Hmmm....Turns Out I'm Right

Today's article says something that I've suspected for years, but always assumed I was wrong about. Apparently, a child's level of activity has little to do with obesity.

I first thought of this because I hated phys-ed. (It turns out I make most of my decisions the way most people make their decisions. I decide things based on non-rational reasons, then I find the logic and evidence to back up what I've already decided. This fools me into thinking I make decisions based on rational reasons. You probably do it too. And a lot more than you may think.) I complained to my friend "Why do we have to take phys-ed?" He said "So we don't get fat."

At the time I was too young to realize how much nonsense this was. We had phys-ed two or three times a week for an hour and twenty minutes. Once you count for time to change, and stand there listening to the teacher telling you what to do, team-picking time, etc. you're down to 50 minutes to an hour of actual activity time. So, that works out to 2.5 to 3 hours per week of forced physical activity time. Not all of that time will be used to run around and be active. There will still be a lot of standing around.

Ask anyone who's tried to loose weight by purely exercising. That is not enough. Plus, there were enough fat kids in the class to refute his claim. Furthermore, I was only forced to take phys-ed until grade 9. So, from grades 10 through 12 I didn't take one phys-ed class. When I graduated from high school I weighed 120 lbs. By my friend's logic, I should have gotten fat. (BTW: In the second semester of grade 12 I ate a slice of pizza and drank a can of pop (non-diet) almost every day.)

Furthermore, my participation in phys-ed wasn't exactly stellar. When playing basketball I tried to put as many people between me and the ball as possible. I tried to stay away from the basket so I wouldn't be passed the ball. When playing badminton I would play with the kid in the wheelchair. And he would usually win. I remember being body-checked in soccer-baseball. I was a pretty small kid, so I got picked on a bit. Plus I was a really annoying nerd, so I got picked on lots. Mea culpa though.

So I didn't exactly get many rewards out of phys-ed. And my heart breaks when I hear the bureaucrats saying "We'll combat obesity by making our kids take more phys-ed." I think of all the younger versions of me. That's the sort of thing that would have made me want to drop out of high school. (For those who have known me in my post-high school time, you may think of me as being studious and keen on school. I wasn't that way in high school.) I hear this plan and know it won't fix anything! Furthermore, this seems like something parents should be taking more responsibility for.

Besides, if kids want to be active, they will be without the school making them. If kids don't want to be active, the school can't really make them. They'll do just enough to pass and get by.

So, how do we get our kids to be thin and healthy?

The article says that they found diet to be more influencing on obesity than activity.
Good diet is paramount. Genetics also help. (That's how I stay[ed] thin.)

I'm An Artist Too (8)

This is a college football player who's jersey number is not 99, 01, 50, or some such rational number, but instead Pi.



UPDATE: The fact that I posted this picture on Pi Day was mere coincidence. Yes, in fact, March 14 is Pi Day. (3-14) Some folks like to celebrate at 1:59. (3-14 1:59)

My Side Of The Story

Yesterday morning in church Pastor Jack said something from the pulpit that involved me, and I didn't have a chance to explain my side of the story to the congregation. So this is my side of the story.

Saturday was the first warm day since the January thaw. RRRRRoll Up The RRRRRRim is in full swing. I'm putting away my sweaters. The days are getting longer. We just set our clocks ahead. Spring is on it's way!

Now, I was out for most of the day on Saturday. When I got back on Saturday night the McQueen's cars were parked side by side in the drive way. I had to block one of them in. Since the Toyota doesn't have the insurance sticker on it yet, it wasn't going anywhere so I decided to block it in.

The last time it snowed out and the plow went by and created a snow-bank. We never cleared it away. We just tried patting it down with the cars as we drove over it. But due to the warm weather (+2 degrees) and the humidity on Saturday the bank at the end of the driveway ended up freezing over. It's also higher at the edges of the driveway than the center.

I backed into the driveway but when my rear wheels got over the bank the car stopped and wouldn't go back anymore. The wheels just spun on the ice. So I pulled out and tried again. Same results. I tried again. Same results. I tried a fourth time, giving more juice. The problem is that if I gave too much juice I'd go crashing into the Toyota, which we just got back from the shop on Thursday night. But this attempt worked. I gave it enough juice to get all four wheels over the hump, but not enough to hit the Toyota. As soon as the car stopped, the front slid to the right putting my car at an angle.

I knew this might cause problems for the Intrepid. But I checked, and it looked like the Intrepid had more than enough room to get around me. And it would have, except for what happened on Sunday morning.

Apparently, the warm weather on Sunday morning caused the bank to melt enough to make it wet and slushy, but not enough for it to shrink and/or go away. So, when the McQueens went to leave that morning, in order to get around my car they had to drive through the bank. The wheel sunk in and got stuck. Given the amount of (wet) ice in the driveway, they wanted to be careful, otherwise they would hit my car. Then some people came walking by, one of whom was built like a truck, and helped them push the car out of the driveway.

One of the disadvantages of living with a Pastor of a church is that if you make a mistake, you may hear about it (along with everyone else) from the pulpit. However the advantage is that when he uses one of us in a sermon (by name) he owes us 25 cents. The disadvantage, as I found out yesterday, is it's a fictitious 25 cents.

So, to sum up, I blocked them into the driveway in an effort to not smoke their car. But this made it hard for them to not smoke my car. Normally my parking job wouldn't be an issue because 1) I am normally a very good backer-upper, staying well out of their way; 2) They normally could have driven over the bank except for the exact weather conditions that existed over the past 24 hours; and 3) being on two worship teams at church I end up having to leave earlier than them. In fact there's only one Sunday per month when I don't have to go in early, and, consequently, can sleep in. This happened to be that Sunday.

I'm sorry, the McQueens.

UPDATE: Apparently, Pastor Jack didn't actually say my name from the pulpit. It just felt like he did because of his tone, and he was looking right at me. There goes my fictitious 25 cents.

Emails (Part 3)

Remember my previous entries on Emails? In the second one I suggested the reason people have so many emails is that they don't read their emails fully, thus causing a chain reaction of otherwise redundant emails.

I came across these articles on emails and thought of another possible reason. (The first article lists the 12 steps to getting over an email addiction, and the second humourously explains why those 12 steps won't work.) Perhaps these people subconsciously purposely send nonsensical replies to emails in an attempt to get more emails. If that person is an email addict than it would be the same as the alcoholic who finds reasons to go past the liquor store, or the gambling addict who's wonderings seem to lead them past the casino. When you have an addiction you want to feed it. When you have an email addiction it gets satisfied when you check your inbox and see new messages in it for you.

I know I am somewhat addicted to email, but I'm getting over it. I receive email at work and at home. At work it's usually work related, so not too exciting. Nothing to get addicted to there. However, I do have a reputation for being quick with my updates. If someone tells me "The link on page X is now www.newlink.com" I would have it fixed pretty fast. So I usually check my messages as soon as they come in. It's not an addiction; it's a reputation to maintain.

The other place I check is as home. Back in the day, a few months ago, I would get home and check my mail and I might have one message in my inbox. Even that wasn't too exciting usually. I subscribe to a few email lists, so most of my daily emails would be from that. Not too exciting. But every now and then it might be from a friend. Especially if I was expecting one. If I emailed someone, and knew they usually took 2 days to reply, on the second day I would check my mail more often. Frequency of checks would increase until either A) I got the email, or B) I gave up waiting. It's waiting for that sort of email that gets you addicted.

But then something happened. Spam. When it first started I would check my inbox and it would say "25 new messages." and I would be all like "WOW! 25 new messages! Boy, am I popular!" Then I would look and it would be all spam. After a while of this I just expect a full inbox with nothing but spam.

So at work my incoming emails aren't rewarding enough to develop an addiction, and at home I've become cynical. Email addiction: cured.

I'm An Artist Too (7)

Often times inspiration for my art comes from what I'm listening to. I started drawing this while listening to Van Morrison. Doesn't really look like him, does it?

Why I Switched

I have a confession to make. Well, it's not so much a confession as a proud proclamation. I don't ever use Microsoft Windows by choice.

In 1996 I moved away to college taking a 486 DX4 100 with me. It ran DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. That's what I used for a year and a half. But I started getting tired of hardware problems, configuration problems, and general usability and overall coolness problems.

I talked to my friends who had switched to Linux. They told me "Sure. You wouldn't be having these problems. Instead you would have a whole other set of problems to deal with."

At the time I didn't want to make computers my career. I was on the road to be a pilot. At the Christmas of 1997 I had enough of Windows 3.1 I went home, taking my hard drive with me. I asked my brother to upgrade me to Windows 95 and while he was at it, could he install that Linux thingy?

So he gladly did. Then he gladly showed me my way around Linux. He showed me the virtual terminals and explained how you didn't need graphics to use to operating system (sort of like DOS, but way more powerful). He showed me X Windows, including several desktop managers including Gnome, KDE, OpenStep, and a few others. At the time Gnome and KDE were more than my memory could handle, so I stayed with OpenStep. But the point was not lost on me. Unlike in Windows or Mac, I was not locked into one graphical desktop manager.

At first I had no idea how to use Linux. I would have to call my brother up, long distance and ask him "How do you get a directory listing at the command line?" But it got better. Apps became more plentiful and easier to use. At first I did all my work in Windows 95, but would go into Linux just for fun. Just to do little more than look at it and double-click random icons to see what they did.

It all changed when I learned to get the internet working under Linux. Then there was very very little reason for me to go back to Windows. I set my computer up as a web/ftp/ssh server that I could access from school.

So I was a confirmed Linux user from 1998 onward. My friends were right. A lot of my DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1 problems had disappeared. But a whole host of new problems came along. Linux does support a lot of hardware. More than what you may think. But, when you buy something, unless it's a piece of networking equipment, it almost never says it works with Linux. In my experience I have less hardware problems with Linux than Windows. But you become really cautious about buying hardware.

The worst part was software installation. With Windows when you install something the Windows Installer holds your hand through the process. In Linux not so. A lot of times you just get the source code. You have to compile and install the program yourself. It's been my experience that it will compile only half the time.

The help docs are terrible for this. They seem to be written for the programmers with 15 years of C experience or something. Not for the average person trying to get once piece of software installed.

Package managers don't make things much easier. They're always whining about "failed dependencies". That means the program you're trying to install requires another program to work, but you don't have that other program, or it can't be found. So then you go and install that program, but it has failed dependencies. It turns out to be a huge vortex and you give up before you find the solution.

But it's still a lot better than using Windows. I had no fear of virii. I had decent security. I knew there were more than one way to do each thing I needed to do. I could administer things in X Windows, or at the command line. I knew that if a program did have problems, then people were working on them. And also, 99% of what you could want to run on Linux is free as in speech, and free as in beer. I could also be one of those smug Linux users.

Then, in 2004, when I was to first move to Ottawa for four months I needed to take a computer with me. I thought I might be doing a lot of moving around so I wanted a laptop. I still wanted to avoid Windows. And I was worried that if I got a laptop with Windows pre-installed, then when I would try to install Linux it might have some piece of proprietary hardware that wouldn't work in Linux.

I knew Mac OS X was built on Unix and came with Apache web server, MySQL, and PHP, so I could do my work and install many of my favorite apps. It came with an X Server, so I could run my Linux programs, from my Linux box on my Mac! And best of all, it wasn't Microsoft! And since it was for my business, come tax time it was a business expense!!

So I bought an iBook G4 and very quickly fell in love. There were a few things at first, which I will write about later, that took this ol' Linux user some time to get used to. Installing applications was a breeze. And if hardware supported Mac, the box generally said so. The software, specifically iLife, was great!

For the non-Mac users, iLife is a suite of software including: iTunes as a music player. No. It's not just a player. It's a music management system. And now it does video, movies, and TV shows. Plus internet radio, and podcasts. iLife also has iPhoto which is a photo-management system, iDVD for making DVDs, iMovie for making movies, and GarageBand for recording music with incredible ease. Since then iWeb has been added to allow you to easily create a web site. iLife has great integration within itself and the operating system. The integration, the little things they thought of, amaze me to this day.

I still like Linux. Ideologically Linux is the best. That position is very hard to argue with. My desktop computer (which hasn't been on in months) still boots into Linux. I will probably stick with both Linux and Mac for a long time yet. Each have their place in my computational world.

What Happens To All Your Change

According to today's article older people use more change than younger people. I could have told you this years ago. I noticed this. I would notice that a line in a store would move at a rate inversely proportional to the mean age of the population of the line. The reason for this was obvious. Young people would pay in bills. Only bills. Old people would look for bills, then start searching their change purse for the exact change. Paying in bills is faster because cashiers make change all day long so they become very fast at it. A lot faster than an octogenarian searching for exact change.

It's sometimes nice to have your observations validated by science.

But you may ask "Why is this?"

Well, guess what! I have a theory about that too!

When you're young you pay in bills all the time so you usually get change back. This means you'll accumulate change, and lots of it. You put the change in your pocket (because you're not old enough to have a change purse), then that night the change makes it's way to the desk or dresser where it sits and collects dust until you get older.

Then, you look at your desk or dresser and there's several thousand dollars there in pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. You figure you have to do something with it. When you're young ,your attitude to change is that it is only money in the technical sense, not the practical sense. (If you look close, I'm making bad puns. Or am I?) It technically is legal tender, but you'd never spend it. You don't have the time to count change. You're in too much of a hurry to download the latest hip-hop song.

So, here you are, older. Your kids have moved away, you've retired, and suddenly you have time, time to count out exact change while a line of youngun's, who are in a hurry, forms behind you. And, why not? You have that dresser or desk full of loose change.

So, basically, the change that accumulates when you're younger gets spent when you get older. Suddenly, change is money in both the practical sense and the technical sense.

I think the scariest thing about this theory is that I formed it years ago, when all I had time for was bills. But now I'm getting older, and I'm stuck in a mid-point. I do use change to buy stuff, but I still rarely count exact change. Instead, if the price comes to $7.63, I'll look for a $10 bill, which I will inevitably not have. (Apparently, the Canadian mint has printed a sum total of seven $10 bills in the entire history of Canada. So the misprint of Flanders Fields isn't as big a deal as you may think.) So I'll get a $20 bill, and look for 2 quarters, a dime, and three pennies. That way the cashier can give me two $5s, a Toonie, and a Loonie. (For all you American readers, yes, that really is what we call our two dollar coins, and one dollar coins respectively. And yes, we do have one and two dollar coins instead of bills.)


I have, on occasion, payed with exact change. But it disrupts a natural process. A purchase interaction is specifically scripted.

Ex:
Cashier: "Hi. How are you?"
Me: "Not bad, and yourself?"
Cashier: "Pretty good." This is followed by a question about if there's anything else, or if I was able to find everything today.
Me: "No, this is it."
Cashier: "That will be $7.63."
Me: "Here's $20."
Cashier: "Thank you. And your change and receipt..."
Me: I take the change in complete blind faith that they gave me the right change, and I put it into my pocket, because I'm still too young to have a change purse. "Thank you."
Cashier: "Thank you. Have a nice day."
Me: As I start walking away I say "You too." Then I quickly turn way in order to break eye-contact while feeling satisfied with a completely flawless interaction.

But when you give exact change that upsets the interaction and throws the rest off balance, and you can't recover. A receipt can act as change, it allows the interaction to flow. But if it's for something for which a receipt is not forthcoming, then it messes everything up.

Ex:
Cashier: "That will be $7.63."
Me: "Here you go, $7.63."
Cashier: "Thanks." Then the cashier and I stand there in awkward silence for a few minutes shifting our eyes to the left and right trying to not make eye contact, and yet not be obvious about it. I'm not really sure if I should say "thanks" and it certainly isn't, according to the script, time for them to tell me to have a nice day.

I wonder how old people get used to that part? Perhaps when you turn 50 you receive a new script that handles that exact scenario?