Over at the Zaggle Togetherness Blog we have a very important announcement :-)

Our new personalized email newsletter aggregates all the events your friends are attending into one simple email digest. You can set the email frequency anywhere from once per day to once per week. Here is a short example of what the email might look like, most emails will have more events than this.

If you think Zaggle is useful, please help spread the word by posting this link on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else with lots of friends: http://bit.ly/zeemail

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Even though Apple makes the best tech stuff in the world, that doesn’t mean their products are free of bugs. Far from it :-) As a former employee of Apple Computer and a buyer of many tens of thousands of dollars of Apple products, I’ve seen a lot of Apple from both sides of the corporate wall. Friends and family often ask my advice on how best to resolve these issues. The following hints at getting your Apple needs met are actually neither tricks nor secret, just observations on the alignment of incentives between consumers and the mega corporations they depend on for cool gadgets.

Behavior

I generally wait about 2 months before upgrading Mac OS X or my iPhone firmware. This allows enough time so that the most egregious issues are suffered out by the masses, and by the time I update most issues are resolved. Understand though that if you are a power user, there will always be issues when you upgrade, and the longer you wait to upgrade, the more issues there will be. Such is the life of technology. This is more a law of entropy than the fault of Apple. I’ve noticed a lot of the time after I upgrade when I’m upset about a “bug” it’s usually just a different behavior that I’m not used to or that I don’t like. It’s best to just move on from those issues.

Use Case

The most important factor in resolving a technical issue is: how many other consumers are encountering exactly the same issue? The more people that have the problem, the faster the issue will “fix itself” because other whiners will get Apple to move their ass. Consider the product you are using and why it was created. Is this free software from Apple like iMovie? In that case, forget about it, this issue will never affect Apple’s bottom line. Did you pay money for the product that is having issues? Take a number, it may be months before your issue is resolved. Is your usage of the product outside of the mainstream? If so, you may want to reconsider. The fewer people that are encountering the exact same issue as you, the more energy you will have to exert in getting Apple to help resolve your issue. If your use case is inside the mainstream, google the error message. The first result will explain in detail how to resolve this problem since everyone else runs into the same situation.

Generally Annoying Bugs

These are general system software problems that affect everyone who has the version of the software that exhibits this issue. Recognize that no one individual person at Apple can mobilize to resolve this issue. It will take days before a developer even finds out that the problem is a problem, it will take more days for a developer to find and fix the issue, and it will take weeks to actually ship the software update. Software updates are extremely risky. Only critically important bugs are addressed in software updates. All other defects are dumped into the next major release of the operating system, which could be years away. What is critically important? … very simple … only issues that put Apple’s brand or bank account at risk are critically important. Be mindful that unless the bug results in data loss or some crazy bad problem, most consumers won’t even notice. If they do notice they will fault themselves before they fault Apple, a fact which all corporations use to their advantage.

It is possible to file bug reports, but it is time consuming. Instead I recommend incenting other consumers to file the bug reports so you don’t have to. Recall Apple doesn’t even allow consumers to search for duplicate bugs in the interest of protecting trade secrets of third parties, etc. But if you really want to file a bug, here is the place: http://bugreport.apple.com.

Your Time is Valuable

As a consumer, your time is valuable. Therefore as with any good corporation trying to maximize shareholder value, Apple implements processes designed to waste as much of your time as possible. The goal here is:

• customer gives up and doesn’t care about the issue anymore
• customer resolves the issue on their own
• customer resolves the issue on their own, posts the solution on forum (best case!)
• customer moves to another vendor

This last case is interesting. Note that it is not beneficial at all for Apple to keep you as a customer if you are costing them more money than you are paying them. You might be suprised how much support calls cost Apple. Then again, You may also be suprised how much your time is worth. When I’m deciding whether to interact with a corporation I pretend my time is worth $500 per hour. Note that this is a pretend valuation of my time, but it helps me make better decisions about which battles I fight with technology.

Resolution

So you’re still running into this issue that affects a lot of people, but not enough to be a big deal, and you have some time on your hands, you want to put some effort into resolution. The best way to mobilize Apple is to convince people to call Apple phone support and waste a bunch of their time. Each time the call center picks up they bill Apple $20-30. Nothing grabs corporate attention like hemorrhaging money. Being so expensive, the top issues are tracked and resolved quickly. If you can pull it off, brand-damaging negative publicity also gets attention. However keep in mind that Apple is the genius of tech marketing. They have sophisticated processes in place for damage control. Unless you have the resources to file a significant class-action lawsuit, using normal consumer channels is probably your best bet.

Hardware, and Real Resolution

The most legitmate issues are those that happen as a normal course of business and are specific to the physical piece of hardware you actually own as opposed to the product in general. Statistically speaking this generally ends up being a laptop with a dead hard drive / lcd screen or a dead iPhone. Smaller defects are not addressed unless egregious. For example, your laptop screen must have five dead pixels on it before Apple considers it to be “defective” .. this really sucks for those who have dead pixels, I feel lucky it’s never happened to me. If I did receive a screen with dead pixels, I would return the laptop and buy it again, probably eating cost of sales tax and/or shipping. Why would I make that concession? Look, give these guys a break. Consumer products are manufactured to high levels of quality which are industry standards, for example ISO 9001. The bargain we make as consumers is that large volumes of products are created which lowers prices to near zero. Quality is kept high, but there is still a non-zero probability of defects. If the defect happens to end up in your device, take your lumps, it is “an act of God” … Or do what I do, pay the incremental cost of returning an getting a new unit, move on with your life, and live peacefully knowing you have the best technology society can offer.

The Genius Bar

When the Genius Bar first started, it was awesome. It was almost as good as Apple’s internal repair facility in Cupertino which is excellent and can fix almost any Apple product in a day. But even for Apple employees, sometimes a problem is severe enough that the unit needs to get “sent to texas” … phone support will try to “send you a box” into which you pack your laptop and ship to texas and get your laptop back two weeks later. Whenever possible I try to make the Genius Bar do this nonsense for me. It’s much easier to drop off the laptop at the Apple Store, have the Genius ship to texas, and then pick up the laptop at the Apple Store again. When you go back to pick up the laptop, make sure it is fully functional before you leave! Bring everything you need for testing, including a power adapter and any accessories. And yes living without a latop for two weeks is damn near impossible. Why doesn’t Apple do something obviously helpful like transferring your data over to a loaner laptop while your own laptop is repaired? It’s too expensive, and apparently consumers aren’t demanding this service even though having a loaner rental car is standard in almost any car insurance policy.

So you have an issue, and after 5 minutes of googling still broken. Make a clear decision about what you want the Genius Bar to do for you and how they are going to do it. Are they going to replace the unit? Fix the software? Explain the situation? Write these goals down! At the Genius Bar it will be noisy, chaotic and frustrating. Having a written list of tasks helps keep both you and the Genius focused on resolution. Once you decide on goals, make an appointment at the Genius Bar and don’t leave the store until you achieve resolution. Various geniuses will ask you to “sit over here” or “step aside while help another customer” … be very polite, but stick around. Stay within the field of view of the Genius and make frequent eye contact. Smile a lot. If you are a tech genius and you “know what’s wrong” … for goodness sake play dumb. The Genius wants to feel like a hero, just like the rest of us. The Genius has to stand around all day listening to bitchy, whiny, or stupid people (or all three) … have some compassion. Here are some tactical suggestions for the Genius Bar, in order of efficacy:

• Choose your time wisely. Pick a time where the Genius will be happy and stress free, likely to be a weekday morning like Tuesday or Wednesday. Choose your store wisely, an Apple Store in a rich neighborhood shopping mall that doesn’t get a lot of traffic is good. Apple’s flagship 5th Avenue store in New York is generally unwise (3am graveyard shift might work though)
• Make an appointment. Often the next available appointment won’t be until tomorrow
• Be Prepared … I cannot stress this enough. Have your software updated to the latest versions, battery fully charged. If dealing with an iPhone issue, bring your laptop and everything you need to backup/sync your iPhone. Think of every excuse the Genius might have to send you back home and plan for it.
• Show up early
• Be polite, but firm. Remember your goals for this visit, which you decided and wrote down beforehand. Choose your battles
• Do what ever they say patiently, project composure and calmness. If they want you to re-install OSX, sit there and do it. Remember, you are going to be cooperative and eventually will be leaving with your needs met. Play dumb.

After following these steps, you may have to escalate to a manager and start all over again. Patience here is key. It also just depends on who you are working with, study up on well known techniques Social Engineering and try to leverage them. If you are working with a Genius that is having a bad day or just has it in for you, go home and make another appointment, perhaps at a different Apple Store.

When Purchasing, Buy Refurbished

While I’m thinking on strategy for Apple consumers, a quick note on saving a few hundred bucks. A lot of people know about the “friends and family” discount offered to Apple employees. Truth is I almost never use that, I can usually get a much better deal buying a refurbished unit. These deals on are the apple online store near the bottom of the page, here’s a picture:

Other third party sellers of Apple products also sometimes have lower pricing than the Apple Employee Discount. The Discount is more of a means of social control to help the Employees feel special, and to incent otherwise intelligent Fanboys to get jobs and slave away at Apple.

Refurbished products are excellent deals for several reasons:

• Refurbished products were returned because of a defect. The defect was repaired and the unit is brought up to the same quality standards as a new unit. Statisically speaking, that same defect is unlikely to happen to this particular unit
• Refurbished units have the same 1 year warantee as new units, but the refurb unit, statisically speaking is less likely to have problems
• Almost all hardware issued to Apple employees for their day-to-day work consists of refurbished units.

Finally, whether you buy a refurb unit or a new unit, beware of buying the first in a series. For example when the very first Titanium laptops came out, they had some manufacturing issues that were resolved after a few months. Refurb units are typically a few months out of date, if not more, look closely at what you are buying. Generally speaking a Fanboy willing to own Apple hardware that 6-12 months behind the hardware release cycle can save about $1,000. That’s enough for two fixed gear bicycles :-P

Filed under: all talk, lifehacking · 1 Comment

Well, here it is, the first rough cut of a Facebook Connect website that gathers all your Facebook events into one handy place. Check it out! and let us know what you think …

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Sent from my iPhone

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this is some text in the body of the email message

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My new favorite little book. It’s got all kinds of helpful funny things. One of the ideas is to map letters to numbers, then make up nonsense sentences to remember strings of numbers (combination lock?). Of course I used a unix command to come up with the most frequent initial letters in the english language. Then I massaged the results a little.

cut -c1 /usr/share/dict/words | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | uniq -c | sort -nr

Here is the resulting map … let’s go memorize some long strings of numbers!!! oh wait … we have cell phones, nobody needs to remember anything any more :-)

0 s ero
1 u on
2 t wo
3 r ee
4 d oor
5 a live
6 m ix
7 h eaven
8 b ait
9 p ine

93 68 59 79 45 47
please remember milk, bread, and please help piggy drain all drinks hai!

Author Steven Saunders has an eccentric little consulting company but I found this paper ABOUT EMERGENCE an interesting Sunday read.

Filed under: all talk, books, inspiration, lifehacking · 1 Comment

We had a fantastic live action demo of TikiTV last night at the reception party celebrating the launch of the Timothy Leary Video Collection. A lot of great people were asking about TikiTV, how it works, how to use it, how to get involved. This is the start of a good thing.

Add your TIKITV comments/questions below and we will hook you up!

Filed under: bay area, code code, video · 1 Comment

Apple seems to be trading in productivity for flash … here is how to disable the “reflecting mirror” effect from the Dock in Leopard:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then send kill -1 to the Dock process.

Link to the blog I found this on

Filed under: no code, osx · 0 Comments

I used the email gateway to upload the photo below but my email text didn’t end up on the blog :-( …. the smilely face is built out of my anti-depressants and I think that’s hilarious. I’m packing for Tokyo, leaving tomorrow AM, super super psyched!! :-)

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I thought I would share a couple of helpful GPL command lines that really get the job done if you want to animate a sequence of images.

First (via Mike) is news of the jhead project. Unbelievably the ImageCapture.app application that ships with Mac OS X cannot handle more than several thousand images. ImageCapture.app will copy all of the image files, but the number sequence wraps around and it overwrites thousands of the earlier images in the sequence!! jhead fixes all that by renaming all of the image files based on the EXIF timestamp in the JPG file. brilliant! Here is the commandline he recommends:

jhead -nfpx%Y%m%d-%H%M%S -dt -ft $*

Now you have a nifty sequence of hopefully hi-res images. One of the cool things about timelapse is you can shoot 5 megapixel images and then scale them down to NTSC (720×480) or HD (1920×1024) resolution. In fact if some crazy 5 megapixel video format comes out 10 years from now, you will be able to support that as well! (As an aside, the Digital Cinema releases that are dribbling out to theaters these days are at 2,000 pixels wide. Eventually that will go up to 4,000 pixels wide, but there are not currently projectors that can support that resolution!)

So anyway, megapixels. How do you scale the images without fudging it up? A little known fact is that most video that looks crappy because of “the video compression” actually looks crappy because of the way the video was scaled down to its postage stamp resolution. So here is what you do: Use the fantastic ImageMagick “convert” command to scale your images down at even higher quality than photoshop! for free! and without using a dumb GUI scripting language. You can read about image scaling in laborious detail or you can just use this command line:

convert  -filter sinc -resize 720x480 foo.JPG foo_ntsc.JPG

I put the following bash script into a makefile to process my timelapse library:

for i in *; do  if [  ! -e "$i/ntsc_jpg/" ]; then  mkdir "$i/ntsc_jpg"; for i in orig_jpg/*.JPG; do echo $i; echo convert  -filter sinc -resize 720x480 ntsc_jpg/`basename $i`;  done fi done

And finally I would like to share the “ghetto HD” format that VJ Science came up with for doing 16:9 format on an XGA projector. This command includes cropping to get my 1600×1200 images into 16:9 aspect ratio … if you have a different source resolution, I’m going to leave it to you multiply your image width by 9 and divide by 16 to figure out the how many pixels to crop on top and bottom. The idea is to crop first and then scale down. Although I guess in terms of quality it doesn’t matter the order.

convert  -crop 1600x900+0+150 -filter sinc -resize 1024x576 foo.JPG foo_xga.JPG

Now you’ve got a nifty sequence of beautifully scaled images. Time to make video! Which of the 7 bajillion video codecs are you going to use? My recommendation is to use ffmpeg to make an mpeg-2 “master” that you can distribute by uploading to youtube, archive.org, and so on. ffmpeg understands image sequences! So here is a quick way to get your mpeg-2 video (no audio). This command assumes your images are named like “IMG_0001.JPG” and so on … I know that doesn’t jive with the jhead naming I’ve outlined above, but you are a big unix haxor and can figure that out.

ffmpeg  -i "IMG_%04d.JPG" -b 10000 test.m2v

For my purpose I am building up a video library for doing VJ/video mixing stuff. In this use case video quality and decode speed is much more important than bitrate. Since decoding mpeg-2 “I” frames is about 3x faster than decoding “P” or “B” (difference) frames I use this command to get a high quality I-frame only mpeg-2 stream:

ffmpeg  -i "IMG_%04d.JPG" -vcodec mpeg2video -intra -qscale 4 test.m2v

You can get higher quality by dropping qscale down even lower, but I think if you do qscale=1 your video basically won’t be compressed at all :-) rajbot?

So there you have it! The basics of an Open Source timelapse production pipeline. I use these tools on Mac OS X. Of course they are available on GNU/Linux. And you can also get them working under windows using Cygwin … We need more timelapse!

Link to jhead project
Link to ImageMagick project
Link to FFmpeg project

Filed under: commandline, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, jhead, photos, timelapse, video · 1 Comment

After 9 months of putting it off, I’m creating new folders and filing everything I have in my “To Be Filed” inbox …. I don’t know what happened but … 9 months … geez.

Here’s a little tip when real life presents a bulk-insert task like this … when you’re trying to find something it really helps to have the papers sorted chronologically. On the other hand you know that you will probably never look at these statements and receipts again … this is a good case for using Lazy Evaluation. I just dump everything in the proper category (e.g. Bank Statements, 2007) and then don’t order them chronologically until I actually have to find something like a specific charge on an old credit card statement.

Link to some interesting GTD stuff

Filed under: lifehacking, no code · 2 Comments

Check out this awesome art piece being created right now right next to my sister’s room at her new residence in Rome, an artist/loft studio. It’s like the Ranch except cleaner.

Rome is a interesting mix of provincial, urban, snobby, boring, emotional … and of course, the Roman Ruins. More later.

ok, the embedded video isn’t working, hopefully rajbot can fix it :-) … here is a link

(click play to start) (link to other sizes)

Update: I added the video!

Unfortunately, archive.org doesn’t provide a cut-and-paste blob that works with wordpress. You have to manually remove newlines, add autoPlay:false and maybe autoBuffering:false, and add urls to the playlist yourself. ugh.

I’ll work on making a webapp to automate this process..

I tried to add this as a comment, but WP throws an error that says ‘Can not open socket’. I wonder if that is a captcha plugin issue. I’ll look into it later! -rajbot

Filed under: rome, soundart, video · 1 Comment

I think definitely wins the award for Funniest Thug Parody of the Week.

Read A Book

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Link to Read a Book on MySpaceTV

Filed under: beats, books, video · 1 Comment

No technology has transformed commerce and the way we live our lives as much as the 20th century shipping container. And compared to other technologies (e.g. internal combustion engine), it’s drop dead simple … it’s a just a metal box. I’ve always enjoyed watching ships roll under the Golden Gate Bridge. And on occasion I’ve enjoyed the Port of Oakland in some ways that involve loud music and the cover of night.

So I was interested to read that the Port of Oakland is considering some of the biggest changes to the industry since deregulation in the 70s. At the center of debate is trucking, traditionally contracted out and held and arms length. But now the Port is owning up to the fact that each crappy truck driving through West Oakland dump 127,677 times as much toxic soot as a regular car does. As the trucking industry phrase goes, ports are where “the trucks go to die.” So-called “independent” truckers serving the port are almost exclusively poor immigrants making about $8/hour after expenses. Naturally they can only afford older used trucks, pollution spouts on eighteen wheels.

The Port is considering proposals as radical as granting employee status to all truckers, which is a breath of fresh air. Besides establishing a more reasonable wage and health benefits, the Port would take responsibility for cleaner vehicles. About 20% of west oakland residents have asthma, and the proportion is rising. The asthma is linked directly to the diesel pollution.

Here’s to the Port of Oakland for trying to make the right thing happen, a move that will force all the other West Coast Ports to follow, if not the entire US. And while we’re at it, let’s open up the port to the public so they can see all the amazing stuff that happens there. Crazy container cranes moving huge loads, massive stacks of containers that form mazes the size of small cities …. it’s some crazy shit.

Link to Death In The Air at The Bay Guardian.

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Hola, hello from Peru!! Some people think I came here to see Machu Picchu but no, I came here to blog.

UCSF Physical Therapy offers an ingenious program where they engage their ergonomics staff in some very helpful side jobs. At Bakar Gym just past the weight area they have a fully decked out physical therapy room complete with funny looking exercise machines. Weird straps make the machines look like torture devices. Anyway, stop by from 5-7pm for a free consultation. After the consult I signed up for four one hour sessions at the ridiculously low price of $140 (total). Given my experience with wrist, knee and now cervical (uh … neck) pain, I was easily willing to pay five times that amount. Stefanie, the physical therpist, has 30 years experience in physical therapy.

This service from UCSF is more or less perfect for me: I need someone with some occupational experience that can tell me what I’m doing wrong and what exercises I can do to fix my problems. I’ve got a set of six neck stretches that are helping my undo 10+ years of bad posture.

• turn head to the left as far as you can, hold for 30 seconds. Repeat towards right. Repeat 3x, both sides.
• lean head left, ear towards shoulder. Repeat towards right. Repeat 3x, both sides.
• This is harder to explain, but a great stretch. Lean head forward, while forward lean head left 50%, now while holding all that rotate head left 50%. My PT describes this as “putting your beak beneath your wing like a bird” … repeat on RHS, repeat 3x.
• Anterior Scalene: lean ear towards shoulder, now rotate your head so you are looking at the ceiling. Repeat RHS, repeat 3x
• Posterior Scalene: lean ear towards shoulder, now rotate head so you are looking at the floor. Repeat RHS, repeat 3x.

So doing all of that is going to take about 15 minutes. But if looking over your shoulder has gotten annoyingly painful, it’s totally worth it.

I also received some useful suggestions for wrist stretches and strengthing muscles around my knee to keep the patella up off of the knee joint area. Yay for UCSF!!

Link to UCSF Physical Therapy

Filed under: lifehacking · 2 Comments

“Sent from my iPhone” … That’s the somewhat snotty default signature that iPhone tacks onto your mail messages. So what’s it like?

I’m typing this post using the I screen keyboard I safari in horizontal mode. Making a blog post on my sidekick caused me convulsions, on my iPhone it’s slightly less painful. Punctuation is a pain. You will note there is no picture for this post: the file upload button is disabled I safari despite the fact that this is an 8GB iphone. And the is no select/copy/paste in the text system, so I can’t even paste in a URL from google images. But I’ve successfully reached the end of this paragraph. I would guess I could have typed this in about 5% of the time on my macbook. I don’t thing mobile devices are ever going to he better than a computer.

the biggest annoyance is the lack of a system-wide on screen “back” button. Clicking a link in your email takes you to safari. The only way to get back is to go the the main screen and then mail. And getting to the main screen involves pressing the only mechanical button on the front of the iPhone which for some reason requires about a million pounds of force. Dancing your fingers on the multitouch screen and then havinf to slam the home button is literally painful.

so does the iPhone live up to the hype? In a word, hell yes. Antialiased fonts. Animations everywhere. Nifty one finger scrolling with auto-dampened deceleration. This is a phone that makes it *fun* for me to scroll through my contacts. For those of us that were wondering what the heck was the point of LayerKit (CoreAnimation) last year, iPhone is the answer.

Even rickety old QuickTime gets an iPhone makeover. Much fuss is made over the lack of flash support. And yet there is YouTube right on the home screen. And the YouTube videos are somehow higher quality on my iPhone than on my $2000 MacBook. How do they do it? Apple is taking their classic walled garden approach here. The message couldn’t be louder: dear web 2.0, you will not get jack on the iPhone unless you partner with us and re-encode all you video. Oh and you have to use QuickTime. Not a bad strategy. With 99% penetration on the web, flash appeared to be the hands down winner of the web multimedia race. Now with Microsoft and Apple entering the consumer electronics arena, we can expect to see a genuine rematch between Flash,Silverlight, and QuickTime.

unfortunately this also means i won’t be able to make a decent blog post without custom iphone apps for wordpress. This post took me about an hour.

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I’m afraid these images speak for themselves … gotta love Vegas.

(more…)

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words … it’s closer to a million for this map I made illustrating where my college friends live:






I’ve known forever that I’m somewhat bicoastal, but I’ve been lazy about flying and I hate airports. But looking at this map a few times reveals the undeniable truth: I’m bicoastal forever and there is no way for me to be happy without traveling a lot. In terms of center-of-social-gravity, it looks like NYC is the place to be. Luck you New York friends! That’s where we’re gonna party ….

Link to Friends map on google maps

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking · 0 Comments

Web 2.0 companies lined up for a mass start at the Facebook F8 Launch this past Thursday. Facebook has 24 million users, set to have more than MySpace’s 150 million users by the end of the year, and an unprecedented empty application market. Just a few days after launch the dust has yet to settle, but iLike is clearly the shot heard around the Facebook. Less than 72 hours after launch of the F8 platform, iLike has over 200,000 users, almost 1% of the Facebook user base and ten times higher than the second place contender picnik, a Flash-based photo editing widget.

Apparently Facebook users like them some music.

Link to iLike Application on Facebook

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As noted a few weeks ago I went to an awesome seminar by Dr Clyde Wilson about nutrition for endurance athletes. Though I’m not much of an endurance athlete myself, I found this material pretty useful for day to day life. I’m typing up my three pages of notes so I can recycle the paper.

Energy Storage. We can store:

• about 2,000 Calories in our muscles. Muscles can absorb only glucose sugar. Maltodextrin is broken down to glucose in our saliva and is the only sugar form that can go directly to muscle.
• about 500 Calories in the liver. Liver breaks down larger sugars like fructose into glucose.
• about 200 Calories in our blood/circulatory system. Blood sugar is down to about 80% after waking up in the morning.

Burning Fuel

• Before training, stock muscle with Calories
• Muscle can burn up to 1,000 Cal/hour (intense running) but can only absorb 250 Cal/hour
• Proper hydration is critical for digestion and converting glucose into energy. Sugars need to be surrounded by layers of H20 molecules.
• The rate at which fuel enters the body is critical. Even eating the proper foods, if it is eaten all at one sitting in a day whatever cannot be converted to glucose immediately will go into fat storage.
• Body burns fat at 1/3 the rate for sugars: up to 4 Cal/minute from fat
• Compare with 10 Cal/minute for maltodextrin (direct to muscle) + sucrose (liver, then parallel delivery)
• Taking in Calories too fast will cause upset stomach.
• 250 Cal/hour works out to 4 Cal/minute. Consuming 40 Cal and then waiting 10 minutes is close enough.
• Every 1% of dehydration is a 5% decrease in performance.
• 50% of glycogen is gone from muscle after a workout

For Peak Performance

• stable blood sugar (no spikes, corresponding insulin spike will put you to sleep)
• stable fatty acid levels
• muscles fully stocked with glycogen

General diet

• We must eat protein, body can’t make it (doesn’t have to be meat though)
• Only need to eat protein 1-2x per day
• Caloric absorbtion rate: excess Calories are directed to abdominal fat (vs. subcutaneous).
• monounsaturated fats send 20% more Calories to muscle (vs saturated?)
• Fiber helps slow down digestion, this is the key to rate-limiting Caloric intake
• Spiking blood sugar -> Insulin rises to suck blood sugar out of bloodstream
• consume unsaturated fats
• consume (moderate amounts of) protein
• eat whole grain starches -> direct to muscle
• eat fruits + vegetables -> liver, then muscle
• 1/3 of Calories should come from (mostly unsaturated) fats
• dried fruit is better than nothing, but take advantage of fresh fruit whenever possible
• cook vegetables a bit to soften cellulose etc, but just a bit they should still be crunchy
• bananas are great in the AM, but get small ones or eat only half (see insulin, above)
• primary ingredient in a sports drink should be maltodextrin
• optimum is 3:2 ratio of maltodextrin to sucrose

Post Workout

• Best to take in Calories within 15 minutes after exercise
• recovery window is very important
• It takes a lot of water to digest food
• We need 1 Liter of water for 1,000 Calories
• We sweat 0.5 – 2.0 Liters / hour when training
• Need about 1/4 teaspoon salt per Liter of water
• sleep is very poor if you are dehydrated (neurons)
• Omega-3 fats, highest concentration is at synapse
• get your DRI for Omega-3 (1.5 grams/day), limiting factor for recover is the nervous system
• breakfast should have as much fiber as sugar (grams)

phew! Ideally our dietary economy and/or my cell phone would keep track of all of this stuff for me. Until then, I find Clyde’s tip sheets to be extremely helpful. Using them enables me to get relatively close to the above without thinking too much.

Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s Blog
Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s website (check the downloads)

Filed under: cycling, food, science · 1 Comment

I’ve always been looking for some way to store, display, see and manage my maps so they were stored out of the way but not hard to get to. And no folding. I hate folding. This has been for years and last week I threw up my hands and just decided to order the first thing I found on the internet.

I had to back down off of that because the first thing I found costs $1249. It was then that I began to understand that this might get a little pricey. Even finding poster display hardware was a pain. Google search “poster display” and let me tell you … you’re not going to find anything that helps you display your posters.

So I opted for the EB-200 “Econobin” at a mere $200. I know as soon as I post this someone is probably going to tell me I can get the same thing at IKEA for $79.99, but whatever …. I like the industrial look. And this thing is built to last, it’s going to be the only thing left in my apartment after The Big One

The ECONO BIN arrived wrapped in so much packaging I had to play like a field medic and cut it all off. It’s made up of decent square and round powder coated steel tubes.

Here is The BIN assembled with the copious packaging in the foreground. I bet the UPS guy was glad I came downstairs to meet him and drag these boxes up myself.

And here are some extremely organized maps. Shown here are the SFBC Bicycle Map, The NYC Subway Centennial Map of 2004, and the AAA Baja California Travel Map.

Naturally I was kind of smoking crack when I bought this thing. It’s way too big, awkwardly shaped and doesn’t fit anywhere. But I like it and I’ll get to see my maps a lot more now. And I have a map bin in my house !!

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking, no code, toys · 0 Comments

From a postcard addressed to RESIDENT:

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directorys & Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr., Executive Director/CEO invite you to join the Community Celebration:

Saturday, April 14, 2007
10:00am-4:00pm
(Official program begins at 11:00am)
K.C. Jones Park
5701 Third Street, San Francisco
Carroll Avenue Station
(Note: The Thunderbird will run every 20 minutes)

Special Guests:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
U.S. House of Representatives
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City and County of San Francisco

Woohoo!! Nancy Pelosi … I’m going to check this out.

Link to Thunderbird on SFMTA
Link to Nancy Pelosi on Wikipedia

Filed under: san francisco, support, upcoming · 0 Comments