Brock Boland

A Week of Fruit

Erin and a girl she works with decided early last week to do a detox diet together. They’re doing different versions if it, but Erin is doing two days of juice, then ten days of just fruit, then two weeks of fruit with raw veggies and nuts. And for some reason, I agreed to do it with them.

Of course, I kind of have a reason. I had been snacking more and more, and my meals were gradually getting bigger to satisfy me – the exact same things I was doing the last time I gained a bunch of weight. I didn’t expect any kind of detoxifying effects, I just wanted to break those habits. But, I also knew that two days of only juice would be too much for me, and I misheard Erin when she first told me about it and didn’t think it was ten days of just fruit. I decided to do a week of fruit, then two weeks of raw veggies and nuts. I started with dinner last Thursday, so the way I see it, I can start eating veggies tonight.

I think I’ve figured out why vegans are so skinny – they just get sick of food and don’t bother eating. I am so tired of fruit that the next banana I see may be used as a weapon. On the other hand, I’ve lost nine pounds since Sunday morning. For most people, that wouldn’t be healthy, and really, it probably isn’t for me, either.  But at my size, I can afford to lose nine pounds pretty quickly. And I’m OK with it – I’m at my lowest weight since who-knows-when, and today I’m finally wearing the smaller jeans I bought on a very optimistic day a year or two ago. I know it’s going to be difficult to keep the weight off, there’s no doubt about that. Of course, after this diet, a piece of bread sounds like a pretty great meal, so maybe I’ll be able to stay in the habit of eating better.

Word of God

I’m not sure I really get people that believe the Bible is the word of God.

This is the word of God! This is the highest book in all the land! It is the literal word of God, and every word is sacred! Well, except maybe this part – “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.” I mean, that’s just plain un-American, right there. And that part about stoning your children or selling your daughter into slavery, I think that part’s a metaphor. But gays! Man, does God hate the gays! He didn’t put them in the top ten, but it’s definitely worse than that thing about my neighbor’s house.

iPhone Apps I Like

Things

I talked about Things plenty when I compared it to OmniFocus a couple months ago. I’m still using it several times a day and love it. It has been updated a couple times since then, and now supports tags in the mobile version. No support for Areas yet, but it still serves my needs pretty well.

Byline

Byline is a pretty slick Google Reader client. I’ve gone back and forth between Byline and the mobile version of the Reader site, but Byline sealed the deal by adding folder support a little while ago. It allows you to share, star, and note items, and you can sync up to 200 items for offline reading – great for reading on the Metro, where I don’t get any cell service.

Instapaper

I fiddled with Instapaper on my desktop and didn’t really see the point, until I got the iPhone app. Instapaper gives you a bookmarklet that will save the content of a web page to their service, and for most sites, figure out which part of the page contains the content so you can just view the actual text.

Sort of useful on a computer; way useful on a mobile device. It will sync the articles you choose and save them on the iPhone for offline reading. Again, great for Metro rides. I typically use this in conjunction with Google Reader: when I come across a longer article or blog post that I want to read later, I save it to Instapaper and read it on the train.

There are two versions of Instapaper available in the app store: the free basic version, and the $10 pro version. The pro version includes several extra features, but the most important is that it will remember your place for you. The basic version just drops you at the list of articles every time you start it, which is a pain if you close the app halfway through a long article.

Evernote

Evernote is a web app for collecting your notes, and they also have clients for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. I’m finally getting comfortable savings things in here, like all the stuff that was in my “Reference” e-mail folders and personal wiki, and a bunch of information about our wedding.

Viewing the notes does require a net connection – it seems that they are cached temporarily but not stored long-term. However, they recently added a feature to mark your favorites notes, which will be saved on your iPhone. I used this for notes about prescriptions and medical information, and information about upcoming flights – basically, stuff that I need to be able to get at whether I have cell reception or not.

Tweetie

I’ve only been using Tweetie for a couple days, but it’s way better than the other Twitter clients I’ve tried. Granted, it’s been a while since I tried any – Twinkle was so slow and weird when I used it months ago that I’ve been using the Twitter mobile site for a long time now. Tweetie is really quick and has a pretty full feature set, so I think I’ll keep it.

The White House – Statement released after the President rescinds “Mexico City Policy”

Hurrah!

In addition, I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries.

via The White House – Blog Post – Statement released after the President rescinds “Mexico City Policy”.

Things I Have Been Enjoying Lately

• Coke Vanilla Zero
• Pretzels
• Not being a parent
• My new MacBook Pro and the huge cinema display I use it with at work
• Simpsons re-runs
• Our new apartment

Moving On Up

Erin and I have been in our lovely new apartment for a week now, and we love it. Because we decided to move at the last minute, we wound up paying rent on both the old and new place for January. That kind of sucked, but it turned out to be a blessing because we couldn’t get the loading dock at the old place until the middle of the month anyway, and then we rented it out to a family for the Inauguration after we moved out. Erin and I brought over a bunch of a small and breakable stuff in the first half of the month, and last Saturday, Jym, Jeff, and BP helped us move over the furniture and everything else.

This place is a little bit smaller, but that gave us a good reason to get rid of a ton of crap we really didn’t need, including a carload of books and clothes that we donated. The view is a lot nicer and we get plenty of sunlight, which is probably why we haven’t had to turn the heat on yet and it still hasn’t dropped below 70 in here (we’ve actually had to crack a window a few times because it gets too warm). We have a small balcony – not quite deep enough for a couple chairs – but the rooftop deck and pool make up for that. We’re only a couple blocks from Chinatown, and the fancy new “gourmet” Safeway is right around the corner, along with Busboys & Poets and Ace Hardware.

We were pretty content with the old place up until the last couple months, when the veneer started to wear off. This building is a lot nicer, newer, and seems to be better-kept. And, it’s a condo building, so I suspect the residents will have a more vested interest in keeping it that way than the people at the old building. Most importantly, though, they allow dogs. This was the reason we started looking around to begin with. We were expecting to stay there for another year, until next December, because we figured it would make more sense to get a dog after we got married in September (mostly because we’ll be out of town a bunch for making arrangements, the wedding itself, and the honeymoon). Erin had been cruising Craigslist, though, and found this place on a Saturday afternoon. We saw it on Sunday, put in our application right then, were approved on Monday, and sent in the signed lease on Thursday. In March, we’re going to adopt Erin’s parents’ Bichon, Lola May.

So like I said, 2009 should be pretty swell, and we’re off to a good start.

Brains Are Weird

This post has also been sitting in my drafts since March, after I wrote OCD and OCD Revisited.  Real quick, let me recap: I became convinced I had OCD, and the more I thought about it, the worse it got.  I got several responses by e-mail from people that wanted to share their experiences, but not in a publi forum.  In the meantime, I started helping myself to some meds that have seemed to help a great deal, and it doesn’t really bug me much anymore.

Anyway, writing those first two posts and reading the responses got me thinking a lot about mental health, but I never got around to finishing this post at the time.  What I came to realize is that I approach the world very rationally.  I think a lot of programmers and geeks are like this: we spend our days working with computers, where rules and limitations apply, and we come to expect the rest of the world to abide by some kind of rules as well.  The mind doesn’t work like this, though.  If your arm is broke, we can definitively say it’s broke just by looking at an x-ray.  But how can we say your mind is broke?  We don’t yet understand well enough how the mind works, or how it works differently for different people, to look at it and identify when something isn’t working properly.  As I said to one person in e-mail, it’s like diagnosing car troubles just by listening to the engine, because you can’t pop the hood and see the crack in the carburetor.  Their response:

I think you’re right in that it is difficult to diagnose OCD. OCD can be manifested in so many different ways because each person is so complex and different. I also agree that everybody has varying degrees of obsessiveness. When someone has a heightened degree of this obsessiveness it can be labelled as OCD. I believe that we do have some very good trained professionals in this world that are able to determine when someone has an unusually high degree of obsessiveness. They don’t have to crack the head open to see what’s broken. They can observe symptoms to make a determination. Just like the common cold- the symptoms give it away. A skilled professional knows what to look for- how many times, how long, etc. If someone replays conversations for 5-20 minutes, I don’t think it’s OCD. But if the person replays for 2-3 hours and frequently, then that’s unusual. There is definitely some gray area though between what is truly OCD and what is not.

This is the part that gets me: what is truly OCD?  Do we even have a clear definition of any mental illness?  How can we really know what’s going on in someone’s mind, aside from observing behaviors or watching which portions of the brain light up in an EEG?  Someone else wrote me a note that included this:

I find that even though the brain is a more complex system than we can readily understand, that doesn’t stop me from working on it. Frequently people make the comparison between the brain and a muscle, they way it gets stronger the more it is used.  It’s obviously more complicated than that, but the analogy does have some truth in it.  I have, over the course of my life, been able to shape the way I think about things.  It’s difficult, but when you concentrate on thinking in a new manner, you make new connections, the neurons themselves actually re-align themselves to work better on something.  If I consistently try to think about things differently, then after a while I do.  If I constantly refuse to let myself be bothered by something, eventually it doesn’t anymore.  Repetition -> Belief.  Which is a point not made in the 34 unconvincing arguments that you posted in your blog.  But as opposed to the existence of God, here, where we are talking about something in the way we think and what we believe, repeating something often enough can actually make it true.

Anyway, the only conclusion I’ve come to is that we do all have our oddities.  In between my starting this post and actually writing it today, Rands posted The Quirkbook, which struck me as a pretty good round-up of all the quirks I had come across in the course of writing these posts.  Unless they’re negatively affecting your life in some way, I don’t think these kinds of things are worth worrying about.

Rick Warren: Burning Condoms for Jesus

Oh, Rick Warren. You’re quite a mensch, huh.

However, an investigation into Warren’s involvement in Africa reveals a web of alliances with right-wing clergymen who have sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education. More disturbingly, Warren’s allies have rolled back key elements of one of the continent’s most successful initiative, the so-called ABC program in Uganda. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is “resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred.”

via Atheist Revolution: Rick Warren: Burning Condoms for Jesus.

Accepting Minimalism

I realize that I’ve donated and sold a whole mess of books and DVDs in the past few weeks, and add, “Update library app” to my to-do list.

And then I wonder, do I really need to maintain a list of the media I own? I’m trying to cut down on the clutter and get rid of things I don’t use much – is it worth the time to make sure I know what I have where and how many stars I gave it? Will that make my life any better?

I uninstalled the library app. Seems simpler that way.

Power Options in OS X 10.5.6

What happened to the power options in the menu bar in 10.5.6? I used to be able to choose Better Energy Savings, Normal, Better Performance, and Custom energy settings from the menu bar – and dagnabbit, that’s the way I liked it!

Crazy Schizophrenic or Bluetooth Headset?

It’s getting harder to tell in this city.

Update for LiveJournal Users

Friends on LiveJournal –

I’m canning the brock_blog syndicated feed.  My biggest issue with using LJ this way has always been the comments left on posts there.  I had an import script that would copy over comments, but not very well, and I got tired of maintaining it.

I am now using the LiveJournal Crossposter WordPress plugin to crosspost my blog entries into my long-dormant LiveJournal account, brocklisoup.  Comments will be disabled there, but the posts will all include a link to leave a comment on my blog.

So, if you’re reading this post in the brockblog account and want to keep getting my updates, add brocklisoup to your friends list.  This is the last item that will appear in brockblog.

Non-productivity

I’m having three productivity issues these days.

1. I need to organize my task list.  A lot more goes into my system than comes out.  I’m collecting all the things I need to get done, but I’ve done a crappy job of giving context-appropriate tags to those things and then taking advantage of them when I’ve got time to work on stuff.  The result is that I still keep a lot in my head – it’s all in my list, but I’m always thinking, “OK, I need to take care of that thing for work, and oh yeah, I was supposed to call so-and-so.”  I need to rely on the system, or it does me no good.
2. I see everything as work.  Everything.  I have written before that this is the foundation of GTD, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m becoming obsessed.  Every spare moment, I feel like I should be Getting Something Done, and I’m constantly anxious about all the things on my list.  Much more on this later, I’m sure, but I’m trying to accept the fact that this stuff isn’t all going to get done this week, no matter how much I would like to have finished it last month.
3. These two are exacerbating one another.  I haven’t organized my list because I have too much other stuff to do and haven’t made time.  I feel like I have a ton to do – and don’t handle it efficiently – because my list is kind of a mess.  It’s a vicious cycle.

I just want to take a couple weeks off and either give up on all of it or just finish it off.

Let There Be Light!

This is the thing about the new place that excites me the most.  On the left, our current living room.  The blinds are closed all the time because our apartment is situated on the corner of a courtyard, so we look out at other apartments that are about 20 yards away.  And, since we’re in the corner, someone else’s living room window is perpendicular to our own, and we could look in on each other if we didn’t both keep the blinds shut.  On top of that, we face north, so we never get direct sunlight anyway.

The new place is on the 13th floor across from a couple small buildings and a vacant lot.  There are big windows and a glass door that go out onto the balcony, and we can leave the blinds open all the time without sacrificing privacy.  It faces east, so we’ll get a lot of sun in the morning.  Honestly, I never expected that I would be excited about getting more sunlight, but I can’t wait.

Another New Year

I’m just going to be honest here: I don’t really feel like doing the year-end wrapup.

2008 was alright. It had its ups and downs. Erin and I got engaged. Loved ones got married. Work was busy. It seems like there should be more to it, but the year went by so quick and in looking back, there aren’t a lot of times that stick out as great or terrible.

2009 has a lot of promise, though. We just got the keys for our lovely new apartment, which we’ll be moving into over the course of the next two weeks. Said apartment allows dogs, and we’ll be adopting Erin’s parent’s dog Lola May in a few months. And we get married in September, then spend a week on a cruise in the Caribbean.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. The perennials are still there – eat better, lose weight, save more money – but I’m still not sure what my goals are for this year. I’m torn between the seemingly diametric desires to accomplish more and relax more. I want to make more time for personal projects and do more volunteer work, but I haven’t read a book in months and I barely see my friends as it is. I feel like 2008 didn’t give me enough time for all the things I wanted to do, but I’m still not sure how to fix it in the new year.

Still, it’s going to be a good year. I’ll get things done, and I’ll make time to relax, and I’ll get a new apartment, and a puppy, and married. It’s going to be pretty swell.