Random Nonsense – Page 14

The 1000 Cranes Project

The ones I'm folding are just a bit more simplistic/traditional — The ones I’m folding are just a bit more simplistic/traditional

I recently mentioned one of my New Year’s Ambitions is fold 1000 origami paper cranes.¹ As an ancient Japanese legend goes, a person who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a single wish. There are some variations on this legend. It’s possible that you “only” get eternal good luck rather than a wish. There may also be a requirement for all the cranes to be folded by just one person, folded within a single year, the wish may only be made by the person who folded the cranes, and/or the person who folded the cranes must keep the cranes.

Whether the result is a wish, “merely” eternal good luck, or just a really impressive project this is something I want to do. I’ve given a lot of thought to how I want to display them too – but that’s probably best left to another post entirely.

A little while ago I ordered two sets of 500 sheets of 3″ square origami paper. They arrived on 4/17/2013 and I debated about when to start folding them. I know the next two months is going to be super busy – and I would rather start later and be able to devote time to the project than start now and potentially doom myself to interruptions and possible faltering in my resolve. Over dinner on 4/18/2013 I mentioned this dilemma to my wife. She pointed out that there will always be interruptions, I might as well start now, and that she knew I could do it.² Thus, I started folding cranes that evening.

I’m debating about how exactly to share my crane folding progress here on the blog. Part of me wants to write a WordPress plugin that integrates a Google Docs spreadsheet with Google Graphs to show the latest progress here on the blog. While I still like this idea and will probably come back to it later – that’s a lot of work to show off progress when I could spend that time actually folding some little birds.

This last week at work has been really really really busy, so there were two days when I folded no cranes at all. Most other days I folded between 20 and 25 and a day like yesterday I folded only 9. At an average of 10 cranes a day (which is very doable) 1000 cranes would only take 100 days or a little more than three months.

As of last night, I had folded 111 cranes in 9 days.

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Photo courtesy of Emre Ayaroglu [↩]
I love the hell out of that woman. [↩]

More than you ever wanted to know

I’m a big believer that small changes over time can have a huge impact.¹ This year I made some commitments to bring about changes in my life. These aren’t resolutions – I’ve had and broken resolutions before. These were ambitions. The most drastic changes to my lifestyle has been my work on losing weight and exercising more.

What I am doing. I have logged everything I’ve eaten for the last 100 consecutive days into FitDay.com. Doing so has made me more aware of what I eat and helped me make good food choices. This along with some other really minor tweaks has allowed me to drop 20 pounds pretty easily.
- I can eat whatever I want and as much as I want, just so long as I am willing to log it into my Fitday account.²
- I try to stay under 2000 calories per day, but I don’t beat myself up if I go completely off the rails.³ Every single day when I wake up is a brand new day. This is a two edged sword. It doesn’t matter how “bad” I was the day before, I get a clean slate. Then again, even if I was “good” the day before, I don’t get to give myself any extra leeway.
- I try to incorporate a little extra exercise into my routine. Instead of using the bathroom one door down the hall at work, I walk up a flight of stairs and use that bathroom. Instead of driving to lunch or walking to one of the places near my work, I walk 0.3 miles to the second nearest grocery store and get my lunch there.
- I only drink coffee, water, and very occasionally alcohol. This actually isn’t any different from my usual routine, but I figured I’d mention it. I’m not big on drinking juice or soda.
- I avoid potatoes and rice when possible. I eat bread and pasta sparingly. I try to eat more leafy greens and veggies – usually spinach. I eat tend to eat more yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, and cheese than I used to. (More of an explanation for these changes below).
Why these changes.
- At the beginning of the year I found that some of my clothes were a little tight. I decided that every day I could get a little bit heavier or a little bit leaner. That day I decided I would get leaner.
- Some of these changes are because of a news bit I heard on NPR a while back. The study, discussed on the Harvard site here, was published in June of 2011. If you get a chance, I highly recommend listening to the NPR clip, scanning the Harvard article, and then glancing through the index to the study where the findings are included. The study basically found that after controlling for many factors, certain foods could be associated with yearly weight increases or losses. Nuts, vegetables, fruits, and yogurt were all associated with net yearly losses and potatoes, red meat, and processed meats were associated with net gains. Surprisingly, cheese didn’t seem to affect the net gain/loss.
What I’ve noticed.
- After being on this “diet” for a few months, I’ve fallen into a little bit of a routine. I tend to consume about 150-300 calories at breakfast, 300-700 calories at lunch, and the remainder of my 2000 calories at dinner. At first staying below 2000 was very tough and now it’s pretty effortless.
- I’ve found that as a result of this “diet” I’ve mostly lost my sweet tooth and I don’t seem to crave salty/fatty/fried/starchy foods nearly as much.
- I probably lost a pound in the first week – which was good because I could “see” a change caused by my minor lifestyle tweaks. At the end of two weeks I had probably lost about two pounds, and while my clothes were still snug – they were less so. When I lost five pounds my clothes actually fit and felt better. When I lost ten pounds I found I was sleeping better. When I lost fifteen pounds people I hadn’t seen since the end of 2012 noticed and commented on my weight loss. Now that I’ve lost twenty pounds I can fit into clothes I haven’t worn in about two years, I sleep better, and I feel like I have more energy.
Looking forward.
- They say success begets success. Having lost a few pounds, I felt encouraged to lose five. Having lost five, I felt ten was a reasonable goal. Then fifteen, then twenty. When I was twenty pounds heavier, the differential between what I used to eat and my 2000 daily caloric intake goal was enough to account for fairly easy weight loss that was also reasonably forgiving. If I had an “off” day, I still had a pretty big caloric deficient which meant I was going to lose weight.
- Now that my caloric intake and weight have reached something of an equilibrium, something has to change. My weight loss has leveled out at twenty pounds. With the differential between my caloric needs at this weight and my caloric intake pretty close, a single “off” day is enough to erase any caloric deficits I might have accumulated over a week’s time.
- Either I need to reduce my caloric intake a little below 2000 (which is possibly a little on the high side for my height/frame), get more exercise, or realistically combine the two.
- I’ve installed a chin up/pull up bar in a doorway in my house. A very very very long time ago I used to do pull ups several times a day. When I installed the bar last week I could do two in a row if I struggled. Yesterday I did five in a row.

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Photo courtesy of m.a.r.c. [↩]
I call it “confessing” to Fitday. [↩]
One epic day saw me consuming 3,800 calories. That was a GOOD day. [↩]

New Year’s Ambitions!

At the beginning of the year I decided upon a few New Year’s Ambitions.¹ I don’t like the idea of resolutions.² Resolutions tend to be rule-driven. And, the problem with a rule-driven resolution is that once it’s broken, your whole plan is shot. An ambition, on the other hand, is a goal without a prescribed methodology for obtaining the goal.

Thus, New Year’s Ambitions. Here is my list of things that, if I were looking back upon all of 2013, I would like to see as a list of accomplishments.

Lose weight and get more exercise
Fold 1000 origami paper cranes
Enter something in the California State Fair
Create and present something at Maker Faire 2013 Bay Area
Blog more
Write more WordPress plugins (’cause it’s fun!)
Start another tiny fun business

Back on the wagon

FitDay.com is essentially a food diary site that lets you look up or enter the nutritional content for the food you eat, set goals, and track your progress.¹ A very long time ago I lost probably about 25 pounds by using the site. A friend lost about 80 using the same site!

Well, I started using FitDay.com again, at the time I’m writing this post² it’s been 37 days. To put this in perspective, in January of 2012 I was able to consistently use the site for three whole days. Prior to that, I used the site for 35 mostly consecutive days. In any case, 37 consecutive days is a pretty good record for me.

As before, my diet consists of trying to not eat like a pig and keep my caloric intake to no more than 2000. While most days I stay below that number, there was a day in there where I just CRUSHED it. In the past I’ve basically completely abandoned the site after having fallen off the wagon. This time, I gave myself permission to go ahead and kick the crap out of my daily limit – as long as I still documented what I ate and kept at it the following day. Several weeks after the fact, even with a mini-vacation in the interim, I’m still logging my diet.

In my experience, a food diary not only helps not only with monitoring caloric intake, but also helps me be more mindful of my choices of food. Since I’m more aware of what and how much I’m eating, I find I choose things that are better for me.

***

I started writing this post back in February. At the time I’m hitting publish on 4/18/2013, I’ve logged everything I’ve eaten into my Fitday.com account for 100 days in a row. In this time I’ve lost 20 pounds – but more on this in a little bit.

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Photo courtesy of Dave Wilson [↩]
You never know how long it takes to actually click Publish [↩]

Perpetuating Password Myths

Today at work I got an e-mail from the IT department saying everyone needs to set new, stronger, passwords.¹ They suggested several things, like:

“tomandjerry” is not as strong a password as “$H2mlf”
“Fishing123” is not as strong as “Fish123ing”

Assuming a black hat hacker is really determined to crack your password, they’re probably going to attack it like they mean it. Let’s assume there’s no defect in your system that allows a cracker to get in without actually entering the correct password. They might try a dictionary attack first, followed by a database of common passwords, but after that they’re left with brute force.

Here’s the most amusing part. Assuming none of the four “passwords” above are in any dictionary or a database of common passwords. Let’s rank the passwords, 1 being the strongest and 4 being the weakest.

“tomandjerry” is strongest, with 11 characters
Fishing123″ is tied exactly with “Fish123ing”, with 10 characters each
“$H2mlf” is weakest, with only 6 characters

The only things that really matter in passwords are that you’re not using (a) a dictionary word or a common password and (b) the length of your password.²

In any case, it’s concerning when information technology professionals don’t understand fundamentals of password security or how a malicious attacker would attempt to compromise a system.

Photo courtesy of akashgoyal [↩]
If you’re using a multi-word password, it is possible an attacker knowing this could use a system that combines words – but this doesn’t really save them a lot of time – we’re talking about numbers with 20-30 zeros in them [↩]

That’s not junk!!!

A few days ago I found a DYMO LabelWriter 400 Turbo had been tossed into a cardboard box with used toner cartridges and broken printer parts.¹ After making sure this really was a box of lost things, I swiped the label printer along with its power cord.

Tiny little printers such as this kind of label writer never use inkjet cartridges or require laser cartridges. They print using heat – like receipt printers. The catch, since they can’t get you with inkjet/toner cartridges, is that the labels are stickers with specially treated heat sensitive non-sticky sides.

Ideally, I would love to feed this little printer some cheap receipt paper and run it as a small, cheap, USB tethered printer. I already have an Adafruit IoT printer, which I love dearly – but it would be awesome to have one that my daughter could use. Apparently this has already been done more than once.

After loading up the newest drivers for the printer and trying out the newest software for it, I couldn’t get my laptop running Win 7 to recognize the printer. I’m looking forward to tinkering with this. :)

Photo courtesy of Tinkerbots [↩]

Dogs and cats living together!

I’m basically through with CD’s. I don’t even want the ones I have. I would much rather just have the MP3’s since they’re just so much easier to organize and play. This has been the case for a while now – the last time I bought a physical CD was four years ago. The CD before that was eight years ago.

I was looking at buying an album off of Amazon the other day only to discover it was $3 cheaper for me to buy the physical CD, which comes with an MP3 “autorip” copy in my Amazon account, than to just buy the MP3 album in the first place. Three dollars isn’t enough to make a tremendous difference in my lifestyle, but at the same time, that’s 1/3 the cost of the CD + MP3 album. I can’t imagine why I would want to pay $3 more for the MP3 album when I could save $3, get the CD and MP3 album, and give or throw away the CD.

Interestingly, now that the United States Supreme Court has upheld the “First Sale Doctrine,” at least in relation to international textbook sales, I wonder if I’m perfectly justified in buying the CD+MP3 for $9 and selling off the CD for a modest amount. (Are there still used CD buying places?!?) After all, it’s not as if I’m making unauthorized digital copies, I’m just selling the physical CD and keeping the digital copies I purchased… right?

Random Gripes of The Day

I was annoyed by two things today and I have decided to share them with you. ((Photo courtesy of Göran Arvidson)) It’s more about the sharing than actually imparting information, but these are two things I feel kinda strongly about. The day is young yet, so I reserve the right to add more things to this list. :)

I was going through my PayPal transactions for the last year and I discovered that providing a full and immediate refund costs me $0.30. That’s pretty lame. When they perform the refund, they get their money back. All they’re out is a few zeros and ones. And, frankly, it’s enough that I think my next few projects will be Stripe based rather than PayPal based. PayPal’s API is a pain, I’m convinced requiring PayPal over a credit card (via Stripe) for transaction probably costs me conversions ((Oh, I could go on and on about PayPal versus Stripe and the posts about the relative benefits and conversions)) , and their policies are worse.
Online forms that require multiple steps across multiple submission pages. The first thing this kind of UI tells me is that the people who wrote the page wanted something done quickly and easily (for them) and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about usability. Because I have a tendency to overthink things, I sometimes go back and revise an earlier step depending upon what I see in a later step. When I see an online form that requires multiple steps I will typically feed it bogus information first so I can see the rest of the steps.

Um. That’s all I’ve got to grumble about today.

Actually, in hindsight, if those are my biggest problems of the day, I’m doing pretty well!

SaaS: the good, the bad, the ugly

I’ve extolled the virtues and pitfalls of running a software as a service business. ((Photo courtesy of Rufus Gefangenen)) This morning I discovered a glitch in my SaaS website that, while it doesn’t cause anything to actually malfunction, creates a very obnoxious problem on a lot of the pages. The site is written in WordPress¹ and the entire SaaS component of the site is built out of plugins.²³ Basically, one of the plugins creates a form that is used in one of the pages. The malfunction is that the form is now included on every page. Ugh. This is going to be a really fun bughunt because even when I disabled every single plugin, the problem persisted. Apparently the glitch started appearing about a month ago – when I last updated WordPress.

Now, I’ve been meaning to just rewrite the plugin from scratch – but I’m also keenly aware of the pitfalls. My biggest incentive to rewrite the code is so that it is more future-proof. Another reason to do it is that the original code was written in such a cludgy manner I’m literally ashamed to tell you how it is implemented. Let’s just say that I originally wrote the core of the plugin after having learned the basics of PHP programming only a few months prior.⁴⁵ About nine months later, I shoehorned the same code into a WordPress plugin – when I had only been using WordPress for about two months and knew almost nothing about plugins. Now, more than five-and-a-half years from the day I launched the site, I do feel I’m a much more capable PHP programmer and WordPress plugin writer. Confident in my abilities to do a better job and facing the task of having to go through a potentially big bughunt anyhow, some part of me wonders if it wouldn’t be best to just rewrite the damn thing anyhow.

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My first open source love [↩]
Such as the awesome Simple Series plugin, OCD plugin stats plugin, and EZ Creative Commons license plugin! [↩]
How’s that for a plug about plugins? [↩]
Look… it works, okay. [↩]
Mostly works. [↩]

Best Super BoWl Day Ever

ToDAY i’ve tinkerED with my DigiSpark From dIGIsTUMP and run it throUGH A few little programs.¹ My experienCE with arDuinos is acTUALLY quite limited. SincE i’M faMILIar with c-style proGRAMMIng languages, I can teLl what an ARDUINO sketch is Doing if i spend enough time staring at the COde. I staRted off with “Blink,” then cHAnged it tO blink fASTEr, then FOUnd some COde for FLIppING CapsloCK on and off.²

WhAT i like about the dIGIspARK IS that IT IS so small I can keep IT IN THE coffee Table drawer nearesT MY Laptop to tiNKER with WHenever I THINK OF something to TRY. TherE ARE SOMe interesting littLE FEATURes to the DiGISpark from the arduino i’LL cover IN another posT THAT doesn’t look liKE it was typeD BY A chimp.

The MOST FUnctional pARTS of TODAY have BEEN devoted to PLAYing, MAKING tangram dESIGNS, bloggiNG ABOUt robot pART design, fiddling with a tiny miCROcontROLLER, and, of course, A NAP. HOW Did you spenD Your super bowl sunday?

Photo courtesy of Adam Fagen [↩]
SEE! [↩]