Phil online

I love the Richard Muller lectures over at UCBerkeley. You can enjoy them too, for free.

I was stumbling through Dr. Muller’s web site today and I ran across this article on weight loss. He basically says the same things I’ve repeated here before (which I learned and repeated from The Hacker’s Diet). To wit,

1. Exercise will not help you lose weight the way you think it will.
2. Hunger is the way to lose.
3. Learn to appreciate the feeling of hunger as your body burning fat.

I’ve been challenged on these assertions before, sometimes by emotionally-charged lose-by-exercising proponents who are certain they needn’t be hungry. I hope they’re right, for their sakes. But it’s nice to see these ideas reiterated by a respected physicist. I wonder if I’ll ever see a nutritionist say the same thing.

If not, maybe it’s because it’s not true.

Want to lose a pound of fat? You can work it off by hiking to the top of a 2,500-story building. Or by running 60 miles. Or by spending 7 hours cleaning animal stalls.

According to Google and this site, I only have to run 22 miles to lose 1 lb of fat (or 25 miles if you go by Muller’s rounded-up 4000 kcals/lb).

I found a handy chart on this Fitness Software site which gives calories burned per hour for various activities based on a person’s weight. I’ll use the 190 lb column, and I run about a 6-minute mile, drop it in Excel [download my Calorie Burning Worksheet (Excel XLS)] and calculate the amount of running I have to do just to lose 1 lb.

Results:

1. 1 pound/week: eat 500-600 fewer calories/day, or run 3.5 miles per day (24 miles per week).
2. 2 pounds/week: eat 1000-1200 fewer calories/day, or run 7 miles per day (49 miles per week).

I’ll keep running (10 miles per week), but it’s not to lose weight.

Lake Lanier north of Atlanta is at record low levels, for various reasons.

I took this first panorama photo of a sunrise at the north end of the lake in October 2006.

This is the same area of the lake in December, 2007.  It’s about 15 feet lower.

Here’s a zoom in on some mobile boat docks.  Some of them made it in time, some of them didn’t.

A neighbor threw away a pair of Master brand padlocks, the kind you always used in school on your locker. She said she had lost the combination for both of them. My son had heard about a technique for picking them, and so had Google. It turns out there are several videos on how to crack these locks in under 15 minutes. Here’s the first one I found:

YouTube Master Lock Picking Video

Long story short, I cracked the first lock pretty easily using the instructions in the video.

Hint not found in the video: I noticed that the lock hasp moved more on 0-2-24 and on 4-2-24 than any others I tried up to that point. So I assumed that the 2nd number was 2. This left me with 8 numbers to try. 36-2-24 was the combination. It took me about 2 minutes to crack this lock.

I set out to crack the 2nd lock. The “notch” numbers were all the same, so I didn’t have to write anything down. Huh, that’s weird. Then I noticed the serial number was the same on both of these locks. Could it be the same combination?

Yes, it could. And it is.

I Googled for a serial number database for Master Locks because surely someone has noticed this before. (There can only be 4000 different combinations.) But I didn’t find it. Time for a Master Lock Wiki?

Does anyone reading this have Serial Number 910368? What is the serial number and combination to your Master lock?

Update: Apparently not.  I have come across another lock with a “serial number” 910368.  Its combo is 37-3-24.  So it’s not a serial number or combo number reference.  What is it, a model number?

I saw that the ISS and the Space Shuttle mission 117 would be visible briefly over my neighborhood tonight. Since the pass was so low (they both entered the earth’s shadow at only 45 degrees up) I went up the hill to watch from “Summit Lane”. And I took my camera. Not a bad shot, considering that I didn’t do any prep work to get my camera set up until I could already see the pair going overhead. And I’m pretty impressed with the star colors. My eyes never see those colors!

In this shot you can see the 15 second exposure trails of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (the brighter, higher trail) and the International Space Station.

Here’s the full image.

Update: The Bad Astronomer (aka Phil Plait) got a nice shot, too.

I have a new setup at work where I’m now using a laptop and an external display in a dual-monitor setup.  I’ve heard everyone rave for years about how MultiMon is an “must-have” utility for dual-screen users, but I wanted something very specific.  I looked around and MultiMon actually claims to do what I want. I downloaded it, but so far I am not impressed.
What I want is for my laptop to automatically switch into dual-monitor mode when I plug the external monitor in, and switch back to single monitor mode when I unplug it.  I’ve looked around and I can’t find anything that will tell me when I unplug the monitor.  I can see that the Laptop knows when the monitor is connected because it won’t let me enable the external monitor unless it is plugged in.  Once it is enabled, however, it does not automatically disable it when I unplug it.    So failing this, a hotkey is my next best option.  That maybe better, even, since it puts the switching under my control.

Here’s what I want for my own setup:

Single-monitor mode:

• Taskbar on the left of the laptop screen.
• All applications moved onto the laptop screen

Dual-monitor mode:

• Taskbar on the left of the secondary monitor (in the middle of my workspace)
• Applications allowed to move to secondary monitor, but not forced

UltraMon tries to do a good job.  But it puts a new taskbar on the second screen just for those application buttons.  I don’t want this.  I can disable it, I think, but I haven’t found out how yet.

Also when I switch to a single-monitor mode, it sometimes makes my taskbar half as wide as the laptop screen (that’s max-width for a taskbar).  This is just a bug, and I haven’t fully characterized it yet.
When I switch back to dual-monitor mode, UltraMon does a good job remember which apps should move back to the 2nd screen.  That’s a nice touch.  But it doesn’t move my taskbar back where I want it.  And that’s a primary feature I want.

So I think I’ll hack up my own.  It should be easy.  I have experience moving taskbars around and hiding and showing windows.  So in my spare time, I’ll try to make a better UltraMon.  But not with so many features.  I don’t particularly care for the extra buttons it puts on the windows and how they look.  Nice, but unnecessary.  I can do that with a system menu or a hotkey.

I don’t want to worry with shareware regs on this applet, so I’ll make it open-source, I guess.  Then when someone figures out how to do monitor-connection-sensing, they can add it for me.  Bonus.

I bought my first house in Atlanta 12 years ago.  It came with a 2000 square foot carpet disaster.  I was broke and the house was all I could afford.  I couldn’t afford new carpeting for 2000 sq feet of house!  Or so I thought.

A friend told me to call Tom McAllister.  I am so glad I did.  Tom is a special sort of character peculiar to the south.  He runs a successful flooring business almost completely off his personality.  As far as I know, he doesn’t have any storefront anywhere.  And he’ll do a job almost anywhere around Atlanta.  But the service I got for the price is what makes Tom so great.

Tom sells all kinds of flooring.  What I needed was good cheap carpet.  And here’s what Tom did.  He went down to the carpet mills in Dalton and found me some seafoam green carpet that was on a seconds roll.  A seconds roll is one that has something wrong with it, like a seconds shirt is one that’s missing a button or something.  Tom told me that they might have changed the dye pack in the middle of that roll, so there’s a dark area that he has to cut around.  But he inspects every roll completely before he buys it to make sure he can use it.  And because of his installation techniques, you’ll never know it had a problem.

Oh my god, it was beautiful!  It was high-quality, too.  Tom took a lot of time explaining to me how the higher density and the twist of the fibers would make the carpet last longer.  And it did!  It held out until we sold the house last year, and it was still beautiful.

Over the years, I lost Tom’s phone number.  I had carpet installed from two other companies.  They were discounters, and the price was good.  The installation was ok.  But the quality was nowhere near what I got from Tom.

So, we sold the house.  Bought a new house.  New house, new carpet. We put new carpet in upstairs.  We used another local discounter.  It’s nice, but it’s just ordinary.

The carpet on the main floor was expensive looking stuff.  Patterned wool berber.  Here’s the problem with berber: it runs.  Catch a thread with the vacuum and you’ll pull a strip out of your floor 10 feet long.  We had three such strips in our carpet already.  It had to go.  Luckily, I found Tom’s number on an obscure realtor’s page through Google.
But I didn’t think Tom would come so far to where I live now, so I shopped around locally for a deal on carpet.  I was pretty disappointed with what I found, but I can afford more these days so I was prepared to pay around $40/yard for decent carpet that would last. And looking around gave me ideas about what I wanted.
I called Tom again.  He said the location would be no problem and wanted me to come what he had and discuss ideas.  I met him at a Home Depot near work to show him what I’d found.  There was a prominent display of their most popular carpet on the end-cap.  Tom squinted at me and said, “Phil, I wouldn’t install that crap in your house.”  Then he proceeded to “shave” the carpet with a pen knife.  After a few strokes, there were great piles of carpet fuzz everywhere.  Tom said, “You don’t want that crap in your house.  It’ll clog up your vacuum cleaner for a year!”  He showed me the carpet that he had in “seconds” — it was a brand that was also at Home Depot, but it was $58/yard installed, a bit out of my range.

He told me he was perplexed that it was a seconds roll that he had because he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.  But we figured out what it was looking over the selection at HD.  It was too dark.  I mean, it didn’t match any of the sample colors there.  It was a nice medium coffee color, but it wasn’t any of the colors that HD had on display.  Can’t sell it if it’s not standard, so it goes to seconds.

Long story short, Tom installed this carpet in my house for an ungodly small amount of money.  He made me promise not to tell anyone what a deal I got, but — well, let’s just say it was less than half of Home Depot’s price.  And I got an upgraded pad.  And I got a professional installer crew who came out and installed it two days later.

I was so pleased, I even tipped Tom a couple hundred bucks.  And then I blogged about it so I won’t lose his number again and so you can find him too.  If you need carpet in Atlanta, whether it’s the top quality stuff or just some cheap crap so you can sell your house, call Tom on his cell phone at 770-934-7707.  Tell him Phil Hord gave you his number.  He’ll treat you extra nice.

He treats everyone extra nice.

Here are some tips on dealing with Tom:

1. When he quotes a price, it includes installation and an 8# pad.  You want the 8 pound pad. Walking on the carpet in my house is like walking on a cloud!
2. If you want crap, he’ll put it in for you for cheap.  If you want the good stuff, he’ll do that too.  Just tell him up front.
3. Go find the carpet you like at your local carpet store.  Get some ideas of colors and features.  Then call Tom and see what he has.  He may even be able to match the exact style (get the style and color numbers off the display).  Chances are, though, that he’ll have something better.
4. Tom likes to talk.  Be prepared to hear some stories.  Get your ideas through to him and then arrange to meet him to see some samples.
5. Be ready to buy some carpet when you meet Tom, because he is the man you will buy it from.  No one else I’ve found comes close for service or price.  I hope he doesn’t retire before I need carpet again.

I like to use coloring rules, such as they are, in Outlook at work.  I want to use coloring rules in Thunderbird, too, but I find them limiting.  Thunderbird colors email when it is given a label.  But you can only have five different labels in Thunderbird.

The default labels are Work, Personal, Important, To Do, and Later.  I don’t care so much about the names since I don’t normally display them, but the colors for these are rather garish.

But I discovered that you can change not only the label name but also the color.  Someone even posted a Chrome hack to change the color from the foreground color to the background color.  Neat — I may try that later.

But for now, I just needed a few little changes.  First, the list.  Open up Tools -> Options and click on the Display icon, then the Labels tab.
Work - I’ll put all my server notices here like Cron reports
Groups - I’ve been putting group mail in “Later”.  Now I’ll rename it. 
Important - Email from my 2am friends.
Impersonal - “Newsletters” that aren’t quite spam
To Do - Not sure what to do with this yet, since I use the IMAP flag.

Now the colors.  I want Impersonal stuff and groups to be muted, so I set those to pastel colors.  Work is a pastel orange.  Important is Fire Engine Red.

Ok, now I need some rules.  I already have rules for most of the labels; let me add one for Impersonal mail.

Whoa…  That’s a lot of impersonal mail.  I think I should start unsubscribing from these (or sending them to /dev/null).  That’s a job for another day…
Next, I go to the Tools -> Filter Messages dialog and Run the new filter on my email.   Voila, my email is all magically colored.

Now Thunderbird will automatically label (and color) the email as it arrives on my computer.  I like how it does this even for my IMAP messages.  (My friend Bob Rankin says it doesn’t do this for him, but I guess this is a feature they’ve “fixed” since then.)

Last year I hired a man to install a rock wall in my front yard. It would be about a foot high and a foot wide and 75 feet long.  I asked him for a price.  He quoted me $6 per foot.  I did the math quickly in my head, came up with $450, and I shook his hand.  It seemed like a good rate and he seemed like an honest guy.

When he was finished I wrote him a check.  He told me I owed him much more than the check.  In fact, he said, I owed him $1300+.   I explained to him how $6 times 75 feet is $450.  He thought about this for a long while.  Then he said, “See, you’re paying me for the 75 feet long. But you’re forgetting about the 75 feet tall, and the 75 feet front to back.”
I assumed he was wanting to charge me per cubic foot.  But he actually wanted to charge me per square foot of surface area! It was crazy.   I explained it all to him in elaborate detail about how his math was off.  I showed him how he had misquoted his rate to begin with.  But I never could dissuade him of the notion that $6/foot is the same as $18/cubic foot.

I could forgive the poor, uneducated rocklayer for not understanding volumetric math.  But George Vaccaro had a similar conversation with Verizon last week.  It seems they are quoting their data bandwidth rates as “point zero zero two cents per kilobyte,” but what they meant to say, was “point zero zero two dollars per kilobyte,” or $0.002 per kb.

What is so extremely laughable is that George recorded the phone conversation he had with all the CSRs, right up to the floor manager, and they all can’t understand his beef and how the rate they quoted was wrong!  Is math really this hard?

We used to joke that you could lose 30 pounds in a day if you had your leg amputated. But here I did the old-fashioned way: I dieted. And it wasn’t hard. Last week I saw the scale show up with a 1 as the first digit. 199. Woo hoo!
I started in mid-July. Here it is mid-October and I’m actually 30 pounds slimmer. I don’t don’t know what I expected when I started, but it was pretty easy overall. I’ve had a few slides backwards; this week I’m at a conference and food is plentiful, so I’m probably up a few pounds.

“I should exercise more, but not for weight loss.” That’s been my mantra. Exercise for health; diet for weight loss. Dieting has made me drop 2 pounds per week, which coincidentally, is what most people seem to agree is the healthy loss rate.

Most of my exercise comes from climbing stairs at my office and at home. It’s not so much exercise anymore, because I feel like I stopped carrying 30 pounds of luggage with me everywhere. And I did!

I really did it just by eating less. Specifically, I ate about 1,250 calories less per day. 8,750 calories per week X 12 weeks = 105,000 calories. 105,000 / 3,500 calories per pound = 30 pounds. Dieting through algebra.

Yay! I’m into the “single digits” of the 200’s. And I appear no longer to be stalled. What’s more, my weight loss trendline looks spot on still, if slightly less steep.

I’m pretty sure I wrote here before about how great FlowersFast customer service was. I was reminded of this again when I screwed up a new order. My mom’s birthday is next week, and I used the FlowersFast reminder service (hopefully not a secret link) to remind me to send her flowers.

I got the reminder this week and went to order flowers. It’s a quick two-step process, so I got the order filled in and sent in under 2 minutes. I ordered her the Premium upgrade for better flowers. She’s always really impressed by that.

Then when I got the order confirmation, I realized that her birthday is the 16th, not the 18th. Oh crap! I checked my email, and there it is, right at the top:

Thanks for ordering from FlowersFast! Please look over the details below and contact us right away if you have any questions. You can email us by replying to this message.

Simple, straightforward instructions on what to do if there’s a problem. No “click here” or “be sure to reference order number 01759″. Just “reply and we’ll take care of it.” Easy-schmeasy. All customer service should be like this.

If you have customers, you should treat them just like this.

I replied.

Oh man — I screwed the date up. These should be delivered on Aug 16, not 18.

Can you fix this for me and let me know?

Thanks,
Phil

30 seconds later I received a reply from their autobot telling me they received my email and would act on it soon. 3 minutes later I received a reply from a human telling me they had indeed corrected the problem.

Woo hoo! These people are on the ball!

Thank you, FlowersFast.com!

Here’s a cool math trick I saw once.

The number 789789 is a multiple of 13.  789789 = 60573 * 13
The number 123123 is also a multiple 13.  123123 = 9471 * 13
Assertion: Any number of the form ABCABC is a multiple of 13.

The assertion is true.  I can prove it.  Can you?

I saw an interesting story on Digg today.  It was interesting not because of the story, but because I was surprised that others found it interesting.  The link was to an article claiming and proving that 0.99… (repeating nines) is equal to 1.  That is, they both represent the same number.

This is a tautology that every algebra student should be able to understand.

But the comment thread on the original post is amusing.  It starts out with various people claiming it’s not true, and some others showing how the commenters got it wrong.  But then it devolves into several thousand comments, many with Math Majors claiming the original post is so far wrong that it’s absurd!

But it is clearly correct, and anyone who thinks otherwise simply doesn’t understand mathematical concepts.

Hey — here’s an easy problem, but with a surprising answer:

What’s are the next two numbers in this series?

142857,  285714, 428571, 571428, 714285, ??????, ??????

My grandmother, Bettie Hord (her real name, not a nickname), was 90 years old. She was bright, alert and coherent to the end. At the age of 84 I gave her a computer, she got online, she learned to send email, and she learned to IM. She continued until her death yesterday at 90.

The last of her generation preceded her in death. Her husband, my grandfather, died two years ago at the age of 90. She had not wanted to outlive him, but she did. Her “little” brother, Pete, died 6 months ago. She was very close to him and his loss hurt her deeply.

My greatest concern for Momabet was that she would live through the ordeal of a nursing home with scant attention paid to her chronic pain (post-herpetic neuralgia afflicted her back) or her phobia of needles. Instead, she passed peacefully in her sleep yesterday, in her apartment where she lived independently, but in constant contact with nearby (and online) relatives and friends. Her pain and sorrow are over. For that I am thankful.

I visited with her two days before she died. She was as bright and alert as I’ve ever known her to be. She talked about her college days at Erskine in the 30’s, her calculus class, her friends, her roommate (who’s still alive) and her first date with her husband.

She had been quite homesick at Erskine. It was 500 miles from home. Previously she had never travelled more than 15 miles from where she was born. Then she brought “Jimmie” home to marry him, and she began her life. She brought these memories to life for us as if it had all happened last week. She seemed very happy. It was a nice visit.

My own mother left us when I was 8 years old. Momabet was the closest thing I had to a real mother all my life. And so I lost two of the most important family members yesterday: my grandmother, and my Momabet.

Of all the crazy things you can find on the internet. Now there’s a huge archive of naughty finger photos.

A friend of mine was in the hospital in Texas having surgery. I called to check up on him afterwards and spoke to his wife. He wouldn’t be speaking on the phone for another day or so. Since I couldn’t talk to him directly, I decided to send him flowers. Guys sending guys flowers — weird, huh? But this is my best friend, and he’ll dig ‘em.

So I went over to my favorite online florist and ordered (more…)

Woo hoo! I bought a new digital camera. I don’t have it yet; FedEx does. But I held one last week at Fry’s. I’ll write more about it here when I get to play with it some.

I got it for the zoom. I knew I needed more zoom than my 3x Kodak DC290, but I didn’t really appreciate what a zoom could do until I marveled over this site of hummingbird pictures. In particular the (more…)

I bought something on eBay last month. Now that they’ve integrated PayPal, it’s even easier to pay for the item. So I did, by clicking the large, yellow “Pay now” button.

I got a confirmation email. Two weeks go by; no package.

So I went to send an email to the seller. I scanned the message for his email address. And I noticed something strange: the wrong zip code. (more…)

I’ve got the new carputer half-installed in my dinky little car. It’s running on a tablet PC I picked up for cheap. I bought a new license for iGuidance and installed it on there. It’s not perfect because it’s running Windows 98 and it crashes a lot. (Windows 2000 is more helpful at cleaning up resources you forget to release.)

But it works. And it has maps. And it knows directions. And it speaks.

It’s basically TomTom GO for only $200. (more…)

I had given up on the idea of a carputer in my little car. But I saw this ForSale ad on mp3car.com that piqued my interest. It was for an industrial tablet PC. It’s basically a 10″ touchscreen with a computer built-in, for less than half the cost of a 7″ touchscreen. How cool is that? And he has so many broken ones, he throws in a couple of those for spare parts.

It all arrived this week while I was out of town. I’ve only had an hour or so to play with it, but I like it so far. Here’s my write-up…
(more…)