Over the past year we've made it the norm in our family that we have a salad with most dinners (some dinners don't really work well with a salad, so this rule is more general than absolute). We buy big tub things of mixed greens (Fortinos, a local branding of Loblaws - I think they made an Italian sounding name to pander to the nearby Hamilton market - has an awesome very high quality, organic, already cleaned tub with something like 2KG of mixed greens for ~$5. With proper storage it lasts for about a week), and then add in some cut green onions, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever else tempts our taste buds that night.

The health benefits are unquestionable, but more importantly it's an epicurean delight.

It is remarkable how accessible, and inexpensive, such quality-of-life improvements really are.

I had an interesting conversation today in relation to caffeine, and techniques to eliminate it from one's diet. I offered up my opinion, which was that the elimination of caffeine should be done gradually - this is true for most lifestyle changes - to minimize the negatives (e.g. headaches) and to maximize the probability that it will be sustainable. For instance in my case I cut caffeine by alternating "real" with swiss-water decaf in increasing ratios, even mixing up the blends, and by mandating a full cup of water between cups of coffee. It worked wonderfully, and in a short while I was off the dastardly white stuff.

What was more interesting than the coffee conversation, though, was the replies that came regarding my brief background story where I explained why I cut caffeine: I had mentioned that I was preparing for a trip to Italy for two weeks, and hearing about the extremely strong coffee there, and the general lack of availability compared to here, I wanted to avoid both stomach upset and spending half the trip searching for outlets of Anthony Hortinos. So I decided to eliminate coffee before leaving. It worked perfectly. Naturally this outraged some people: "But isn't coffee in Italy the best coffee in the world?"

Ignoring the entirely practical reasons why I didn't want to do coffee in Italy (and anyone who claims that convenience coffee is as widely available in Italy has never been here in Southern Ontario), the absolutism about such a subjective point is what strikes me as ridiculous: While sometimes a region has constituent accessibility that gives them an advantage or specialty (e.g. seafood is generally better on the East Coast where it's fresh from the ocean...unless it was on a long run trawler that is), often it is subjective regional preferences that people confuse with superiority or inferiority.

For instance a common mantra here in Canada is that our beer is "better" than in the US, because there the general American consumer prefers a lighter blend than Canadians do. We get misled into thinking that we have some sort of material advantage in beer making, confusing subjective choices with absolute measures. And of course the Brits think their beer is "better" still, because they prefer a thicker beer. It's all so inane.

Lately I've been getting a lot of "we'd love to get your feedback about the [Product you purchased or Event you attended]. Please take at few moments and fill out our survey at ..." request emails. Usually they have the carrot of some trivial low-value prize. Other times they exhort you to help make the world a better place by giving some feedback.

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I enjoyed filling out these surveys, and I actually participated. I really, truly felt that I was helping improve events and products, and generally making the world a better place. And hey, there's a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of winning a $10 Amazon coupon!

It was on someone else's time anyways (most of these are sent to employees at workplaces who are more likely to give up 15 minutes or more for some random survey), so why not?

Nowadays I never fill out online surveys - I've become too jaded about them. All opinion companies pull the same gross abuse-of-trust scam, which is the old "tell you that it's only a couple of minutes, but really it's 20 pages long with 10 questions on each page, with absolutely no indicator of how far you are. Ha ha ha sucker!". Of course they're hoping that once you've committed the time for the first 4 pages, you're going to keep pushing yourself to finish what you started. "Okay...fine...just one more set of questions," until you've burned 45 minutes of your time to help an opinion company get a commission.

Motion activated lights are a fantastic way to see nocturnal creatures on the prowl.

Last night, for instance, the lights triggered. My wife looked out to see a skunk on our patio, casually partaking of some delicious French bread (when we have fresh bread I often toss the leftovers out back. Between the birds and the nighttime creatures it's gone by morning, and it's infrequent enough to be unanticipated and non-habit forming for the neighbourhood friends).

Sensing an opportunity to educate our awake-far-too-late Sr. Toddler daughter a bit, I brought her over to look out at the skunk. She burst out crying.

"My toys are outside! Bring my toys in! My toys!" (there was a little plastic bicycle, and a couple of toy gardening implements outside)

After finally getting her to settle down a bit, I got her to tell me what was upsetting her.

"The skunk is going to poop on my toys!"

Today we took advantage of the gorgeous, barely below freezing temperatures, and the fresh snowfall (which is one of the few snowfalls before Christmas in recent years that actually stayed on the ground more than a few hours, though it'll be washed away as temperatures go to 14C+ in the coming days), this time visiting Crawford Lake again.

It was a beautiful day, with some beautiful scenario. To contrast, the following was Crawford Lake on the Canadian Thanksgiving.

User measurement and tuning of computer hardware and components is largely a lost art - we buy high performance hardware within our budget, and it is what it is. When we require more speed, or more likely just buy to keep up with technological advances, we buy something new.

This came to mind as I was evaluating why the media performance between a couple of home PCs was relatively poor: For whatever reason, streaming media files were stuttering, and photo replication was taking far too long given the quantities of data involved. While I just lived with this for a while (it is just a couple of home PCs), I finally decided to get some real metrics to know what I was dealing with. I decided to look at the numbers from the file system level (rather than measuring just the network itself to catch any high-level issues). Off I went with the fantastic application iozone (which also doubles as an excellent test utility to gauge the performance of various segregated storage systems, which will be another entry coming very soon), analyzing both the wired network and the wireless network.

To make a boring entry even more boring, it turns out that the source computer - running on an nvidia nforce motherboard - was using the nforce chipset networking adapter, with the secondary Marvell adapter disabled. All with stock settings. After running the first set of tests, seeing that the network performance over the 100Mbps network was yielding about 800KB/second of actual transfer (despite the links all reporting a 100Mbps signalling speed), I disabled that network adapter and enabled the Marvell, switching the ethernet cable over.

With that simple action, network throughput suddenly jumped to 12MB/second (the theoretical limit of 100Mbps ethernet). A 15x performance improvement just because I finally decided to measure it and do something about it. Now I think I'll play with the buffer settings to see what further benefits can be gained. Then I'll probably upgrade to 1000Mbps and start again (amazing how inexpensive 1Gbps networking equipment is now).

I always enjoy these exercises because inevitably you go down a path and learn more about a fringe - yet still important - element of our computing world. For instance some interesting details about the file cache of Windows 2000 (which was largely unchanged for Windows 2003).

Enjoyable weekend, packed with Christmas parties and other holiday related events. What a wonderful time of year.

I don't normally do this, but since this is hidden in the personal category, what the heck: Surely everyone has seen this by now (I believe it's over 2 years old now). Amazing amount of planning and work (not to mention cost) went into that. They went big, and superbly kept some big-bang in reserve until the end. Amazing.

This is quite a humorous video.

On the more disturbing side are these and these. Apparently this has been going on for a while: An extremely talented motorcyclist ("GhostRider". Apparently the name is based on a comic) drives through congested urban streets and highways at absolutely insane speeds, darting between unpredictable traffic, capturing it all with several bike mounted cameras (along with coordinated "crew"). Most of these take place in Sweden, and apparently this is something of a trend there. [One individual insightfully commented that this was all inspired by an infamous scene from the French movie The Rendezvous, in which a hired, and apparently still mysterious, driver goes insanely quickly through the streets of Paris one morning, endangering pedestrians, other traffic, and himself as he disregards traffic lights and controls. See for yourself].

While I don't want to support that sort of activity (go crazy on the track, just don't put innocent people in harm's way for your fun - I'd love to have the real DVDs of these, but I'm not going to financially support it as a pursuit), I am in awe of the talent, and I am absolutely disturbed by the complete fearlessness: In a number of situations a driver making a last minute lane change would have resulted in certain death.

Actually that points out one of "GhostRider's" key talents, which is reading traffic (very, very rapidly). It is remarkable how many people have no ability to do this at even a much more liesurely pace. You know - those people who always seem to be speeding, yet they keep passing you over and over and over again (because they keep screwing themselves into dumb positions, particularly when they try passing on the right on 6 lane highways).

I think these fascinate me for the same reason that I enjoy F1 - extreme engineering (the devices featured are extraordinary pieces of engineering and perfection), risk, and extraordinary skill. These aren't a bunch of kids in Honda Civics with loud exhausts - they're obviously professional drivers and bikers to some degree, and the confidence and skill is extraordinary.