ExistentialBlues

I need to spend more time surfing YouTube

Nathan Wray — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I can't believe I'd never stumbled across this before...Most marvelous Mike Myers movie.

MacMini gets a powerup

Nathan Wray — Thu, 6 Nov 2008 23:26:48 -0500

The Mac mine is a very cool piece of computer hardware, the only problem I had with mine was the measly 512 MB of Ram. But when buying Apple hardware new, they really soak you on the memory upgrades AND require you to order on-line rather than pick up from their store, so I heartily recommend getting the base model from them and upgrading the Ram yourself. With most Apple systems this is super easy, like with our aluminum iMac, it took about 5 minutes. The Mini takes this normally straightforward computer task

Summing up the Presidential campaign results

Nathan Wray — Wed, 5 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Cartoon by award winning illustrator Tony Auth

The first rule in IT - Keep good backups!

Nathan Wray — Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Despite the best laid plans disaster does, occasionally, strike. in in the IT world that means you need good backups of your systems since, occasionally, your systems will melt down.

As you may have noticed, ExistentialBlues.com recently underwent just such a catastrophe. Power blackouts shouldn't tank servers connected to UPS, but somehow things that shouldn't happen, do. And on an annoyingly frequent basis, I might add.

The backup was, hmmm, not good, being three months old, I'll have to do better next time. But at least it worked, which is much better than I've seen on other ocassions but much more sophisticated operations than mine.
After a looong weekend of being unable to give the server the attention it needed in order to rise like a Phoenix from its ashes, it's back. Let the e-mailing and web server continue!

My favorite mystery food: Natural Flavorings

Nathan Wray — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I read food labels all the time. I've been doing it so long, it's habitual and I've developed something of a knack for it. I can spot wheat almost instantly no matter how long the list of ingredients is. Other foods like milk, peanuts, and corn, almost as fast.

One ingredient that's still tripping me up, however, is natural flavors.

There's two reasons for that, one being that I only recently added it to my food blacklist, the second being that I haven't been able to fully identify it as a problem ingredient in my own mind because, well, sometimes it is an allergy problem for me, but not necessarily.

The actual definition of natural flavorings under the US Code of Federal Regulations is: “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional” (21CFR101.22).

Additionally, to show up as "natural flavor" and not, say, "natural strawberry flavor" the flavoring has to be a combination of two or more flavor compounds.

So a company can put just about any combination of things in their food and call it natural flavors so long as the "significant function" is to be a flavoring. As a guy allergic to a variety of foods, what are the chances that I'm not going to be allergic to "natural flavors?" I'd say zero, and so from here on out, I'm avoiding any food which contain "natural flavors" and would suggest others with serious allergies do the same.

Reference:
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/CF101-22.HTML

Weirdest thing I learned in school today...

Nathan Wray — Tue, 8 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Is that you can buy dolls of goth chicks on-line. It's for the greater good that I learn about dolls about goth chicks; higher education is always a greater good, right?

Sadly, my own site analysis was on a grocery store. I coulda been having a lot more fun in this class than I am...

...guess I'll just stick to figurines of chicks with multi-color hair taking their fish for a walk.

How did I not stumble across this site sooner?

Nathan Wray — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I'm at a loss to explain how I didn't know about this site sooner. It's hilarious, though it's focused on the excesses of the IT world, so the uninitiated may not be as amused as I have been.

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will

Nathan Wray — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:48:16 -0500

Special thanks to Jeremy for passing this along:

Rest in peace, Kurt Vonnegut

Nathan Wray — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Kurt Vonnegut 11/11/1922 - 4/11/2007

American writer, his works were often darkly humorous, satirical and philosophical. By combining them all with a writing style that some called inspired and others derided as incoherent Vonnegut produced powerful works which forced readers to evaluate their own place in the real world as well as the characters places in the fictionalized world the books created.

Wikipedia entry

NY Times Story on the passing of Kurt Vonnegut

Changing DST accomplished...what exactly?

Nathan Wray — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

This is more than a day late, but still worth thinking about.

Thanks to our fearless leaders, daylight savings came three weeks earlier this year than they did last year. Somehow this was supposed to save us energy, supposedly by having us all use less electricity to power light bulbs or something.

Well, that turned out to be wrong, no energy was saved.

It did do one thing, however, and it did it in dramatic style. And that was cause techies to pull their hair out. In case you're unaware, most computer systems automaticly adjust their time for daylight savings. This is a feature, it means people can push fewer buttons. But of course comptuers have to be programmed for when to automatically change the time, and reprogramming every computer in America is no simple thing.

Of course that's facetious, not every comptuer in America was updated. Some people didn't care, some people live in areas with none of this DST sillyness and some computers (old school!) don't do DST.

My thought? First, repeal DST in America, it will make all of our lives considerably easier. Secdond, the government should stop passing stupid laws which don't help us.