Daily habit goals for 2017

[table]
Time[attr style=”width:50px”],Action
08:00,Wake
08:30,Brush teeth
,Blood sugar
,Start hot water
,Walk
09:00,Make coffee
,Make/eat protein breakfast*
09:15,Begin work
09:30,Medications (second cup)
11:00,Standup
11:30,Lunch: (tbd) calories and (tbd) carbs
13:00,Blood sugar
15:30,Snack
17:30,Chores
18:00,Dinner: (tbd) calories and (tbd) carbs
19:30,Free time for…
,…Mindfulness
,…Music
,…Chores
,…Reading books
,…Second walk
,…TV
22:00,Brush teeth
,Bed
[/table]

* eggs, snack pack, peanut butter toast, cottage cheese, string cheese

A comment I wrote to William Shatner in a Reddit thread

Bill (can I call you Bill?), I want you to know that Has Been is one of my favorite albums of all time. I try to get people to listen to it but nobody takes me seriously. I recently had a “win” as a parent when my oldest son (17) asked me about Has Been.

I love how you poured yourself out for everyone to see and I use it as inspiration in my own (meager and infrequent) attempts to be an artist.

I bow to you and thank you, sir. 😀

PS: How do I get invited to one of your legendary parties?


Here’s the original thread which was brought to my attention by an r/bestof posting. I submitted my comment twice but Reddit didn’t accept it. I suspect that Bill has temporarily disabled comments. 

News from the Bubble: Credit for Killing bin Laden

Yesterday my old boss shared this graphic on his Facebook wall:

Of course, the analogy is deliberately flawed to achieve the comic effect of calling Obama a “clown”. A more apt analogy would compare the president with McDonald’s CEO, Don Thompson. Does Mr. Thompson cook your burger when you visit McDonald’s? Of course not, but he is an important member of the team that produces all those burgers. The real question is whether Mr. Thompson deserves any credit (or blame) for your crappy McDonald’s burger?
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News from the Bubble: Second Amendment vs. Crazy People

A Facebook friend posted this to his pics awhile back:

Despite my friend’s protestations to the contrary, this image apparently makes the argument that an armed population is a safe population. More specifically, if considered within the context of the recent shootings in Colorado, it seemingly argues that the Aurora shooter would have fired fewer shots if that theater had more armed citizens at the movies that night.

I suppose that some might think that this image simply says that “guns prevent crime” or that “guns stop crime” but it goes beyond those assertions (with which, by the way, I would never argue). The inclusion of the word “crazy” is significant and tells us that the author is not speaking just of criminals but of people that are insane. Furthermore, the author also says that she is speaking of insane people who are armed – i.e. the kind that can “get off shots”. These two specific word choices strike a very specific chord in our psyche: vengeance.
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News from the Bubble: Welfare Drug Testing

A friend of mine added this to his Facebook photos today:

My first reaction was to add this comment:

I’d rather see nobody drug-tested. Doesn’t that make more sense?

Then, since I remembered reading about Rick Scott’s program in Florida some time ago, I googled “florida drug testing welfare“. I skimmed two articles and added this comment:

BTW, Florida spent more money testing than they saved cutting benefits for those who tested positive. They also found that only 2.6% of those tested were drug users. Compared to Florida’s rate of 8.13% among the general population, it showed that welfare recipients actually use drugs less than everyone else.

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Letter to my Uncle Lorell who is dying

September 3, 2011

 

Dear Lorell,

When I was a kid there were few things I liked more than going to my uncles’ farms. Being a “city slicker” (as my classmates often called me), the farm was a completely different world to me. When I visited my Uncle Merlin’s farm it was mostly about hanging out with my cousins who were close in age to me, but when I visited your farm, it was always about you and I spending time together. That is a gift that I will always treasure.

One time when I was there “helping” you, we tried to take a dent out of the local rat population. I’ll never forget when you lifted up a piece of plywood (or maybe it was corrugated tin) that was laying behind the big machine shed. The plywood was laying on a small pile of corn and when you lifted it, it revealed several rat “tunnels” and the rats inside them. I was surprised but you were not because you had a gun and started shooting the rats as they scurried away. Guns, rats, tunnels – everything about being on the farm was so cool.

You’ve always been there. You were at Grandma Christensen’s for all those Christmases with the toys in the bedrooms and the money in the envelopes. And you were at Grandma Ring’s for the oyster stew. I remember sitting in that little living room watching Vitas Gerulaitis play tennis and you laughing when I joked that his name sounded like a disease. Harold was there. And my dad. And Gene.

So many memories I have of you and so little time to tell you about them. You kept your golf cart in Grandma Ring’s garage. You drove that giant green Cadillac. You visited me at my first house in Portland. Remember? You got lost and I told you “find the first bridge you see and cross it.” I was so sad to spend what I thought would be our last birthday together three years ago but now I’m so glad that you have had three more years in this world. I’ve never had a birthday where I didn’t think of you. And I never will.

As I sit here with all these thoughts and memories swirling through my head, I’m desperately trying to figure out how to end this note to you in a meaningful way. I suppose that life mostly doesn’t come to an end in a dramatic or meaningful way so perhaps I should just end this by saying that I thank you for your many kindnesses towards me over the last (almost) 45 years and that I think you’ve been a good uncle and a fine man. I also thank you for my double cousins without whom my life would be lesser. I hope that you reach the end of your days peacefully and without regret. And I love you.

Mick

Summer Playlist

After a few hints from the family, I have concluded that is time to end my blues exploration – at least for the time being. I had a revelation while eating dinner with the family the other night: The Summer Playlist. I’ll describe it in detail below but first a little context about the music listening situation in our house.

iTunes MBPDuring the work day I spend most of my time in my office, the kitchen or the bathroom (in that order). On the left side of my desk my MacBook Pro (MBP) runs iTunes all the time. The MBP is connected to my awesome PMIX-100 personal audio mixer (seen on the right of the photo). The mixer is connected to my Cambridge Soundworks desktop speakers which are located 18 inches in front of my head in the classic stereo position. This is where I do almost all of my listening these days.
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The Stumble

Today as I was listening to A Hard Road by John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers for the first time, the song that most caught my attention was their cover of Freddie King’s “The Stumble”. Since I had recently added The Very Best of Freddie King to my iTunes collection, I knew I probably had the original:

iTunes search for "The Stumble"

Sure enough I had the version by Freddie as well as another by Jeff Beck I immediately queued them to play next: Freddie followed by Beck. In the meantime, I pulled up the Wikipedia article to find out more about this rollicking electric guitar solo + what is the wah wah effect. There’s not much there but the article does have a list of artists that have covered it. My eyes immediately found Gary Moore who was more or less a disciple of Peter Green, Mayall’s guitar player on his version of “The Stumble”. Having just downloaded a chunk of Moore’s work the night before, I anxiously scanned the files for his version of “The Stumble”. I dropped it into iTunes just as Beck’s version faded out.

As Moore’s version blasted my ears, I went to YouTube for further insight. I wasn’t able to find the Freddie King version but I did find Green, Beck and Moore as well as a couple of interesting versions.
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Mega Cool Super Church (and Technology)

Saturday I drove down to Happy Valley to pick up Graham following an overnight at his friend’s house. On the way there I saw a monstrous building and noted it was a church. On the way back home, we stopped so I could get a picture. I posted the first picture to Instagram (warning: link opens iTunes). In that picture, I included the sign as a point of reference but it somewhat eclipsed the gigantic church so I moved a few steps east and snapped another:

Abundant Life Church
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The Impact of War on Segments of the Middle East Population

Have you seen Google’s Public Data Explorer? It’s an interactive interface to some gigantic sets of data gathered from around the world (sorry, requires Flash). I found it when I searched for “population growth” on Google. If you click the chart at the top of the list of results, you can graph the change in population growth rates for any country from 1960 to present. The chart graphs the US population rate by default but you can turn on any combination of countries as well as the world population growth rate for comparison.

After playing with it for a few minutes, I wondered about Iran and Iraq, two countries that we all probably wish we knew less about:

Remember the Iran/Iraq war? You can see it right there in the data. Can you tell who “won” and who lost that war?

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