Damien, are you there?

I recently sent an email to a friend explaining the best ways to get hold of me. Since I have been guilty in the past of communicating poorly with good friends who approached me on completely valid but underutilized (by me) means of communication (Aaron, Fleur – I am so sorry I never responded to your snail mail and I hope someday you will forgive me!), I thought I’d document my habits. It may just be for posterity – hopefully I will improve these with time. Below is a slightly edited version of the email I sent.

Dear (Friend),

Hope I gave you the feedback you sought. I’m going to lay out my preferred methods of responding to communication. I’m not implying that this is how things ought to be or even holding myself out as an example; I simply thought I’d try to explain what works with me and what doesn’t:

PREFERRED, in order of preference:
1) Email with topic identified. I check my email every few minutes, at the very least hourly, at least while awake, on my phone and on my computer, at which I sit >8 hours a day. On weekends it can slow down, but all email is checked usually at least daily.
2) Repeated phone calls – simply calling back a few times until I can answer is totally fine. I don’t mind persistence, and when I take the call, it means I can talk then.
3) SMS with topic identified- I respond pretty rapidly to text messages, when they have a context and explain what is needed.
4) voice mails with the topic identified – a voice mail that says “we need to blah” or “i need feedback or a decision on blah”. This allows me to think about or work on the problem, come up with a response, and then when I call / email / text back, I can have gathered my thoughts or solutions for an efficient communication.

URGENT:
1) Any combination of the above: email + voicemail, or email + sms – “hey I sent you an email, pls respond by thurs if possible” . Some people also ping people close to me and say “make damien respond to blah” if it’s really burning urgent, as these family/friends/coworkers aware of where I am and can hunt me down and make me answer.

SLOW, INEFFECTIVE, NOT PREFERRED
1) Voice mails that say ‘call me’ but give no data- these sit in my phone for days or weeks. I usually note that “blah called” and maybe by the end of the week I will pick up the voice mail. if the voice mail doesn’t identify the topic that may add even more delay as I try to fit in calling the person back. I often forget about these, bad habit but true. Sometimes these get don’t get cleared out until my voice mail fills up (I know, I know!)
2) Emails, sms, that leave no data as to the purpose of the communication – generally, these wind up in the “this person wants to talk to me” bucket, and with my travel schedule I may not have a chance for days. email goes off the page every day; I won’t see an unresponded to email in my inbox for a month or more until I clear out my inbox.
3) Bulk email that is not clearly addressed to me. I may read the title and not read the email.
4) Email with no call-to-action. A communication that needs response should say so, otherwise it may be interpreted as an FYI, and I may wrongly fail to respond or act on it.

WHY?

I think it’s because the best way to get me to answer is to successfully put the problem in my universe. I have a very good memory for problems that I need to solve, especially if provided with an expected deadline – because I will push the task back if I can’t make it by the deadline, or i’ll simply get it done.
By far, my most preferred way of getting things done is EMAIL, This is because:

0) If a tree falls in the forest, it may make a sound but it isn’t necessarily recorded for follow-up.
1) Often all the data needed to work on the solution is there.
2) It’s in writing, so I don’t have to take notes on a call that generates 3 or 4 to-do items; it’s right there in the email, in my inbox.
3) I can work on it when I have time – many evenings and travel times are free, and I usually look to email for things to do.
4) It reduces delay – I don’t have to wait until my schedule synchs up with someone.
5) It is the mode I am used to for work, and how my life is scheduled.
6) It is how I operate with most of the other people in my life for production tasks. I use phone and in-person conversations to handle upsets, or very charged issues, or confidential issues, but not for most day-to-day production issues.

There are some communications that are not appropriate for email, but many of them can be summarized, or alluded to successfully (“this relates to the recently discussed re-sign issue…”) or (“this is about the issue we solved last week with respect to signed forms…”) so that the requests can be solved.

I hope this helps explain that I’m not at all inaccessible and I can be very rapid in response (same day or next day) but the best way to get that out of me is emails with calls-to-action (“do this”).
I sincerely apologize if I have been slow to respond to you in the past and I will endeavor to improve my habits in this area.

Your friend,
Damien

For those who have studied comparative religion, there’s a term ‘apocalyptic’, which means, religions or denominations which focus on a postulated or predicted ‘end of days’. In early Christianity, for instance, there were many followers focused on the imminent return of Christ. Similarly, in the era of American new religious movements and Christian variants for the last two hundred years, many have focused on an upcoming ‘big event’, day of reckoning, cataclysm, or other major transformation.

Perhaps one of the fastest growing belief systems of the 21st century is skepticism. The 2008 ARIS survey provides a statistical breakdown of the group of people who identify themselves as having ‘no’ religion. Generally the survey shows that they are agnostic or deists (god exists but doesn’t interfere with life) rather than atheists (no god) or theists (an interfering god).

The net result of this is that you have a large population in the US and perhaps more around the world that do not concern themselves with religious endgames, but rather, ecological endgames. Whether these ‘ecoists’ strongly believe, somewhat believe, or challenge global warming, the fact is that the secular apocalypse is climate change.

I fly a lot and so I find myself trying to ignore a lot of CNN in airport terminals. When they aren’t revealing the latest poor life choice of a celebrity, they spend a good time fanning the flames of debate over climate science, at least recently.

I believe that the awareness that things could all change suddenly is a rational awareness. I believe that the human urge to predict a future – even a catastrophic one – is reasonable. When it gets caught up with religious belief, fervor and individual divination, the predictions can be far off.

There’s also an interactive aspect, in that the human race does have a tremendous influence on our endgame. While we could be wiped out by an asteroid by no fault of our own, we theoretically could take responsibility for a threat even that large. And we certainly can take responsibility, as a race, for the continued health and energy of our own planet.

I think the parallels between human secular “realities” and religious “beliefs” are too close to ignore, and I believe worry about the outcome of our race is a very, very traditional concern, even if filtered through a new belief system.

I’m 6’3″ tall. A few years back I went on Atkins and lost about 30 pounds, going down to I think 183. I then went on the “I’m in Europe” diet, ate whatever I wanted, and kept the weight off. Then I went back to the US and went on the “eat whatever seems yummy” diet, and my early 30′s metabolism resulted in my slowly gaining weight.

Since I’m a relatively inactive “information worker” executive, I wanted to figure out a new way of eating, not just “go on a diet”, because I didn’t want to stop eating things I liked. I like soda pop and ice cream a lot. I don’t want to eat lousy fake ice cream without fat and sugar, and I don’t want to drink too much aspartame-fueled zero calorie dyed flavor-water. So I decided to figure out how to

1) retrain my body so it wasn’t always asking for junk food
2) lose weight without some unsustainable weird diet fad
3) lose weight without becoming a marathon runner

Here’s the basics rules I learned:

1) bodies need so many calories a day. If you eat more than you need, you get fatter. Less, you get skinnier. the right amount, you stay the same
2) bodies my size burn about 3000 calories per day. Smaller female bodies might only need 2000 or 2500 calories per day.
3) One pound = 3500 calories.

So losing weight turns out to be really simple – eat less calories. If you burn 2500 calories a day, you need 17500 a week. So just eat 14000 that week, and you’ll lose a pound. Eat 10500 calories that week, and you’ll lose 2 pounds. The other end is exercising. It’s really slow, but if you start running or doing other aerobic stuff it would probably help too. I chose the ‘eat less’ route because it actually is relevant to my lifestyle; I play with my family, I run around and commute a bit using public transportation, so I get some walking in, but I’m no athlete.

The other rule I applied was simple – eat healthy. One could get very confused about “healthy” due to all the opinion and propaganda and marketing, but most of the basics are obvious. Respecting any allergic, religious, cultural, or other reasons to abstain from certain foods, healthy means good food prepared from good, fresh ingredients that isn’t over processed, isn’t filled with hard to pronounce chemicals, isn’t designed to last for days or years on a shelf. “Whole foods” market is an example of foods that are healthy. Cheaper alternatives can be found in local markets, ethnic markets. Fruits and vegetables in the Mexican “Vallarta” market chain in Los Angeles, for instance, have noticeable bruises. However, they taste more flavorful than the shiny-but-bland visual feasts at Ralphs “Fresh Fare”. But vegetables from either place are presumably better than weird synthetic low calorie chocolate bar concoctions.

You don’t want to drop calories by eating nothing but weird diet food. You’ll become malnourished. Common sense tells you the four food groups are a good idea, despite the potential government propaganda imbued in that message. Besides, most food comes in those varieties.

Here’s what I did:

0) I talked to my body and explained that this was not a punishment; that I was going to make it healthier, and to work with me. I tried not to set my self up for a battle of wills, knowing that my body would fight back if I didn’t get it’s basic agreement.
1) I kept track of my weight and counted my calories every day. I made a target of 1200-1500 calories. That meant that I could have a few 300-400 calorie meals, and a couple-hundred calorie treat.
2) I figured out some foods that fit in the 300-calorie meal range. For instance, Jared’s subway fetish made sense; bread, meat, good veggies. I could get a subway club with spinach, skip the mayo, eat it, be relatively full. I figured out that jack-in-the-box tacos (2 for $0.99) are about 320 calories. On stuff with no calories on the back I would simply google it “large caeser salad calories” or “pesto sandwich calories”, that sort of thing. I figured out that a can of coke was 140 calories, so I could have that sometimes.
3) I stopped eating desserts every day (duh). I drastically reduced sugar intake.
4) I started drinking as much water as I could stand. I bought caseloads of dasani cheaply at Fry’s electronics. I hear it’s the worst of the bottled waters and has sodium. I know that it’s far better than 2-3 sodas a day. I drank like a fish, or a human emulating a fish.
5) I stopped eating after 8-9pm. I heard that on a radio ad one time for some weight loss placebo, “take our junk and don’t eat after 9″ so I figured it was the “don’t eat after 9″ that actually worked.
6) I tried to integrate weightloss into my lifestyle. I didn’t make weird personal lunches; I tried to eat out, but eat less. I would order hamburger, like normal, but just not eat it all.
7) I ordered kids meals whenever possible. they’re usually bland and sauceless and lower portion size – and cheaper. Or buy two tacos, no beans and rice, lots of lettuce. Buy small portions. Buy individual items a la carte. Get a water as your drink.
8 ) I relied on nonfat frozen yogurt for my icecream fix- pinkberry and it’s many clones – which in the small cup has like 100-120 calories. Sometimes i’d even freak out and have a medium and get like 200 calories.
9) I ended my affair with whole milk. We still go out some times, but it’s not the same as it was. Some would argue that I’m a full grown mammal and don’t need it. I wont’ go that far, especially in light of chocolate desserts, but after calorie counting I understand how it’s especially good for growing babies and equally effective at fattening adults.
10) I did not try to escape a feeling of hunger. Here’s the deal: You’re eating less calories than you burned. Thus, your body is eating itself to get more energy. This means you’ll feel HUNGRY, or at least sensations strikingly similar to hungry:

• starving
• underfed
• “a feeling that you should eat”
• snacky
• craving
• etc.

If you try to “avoid hungry feelings” and yet you force your body to be hungry, it’s a bit of a challenge. Even filling your belly with various foods, you’re still going to want sugary foods and “naughty” foods and that full feeling. Deal.

So basically, I started around April 22. My weight had maxxed out at 217.5. I dropped to 197.5 after about 5 weeks. My birthday was June 1, so I had a bit of cake and brownie and some white russians and some ben & jerry’s ice cream, but as of June 2 I’m up between 198-199 depending on time of day. Birthday’s over, I want to get down to about 185, so I’ve still got 15 pounds to go. You can see a spreadsheet of my diet tracking below. I’m not counting calories precisely anymore because I know by now what overfed, underfed, and fed feel like, and I just eat sensibly. If I know I want some crazy fat food snack I just budget it in, like spending or any other budget activity.

A google spreadsheet showing my weight loss

I used an external drive to back up my raid, then I reformatted the drives, and formatted the new 128GB solid state drive. I was able to clone my main drive over to the SDD using Carbon Copy Cloner for OS X. I then moved my large media – all my movies and songs and my main work directory with my books and other large files that I like to have handy – onto the 500GB.

As you probably expected, this thing boots fast. Takes about one minute. And launching applications is often “one bounce” (in OS X dock terms), i.e. fast. I have to run and quit apps all day; task switching and app launching slows me down. I get a lot of word and excel documents with my patent analysis and I have to get them open and closed, look up dozens of web pages, quit that out, open new files, do more analysis. I of course like to run iTunes in the meantime.

Browsing is faster; launching is faster. A successful experiment!

here’s the deal – I am not a trekkie. I am a star wars fan, but I have only seen some of the star trek movies (the 80′s ones); I watched some Next Gen but not the later two series. So I want to get my not-a-trekkie credentials clear.

I’m born in 74, so I grew up on old star trek reruns, and I probably watched them when they first aired in a past life. So I was quite familiar with Roddenberry’s original episodes.

In short, J.J. Abrams has my undying admiration; the writers, Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, should earn Pulitzers.

I feel SO STRONGLY about this movie? Why? It’s done perfectly. Even if you only vaguely know the Star Trek story from the original episodes, you should be delighted by this version.

If you know nothing about Star Trek, you should still see the movie

The opening sequence had me in tears; a few sequences later had me in tears.

This kind of film making makes me feel sorry for other movies. Seriously, all I could talk about after the movie is “why aren’t other movies this good? Why do directors have to work with bad scripts? Why do good scripts have to work with bad directors?”

Thank you, JJ. Damn.

Expanding on their audio port modem , PerceptDev engineers Zack Gainsforth and George Dean developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics.

Zack created a modified version of the microcontroller firmware used for the audio port modem, expanded to detect an infrared signal or read from a USB host controller, then read the data transmitted by an attached keyboard and convert it to an FSK signal for transmission to an iPhone.

Link to YouTube for iPhone

George then modified the iPhone application to interpret the keyboard data and display the appropriate characters on-screen.