Mokka mit Schlag » 2006 » June

I’ve been reading The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. I’ve mostly managed to stay away from fad diets over the years, but this one got some unusual endorsements from people I respect including Kathy Sierra and the Freakonomics duo.

The basic idea is that twice a day you eat one to two hundred calories worth of sugar water or extra light olive oil. You must do this at least one hour after and one hour before eating or drinking anything else except water. Roberts claims this reduces your “set point” and thus reduces your appetite. Consequently you eat less, and lose weight.
(more…)

Today I’m at the New York PHP Conference. It’s interesting. I wish I had a little more time to spend here this week, but I have to get ready for next week’s ABA conference in Bangor.

I’d hoped to do some live reporting about this, but the wireless here at the Hoel New Yorker is quite flaky. It keeps coming in and out. This is often a problem at some of these old New York hotels that are full of iron in the walls.
(more…)

I’ve enabled the Akismet plugin to try to stop the flood of drug spam that attacks this site. If it works I’ll expand it to The Cafes as well. If you notice a problem and can’t get through via the comments, please send me a personal e-mail and I’ll look into it. Thanks.

I’m having a hard time getting worked up over the defeat of the net neutrality bill in Congress. Yes, I think that net neutrality is a good idea; but I find it hard to see why the market won’t provide this. I assume consumers will holler bloody blue murder if their ISPs start throttling their YouTube bandwidth or their World of Warcraft games.
(more…)

Yesterday while shopping for my wife’s anniversary present, I noticed that season 2 of the new Doctor Who (i.e. season 1 of the tenth doctor) is already available on DVD in the UK, even though the BBC hasn’t finished broadcasting it yet!. The unbroadcast episodes aren’t available yet, but apparently every three episodes or so, they release a new disc. No more waiting six months to catch up, or hoping they’re some decent seeds on BitTorrent.
(more…)

Fulvous Whistling-duck was one of my target birds for the year. I’d planned to pick it up in Audubon Park in New Orleans, where they’re regular in the winter. However, a family of Fulvous Whistling-ducks showed up in the West Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge last Sunday, and have been regularly seen there almost every day last week, so this morning bright and early I took the A-train to Broad Channel to see if I could add this bird to my life list.
(more…)