Opt Out at OptOutPrescreen.com.
You can opt out from these offers either for 5 years, or permanently (by mail).
It won’t eliminate all of the offers, but according to MasterYourCard it took care of about 90% of their junk mail.
Ecological, and de-stressing.
The rest of the post at MasterYourCard is worth reading also–it’s about doing for yourself what the company LifeLock says it will do for you for $120/yr.
All posts by keith
Midnight Meals are bad for you.
So says a report in the New York Times: Midnight Meals – New York Times
“Eating a big meal just before going to bed has been found in studies to elevate triglyceride levels in the blood for a period of time,” Dr. Aronne said. A higher triglyceride level “has been associated with metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance,” both related to weight gain, he said.
Dr. Aronne suggested a theoretical framework for why late meals may stay with you. “If you ate 500 calories during the day but walked around afterward, your muscles would be competing with your fat cells for the calories and could burn them up as energy for physical activity,” he said. “But if you consume it at bedtime, with no physical activity, the body has no choice but to store the calories away as fat.”
today
I spent most of my day replacing the heater/vent/light in the bathroom. What a pain in the butt. this one seems to be slightly better made than the previous two, so I’m hoping that the heater lasts longer (which is why I had to replace it). Last time I just replaced the heater, but this time, the insides are totally different, and actually the dimensions are slightly different also, so I had to do some cutting in the ceiling. Two things that suck about the unit:
- 1. The wiring box needs to be bigger, so that you can actually close it when you get all the wires in.
- 2. The way the light reflector is held in is engineered stupidly–you screw a cap nut onto a bolt until it’s tight and then keep going until the bolt unscrews itself out of the cross bar it’s in until the cap nut pulls the reflector against the bar. Why not just use a short sheet metal screw like they always have? Why make it difficult, and non-obvious? Jeez!
For those who wonder the unit is a Nutone 665RP.
Kiosk by Bruce Sterling
A new piece of fiction from Bruce Sterling at F&Sf. Although I enjoy his non-fiction work, I love his fiction, and it’s good to see something new from him. It’s about technology, the internet, and revolution. Good stuff. Here’s an excerpt:
Ace lifted and splayed his fingers. “Look, tell me something I can get my hands on. You know. Something that a man can steal.”
“Say you type two words at random: any two words. Type those two words into an Internet search engine. What happens?”
Ace twirled his shot glass. “Well, a search engine always hits on something, that’s for sure. Something stupid, maybe, but always something.”
“That’s right. Now imagine you put two products into a search engine for things. So let’s say it tries to sort and mix together…a parachute and a pair of shoes. What do you get from that kind of search?”
Ace thought it over. “I get it. You get a shoe that blows up a plane.”
Borislav shook his head. “No, no. See, that is your problem right there. You’re in the racket, you’re a fixer. So you just don’t think commercially.”
“How can I outthink a machine like that?”
“You’re doing it right now, Ace. Search engines have no ideas, no philosophy. They never think at all. Only people think and create ideas. Search engines are just programmed to search through what people want. Then they just mix, and match, and spit up some results. Endless results. Those results don’t matter, though, unless the people want them. And here, the people want them!”
Punk
So the wife’s doing a game of blog tag over at her blog. You have to go to photobucket.com, and type in the answers to various questions, in the search form. Since I’m lazy, and not really into this kind of stuff, I just took the answer to my favorite kind of music, and you can see the result right here (it’s also cool, because the penguin is the mascot of my favorite OS–Linux). Check out Jen’s answers on her blog, there’s quite a few.
Too Tired to Exercise?
Wrong, exercise actually boosts energy, as pointed out in this article at webmd.com.
It doesn’t need to be a lot either, just 20 minutes of low intensity exercise 3 times a week helps fight chronic fatigue.
So what’s stopping you? Get on it.
Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?
It seems that not everyone thinks so, and it may not help so much in certain sports like the marathon.
Several pithy quotes from the article:
And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said. “The
fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said.
Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender
and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr.
Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are
not going to have big muscles.”
The main problem with weight lifting is that many people do it all
wrong, said Kent Adams, the director of the exercise physiology
laboratory at California State University
at Monterey Bay. They don’t have a program or a goal. Technique may be
sloppy. Or, Dr. Adams said, they use weights that are too light.
Muscles need to be stressed if they are to respond, he said. Dr.
Kraemer is on the same page. One study, he said, found that women tend
to lift half or less of what they could lift. And this happened even
when women were working with personal trainers, he said. “There
is so much misinformation,” Dr. Kraemer said. “It’s a quagmire out
there.” He recommends trainers certified by the National Strength and
Conditioning Association, which also supplies educational information.
Dr. Kraemer is a past president of the organization.
Technorati Tags: weight lifting, exercise
Two posts in one day WOW!!
Hehe.
So I took this pic on my way to work the other morning, and haven’t got around to posting it until now.
The splendors of a Maine morning.
Health Spending to Double by 2017
from webmd.com comes this article.
The headline really bugs me, because it’s such a misnomer. “Healthcare” and “health spending” is so untrue, it’s illness, or medical care, and spending.
Health spending would be on stuff like good, clean foods, exercise equipment, gym memberships, etc–stuff that keeps you healthy in other words, not spending on things to help us when we become unhealthy/sick.
I just wish that otherwise great sites, like webmd, would realize this, and stop using these euphemisms, so that people might realize that except for checkups, going to a doctor isn’t about health, but rather about sickness.
WikiLeaks
Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.
Martin Luther King Jr.
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.in/wiki/Wikileaks
Check it out, decide for yourself.