{Insert Clever Title}

Low carb diet

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:40:00 +0000

I recently read the book ‘Why we get fat and what to do about it’ by Gary Taubes. The book is not a diet book. It is a science journalist’s research on the current state of nutritional science, and his criticism (and some anger) at both the medical community and especially public health policy makers at their seemingly purposeful ignorance of the current state of the research.

I would describe my feeling of reading the book as an epiphany that almost everything you have been told about diet and nutrition is dead wrong.

Here is my summery of his argument: insulin in large part is responsible for regulating how much fat you have, the more the insulin the more fat. Insulin tells your fat cell to absorb and maintain their supply of fat, and not to release it into the blood stream. Insulin is produced in response to the presence and amount of blood sugar in your body, when you start to eat your blood sugar increases. Fructose and carbohydrates rapidly increase your blood sugar levels resulting in a highly elevated level of insulin. Eating a lot of fructose and carbohydrates every day will result in a condition known as insulin resistance. This will result in your body having an elevated level of insulin at all times, making you virtually incapable of using anything but glucose and carbohydrates as energy. Because the cells in the rest of your body quickly run out of energy you get hungry faster because you are just coasting off of the carbs from your last meal.

So here is my anecdotal experience. For the last little bit, Diana and I have been trying to eat/be a lot healthier, which lead me to read this book among others. I haven’t had a soda in over 6 months for instance. After reading the book I have consciously tried to limit the amount of carbs and especially sugar in my diet. The carbs I do have are generally vegetables that are high in fiber, meaning they will not increase your blood sugar as rapidly. I didn’t start all at once, I kind of phased it in over the course of a couple or three days. In the first week or week and a half, I lost something like 10 pounds, though a lot of this could be water weight.

Over the next few weeks I have lost a total of somewhere around 25 pounds. This is all without being hungry, though we have been trying to ramp up on our running/exercise recently as well.

I can really tell a difference in the way I get hungry as well. I used to eat a pretty large lunch and even then, around 6 or so I would start to get really really hungry. I'd have to eat a snack right then, before dinner. Now sometimes I don't eat anything but I few nuts for lunch, maybe some tuna, and by the time dinner rolls around I can tell that I am kind of hungry, but it is not an overwhelming, must eat now, feeling.

I very much believe that I was experiencing what Taubes described in the book, called metabolic syndrome. A few hours after eating my blood sugar was crashing and I needed to get it back up. Since starting this diet, I feel much healthier. I am not sure if the book described this or not, I may have read it online, but after about a week of eating no sugar, and low carbs, you feel something akin to "fog lifting". I feel like I am awake faster in the morning, and my brain works better, and I have more energy.

A couple of warnings if you think you might try this. It is not recommended by the medical establishment, so do it at your own risk (however you need to read the book to understand why they are wrong). Also, the first week of doing this diet will be tough. You will have sugar/carb cravings, you will become dehydrated, and you may have headaches. This is normal, your body is just adjusting, and those symptoms will disappear after a week or so.

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:43:00 +0000

I heard about this on a podcast, and true enough when I went whitehouse.gov I found this. It is an executive order from the President as plain as day.

Do you see anything wrong? Yeah, the word 'Pusuant', is miss-spelled. It should be 'Pursuant', with a R.

Now this executive order itself. Basically is a slap in the face for anyone who voted for Obama. How many times did he say he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay? That was one of his main campaign promise. I think that there is no disagreement on that on. But here is is plain as day, breaking that promise, and can't even be bothered to run it through a spell check.

It begs the question, if they can't spell check for something this important, are they checking if it is constitutional?

New Location

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:29:00 +0000

Hello all. I am moving this blog to my new website kevinkinnett.com.

There are two separate feeds. The first located at the home page, will concentrate more on my professional thoughts, software engineering, or computer related material.

The second, this one, will be located here. Which is this blog and more personal.

You can subscribe to both feeds on the their respective pages, and I will soon have a combination feed.

“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.”

- Mother Teresa (1910 - 1997)

Double Dip Recession?

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:48:00 +0000

I wonder if with all this talk about a double dip recession, if we have not all ready gone through a double dip?

Take a look at this graph of the last ten years for the S&P 500. In 2003, the S&P tested its bottom at about 800 and then more recently in 2008 it dipped just below 700 albeit much more sharply. Those two events were only 5 years apart. We are approaching the third year mark and if there is going to be a second dip in the economy, and that is going to be called a double dip then it might should be called a triple dip.

UAE's Fall From Grace

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:56:00 +0000

You may have heard of Dubai; it is the crown city of capitalism in the middle east. I had always had some misgivings on it ever since I read a fairly lengthly 'Newsweek' article that had nothing but positive things to say about it, about 5 years ago. In the recent financial turmoil however the media's take on the kingdom has become less than positive, it seems the city is falling apart at the seams which has brought to light the country's medieval debt laws, among other human rights abuses. I read these articles in this order which basically shows Dubai for what it is. The second article, in The Independent, is extremely lengthly, but if you have a spare hour or two it is definitely worth the read. My stomach was turning reading it, it is extremely disturbing but very eye opening. The most recently news in the last article is that the crown price's brother has video taped himself brutally torturing at least 25 people, and the government is covering it up. His name is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan.

Censorship - boingboing

Slavery - independent

Torture - boingboing

Sleeping with my iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:21:00 +0000

Recently I have been using my phone as an alarm to wake me up in the morning as my schedule now has me getting up at unusual times on different days of the week. So I have been sleeping with it less than a foot away from my head. This has brought about a new phenomenon of me checking my email in the middle of the night. I am not saying that I am checking it in my sleep. I am awake, but.... not fully conscious. What makes me do it? Well I have also been having bad dreams about getting email, not nightmares per se, just dreams about getting email that I don't want to get, or just dreaming about sitting there writing email. And to calm my nerves, I end up just reaching over and checking my mail. Or I might wake up to the 'ding' sound of email, now I am lying there half way awake and thinking about what the email could possibly be. So I just go ahead and check it. The next morning, after I get to work or go off and starting doing whatever, what are the chances that I will remember that email... virtually none. It is a problem I am not sure how to solve it really besides just setting my radio alarm every night. I'd prefer something more high tech though...

Supporting Their Fellow Criminals

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:07:00 +0000

I was watching Fox News yesterday... I don't know why I was, don't ask. They reported the news of the Pirate Bay conviction something like this....

Four men in Sweden have been convicted for copyright infringement on a massive scale and sentenced to a year in jail. Now their fellow criminals have taken to the street in protest.

...Then they show a second of 2 nerds walking down the street, not holding signs, not chanting anything, just walking down the street, they could have been walking to work for all I know and probably were. Then they showed what looked like stock footage of Sweden, and courthouses for another 5 or 10 seconds.

What kind of reporting is that? Fair and balanced? .... NO! Their fellow criminals, what?!?!?

First, way to go for in in depth analysis of the issues involved in this case. Consumer rights, safe harbor, free speech issues all out the window. No, no it is "infringement on a massive scale", not even an "enabling infringement on a massive scale". Nope! These guys are as guilty as SIN!

Second, they were probably reporting a non-news item (in regards to the protests) if they couldn't even come up with more than literally one second of questionable footage.

Third, have these protesters been convicted too? They have not. The media is always extremely carefully to call someone who has been arrested and charged as "alleged", because they have yet to be found guilty in court. These guys have not been convicted, charged, or even named as suspects. There is not even and investigation for there even to be charges. Why are they calling these guys "criminals"? If I were one of the people they showed for a brief second, I'd be seriously contemplating suing Fox News for Liable.

Now let me talk for a second about what Fox News did not, which are the serious implications of this action. Unlike most of my friends, I don't really blame the music industry necessarily. The little Adam Smith in my head is jumping up and down saying that the music industry should be free to pursue what are clearly unprofitable business practices. If they want to alienate and anger their customers then let 'em. If they want to make themselves less and less relevant by shying away from clear trends in technology, like a 'see no evil' monkey, they should be free to do so. Eventually they will fall.

What makes me angry is that the governments, in this case Sweden but the US is just as much to blame, are bowing to the demands of the music industry, instead of protecting consumer rights. Why does the financial gain of one industry (which is small when compared to the overall economy), have more weight than the consumer and free speech? The implications of this are fairly simple to demonstrate. A week ago I could post a link a link here that would take you to a site where you could download something illegally. Now I could go to jail, and be charged like I was the person actually doing the piracy, if I did. In other words I am not free to say what I would like. All this in an effort to save a dying industry the refuses to adapt?

All of this is admittedly still a legal gray area. The major win in this case is to spread "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". All the battles are not over, and the winner will eventually be free speech, and choice, as this is the Internet we are talking about. But this delays it, and in the mean time it stifles culture, innovation, and economic progress.

Worst Phishing Scam Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 11:21:00 +0000

A few days ago got the following email.

Please note I've obscured some of the URL, so that someone does not go there, and not to give them any google juice.

**********************************************************************************
Subject: Recruiter

Hello,

Please update your profile by using the URL provided in regard to your candidacy and further consideration.

This is a must as this database is being dumped and your resume may be lost.

http://tpgi.ca---ne.com/careers

Thank you,
Cy Myrick
Resource Director
The Project Group, Inc.

**********************************************************************************

This is probably the first phishing email that I ever looked at twice. I spent maybe 3 or 4 seconds thinking it was real. It is the classic scam complete with the emotional tug up "further discussion" and then fear "database dumb" that makes people just click without thinking about it. The thing that tipped me off was the database dump part, as I have experience dealing with databases that phrase just didn't make a whole lot of since.

The part that got me was I am actually looking for a job, and yes I have filled out a lot of information in many places, and oh no! there ARE a couple of prospects that I don't want to loose!

Of coarse the insidious part about this scam is who it targets. There are so many people right now looking for work, many of whom are in desperate straits. And these guys come a long, looking to steal money from people that are already having to worry about where they are going to get enough money to live. This has got to be one of the worst types of criminals there are!

No Agenda Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:08:00 +0000

I've been listening to podcasts ever since I got my first iPod back in summer 2006. And I listen a lot, really more than anyone I know. I've stopped listening to music for the most part in favor of podcasts; they are more entertaining in a lot of ways. I guess I'd be an A.M. talk show listener back in the radio days.

I recently have been listening to a podcast called No Agenda, which has quickly become my favorite show, with hosts John C. Dvorak and Adam Curry. Dvorak is a semi-famous tech/financial blogger/columnist. Curry is famous for being an MTV DJ for many years, and more recently "inventing" podcasting as a distribution mechanism, the self styled "Podfather". As the name implies the premise of the show is basically both hosts just talking about whatever they want. But don't let that fool you, the conversation is usually extremely interesting, and the focus tends toward non-mainstream news. In fact whenever they talk about celebrity news they have a special sound that signifies "now time for the real news" in jest of the fact that celebrity news is the only news that most people keep up with.

At some point someone suggested that they should call themselves crackpot and buzz kill for Dvorak and Curry respectively, and they took that and ran with it. Now they introduce themselves as the crackpot and buzzkill. The moniker really sticks Curry constantly has one conspiracy theory after another. Some are crazy, some are entertaining, and some are scarily plausible. I've certainly at least taken a second look at my option on global warming for instance, and some of the dirt they've dug up on Obama administration officials, and some insights on the current financial mess. And Dvorak true to the buzzkill name, is telling him he is crazy for one reason or other, sometimes agrees.

One theory that Curry had, was that Iridium, was in some sort of space war, following a satellite collision involving one of theirs and a defunct Russian satellite. I work for a company that does business with Iridium and was able to provide some insight in an email, that he read on the air! I can’t explain how stoked I was after hearing my letter read. It was from Thursday March 19, 2009 if you are interested in listening.

http://www.mevio.com/episode/147973/NA-081-2009-03-19
http://noagenda.mevio.com/
http://curry.mevio.com/
http://channeldvorak.com/

Animals that make (and break) Civlization

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:14:00 +0000

Why did civilization rise to the level it did in Europe, India and China, but seemed to stagnate else where? It seems odd that civilizations rose when they did and the extent that they did, and did not in other places, namely North and South America, and Oceania.

This an extremely tricky topic to address, many because (ignorant) people have put forward their thesis on why this is, based largely on racial and prejudice ideas. This is absurd for many reasons that I will not go into.

I believe that one of the main reasons these civilization did not rise earlier, or to a great extent, is because of the lack of draft animals in those regions of the world. In the modern world it is not a thing that we take into consideration, but was (and many parts of the world still is) of eminent importance. Would you plow your fields by hand? Without a horse, ox, or donkey it would be almost impossible to grow food. Without horses how could you transport large amount of goods across any distance?

So here we have two things, farming and trade, that are virtual impossible to do at any scale without those animals to help you. And farming and trade are the bedrock of any kind of civilization. Imagine yourself living in those times, how in the world are you going to do any farming related tasks plowing, grinding grain, shipping the food to where it is needed?

Now the interesting part of all this, is I believe, a number of potential suitable animals that lived in those regions at one time, but most of these had died out the end of the last ice age, when civilization first began planting it's roots. I don't think that it was a coincidence that these animals died around the same time that humans began to live there. I think that these animals had not co-evolved with humans, and because of it had not learned certain avoidance behaviors and adaptations that would have surly been required with the addition of a new predator (which humans no doubt are) in the region.

I should note however, that the people living then were not to blame in any way for this. I can image myself living in a hunter gatherer society and here are these animals that are extremely easy to hunt everywhere, I would defiantly not hesitate to take as much as I wanted. Also something to note, is there is no way for sure to know if the animals could have been made suitable for domestication and work. For instance the zebra is closely related to the horse, but it is in fact impossible to use it in the same way that the horse is used and so on.

There are a number of pre-requisites that are required for civilization, and people even debate what civilization really is. And there is no discounting the achievements the Maya, Aztec, and Inca. But, their level of development (technologically at least) was still in the bronze age when Europe was only a couple of hundred years short of the industrial age. I believe that this aspect of the human experience, that of having and using work animals, has been discounted as a major reason for the rise of civilization, and it is apparently because of the contrasted lack of civilization in other parts of the world that lacked them.

There is no such thing as ET (or at least it doesn't matter)

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:33:00 +0000

It is a strange topic to be sure, and one that most people only ever give a momentary consideration to, however since I was a small child the possibility of intelligent life on other planets intrigued me. Maybe it was all the science fiction I had been exposed to, maybe it was just the nerd in me. In any event it has been something that I have thought about a lot, for a long time. Once in high school I did an informal survey of my friends and found out that something like 9 and 10 believed in at least the possibility of intelligent life living somewhere out there.

Recently however, I've begun to think that perhaps the entire question is a mute one. That is, the amount of space and time involved with communicating with other civilizations is so immensely huge as to not matter if they even exist at all. The argument goes something like this.

Lets assume for a minute that modern physics is pretty much right, at least in so far as much as the rule that nothing travels faster than the speed of light is correct. Now consider the length of time that it would take to communicate a message across the milky way. It is 100,000 light years across, so that is 100,000 years to reach them and a 100,000 years to hear anything back. A total of 200,000 years to send one message. OK so now you say that what if they are closer like 1,000 light years away. You could image two civilizations having something like a dialog at that distance, sure. But what are the chances of that happening? At this point you also have to take into account the age of the universe, or even just the age of the galaxy. Consider that the galaxy itself has been around for something like 13 billion years, now consider how many civilizations could arise in that time, now for the critical consideration, how long do these civilizations last? That last one is important. How long do you think that human civilization will be around to communication with others? If you start off by saying each civilization lasts for around a million years (which sounds pretty long). Then no matter how common you think that civilizations are the possibility that any could have any kind of contact with one another quickly becomes zero.

To think about it another way, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In that time only one civilization has grown out of it. How common do you think that life is on other planets? And how many of those will have civilization on them? Considering the whole life time of the planet a mere sliver of a fraction of time each of those will have in order to communicate with each other. Given the density of stars, even a relatively liberal estimation of the rise of planets, life and civilizations, will result in the almost astronomically small chance that any two will arise at the same time and at the same vicinity.

As I said before, this argument is based on the assumption that physics for the last 100 years have been right. That nothing can travel faster than light. I believe it is a pretty safe assumption. Relativity makes a number of predictions which have been verified a number of times, in many different ways. There is of coarse the possibility of it all being wrong, or right in the wrong ways, and we will figure out some way to surmount this universal speed limit. To think it is not at least a possibility would be conceited. But, as far as we can tell, and to the best of our abilities this is the only logical base for our arguments.

Sorry to disappoint any science fiction fans out there (I am one of them), but I think it is only a amusing thought experiment as to whether or not intelligent life exists elsewhere. And it is completely imaginary to think that at any point or for any reason, anything out side the solar system will affect humanity in any way for its entire life time, or that we will someday affect others. But it does put into focus the importance of taking care of what we have, both in terms of the Earth, but also each other, because that it is the only thing that we will ever have.

Backup!!

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:42:00 +0000

I was having a discussion with a some friends, a while back, about the things that you would take with you if your house was burning down. The usual suspects were named, namely pets, and family photos, but someone said they would take the computer, because most of the family photos where kept there. This got me thinking about how many important things I keep on my computer, and there is no back up, if there were a fire, or if lightning struck, or if it was stolen, or just a simple hard drive failure (which has happened to me before, and is extremely common), all of it would be lost. This lead me to develop my way of keeping backups which I will share below in hopes that once you see how easy and relatively cheep it is, it inspires some people to start backing up.

As a software engineer especially, I think that I have, and a lot of my colleges have developed a certain dis-trust to the machines we are working on, because we see them fail so often. This is why perhaps, you hear system admins harping on making backup so often. I hear horror stories all the time on one my favorite podcasts "Security Now". One of the hosts made his name and fortune off of hard drive repair and maintenance software, which he will plug occaiontally by giving antidotes about people loosing (and subsequently recovering) there valuable information. Things like: wedding photos, financial information, government information, professional photographers with 10+ years of pictures, thesis papers... you name it, people of have lost it. In college, I was taking a class, computer science of all things, when one day the professor came in, and announced that the recent power outage on campus had destroyed his computer, along with about a month of research. Afterwards, he gave a 10 or 15 minute lecture on how important it was to backup, instead of the the regularly scheduled lecture (which was presumably lost also). With more and more of our lives being put on the computer, it becomes imperative that we backup, and most people just don't do it until a disaster occurs.

I use two pieces of software in conjunction to accomplish this. One is free and the other is not.

1) TrueCrypt - Free and Open Source.

2) Mozy - 5$ per month - unlimited space and bandwidth

TrueCrypt works by creating a virtual encrypted disk. You basically create a file, that TrueCrypt then mounts as a hard disk. It looks like any other hard disk you have in the system. I specify the size of this file as 4.7 GB. Then I automatically mount the volume every time windows starts (it will prompt you for a password). Every time I am working with any kind of important information ( financial, programming, resume, etc... ) I make sure I am working out of this virtual hard drive. This has several benefits. First, if anyone were to steal the computer, or if I threw away the hard drive without erasing it, then no one would be able to access that information ever. Second, it keeps me very organized as to where all my important information is kept, because I know that is is on that (encrypted) drive. Third, and this is where the backup comes in, it allows me to just burn a copy of that one file to DVD, whenever I want to back (which I try to do about once a month) and at the same time it is encrypted. The fourth reason is it makes it easy to point to one place for Mozy to start backing up, explained below.

Mozy is an automatic remote backup solution. You install a program. It runs in the system tray always. You specify the directory(s) that you would like it to backup. And, every so often, it will look for changes and upload the new/changed files through your Internet connection, to a remote site. Since I have all my important data located on that one disk, all I do to configure it, is tell it backup that entire disk, and a second disk where I keep all my photos. And that is it. Configure it once, then forget about it, until someday you might need it.

With these two solutions, the only way I could have a complete data lose is if someone where to come into my house destroy my computer, and the backup DVDs, then go and burn down the multiple data centers that mozy is running there machine off of. Or if there were some devastating natural disaster that took down multiple parts of the county at once, like a huge meteor impact, in which case I would probably be dead anyway. In reality, all you really need is Mozy to start backing up, I just find that using both Mozy and TrueCrypt are so easy a way to mentaly mantain back-up and security, I talk about them both here. So hopefully, if you decide to make backups this way, or some other way, when your house is burning down you can grab something a little more important than our computer on the way out.

Inauguration Surprise

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kinnett) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:43:00 +0000

With all the news about the upcoming presidential inauguration, my dad told me an interesting story about one of the past inaugurations the other day. My dad worked in the hotel industry for something like 20+ years, many of which were spent in and around Washing D.C. (where I was born), and he had first and knowledge of the city's handling of a number of inaugurations.

Although he can't remember which president it was, not that it even matters to the story, he said on this particular year it had rained unexpectedly. Though, with a little Internet research, I believe he is referring to the second inauguration of President Reagan. The parade was canceled, and the ceremony itself was held indoors due to the 7 degree high temperatures and -10 to -20 degree wind chill. The picture is an actual one from the day.

In any case, the problem with holding it inside versus out, is that the outside can accommodate vastly more people. The decision came down to hold the ceremony inside the U.S. Capital's Rotunda. This left many, many people quite literally out in the cold.

The interesting part of the story is that the limited space made it apparent who was who. And as my father, who was working in a very up scale hotel right in the heart of D.C., observed everyone assumes they are the important ones that should have been choosen, and that was not a good day trying to keep the dejected guests happy. I can just imagine all of the regional coordinators, local politicians, and large (but not large enough) campaign contributors, all milling around, taking their frustrations out on hotel staff.

See for more info:
http://inaugural.senate.gov/history/chronology/rwreagan1985.cfm