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This book has made more sense to me than anything I’ve read before about diet. Although the author doesn’t use this analogy, it makes the large-scale food processing industry look a lot like the tobacco industry: huge corporations in the business of finding out how to make a product that sells, not one that is healthy.

Michael Pollan writes descriptively of how these corporations shaped the public’s perception of what food is from whole things like rice, apples and spinach, to nutrients, like Vitamin C, anti-oxidants, and Omega-3 oils. When people’s idea of what food is changed, they started eating to fill what they thought their bodies needed, like less oils and more carbohydrates, or more Vitamin C to stave off colds. These dietary fads continue, and often fade as they are seen to not have the advertised effect.

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We just got our renewal to our State Farm homeowner’s policy, and like every year, there’s a rider with new exclusions of coverage.

I thought this one was ominous:

“This policy is revised to exclude coverage for loss arising out of nuclear reaction, radiation or radioactive contamination from any source, or any detonation of, or release of radiation from, any nuclear or radioactive device.”

So . . . we were covered for that up until now? If so, what has changed to make them decide to revise our policy?

I notice we also are now not covered for any loss due to the locomotive we (or anyone else) owns.

This is in production and will be available next year. The electric-only version charges in a couple of hours, and goes for 120 miles. The hybrid version, capable of going 300 miles on a gallon of gasoline, will be on sale in 2009 for around $30,000. I want one.

                 

     Although I’ve been a Hillary supporter up to now, last week’s "debate" between Obama and Clinton on ABC was a turning point for me. Don’t get me wrong, I still support Hillary, and I think she’d make a great executive, but I no longer am cheering for her to win.

Notwithstanding the shameful performance by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, who took more than 45 minutes to pose a question of any import, when they jumped on Obama because of his associations or lack of flag pin on his lapel, Hillary joined right in with the attack.

I simply don’t understand why Obama didn’t take the opportunity to ignore the stupid questions, and ask the moderators what their motivations were in asking them. Why didn’t he ask them why it was taking more than 45 mintues to get to one question about Iraq? Is this his "inexperience"? By the time he did ask those questions, the debate was over and he was safely inside his circle.

This campaign is lasting too long.

                

“If Evolution is Outlawed, only Outlaws will Evolve.”

I love living in Sebastopol.

In an amazing move by Microsoft, last week they capitulated to the public uproar from the web developer community and announced that they would release Internet Explorer 8.0, now in beta, set to render web pages in “standards mode,” which means that it should now work with web pages developed to the international standard. Previously, they were going to release it so that it rendered web pages incorrectly like IE 7.0 currently does.

That’s completely amazing, and I’ll believe it when I see it, but it looks to be great news for those of us spending too much extra time trying to make things work across the board.

This year is the first year I find myself getting birthday greetings from corporations I’ve done business with in the past. This morning, my birthday, I got an automated call from the president Hansel Toyota in Petaluma, who we got our car from.

I find it unsettling on many levels. First, the fact that they know my birthday, and second that they thought it was good marketing to use it to try to get another sale out of me. In case any future marketers are reading this, both Fred (who got the same call on his birthday) and I now have the incentive to never buy anything from Hansel Toyota in the future. Fred got a birthday postcard yesterday from a restaurant in Occidental offering a “Birthday Dinner Discount.” How did they get his birthday, and why did they think it was appropriate to try to sell to us that way.

I think the most disquieting thing for me is that if I were 20 years younger, this probably wouldn’t bother me at all; I’d think it was fun and cute.

Okay, so I’m getting a small discount for plugging this site, but it’s small enough (5%) to influence me to place this link, but not to lie about the company. We’ve been looking to upgrade our memory in our Mac Pros from 4 to 8 GB. It sounds crazy, but we both are running out of space and are swapping (we tend to have a lot of applications up at a time). We took a look at the Apple site, and their memory ran about $1,200 for two 2-GB SIMMs. Kind of prohibitive. We looked around and found MemorySuppliers, Inc. and were able to get the same thing for $270. The memory looks a little different (the heat sinks go a different direction), but the memory is working fine, and our Mac Pros are zippier. We’re ordering more.

I’ve just finished a very frustrating two days trying to figure out why this site, and another one I’m developing will not display correctly on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7. My partner is sick to death of my rantings (and his own) about this subject, but as two developers who are constantly having to find solutions to the fact that Microsoft blatantly ignores the agreed-upon standards for CSS and produces a browser that renders web content incorrectly.

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