Good or bad. Doesn't affect cancer or heart disease risk either.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20100318/hl_hsn/lowfatdietdoeslittletoaltercholesterollevels

So, there are some good tidbits in this article and also a lot of BS about promoting high-carb diets that doesn't really even seem to be related to the study. For some reason one of the lead researchers appears to be on a mission to promote high-carb diets but her definition of a high-carb diet is totally fucking whacked to try and make it relevant to this study (since this isn't a study about carbs which really makes me wonder where she's coming from).

( Read more... )

The cleaners could not hem my ball gown because it is made of a slinky fabric they aren't able to work with. So I took it to an alterations place up the street from me. Even though the owner is an older woman (late 40's or possibly 50's) she went crazy for the dress. She loved it so much that when I tried it on for her to pin up she asked me to come back to the break room so she could show the gown (on me) to her employees having lunch in the back. They were wide eyed at the gown as well.

I knew the dress was stunning in a gothy way, but I didn't think the normal folk would appreciate it so much. And absolutely no one else at the ball will be wearing anything like it. Now I'm extra excited for a chance to wear it!

A group of kids, high school age. Their gang reads just like a "hero team" from a movie or anime.

The "big one" is plural, a matched pair. Big tall and strong, their rough features very much indicative of Boston's old working class white immigrant history. They don't say much, but they have ready smiles that run across their faces.

The "thoughtful one" is the tall skinny boy. He is of middle eastern or eastern Med ethnicity. He says nothing at all, but stands with his friends.

The "the chick" is a lovely latina, with round features. She leans against the standing bar by the door, bantering comfortably with her friends. Her nose ring gleams against her skin.

The "weird one" is short, ferret-like features. Curly sandy red hair. Rimmless glasses, and a newsie hat. He walks gracefully, and with no need of handholds, as the subway card twists and bounces.

And at the center, telling stories and cracking jokes, the focus of his friends' attention, is he "the lancer" or "the leader"? Chinese ethnicity. Also standing comfortably without handhold in the bouncing subway car.

Their skins are a range of shades and hues of brown, their parents or grandparents or greatgrandparents from all over the world. They all share the same broad working class Bostonian accent.

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Current Location: MBTA Red Line, somewhere between Central and Davis

A young man, lean and a touch rugged, with a fresh tight haircut, wearing on top a clean white dress shirt, silk tie, and perfectly fitting light grey dress suit jacket. And on the bottom, a pair of used but clean blue 501s, also perfectly fit, and a pair of heavy work boots. He's doing final checks of his grooming and tie in his reflection in the window. I wonder where he is going.

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Current Location: MBTA Red Line, somewhere between Central and Davis

A Dunkin' Donuts is physically configured and crew trained such that you can be handed a breakfast sandwich, a donut, and a black coffee about as fast as you can say that (and here in Boston, people can say that extremely quickly), but when you ask for any sort of "speciality coffee", such as a latte, ven though it is prominently featured at the top of their menu board, their well-designed and well-practiced pattern stumbles, and it takes a while for them to prep and present your drink.

It looks like nearly everyone in Boston has a Charlie Card. Why now isn't the MBTA building on that success, and going down the path blazed by Hong Kong's Octopus card, and having it start to displace small retail transactions, such as for my breakfast sandwich and latte? Well, other than we are talking about an agency of the government of Massachusetts, which is all the explanation necessary.

A pan-handler at the door to that Dunkin' Donuts has got a working gimmick. As I approached, he smiled, said "good morning", and opened the door for me. As I was leaving, he opened it for me again. He got the change in my hand for it. My feelings about this kind of transaction are complex. But, he did get my change, and very few spare-changers do.

It's a nice 10 minute walk from where I am couch-surfing (thank you, Deb of the FSF) to where I am set up to sit and work (and thank you, Sheeri and Pythian). The walk was especially nice today and yesterday, what with the sun shining and it being acceptably not-cold. The days before, it was either rainy, windy, bitingly cold, or all three.

When I am out walking quickly in the sun, my brain is full of energy and ideas and problem solutions. But when I sit down at the desk, it's like my skull has filled with sludge. I need a way to be able to write and to code while I'm on my feet walking around outside.

This entry was originally posted at http://fallenpegasus.dreamwidth.org/832531.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Current Location: Pythian Boston Offices, Central Square, Cambridge MA

It's a fairly high specced, business featured projector, asking $340. Lots of details here: http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sys/1649293348.html
Yes, if you can see this and actually want to buy it without giving me a lot of hassle you can offer me a lot less money and I'll probably say yes. It is going towards thevikingbunny's education fund though so please be generous.

( some clothes for sale: )

I haven't found a ride to Portland yet for the Vampire Ball, but hope springs eternal! I'm taking the gown I purchased in December to the cleaners today to have it hemmed in time for the ball. The dress is very unusual and gothy and sexy as hell. I feel like Cinderella now, I have the perfect gown and all I need now is a pumpkin coach to take me to the ball.

Sent from my Windows® phone.

We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.

We've updated the global navigation menu:

Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:

• Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
• You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
• Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
• Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
• Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
• Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.

LiveJournal Mobile update:

We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.

Other important changes:

• You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
• We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
• You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
• You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
• We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.

We've got your fix:

• UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
• Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
• Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
• We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
• We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.

Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!

Tags: custom mood themes, global navigation, mobile app, tags, vgifts

I will be at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in a few weeks in the middle of April. This will be my fourth time there. Gear6 is going to be there as a sponsor, and some of my coworkers will be presenting, and I will probably share some stage time with them as they do.

My first time, was my first time. I was still working solo, as an independent. I met many MySQL-sphere people who are now personal friends, as well as being industry peers and contacts. I gave the talk that "put me on the map", for a project that was my opportunity to learn about distributed version control, cloud computing, Amazon Web Services, MySQL internals, and MySQL storage engines. I would look at the presentation schedule, and usually not even understand the titles.

My second year, I was working as part of MySQL Professional Services. My presentation was about MySQL User Defined Functions. The major buzz was "What will Sun do?". The technology arising that I was the most aware of was Memcached. One of the first memcached hackathons happened. The business thing I became aware of was Rackspace's gearing up to enter the cloud computing space. I learned later that the seeds of Drizzle DB germinated there. I would look at the presentation titles, and wish I could attend more presentations, because I could learn from almost all of them.

My third year, last year, I was working on Sun Cloud. The major buzz was "What will Oracle do?" and about the separate Percona conference and similar political/personal stuff. The tech buzz was about Drizzle DB. I would look at the presentation titles, and realize I could teach most of the presentations myself, and so focused mainly on networking and on the "hallway track".

It will be fun to see what this year brings.

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Tags: mysql