So my friend Stacey received a job offer this week, and her employer is paying for to go the Geekcruise next week. It’ll definitely be nice to have her along on the cruise. And I’ve set things up so that she, Phil Karn and his wife, and I will be seated together at the dining room. Very Cool. Now, to convince more of my friends to partake of the Geekcruise next year….

I went bicycling for three hours today, going through Winchester, Arlington, Lexington, and Bedford for a total of 32 miles. Given that this is the longest I’ve ridden in probably at least 7-8 years, I’m surprised how well my bicycling muscles seem to have survived intact. My bicycle seems to have been in pretty good shape. I had Ace Wheelworks give it a checkup, and it came back with a clean bill of health.

I’ve been measuring my weight, body fat, blood pressure/pulse, blood sugar, amount of exercise, and amount of sleep every morning, and I’ve found it useful and interesting to be paying attention to this level of data on a continuing basis. It’s pretty clear for example, that exercise has direct correlation to my morning fasting blood sugar levels. If I don’t do much exercise (only 30 minutes a day once or twice a week), keeping all else (diet, mediciation, etc.

I know, lots of people have done this before me — I’m behind the times, so sue me — but it really is nice to be sitting in a Starbucks (I’m currently in the one in Arlington Center) hacking on a laptop, while sitting at a table watching the traffic and pedestrians go by on Mass. Ave. It makes a nice change from working at home…

Be careful what you read in public…

A friend took me to a Unitarian Universalist church service, and one of the things which I noticed about that particular service (I don’t know how representative it is of all UU churches or services) was the notable lack of what I can only term as “trigger words” used in their worship service. Perhaps the best way to describe it is by example. In my tradition, a very common pattern to start a prayer is for the worship leader to say, “The Lord be with you”, to which the response (said by the entire congregation) is “And also with you”, which in turn is followed by “Let us pray” and the actual prayer itself.

The networking at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference seems to be up about half time, and down half the time. And when it’s up, it’s corrupting packets so frequently that ssh connections die after a few minutes, and imap-ssl download connections die after downloading 2-4 messages, thanks to checksum errors. LAME…

I recently came across Clay Shirky’s essay, A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy, which talks about social dynamics, and challenges faced by on-line groups created by various technologies (Usenet, weblogs, etc.) It’s definitely worth a read; there’s a lot to think about.

At this point I’ve been on the Atkins diet for a month, and I’ve lost ten pounds. I know it’s fairly controversial amongst some medical circles, but it seems to work pretty well for me, which is cool. I got started on it when I arrived in San Antonio for Usenix, and realized that I had very cleverly forgotten to bring any of my diabetic medications. Since I had managed to go off the meds for half a week without ill effects back in January when I had similarly forgotten to pack them when visiting Israel, and since I had been meaning to try out the Atkins diet anyway, I figured this was a good time to try it out.

Whee! A quick ten minute hack involving some left-over X-10 hardware,

“apt-get install heyu”, a quick edit of a configuration file, and I

can now remotely reboot my kernel crash and burn test machine, even if

it’s completely wedged, by the simple set of commands:

heyu turn computer off

heyu turn computer on

I am so pleased with myself.

I am such a geek.