Well worth a look. Stephen Fry lectures on why the Elgin marbles must be returned to Greece.
Stephen Fry on the greatest civilization ever known – Hint: It isn’t the USA
29 Friday Nov 2013
Posted Uncategorized
in29 Friday Nov 2013
Posted Uncategorized
inWell worth a look. Stephen Fry lectures on why the Elgin marbles must be returned to Greece.
20 Wednesday Nov 2013
Posted Food, Psychology
inI’ve written about orthorexia in the past: The obsession with eating “correctly”, whatever that may mean to you. Usually, it relates to eating “healthfully” despite the fact that we really don’t know much about what that truly means. The human diet varies widely, from cultures that live for long periods in good health by eating extremely high fat diets, e.g. seal meat, blubber, etc., to those that obtain 90% of their calories from carbohydrates.
Some psychologists argue that orthorexia is more an obsessive/compulsive disorder rather than an eating disorder. And I understand that it didn’t make it into the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, the DSM-V. Does it really matter?
Here’s an excellent article entitled: Orthorexia: How eating healthy can lead to an eating disorder.
I still love nutritionist Ellyn Satter’s definition of normal eating:
Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it -not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.
In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food and your feelings.
14 Thursday Nov 2013
I currently receive around 40 legitimate emails per day from customers, colleagues and friends. At last tally, I receive an additional 1000-2000 spam or scam emails each day. A couple of times, I’ve inadvertently opened a few of these, or worse, hit the unsubscribe link. Either of these actions doom you to even more spam/scam emails, as you are now qualified to be on the highly valued, “Responsive/Stupid” list.
If you have half a brain, it is unlikely you’ll fall for the Nigerian lottery emails, or the letters from Interpol advising you that you have been awarded $50,000,000 for the lead you supplied that led to the arrest of that notorious Russian crime lord. I’m not even sure why they bother with these, but there must still be extremely gullible and stupid people that respond, otherwise, they wouldn’t be sending the emails.
There is, however, a newer type of spam/scam that appears to come from sources you already do business with, e.g., Apple, your bank, specialty vendors, etc. These are extremely well done and the HTML looks exactly like what you would expect if they were legitimate. Here’s a tip for recognizing these:
If you look at the URL, you will see that while they do end in the legitimate code, e.g. apple.com, royalbank.com, etc., there is always a prefix to that code. For example, the scam email from “Apple” will look something like this: specialoffers@info.apple.com, or mortgageupdate@reply.royalbank.com, or breakingnews@immediate.droz.com, etc.
Some tech gurus have written that spam will be the end of the internet because it not only eats up massive bandwidth on servers around the world, but it creates mistrust of the basic medium among users. I’m getting there.
08 Friday Nov 2013
Posted Food
inA few days ago I wrote about the various myths around the cleaning of cast iron pans. Intending to buy another, larger Lodge pan to replace one of my Gastrolux units that has a cracked and pitted coating, I went to the Lodge web site. The Use & Care section has a very nice video on the cleaning of Lodge cast iron pans. Note the “Use soap if desired”:
07 Thursday Nov 2013
Posted Food
inMy wife and I have recently developed a fondness for the Bloody Caesar, a mixture of Clamato juice and vodka plus worcestershire sauce, celery salt, lemon juice, and Tabasco. But reading the contents of the Clamato bottle is like reading the contents of a chemistry set:
Ingredients: Water, Tomato concentrate, High fructose corn syrup, Monosodium glutamate, Salt, Citric acid, Onion powder, Celery seed, Ascorbic acid, Garlic powder, Dried clam broth, Spices, Vinegar, Natural flavours, Red 40.
Interestingly, if you read the origins of the Bloody Caesar, it was a concoction made in 1969 when Calgary restauranteur Walter Chell combined Tomato juice and clam juice with the aforementioned condiments. Now, tomato juice is a pretty benign beverage that consists of tomato concentrate, salt, and Vitamin C. So why do we need the rest of that crap in our drinks and bodies?
I went back to the origins of the Bloody Caesar and made one with the right stuff. Terrific! Better than with Clamato juice. I also tried it with V8, and it was even better, once again with very benign ingredients. Try it.
03 Sunday Nov 2013
I’ve used MS Outlook for more than 25 years. It has been the “nerve-centre” of my business for 20 of those years, coordinating emails, calendar, contacts, notes, and to do lists in a centralized and very efficient program. I have about 10,000 emails stored in Outlook, that represent a large part of my intellectual property and business “goodwill”. I am often surprised by how often I need to find an email from 5 years ago or more as a reference to a current project. In a nutshell, Outlook has been the dominant email “client” for most of the world, both business and private, for decades.
I’ve been so “hooked” on Outlook that I even waited to convert to a Mac four years ago because Outlook for Mac wasn’t fully functional. But once it was, I was on board and became a convert to the Apple philosophy of simplicity and user experience. And now, Outlook has been killed…at least for me.
Last week, I finally had to bite the bullet and convert my nerve centre to the resident Mac systems…separate email, calendar, contacts, and notes programs. I’ve kept Outlook off-line simply as a repository for my heritage emails. How did this sorry state come about? Who is at fault? Apple blames Microsoft and Microsoft blames Apple. But the answer is simple: Greed.
You may have noticed that in almost every product category, manufacturers have discovered the Holy Grail of sustained revenue and growth: The perpetually expiring product that needs to be constantly updated in order to function, i.e. The Cloud in all its variations. We no longer buy products, we buy services and outcomes. Pretty soon, we will all be renting cars and refrigerators instead of owning them…for an automatically renewing subscription fee. After all, who wants a happy guy with something he replaces only every 10 years because it meets his needs?
Microsoft says that Apple killed Outlook because it no longer supports SyncServices, i.e. you can’t synchronize your calendar, contacts and notes between your desktop and iPhone, iPad, etc. Apple says it was Microsoft’s fault because they really want to shift users to their cloud-based system, Office 360. And of course, they are both right.
Looking back at my thousands of legacy emails and more importantly, thousands of proposals and project reports, it makes me REALLY nervous to have all that intellectual property on a cloud server that I don’t control. I prefer to have a hard backup of all that wealth on a drive that I own and can touch (although I also use a remote service as double back-up in the event of a fire).