Sean Middleditch » 2008 » January
I’ve never been much of a health nut, but there are a few things I’ve tried to pay attention to. I avoid drinking soda as much as possible, especially anything with corn syrup in it. I buy organic meat (no steroids), and preferably buy the stuff raised the old-fashioned way and not on a large industrialized farm. I drink soymilk instead of regular milk, especially since the doctor recommended that one to me. I eat organic oatmeal. Other than the occasional splurging on fresh organic fruit or a trip to Zingerman’s, that’s about the extend of my organic buying.
A friend who is very big into the organic food and local farming lifestyle has kind of given me a bit more motivation to try harder. After my last shopping spree, I’ve managed to convert about 1/3 of my diet to all organic products without really raising my grocery bill much. I still have a ways to go.
The biggest problem I’m noticing is a lack of pre-made or semi-made foods that are all organic. For example, I can get the ingredients to make some kick-ass pasta sauce (along with all organic wheat pasta) easily enough, but finding a bottle of already made sauce is another thing altogether. I’m lazy. I don’t really know how to cook, and even if I did, I don’t think it would be something I’d do more than once or twice a week. Especially not in this stupid apartment with the neglectful landlord who won’t get rid of the ant problem that makes my kitchen close to unusable.
So, most of the organic food I’ve bought is stuff I can eat with little to no cooking or preparation. That mostly comes down to snacks and light meals, but not the kind of stuff I can really live off. I’d love to see a bigger variety in organic cheeses (the only ones I can find are generally whole wheels that cost a fortune), pre-made sauces and side-dishes, and so on. I’d also like to see a bigger variety in organic and whole-wheat pasta; I can’t find farfelle organic pasta for the life of me, for example.
Assuming I could find such products, I could get my diet up to at least 3/4 organic foods, with the rest of my diet being from restaurants (and several of my favorite restaurants are all organic).
My last major sin in terms of food consumption would then be that I drink bottled water. A lot of bottled water. About 150% to 200% of what the average person goes through. I don’t know why, but my body needs more water than most people. I sweat heavily even in cold weather. My father is the same way. Also, I just can’t freaking stand tap water. I mean, to the point that drinking it actually makes me gag a little. It might be that I was raised on nasty well water and I’ve been conditioned to hate tap water, but I swear even the filtered city water I have now is pretty gross. Now, I don’t believe that bottled water is bad for me (it isn’t), or even that drinking that water is bad for the environment (it isn’t), but the huge number of plastic bottles I go through is enormous. We don’t have recycling collection around here, and even if we did, it’s generally shown that recycling creates more waste due to the energy recycling and collection requires than just throwing the stuff out. I’ve tried a few alternatives to drinking bottled water, including the reusable water jugs that stores like Meijer has, but that water tastes almost as bad as tap water (that’s probably all it is). I wonder what other alternatives are available given that I just will not drink tap water?
My cupboards currently contain a few foods I bought earlier this month that, once consumed, I’ll replace with organics. I’ve got a jar of peanut butter (which, honestly, I need to cut out of my diet - that stuff is going to be the death of me), some farfelle, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and some jars of Kroger brand strawberry preserves. Everything else is organic, a lot of stuff is whole-wheat (I haven’t eaten white bread in more years than I can count, except for the occasional baguette), and a few things are possibly even locally grown (most of it isn’t, though).
I’ve also started taking some “all natural” vitamin supplements, as it’s been pointed out to me that my general diet sucks and I’m probably missing all sorts of crap my body needs, which combined with my lack of working out for the last year and half has led to some severely deteriorated health. I’m sick for the second time in less than a month, for example.
Laura also gave me some recipes for some very easy to prepare dishes I might try out once the fucking ant problem is solved. (This might have to result in me threatening legal action for landlord negligence due to failure to correct unsanitary living conditions. Fun.)
I’ve been using Ubuntu pretty much since it first came out, after Jeff Waugh sent me an invite. (I forget why he did so - possibly I was bitching about whichever distro I was on at the time.)
Ubuntu was pretty great until the last few releases. Starting around the time of Feisty, the number of bugs seemed to be creeping up and up, and more effort was being put into adding horrifically fucking stupid features like “Compiz by default” (whoo, an ugly and eye-straining WM that only works on less than half the hardware out there with OSS drivers, just what we needed).
Some of the bugs were really starting to impact the usability of the desktop for me. They weren’t getting fixed, but new stupid-ass features were being added all the time. I gave up.
Having heard good things about the last few Fedora releases, I decided to reinstall my desktop with Fedora Core 8. The install went very smoothly (unlike Ubuntu, with its idiotic Live CD installer that takes longer to boot than it does to install, and usually crashes or locks during said install), and I’ve got the system up and running.
The first problem I ran into was not being able to log in as my user. I had left the /home partition unformatted. I had also left the default SELinux settings in Fedora enabled. The problem was that the /home partition was not labeled, and so my user could not access his own home partition. After a few minutes of learning the SELinux commands, I fixed that up.
Next, the display in the desktop was practically unusable. The max resolution supported was 800×600, and I had no mouse cursor. I had to reconfigure the monitor to a generic LCD 1680×1050 to fix the resolution, but I still had no mouse cursor, and everything was looking stretched even though the right resolution was being used.
The nv driver had been selected by default, so I switched to the nouveau driver, which I’ve been wanting to try for a while now. Switching the driver gave me a mouse cursor, but things were not peachy. The color of my desktop kept randomly changing, and the screen was somehow taller than the monitor, so even after auto-adjusting the top of my screen was not visible. Plus, just like with the nv driver, all my fonts looked like shit, and were stretched out too wide. It’s like neither of the drivers support wide-screen monitors correctly, even though they were running in the right resolution (well, maybe nouveau wasn’t, even though it was told to).
So, I installed the nvidia binary driver from the livna respository, and blam, everything looks great now. This a real shame that just getting basic 2D functionality working still requires the binary driver. ::sigh::
I’ve since tweaked a few other things, and am still doing getting everything up and running just right. The only other actual problem I’ve had so far is that all the channels on my soundcard were set to 0 and muted. Weirdness.
All of the bugs I had in Ubuntu are gone, though. Including bugs which I would have guessed were GTK+ or X bugs. So either Fedora is actually bothering to fix stuff, Ubuntu’s new feature squad is breaking stuff, or the bugs only manifest with a certain combination of software versions that is different on Fedora. All the base package versions are the same, though.
Oh well, I can use my computer now without constantly getting frustrated by stupid bugs. Yay me!
More photos of the 20th Annual Custom Bike Show in Birch Run, MI.
The show was sponsored by Bubba’s Tri-City Cycles, and the four beautiful models we took way too many pictures of are employees of M/C Leather Works.
We won first place in our class (Manufactured Custom) at the 20th Annual Custom Bike Show in Birch Run, MI. Pretty cool.
Some of the models there agreed to pose on our bike for us, so here’s a picture of the gorgeous Jackie from Leather Works posing on our green Big Bear Choppers Sled Pro custom bike:
(click for a bigger copy)
So I just got my first real hair cut in 11 years.
Yeah, it’s all short now. The picture’s lighting sucks, as my apartment’s lighting sucks. What my apartment lacks in lighting it more than makes up for with pharaoh ants (I think, hard to identify a bug that size with eyes like mine and no magnifying glass).
The short hair is kinda throwing me for a loop. I don’t have a ponytail to play with while I think anymore. :(