In my July 24, 2001 post I mentioned Linux From Scratch, and that I was planning on building such a system. I finally cobbled together another computer (that’s three I have running here now, not counting Debra’s machine) that I can play with. The “new” computer is my old Dell Pentium 200 MHz system with 64 MB of RAM. It’s the system I used to write the Kylix book and do my first experiments with Linux. I took the drives, monitor, and keyboard from the Dell to put into the new system, leaving me with a Dell case, motherboard, RAM, and power supply. Last night I cannibalized an old 486 system for a few parts, located the Dell’s original video card, and threw in a couple of old hard drives (3 GB and 8 GB). SuSE Linux installed without a hitch, and I now have a minimal SuSE Linux system running in a 1 GB partition. Following the instructions on the Linux From Scratch site, I’ve created a 2 GB partition for my LFS system. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with the 8 GB drive. I’ll decide once the LFS system is up and running. I start the LFS installation tomorrow, and will let you know how it goes.
Monthly Archives: August 2002
Conference Bike
It’s not very practical, but it’s kinda cool. Check out the Conference Bike. It’s a tricycle with seats for 7 people, all of whom can pedal or not as they choose. Before you get any ideas, it can’t go very fast. Their FAQ page says the fastest they’ve had it going was 35 km per hour (about 22 MPH) on a long downhill. Under normal riding on a flat, expect about 10 KPH (6 MPH), or 15 KPH if you’re really pushing it. The bike is too heavy (almost 450 lbs) and the aerodynamic cross-section is way too big for it to be any kind of speed machine. Nonetheless, it’d be great fun riding the thing around an amusement park, or cruising the boardwalk at some vacation spot. If you have a large family and live in a quiet neighborhood, it’d be an interesting way to spend some “quality time” together.
What distinguishes a religion from a cult?
What distinguishes a religion from a cult? I don’t remember how the subject came up yesterday, but my friend John’s immediate answer was “The number of followers.” The six of us talked around the topic all the way back to the office after lunch, and that was still the most satisfying answer, as far as I’m concerned. Merriam-Webster‘s definition of the word cult isn’t much help, and the Defining Terms article from the Deception in the Church page, although interesting, just adds more fuel to the fire. Popular usage of the term cult is all about what’s considered mainstream.
No, there really isn’t a point to all this pondering, beyond noting that one person’s (or group’s) cult may be another’s religion. Definitions are such slippery things sometimes.
Fat people sue fast food companies
I must have been living under a rock last month when this story came out. I heard the story on Marketplace when I was driving home this evening, and then searched the web to find the Fox News article. I mentioned this as a possibility in my January 22 post, but it still bothers me that it’s come to pass.
A New York City lawyer has filed suit against the four big fast-food corporations, saying their fatty foods are responsible for his client’s obesity and related health problems.
The lead plaintiff, Caesar Barber, is a 56-year-old maintenance worker who ate at fast food restaurants four or five times a week, and blames his diet for his many health problems: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and two heart attacks. He’s the only complainant named in the suit right now, but two others will be filing soon: a 57-year-old retired nurse who says eating fast food twice a week since 1975 caused her to go from a size 6 to a size 18, and a 59-year-old man who says that his habit of eating a pound of fries a week gave him high blood pressure, diabetes, and made him obese. “In 1993,” the article says, “he passed out and had to be rushed to the emergency room because of the medical problems caused by his diet.”
“I trace it all back to the high fat, grease and salt, all back to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King – there was no fast food I didn’t eat, and I ate it more often than not because I was single, it was quick and I’m not a very good cook,” Barber said. “It was a necessity, and I think it was killing me, my doctor said it was killing me, and I don’t want to die.”
I’ll bet his doctor said something about exercise, too. He’s going to sue the fast food industry because he’s too lazy to learn how to cook? This is ridiculous! Talk about living under a rock! How can these people try to hold the food industry responsible for their own bad choices? The attorney in the case claims that the aim of the legal action is to force fast food restaurants to offer healthier choices, and to obtain federal legislation that would require warning labels on fast food similar to those on tobacco products. Yeah, right! If they don’t listen to their doctors saying “that stuff’s gonna kill you,” it’s damned unlikely that these fat asses would give a second thought to a warning label. Not that warning labels would save the fast food industry even if people did read them. We’ve seen how effective those labels were in protecting the tobacco industry.
I doubt that this particular suit will go anywhere, as public sentiment isn’t quite yet on the side of the fat asses. I think similar suits will be filed, though, with increasing frequency. But in 10 or 20 years, when more of the population (and most of the judges and lawyers) are fat assed couch potatoes facing the consequences of their lifetime of sedentary self indulgence, they’ll extort billions of dollars from the fast food industry in the same way that the States have robbed the tobacco industry.
Personal responsibility? Ha! Who needs it?
Century training progress
The century training continues. This week was a bit different because my road bike was in the shop for a couple of days. So I got to ride the mountain bike instead. Other than that, just training as usual. Monday I was supposed to do 12 miles easy, but I decided to ride to the office with a co-worker, so I ended up doing 13.5 in the morning and in the evening. Since last Sunday was kind of an easy day, I did hill sprints on Monday. That is, I rode slowly along the flats, coasted on the downhills, and sprinted like mad up the hills. Runners call it “fartlek.” Cyclists call it “unstructured interval training.” I’m feeling very good, and continue to be impressed by the training program.
This week’s mileage:
| Monday | 27 varied |
| Tuesday | 17.7 pace |
| Wednesday | 18 brisk |
| Thursday | rest |
| Friday | 18 pace |
| Saturday | 59.2 pace |
| Sunday | 22 pace |
| Total | 163.4 |
Extreme bike rides
It takes discipline and hard work to train for and ride 100 miles on a bicycle. There’s no doubt about that. But in cycling circles, “simply everybody” has done a century. In my two years of road riding, I’ve met many people who have moved from overweight couch potato to century finisher in relatively short periods of time. Some in less than six months. Accomplishment that it is, I’ll have to do something a bit more intense in order to remain interested. Just as with running, where “simply everybody” has run a marathon, but not so many have done Pike’s Peak.
While I was researching training programs, I ran across two very interesting groups. Members of the Ultra Marathon Cycling Association specialize in endurance races: double centuries (200+ miles), 12-hour and 24-hour races, and the annual Race Across America (RAAM). I won’t be riding 3,000 miles in 8 days any time soon, but a double century looks interesting. Perhaps next summer.
The other group is the Perimeter Bicycling Association of America. What these folks do is intriguing—they ride around things: cities, lakes, counties, countries, etc. One person has logged almost 65,000 miles in perimeter rides, covering 9 countries, 26 counties, 31 lakes, and 5 islands. This is something I can sink my teeth into. I can think of plenty of things to “ride around,” right here in Central Texas. I’ll need to improve my fitness level a bit, but riding around the city of Austin, or the perimeter of Lake Travis don’t look like unreasonable goals to start.
Spam Legislation/The Internet Mail Consortium
The August 19 issue of eWeek has a group of articles about spam. One article describes the problem, and provides some interesting numbers about how spam has grown over the last year, and what spammers are selling. Other articles discuss current filtering techniques, and some proposed legislation. What strikes me about these articles is that almost all of the “experts” agree that filtering is at best temporarily effective, and that legislation likely will be wholly ineffective. And yet, those same “experts” continue to support legislation. Huh?
Just how effective do you expect anti-spam legislation to be when the very same legislators who will be passing the laws will use unsolicited bulk email as a tool to get re-elected? If you doubt that, take a look at this article from The Mercury News. In related news, the Federal Election Commission decided that it’s okay for political ads transmitted over SMS (short messaging service) to forego transmitting disclosure information. To be fair, disclosure exemptions are common practice for media that are limited to small numbers of characters. Still, expect your mobile phones and perhaps your text pagers to be flooded with political spam in the next few months. I’m sure your newly elected legislators will be happy to pass an anti-spam bill after they see how effective those campaigns are.
I’ve mentioned the Internet Mail Consortium before. Today I found two reports on their site: Unsolicited Bulk Email: Definitions and Problems, and Unsolicited Bulk Email: Mechanisms for Control. Both reports were written in 1997, and the “Mechanisms for Control” report was updated in May of 1998. The articles do a good job of defining the problem and identifying in broad terms the possible solutions. One thing of note is that this is the only place I’ve seen serious discussion of my “trusted server” idea. They call it “First-hop Accountability.” I find nothing on their site that takes this idea any further, nor any real discussion of the spam problem in general, other than support of legislation. I’m disappointed, but not terribly surprised, I guess, by the IMC’s ineffectiveness. Their main web page says:
The Internet Mail Consortium is the only international organization focused on cooperatively managing and promoting the rapidly-expanding world of electronic mail on the Internet. The goals of the IMC include greatly expanding the role of mail on the Internet into areas such as commerce and entertainment, advancing new Internet mail technologies, and making it easier for all Internet users, particularly novices, to get the most out of this growing communications medium.
In truth, I think the member organizations are members only to protect their own interests, and ensure that they’re kept abreast of any proposed changes. That they haven’t actually done anything to help combat the spam problem shows me that the IMC is just another group of industry “leaders” who aren’t at all interested in solving anything.
Finally, I wonder how receptive Brightmail and other anti-spam software providers would be to an effective solution to the spam problem. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even accuse these companies of supporting spammers. But, no, they wouldn’t do that. Would they?
Pike’s Peak Marathon
20 years ago today, I ran the Pike’s Peak Marathon. That is by far the most physically challenging thing I have ever done. Starting in Manitou Springs, you travel 13.9 miles up the mountain; first on a pretty decent 4-wheel-drive road, and then a mule trail that winds its way across the mountain and up. The elevation of the starting line is about 7,500 feet. The peak itself tops out at 14,110. The last three miles of the climb are above timberline, with an average rise of 1,000 feet per mile. It took me three hours and 45 minutes to get to the top of the mountain.
The 14.1 miles back down the mountain weren’t a whole lot easier. I slipped and fell several times on the way back down the first three miles, and after that the steep grades made me backpedal to keep from going too fast and falling over. I finished the last 10 miles in a mental fog. Even 20 years ago, I remembered very little of the descent. Other than my falls, I have two very distinct memories: the woman with whom I shared most of the last 5 miles, and the spectators all along the last mile to the finish yelling “It’s just around the next corner!” By the time I finally turned a corner and saw the finish line, I wasn’t entirely sure it was real.
I was completely exhausted after a little over 6 hours of running.
Where were you 20 years ago?
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the answer is 2.5 pounds per year. I’m trying to get that down to about 1.5, but it’s a tough go.
Drawbacks to full text searching
I think I’ve mentioned before the limitations of full text search. Today I got a couple of great examples. I’m doing some research on watershed management, flood control, how agencies manage the floodgates in our many dams. My Google search term today was “watershed modeling floodgate”. The first thing to catch my eye was the second sponsored link from Fox Talent says “Are you model material?”. Apparently, Fox Talent pays for every hit on the term “modeling”. The sixth link on the first page of search results was this article from Christianity Today magazine. Need another? Last week I got an email from a woman who was given a link to my December 2000 diary page when she searched for “fig toothache.” She was looking for information on a folk remedy for toothache, which involves the sap from a fig tree. She got my page because early in the month I had mentioned my toothache, and late in the month I mentioned trimming back the fig trees.
It sure would be nice to have a well organized “table of contents” for the Web. Full text search has its uses, but as the web grows, the signal to noise ratio in Google searches is becoming absurd.
Training for a century
The reason I’ve been so quiet here recently is that I’ve started a training program that has me getting up at 5:00 almost every morning to go cycling. I’ve set a goal to ride the Waco Wild West Century on September 28, and I’m determined to do it right this time. The last time I rode 100 miles (two years ago), I wasn’t prepared for it and I suffered through the last 25 miles. My body hurt, and it took me a week to recover. It was not a pleasant experience. My “training” for that ride consisted of riding to work and back (26 miles each way) a couple of times a week, and perhaps a long ride of 50 or 60 miles on Saturday. Sure, I was riding a lot, but I was doing it wrong.
After looking through several books and browsing the Web for relevant articles I settled on this training program from Bicycling magazine (oddly enough, I can’t find that thing on the Bicycling web site), and started it last Monday. I rode 50 miles relatively comfortably last Saturday, so I figured I was fit enough to tackle the second, more aggressive schedule. A week into the program I’m feeling great—none of the run down feeling or continual sore legs that I remember from the last time. My legs are a bit weak from yesterday’s 52 mile ride in the wind and the hills, so I made today an easy ride rather than the “pace” ride that the schedule calls for.
This week’s miles:
| Monday | 11.5 easy |
| Tuesday | 16.4 pace |
| Wednesday | 20.2 brisk |
| Thursday | rest |
| Friday | 16 pace |
| Saturday | 52.5 pace (hard ride) |
| Sunday | 18 easy |
| Total | 134.5 |
Granted, I had reached a certain level of fitness prior to starting the program, but in the past I’ve had difficulty getting beyond that point. It seems like 50 miles is my “easy” threshold—going beyond that takes a concerted training effort. So far, so good. I’ll update my progress here each Sunday until the ride.