You and Jesus

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Kevin

Yesterday I attended an event and ended up packing food into boxes for the Harvest Hope food bank, an organization in South Carolina that works to relieve hunger in the state. So this morning in church my Pastor said: “There are only two people in the world—you and Jesus.” By that he meant that whenever you feed someone who is hungry, you are doing it for Jesus, and when you visit someone who is sick, you are visiting Jesus. I certainly felt motivated to do more of what I did yesterday.

My Senator, Lindsey Graham, on a telephonic town hall meeting a few weeks ago was talking about gun control. He said that there was no legitimate use for an assault weapon for hunting. He explained that he had an AR-15 to fend off mobs of people who might come looking for food after a possible future natural disaster. He said that an assault rifle was much more effective than a double-barreled shotgun. He’s going to shoot Jesus.

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The 5-2 diet

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Kevin

I’ve had this blog for years, but never had a “Health” category before. It seems that as you get older, health is something that you don’t take for granted any more.

Personally, I’m on the borderline between overweight and obese, and my blood sugar is high. I’ve tried various diet and exercise programs over the years, and all of them worked, except that they were hard to stay on. Here are some of them:

  1. Atkins diet
  2. Orange Creamesicle diet
  3. Food diary / computer diet
  4. 40-mile (cycling per week) exercise

So, I’ve started a new diet based on some Michael Mosley videos that were on PBS a few weeks ago. They are supposed to have all sorts of health benefits including weight loss, lowering cholesterol, growing new brain cells, and reducing the risk of cancer. The diet is basically eating 600 calories a day (500 for women) two times a week.

At first one might think that eating just 600 calories a day is uncomfortable. Actually it is only that way the first time you do it. The second time, it’s not much trouble at all. Some diets are hard to follow because they require special foods. This one doesn’t. What I also found is that once you do a “fast day,” you’re not as hungry and you feel satisfied with smaller portions on the other days. If you need motivation, just remember that on the non-fasting days, you can eat whatever you want.

Mosley also introduced a rather remarkable 3-minute a week exercise program that for some people has remarkable benefits, including increasing insulin sensitivity. I haven’t started this one yet. Basically you get on an exercise bicycle and pedal your heart out for 20 seconds, cool down, and repeat for a total of three times (1 minute). Do this three times a week. That’s 12 minutes a month. Again, this is a program that should be easy to stay with because it doesn’t take a lot of time. The only problem is the special equipment.

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Senator Graham wants crazy people to buy their guns privately

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Kevin

I just listened to a telephonic town hall meeting with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who voted to block a universal background check bill in the Senate. Graham told a story of a woman who was determined to be mentally unstable in court, but whose status was never entered into the federal background check system. She later bought a gun legally and tried to shoot up a school in Charleston, but the gun didn’t work. Graham says that people like this need to be in the federal background check system.

In fact state participation in the federal system is spotty, particularly when it comes to mental health data. It’s a big problem.

Graham admits that there are people out there who are dangerous who can buy guns, and the current background check system won’t stop them. Graham’s answer is to get these people in the system. If they are in the system, then these dangerous people will have to buy their guns from private unlicensed sellers online or at gun shows.

It doesn’t do any good to have every dangerous person in the federal background check database, when not every gun purchaser is checked against that database.

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Stupid Windows tricks: Shaky-Shaky

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Kevin

OK, here’s a trick that works with Windows 7.

If you have several Windows open on your desktop, give this a try. Take your mouse and left-click and hold on the title bar (top) of one of the Windows, as if you were going to drag it. Instead of just dragging it, shake it back and forth vigorously. All the other Windows will minimize. Shake it again, and they will restore.

Update: This trick finally stopped working on Windows 11.

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Charter fights spam

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Kevin

Usually I’m critical of my Internet service provider when I can’t do what I want to do. In this case I was trying to forward email spam to a spam-reporting service. Charter Internet, who is my provider, blocked my sending the email, saying it was spam.

A lot of email spam comes from home computers, connected to high-speed Internet services, that have been compromised (hacked, pwned) by spammers. What Charter appears to be doing is blocking that illicit activity. This is the kind of corporate responsibility I applaud.

What was a bit curious, however, is that Charter figured out that the email was spam. It was so deeply obscured that my own spam filter, including a well-trained naive Bayesian classifier, didn’t catch it.

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Oblomov

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Kevin

I am please to announce completion of my latest audio book, Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov. When I started this project, I thought it would be a fairly uninteresting reading of an unknown work by a little-known author. That’s not how it turned out. This is a book that literally everybody was reading in Russia when it came out, and I think it has something to say to modern people as it deals with questions of work and leisure. Here’s my summary (with help from the Wikipedia):

Oblomov is the best known novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. Oblomov is also the central character of the novel, often seen as the ultimate incarnation of the superfluous man, a symbolic character in 19th-century Russian literature. Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Spoiled as a child to the point of not even being able to put on his own socks, Oblomov is unprepared to deal with the smallest difficulty of adult life. In his fevered dreams he sees the words “Oblomovstchina” (“Oblomovism” or in this translation “the disease of Oblomovka”) in flaming letters on the ceiling putting a name to the disability of which he is all too aware.

This romantic novel was considered a satire of Russian nobility whose social and economic function was increasingly in question in mid-nineteenth century Russia, and from it the word “Oblomovstchina” entered the Russian vocabulary.

Posted in Audio Books, Books | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Degen DE32 AM/FM/SW radio/MP3 player

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Kevin

imageThis is an interesting little shirt-pocket radio available on eBay for under $30. It has a few nice features and some drawbacks too.

The radio covers the US FM radio band as well as the low FM band (64-87 MHz) used in some parts of the world. It covers AM (MW), and shortwave in 8 bands from 5.6 – 22 MHz. The tuning and display is analog.

Sensitivity is not stellar. Because of the radio’s size, the internal AM antenna is small and not very effective. The telescoping whip antenna only reaches 13 inches, again limiting sensitivity. The dial is very tiny, making it difficult to tune precisely and there is considerably play in the tuning wheel, which means it’s hard to position precisely. If you tune just a touch past a station, you have to turn back a lot to find it again. One inexcusably bad design point is that it is extremely difficult to tell which band the radio is switched to by looking at it unless the radio is lit dead on. The indicator is down in a hole.

There are also some nice things to note with this radio. First, it uses a digital signal processor for improved selectivity. In fact one finds clear separation of stations, and stations tend to snap into tune as one turns the dial. There is an effective LED tuning indicator also. Another feature of the radio is that it doubles as an MP3 player with a slot to plug in a Micro SD card. With headphones, I was extremely pleased with the sound of MP3 playback with the only complaint being no booming bass. The sound of FM, however, was a little tinny, and no one would want to listen to anything on the internal speaker.

Other nice features include:

  • Flashlight (although no dial light)
  • The tuning knob is accessible from both the top and the side of the radio
  • Built in rechargeable battery (supplied). It uses the Nokia BL-5C battery that can be replaced for under $10.
  • Battery charges from mini USB cable (supplied)
  • Stable, and does not tip over easily

If you want to combine a shortwave radio and an MP3 player in one, then this is a good low-cost option. If you don’t need the MP3 player, then you can get the Degen DE321 with some rechargeable batteries (which you have to charge externally) for $10 less . The DE321 has a bigger dial and the same digital signal processing feature.

Posted in Product Reviews, Radio | Tagged , | 2 Comments