Bananas, mangos and mint

What better way to start a sunny day than with some fresh fruit and garden herbs? I had mashed bananas, diced altauflo mangos, with some fresh mint. The mellow sweetness of the banana gets a punch from the tangy mangos (I would need to ripen them some more if was going to have more than the 2 I had here) and a breath of fresh air from the mint. Kept me going for 5 hours, just like it should.

Firefox keyboard shortcut

I haven't seen this anywhere else on the internet, so I thought I'd document this new Firefox keyboard shortcut I discovered today. It might be useful for peeps who access their windows desktop a lot and would rather not minimize firefox. This works for FF3.5b4 win. Can't guarantee it'll work for any other build!

Ctrl+Shift+O will open the desktop in a new explorer window from Firefox.

Enjoy.

Raw Vegan Power!

This is my very 1st announcement on this topic, but I am happy to proclaim that I've happily switched from being mostly-vegan to being raw. It was around late-August 2007 that I began the transition and it has been a super enlightening journey for my digestion and my power!

What does a typical day look like for a raw-foodist like myself you ask? It's more or less the same number of meals. One thing that strays from conventional eating wisdom is the lack of snacking - amongst other things. On most days, it goes like this:

• Morning: (after some activity like yoga and/or a commute to school) fresh ripe fruit! Either blended, sliced/chopped, whole, or whatever I have time for. And maybe some dried fruit thrown in.
  
• Noon/Afternoon: more fresh ripe fruit!
  
• Later Afternoon: still more fresh ripe fruit!
  
• Evening: vegetables with perhaps some nuts or seeds for a dressing. Either as a salad, pasta, chopped, whole or whatever suits me.
  

It's a remarkably simple affair. I have 20 - 30 items it choose from at the produce section at the grocery. Gone is the hassle of scanning through all those isles!

Does this look familiar? It might, because it's based on 80/10/10 aka 811rv. My food intake is low on fat, gives me plenty of calories and is super high on macro & micro nutrients.

Look for future postings with recipes, pictures, and personal stories as I find my way deeper into raw!

Expel CO2 into outer space? Not so fast!

I love creative ideas, don't you? More than that, I love the creative process. For me brainstorming is like the intellectual big-O. It's so much fun, and it's productive to boot. Who do we have to thank for planes, trains, and automobiles?

So what are your personal favourites? Right now I'm eating a nice warm bowl of curry, so I'm glad someone had the idea to:

1. Bring fire together with plants to make food (it's so obvious, and unless you are 100% raw vegan, utterly important)
   
2. Domesticate plants for agriculture
3. Put together coriander, fenugreek, tumeric, cumin etc. to make curry powder. (Not so hot about on the British colonization of India)
   

Hey, I even love stupid ideas that come out of the creative process. Get them out into the open, toss into the no pile, and move on thank you very much.

So it really bugs me when I see something gives me far too much of the no feeling. Take the idea of fighting global warming by expelling CO2 into outer space, for example. UCLA physicist Alfred Y. Wong has the idea to use earth's magnetic fields to ionize carbon dioxide which in theory would produce this ejection.

What's wrong with this picture? True, carbon dioxide is arguably our most despised enemy. Why not be rid of it by whatever means possible?

Here's the thing: CO2 holds our most valuable resource - oxygen. Losing that CO2 means losing the opportunity for getting that oxygen back. Forever. Last time I checked, I still needed air.

Nice try Alfred. We need outside-the-box thinking to tackle climate change, but I'm going to vote no on this one.

VIA: Economist : Treehugger

IT Admin Stuff

On occasion, I'll take on a gig that's a wee bit technical and obscure. Why?

Does it have something to do with a childhood spent making Transformers from Lego? Or that Commodore 64 that my brother would spend hours typing the code for Lode Runner onto cassette tape? Must be that, yeah. Forever wondering how I lost my hard drive on good ol' 486 keeps me hungry too.

A short while back, I came face to face once again with that wonder. Ok, I exaggerate. The drama was nothing like ol' 486.

Picture this:

• Small Mac-PC network
  
• File Server is on Windows XP Pro - no server OS here
  
• Each Mac & PC is configured to mount multiple network shares at startup
  

Depending on the day, one or more workstation would not be able to mount all their shares. The Macs would complain of -36 errors. Aliases to the network shares were "missing" (or words to that effect). PCs too would sometimes complain of not being able to mount the drives.

This was a head scratcher for sure. Nothing on the forums had any solutions that worked. Not Macwindows.com. Not MacOSXhints.com. Not Macintouch.com. I was ready to throw in the towel until I looked in the sessions viewer on the WinXP file server.

To make a long story short, here's what I found. I hope no one else has to go through this!!!

• Windows XP Pro only allows 10-11 sessions at once to be opened for file shares. Makes sense. WinXP is not a Server OS and this is well documented.
  
• When the PC workstations mount all the drives, they do it in a single session - just like they should.
  
• When MacOSX mounts the drives, it mounts each drive in a different session. Why Steve, why?
  

If even only 2 Macs needed to mount 4 drives each (not uncommon) there'd be nearly nothing left for the other workstations. Why Steve, why?

Simple (but not free) solution: use DAVE. Mounts all the drives in a single session. Why can't you do this with your Samba client Steve? Even if we had a server-OS, why should be buy extra licenses just for your idiotic CIFS/SMB implementation?

what's my inner power?

It's like asking, "what keeps me going?"

I have a confession to make. Maybe it's obvious in the name of my blog. I find myself most at home when I discover what drives you. It could be some great new recipe for pizza potatoes. You could have super easy instructions for making hot-processed soap. Hey, you could even have made the discovery that the iliopsoas should be stretched before stretching/massaging the hamstrings.

What's my inner power? Why geek of course!

You too are a fellow geek, no? Perhaps then, you'll enjoy yourself as you witness my inner monologue become, well, not so inner.

Enjoy!