morning.

I’ve just uploaded fresh builds for CRON-o-Meter v0.1.2. Unless you’ve already installed v0.1.1, see post below for upgrading from 0.1.0 or for new installs.

I’ve added improvements to the recipe editor UI, various UI tweaks and bug fixes, hot-looking target bars in the nutrition tables, and a new read-only dataset — the CRDB, which will contain food items that I and other CRON-o-Meter users can submit to share with one another. I’ve started it off with 3 items: Psyllium Husk (which was absent from USDB), AOR Essential Mix (a supplement I put in my smoothies), and a full recipe entry for Sherm’s Mega Muffins.

Download: Windows Version or Mac OS X Version

Made my brother Sam’s recipe for Yam and Broccoli soup for dinner tonight, along with a fresh loaf of spelt bread that Christine made. T’was delicious, although a tad carby. Sam’s in Asia right now doing a UBC Orchestral tour. Cool beans.

Tonight we’re off to a dance party (like, um, a rave) to dance away the remainder of the year and perhaps about 1/1500th of the next.

Huzzah, here comes a new build for the five or six people out there that care. Version 0.1.1 includes a number of fixes and nice UI tweaks to make data entry easier. It also comes with the brand new USDA sr18 dataset. It should now have more realistic values for Omega-3 and Omega-6 (thanks MR!).

And now, the BAD NEWS. I wasn’t kidding when I said this version is still an early alpha and not to expect your data to survive from 0.1.0 to 0.1.1, so I hope no one has used it too heavily yet. So the bad news is you will need to delete all your settings from the older version, or this version will probably go crash and boom when it loads. See below for instructions. The good news is that if you created any custom foods, you should be able to export them from the old version, then blow away the settings folder, and then import them back into the new version.

Download: Windows Version or Mac OS X Version

Note: For both Windows and Mac OS X users, you’ll need the latest version of Java (1.5) installed: Download Java for Windows, Download Mac OS X JDK1.5r3

How to nuke your old settings folder
Windows:
    First make sure you have set in your windows file explorer, the option to view hidden folders (Tools menu -> Folder Options… -> View -> Hidden files and folders). Then find the user settings and delete them. On WinXP they would typically be found in C:Documents and Settingsuser nameApplication Datacronometer

Mac OS X
     Delete the folder: ~Library/Preferences/cronometer

I’ve been improving my supplementation situation lately. Now I’m popping so many pills a day, it’s weird. It seems like a lot, but it’s not actually much. Mostly high quality basics but the doses are moderate. As I mentioned before, I’m taking some stuff for bone and joint health (Glucosamine, D, Calcium, Magnesium), and two grams of fish oil a day for some EPA/DHA. I’ve added some Zinc as well. It was looking like I was chronically low on D and Zinc, so this should shore up that weakness. Regarding Vitamin D, I saw a news item yesterday showing 1000 UI of Vitamin D3 a day can dramatically slash your cancer risk. I just happen to be taking 1000 UI of D3 a day, so jolly good news.

I also used a Xmas gift certificate to get some exercise gear. I got some weights and a rebounder for cardio. I did 10 minutes on the rebounder and was half dead. I think it’s gonna do wonders for my cardio, and obviously I need it badly. The dumbells should help too as the pushups and crunches were just not doing the trick anymore.

Aside from that, I’ve been enjoying my week off by lollygagging about in my pj’s, playing some online poker, and sneaking in some work each day because I’m a workaholic, and I need my fix.

MR had a peek at the CRON-O-Meter and gave me some good feedback. I’m working a bit on it today, and should have a new build done this weekend with a bunch of bug fixes and improvements… Assuming I don’t get too lazy.

We made Spelt-Pancakes for breakfast this morning. Not the best CR breakfast, but as far as pancakes go … quite nutritious:

We used a low-calorie syrup made from white grapes that was, in my opinion, tastier than anything Auntie Jemima ever concocted.

Is it xmasy in here or is it just me? Christine & I drove out to Drayton Valley today to kick off the holidays with her family. We went over to her aunt and uncle’s for a fondu party, which was fairly CR friendly provided one could exercise portion control. I fondued some salmon and halibut in a ginger broth which was really good. Also a bit of chicken in some oil, a few strawberries and chocolate, and broccoli dipped in a cheese sauce. I’ve no idea how I did for calories, but I think I did ok, since I had nothing but a giant pear and a giant apple for breakfast and lunch.

We opened up a bottle of glenlivet Scotch that belonged to my Grandfather, who passed away earlier this year. We gave a toast to him and enjoyed it — this quality stuff was sure better than the cheap scotch I’ve tried previously.

As is tradition in Christine’s family, we all got new Christmas eve pajamas, then sat in the livingroom for the reading of The Night Before Christmas, and then off to bed. I got these AWESOME pj’s that are all spandexy and make me feel like I’m a super-hero: FROZEN FISH MAN!

Merry Xmas! (that holiday that capitalists co-opted from the christians, who co-opted it from the pagans, who probably co-opted it from somewhere else…)

Well TGIF. It’s been a very busy week — preparing christmas gifts and plans on the home front, and on the work front we started official beta testing for Poker Academy 2.5. One of the big features we’re testing now is Online Multi-Table Tournaments, which are essentially massive coordinated poker tournaments (hundreds of players). They are a logisitical doozy to work through on the server side.

I checked my blood pressure today at the drug store — 115/78! That’s the lowest reading yet! I measured it twice just to be sure it wasn’t a fluke.

I’m starting to get ever so slightly more sophisticated with my supplements. Up to now, all I was doing was semi-regular use of AOR Essential Mix, which is a quality multivitamin powder for putting in smoothies. However, it’s really a shot-gun approach and only covers the basic vitamins and minerals.

My knee hasn’t completely healed since this summer’s hiking injury. Kevin suggested I try some basic Glucosamine/MSM and Vitamin D for bone health. This is good as my cronometer was showing my diet to be chronically low in Vitamin D. I’ve also started to take fish oil supplements to make sure I get my EPA/DHA dose. I just wasn’t getting enough consistently in my diet (the main sources being fish and some other Omega3’s from flaxseed oil and nuts).

I also appear to be consistently low on zinc, but I have to rule out that my cronometer isn’t bugged or that the database is just missing full nutritional survey information.

I’m quite paranoid about supplements. Paranoid and skeptical. Paranoid, because I don’t yet have the confidence in my biochemical knowledge to separate the snake oil from the science. I don’t like the idea of ingesting things I don’t understand. In a way, it’s silly, because the processed gak I ate for years, and that the standard north american diet consists of, is bloated with all manner of crazy chemicals, most of which we already know are very bad for you.

Today, dementia cases set to double in two decades. Research of late is starting to show that Amyloid Beta plaques building up in the brain (which appears to cause Alzheimer’s) is related to insulin resistance in the brain. This suggests that we may be able to characterize Alzheimer’s as Type III Diabetes. Type II Diabetes rates have been skyrocketing in North America as well. News flash: It’s because people eat too much processed crap that saturates their bodies with insulin.

Calories were slightly on the high side today as I ate out for lunch, and my greek salad was well drenched in olive oil.

Currently Listening to: Hypnotize by System of a Down

We’re back in Edmonton now. Christine & I spent the morning shopping, mainly groceries and mega-muffin ingredients and xmas stuff. Then we made April’s egg-white & salsa frittata for dinner, and while that was baking I whipped up a batch of muffin mix so that I was able to simply swap out the frittatas for the muffins. Then we snuggled up and watched DVD 4 of Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica which we are hopelessly addicted to.

I’m just getting to putting up some images from our trip. I’ve sprinkled some pictures from our trip in the older posts below. I also have some hand-held video of the dinner, mainly Aubrey & Ray’s presentations, which I still have to slurp onto the computer. Unfortunately, Kurzweil’s talk went longer than an hour, which is the length of my Hi8 tapes in my video camera, so I didn’t get the last 10 minutes or so of his talk. I also had the brilliant move of brining my tripod and then forgetting it in the hotel so I didn’t actually have it with me at the dinner when I actually needed it. But I’m sure it enjoyed the trip to Boston.

As you can see, my beard is coming along nicely, and I’m sure that given another month or so, It will put Aubrey’s to shame. As you can also see, Aubrey has a way with the ladies. The dinner was great, the talks inspiring, and the people fantastically smart and engaging. My only complaint is that it was way to short! I didn’t even get to talk to half the people there and could have shmoozed for hours. I’m not a very sociable guy so that’s saying something. My idea of a good time usually means being alone or with one or two people.

As I mentioned earlier, Kurzweil gave us all signed copies of his last two books. Well, Christine & I couldn’t wait and we both started reading the same book (Fantastic Voyage) on the flight back home. We couldn’t stop giggling at how dorky we looked side-by-side reading the same book.

Muffins.

Sorry, this will be brief as I’m writing from the hotel and I’m exhausted. On Day 2 we bundled up and trotted about historic downtown Boston. We saw an old graveyard with Ben Franklin’s grave site, and had lunch at Cheers. In the evening we had the mprize dinner. About 35 people attented. Aubrey de Grey opened the evening with a summary of SENS and how the mprize has been doing. After a CR-friendly dinner, Ray Kurzweil gave a talk summarizing his new book The Singularity is Near. He also gave every attendee a free autographed copy of his two most recent books, which was a nice touch. After much shmoozing we got back to the hotel, engergized with ideas and excitement for the possibilities the future may bring.

Today we slept in a little bit and then woke up to a huge-normous blizzard! Our cab driver was looking pretty panicky trying to navigate in a white-out. Of course Christine and I were pretty relaxed and found it a comical how a little snow can bring a city to it’s knees.

Anyhoo, we cabbed slowly over to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where we spent the whole afternoon and evening taking in some culture (envision me sipping tea with my pinky finger in the air). We started with an Ansel Adams exhibit, then some classic european masters (wow, these paintings were HUGE and the colors and realism fantastic). Then we perused a collection of egyptian, greek, and roman artifacts, and next some impressionist stuff (a pile of monet and the like). After some dinner, we checked out the cubist exhibit (mostly Picasso stuff). Then we tried to get back to the hotel. It took us two hours to get a taxi! They really don’t know what to do when it snows here.

Heading home tomorrow, although it will be another very long day of travel. We’re flying through Denver on the way back to Edmonton. Hope it’s not cloudy, I’d like to see a little bit of Colorado.