Signal to Noise

I have always been obese. Well, probably not really, I was probably within statistical norms for a few minutes after birth. And when I say that I am obese and have been for the last twenty years (which is closer to accurate) it is based on the body mass index.

I would also like to point out that at various periods during this time I was

• Playing competitive (let’s call it somewhat competitive) soccer three times a week
• Biking 200+ km per week
• Playing hockey (again call it semi-competitive) five times a week
• Practising taekwondo four times a week
• Generally being fit and outdoors and happy

My point being that I am a big guy and have been for a long time. I was fortunate enough to have a bicycle built for me by Gilles Bertrand at one time and I wanted a particular frame. I was told in no uncertain terms that for such a bike I would have to weigh less than 200 lbs or I would greatly lessen the life of the bike. I was a “gram weenie” far more than was healthy for a guy my size. I am far better described as torque-enabled or gravity-enhanced than as a mountain goat. I suffered up every hill that my more svelte friends ascended with (what appeared to me to be) the greatest of ease. My only revenge was the downhill where gravity and a tuck were my friends.

So, back to being big–I was and am. My BMI has always been high. To be fair, I just checked the scale and when I got down low enough to buy the bicycle I was only “overweight” on the BMI scale. I biked over 2500km that year around Ottawa.

I have come to hate the BMI. I hate being classified as being so overweight. “[Because of its] ease of measurement and calculation, it is the most widely used diagnostic tool to identify weight problem within a population” (Wikipedia). And there is nothing more comforting than a simple number when making a diagnosis, especially when the number is the result of a mathematical formula. Those things are great.

When I came across a NPR article called “Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus” I could not have been happier. I read it three times just to cheer myself up. Hey, I am still a big guy. I am bigger than I should be given my current lifestyle and physical ability but I would appreciate not having people rely on an abstract number that assumes uniform body composition across all members of a population and uses poor mathematics and statistics (as well as an early 19th century understanding of physiology) to classify individual fatness–particularly when the inventor explicitly said it was not suitable for that purpose. For the record, here is the top ten list in abbreviated form:

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.
2. It is scientifically nonsensical.
3. It is physiologically wrong.
4. It gets the logic wrong.
5. It’s bad statistics.
6. It is lying by scientific authority.
7. It suggests there are distinct categories of underweight, ideal, overweight and obese, with sharp boundaries that hinge on a decimal place.
8. It makes the more cynical members of society suspect that the medical insurance industry lobbies for the continued use of the BMI to keep their profits high.
9. Continued reliance on the BMI means doctors don’t feel the need to use one of the more scientifically sound methods that are available to measure obesity levels.
10. It embarrasses the U.S.

(from NPR)

Aside from the conspiracy theory tilt of the last three points I couldn’t agree more. There are lots of fat people and there is little argument that we (Westerners) are becoming fatter. I am a big believer that the reasons centre around eating too much and exercising too little. I know, that is the kind of rocket science that you just cannot believe I am giving away for free, but there it is: more calories come in than go out so we get fat. Our diet has increased in sugars and fats so the calories go up. We are more sedentary so we are burning off fewer calories. These problems are serious enough without confusing the issue with poorly constructed formulae and statistics to prove the point.

It is almost quaint to hear an automated voice on a telephone call instructing the caller to insert more coins to continue a call. I got a call from my mother-in-law on June 30th telling me to gather my family and make sure we were at the Sun-N-Shade campground in Borden-Carleton on Canada Day. As this campground is owned by my family I had no problem with the request although I wondered why it was coming from my mother-in-law; she has no connection to the campground. I agreed (I am working to maintain my acceptable son-in-law status). I started to ask some questions regarding the reason we should trundle off to the campground and what time would be appropriate but the aforementioned automated voice interrupted to request more money. My mother-in-law was out of change so all I got was a “I have to go. I will see you tomorrow at the show.”

Ah ha … a clue.

It turns out that my parents (and several others) were putting on an evening performance of music and entertainment (a common happening at the Sun-N-Shade) that evening and they had been pressed into service for a bus tour at the last minute. My mother-in-law, her sister, and a number of her friends were on the tour and would be rolling in to the campground to see the show.

There were a few performers that began the show and then a longer set by the Dunromin Duo (the picture above is of them playing–and yes, there are three of them). They are (from left to right) Harold Noye, Vans Bryant, and Marnie Noye (the silent bass player). If you are a Last.FM person you can listen to their album. Jericho Road (Harold and Marnie Noye and Vans and Emily Bryant) came on after a break to finish the show.

The show was very good … really. The opening performers played traditional Maritime tunes (conspicuously evenly balanced between the provinces) and a couple of country songs. Dunromin Duo concentrated on duets (typically the “brothers” songs of the 1930s to the 1960s) and chose songs featuring close harmony including a version of “Kentucky” by the Louvin Brothers that ran close to eight minutes. The lyrics are below. As it works out to just slightly less than a minute for each line you can understand my amazement that I enjoyed the song as much as I did.

Kentucky you are the dearest land outside of Heaven to me
Kentucky your laurels and your red bud trees
When I die I want to rest upon your graceful mountain so high
Kentucky that is where God will look for me

Kentucky I miss the voices singing in the silvery moonlight
Kentucky I miss the hound dog chasing coon
I know that my mother dad & sweetheart all are waiting for me
Kentucky I will be coming soon

Kentucky you are the dearest land outside of Heaven to me
Kentucky I will be coming soon

Without disparaging the earlier acts, the evening was more enjoyable as it progressed. Jericho Road’s bluegrass and gospel music was an excellent capstone to the evening and the people I spoke with at the end of the evening echoed my sentiments. This Canada Day was far from typical for us; we usually see fireworks and sometimes outdoor concerts. I was expecting simple and homey and familiar. I got all of that–I was surprised by how much I truly enjoyed it.

When I was growing up I was under the impression that “burning the candle at both ends” was a bad thing. It usually meant that somebody was working too hard and was in danger of “burning out.” Of course, as with many sayings of yore that were meant to act as warnings, there were occasions where one might be accused of burning a little too much candle with an overtone of admiration; look at you doing so much and being so successful and suffering no ill effects from your superhuman efforts–obviously you must be one of the rare few that has unlimited candles and can burn them willy-nilly (any post that uses the word “yore” must be balanced by the use of “willy-nilly” or risk falling into the pit of arrogance and self-reflective cleverness).

I continually (against my best efforts) fall into the trap of assuming that I have an unlimited store of candles that can be burned with the aforementioned willy and nilly abandon. History has shown that I am an idiot in this regard and somehow manage to be (honestly) surprised each time I run into a wall of exhaustion. I was not planning on getting sick as a (very sick) dog after doing more than is my ability–EVEN AFTER RECOGNIZING THAT I WAS DOING MORE THAN I SHOULD. How can a person be so oblivious to such a precedent? I have a rare gift for selective ignorance. If I could bottle it I would be a rich man during election campaigns … wait … that is another rant.

It was somewhat by accident that I started reading the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and found that she appreciated the value of a well-burned candle. If you were to believe WikiAnswers then her poem was the origin of the candle burning phrase. I would suggest you do not believe this. It is more likely to have existed for quite a while and examples of the phrase being used to describe living at a hectic pace and in relation to extravagance and thriftiness have been around for hundreds of years.

I have had a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Lyrics for a few years without ever venturing into its covers. I heard her work mentioned when I was taking one English course or another and found the book shortly after. It then promptly fell victim to limited time and changing interests. C’est la vie. Having time thrust upon me by virtue of being ill I dug out the book and read bits of it between other books and movies and waiting to get better.

I like it a lot–and not just the bit about burning the candle at both ends. That poem is called “First Fig” and is the first in A Few Figs from Thistles by Millay (1922).

MY CANDLE burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
    It gives a lovely light!

I will resist my temptation to give my version of literary criticism on this poem and those that follow in A Few Figs from Thistles. Read them yourself. Millay wrote in the post-World War I era (and before that as well but I enjoy a lot of Modernist literature so I am lumping her in with that lot). Millay is a writer that has fallen into relative obscurity (in comparison to the high-profile lifestyle of most poets) but earned high praise from her contemporaries and produced work worthy of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It was a bit of good fortune that I stumbled onto her work while I was suffering from post-double-candle-end-burning malaise. I am still reading bits of her work when time permits but I am now well and truly hooked.

I have been doing quite a bit of development for hand-held devices lately, mostly the iPhone and Windows Mobile. I took a brief foray into Blackberry and realized that I did not have enough high-quality booze to get over the learning curve (as close as you can come to a step function and still have rounded corners) and Byzantine documentation and API choices. I felt rather guilty at not being able to master the Blackberry and will probably give it another try when I have more time and fewer deadlines.

I came across a story about a developer who decided to write an application for the Blackberry and documented some of the ups and downs of his work. The article concentrates a lot on the aspects of writing an application that come after the development is “finished” (at least released) and the difficulty in converting the application into customer dollars. That part is interesting but the part that caught my interest was the first third of the article that deals with the development process and some of the difficulties he experienced. The part where he describes choosing the development environment hit very close to home as this was early in the process for me (and him) and it left me rather disheartened early in the process.

All BlackBerry phones are java based, and there are two SDK options for developing software on them: MIDP/CLDC and BlackBerry specific APIs. … Initially I leaned towards CLDC to maintain portability, but I eventually decided I’d rather take full advantage of the platform. I could always port it later if it came to that (if there is a later).

Great, now I just needed the RIM SDK. Turns out there are about 5 different versions, and the more features you get the fewer devices you can support. RIM has been around for a long time, and unfortunately (and unlike the iPhone) not all operating system revisions are available for all devices. The basic choices when I started PodTrapper were 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, and the newly released 4.7.

He also hit a snag that I experienced (and the one that eventually broke my will), connecting to the network:

There are 10 different network transports available on BlackBerry: WiFi, Direct TCP, WAP, WAP2, BES/MDS, BIS, Unite, BES Serial Bypass, USB and Bluetooth. A lot of options for getting data in and out. What would be nice is to say:

Me: Give me an HTTP connection using least-cost routing.
BB: Here you go

What you get is:

Me: I need an HTTP connection, is Wifi available?
BB: No.
Me: Is BES available?
BB: No.
Me: Is BIS available?
BB: Yes.
BB: Ooops, that file is over the size limit for BIS.
Me: Is TCP available?
BB: Yes.
BB: Ooops, TCP looks available but it was blocked by the carrier’s firewall…..

Regdarless, he persevered and ended up with a decent application. I envy his dedication and results. Mine will have to wait until next time. I know it can be done now.

I had planned to do a lot of biking this year but I have found that I have very little reason to get on my bike for travel. I used to bike to work (which was a decent 20+ km each way) last year but I am working from home this year and do not really have the need to wander too far from my coding dungeon to ply my trade. The end result is that my bike has not been out of the barn yet this year.

On the other hand I have been riding tandems far more than I ever have. I am not counting kilometres too closely but the number is likely closing in on 400km already. Part of that is the training I was doing with a friend (he recently completed a two-day 200km tour in Toronto) and the rest is on a recumbent tandem that we bought this year.

Because I promised my youngest daughter that we would bike into school together this year, and as today is the second last (the penultimate for all you word geeks) day of the school year for my daughter, we saddled up bright and early for our ride into school. I brushed the spiders off of the recumbent tandem, adjusted the seat positions, and stuck a bottle in one of the cages (nothing like having a new batch of baby spiders on your bike to make an early-morning ride ever so less enticing–I did this before my daughter saw anything; that might have scuttled the plan before we got started). Then, a little before 8:00am we began our ride to school.

It is at this point where I should mention that we live at the bottom of a rather steep hill. If you think PEI is flat then you are right from the point of view that there are not a lot of mountains (“The highest elevation is 466 feet (142 metres) above sea level in Queens county.” from Prince Edward Island (province, Canada) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia). On the other hand, I live in Queens county and our house is approximately 3 metres above river level; I call that close enough to sea level. Also, Prince Edward Island may have more roads per square kilometre than any other province but they saved a fortune by not changing the grade of secondary roads from the natural rolling and winding paths that were their ancestors. So, this is my way of saying that the ride to school this morning was anything but flat.

I had anticipated the 14km ride to take a little under an hour. I was wrong. I had forgotten to factor in the recumbents-are-more-comfortable-but-make-hills-excruciatingly-painful-to-climb coefficient. For our ride that coefficient was approximately 1.3. My daughter rolled into school at 9:14am. I will try to have her at school on time tomorrow. It is best to end on a good note.

The next ride will be on a nice flat stretch where the recumbent tandem really does shine.

So, my legs are sore. She did her best but her nine-year-old legs were no match for my older and much greater mass. Some of the sweetest words I have ever heard were “Do you need a little burst of power now daddy?” and I heard them often enough to find them funnier each time. She would blast out twenty or thirty hard pedal strokes that would rock the bike side to side and then let out an exhausted sigh. The bike would slow a bit and then (inevitably) I would hear “I can recover quick if you need me to do it again.” It was a great ride.

I am smiling. She was smiling when she walked into school. One nice family moment and one more reminder that even a bad day on a bike is better than a good day in the office.

One of the great things about working hard is the feeling of accomplishment. Another is finishing and looking back at a job well done. I have been working rather diligently lately doing some coding for mobile devices (Windows Mobile of all things … how I ended up at that is a long and winding tale beyond what I feel you, the casual reader, can endure at this moment). I was also teaching a programming course for high-school students on Saturday mornings. On top of this I was enjoying helping a vision-impaired cyclist train for a 200km tour ride by being a sighted rider on a tandem with him. Actually, “rider” is not entirely accurate because there was no notion of “being along for the ride” while we were training (yes, damnit, it was training and my legs are still sore).

About ten days ago I finished the programming course. It was quite good but I am sure I could do better if there is a next time. That day (Saturday) I went out biking for the long ride that was to be the big ride before some easier rides that would lead to the tour the following Saturday. Man, what a ride. It was long and hot and … as we were going down a large hill very quickly … terrifying. The second most horrible sound a person wants to hear (and possibly the last sound one might hear) when speeding down a hill on the front of a tandem bicycle (one that tilts the scales at nearly 600lbs with both riders and gear) is the taaannng of a spoke breaking on the front wheel. The most horrifying sound is a second taaannng that follows the first before one has had a chance to decelerate any significant amount while still going down the hill at great speed and squeezing the brakes with increasing force and urgency.

It was a very long, careful, and slow ride back to town.

I also want to plug MacQueen’s bike shop in Charlottetown (particularly Danny) who shook his head and pulled a wheel off of one of his tandems and told us not to worry about it until later so we could finish our ride. I appreciate his desire and ability to keep us riding.

The upshot of all this is what my body did to me on Sunday. The biking, teaching, and working left me tired and (apparently) susceptible to the Martian Death Flu (MDF). Not to be confused with Swine Flu or West Nile Virus, or any of the horrors that will terrify us throughout the summer, the MDF knocked me out of normal life for a week. Of that week I spent 4 days in bed (it might have been 5 but it is hard to judge that last one where I was out of bed for part of it). Did I mention that I was IN BED during this time–and not just moping around the house.

The good news is that I was able to watch movies and (eventually, when my brain would allow it) read some books. I read all five of Dashiel Hammet’s novels and would seriously recommend The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. The first two, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse are quite intense–think Kill Bill as a novel. I have watched The Maltese Falcon a few times and it is very close to the novel. The Thin Man movie was a much looser interpretation of Dashiel’s book but attention to the characters in the movie brings out much of the charm (yikes, lots of pretence to use the word “charm” when writing about books and movies) of the novel. The characters spawned a total of six Thin Man movies. I like them all (with the last two being my least favourite but still worth watching).

So I read (I also finished my next book in the Cadfael series, Saint Peter’s Fair) and watched (all three of the original Star Wars movies with director’s commentary on–you know you are sick when you can lie through that dribble and be too apathetic to change the audio track). And I am very glad to be back on the mend. Oh, and the BBC adaptations of the Cadfael novels is quite good as well.

Life lesson: do not work so much that you get sick. Burning the candle at both ends leads to a short and soggy candle, even if it were extra bright while it burned. Let’s see if I can remember that for the next time.

It is a long-standing tradition at our house that we read aloud stories before bedtime. The stories we read have have grown from the early (and insipid) books that repeat words and phrases to amuse children to short anecdotes with bright pictures (often authored by some guy named Munsch) and now to stories of some length, without all the pictures, and with a plot and characters. I love these stories.

It is a shame that many of the books for young adults are missed by the not-so-young adults. I do not know how many books we have read aloud but the bookcase in the children’s room would suggest that the number is in the hundreds. We have read some of the “classics” from Roald Dahl and Judy Blume (Fudge and his brother are great). There have been some newer books by Andrew Clements, notably Frindle. And there are a host of others I have not mentioned.

I want to point out, again, that these books are enjoyable to read. I will allow that part of my joy in reading them is seeing the pleasure in the audience. Hearing the laughs and making the funny voices is always going to improve the experience. But I also found that if I missed an evening and was behind a chapter or two I would need to read the missing pages before I would allow more to be read (okay, that last bit may be an indication of my compulsive nature … but I was not going to miss out on the story). And there is nothing like having a children’s author describe and explain some of the most complex and emotional issues facing children (and everybody) to make it tough to choke out heart-wrenching dialogue out loud.

The last books we read were A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck. These books are two of the most enjoyable books I have read. Each book is a series of short stories (a chapter per story) and are told from the point of view of Joey Dowdel (A Long Way from Chicago) and Mary Alice Dowdel (A Year Down Yonder) and describe visits to Grandma Dowdel in a small town in Illinois. The stories are set in the late 1920s up to the late 1930s and are told in retrospect by Joey and Mary Alice when they are in their old age. The language and attitude of Grandma Dowdel had me laughing to tears. Peck also manages to wrap the character of Grandma Dowdel in a nostalgia that is not overly sentimental (in the sense that she shot the lid of dead man’s coffin when a reporter was in the room) and still showed a deep caring for people who were having a hard time. This was the depression era–most people were not doing that well.

I cannot remember ever having such good chats with the girls as the chats we had after reading chapters from these books. It is surprisingly hard to explain why some of the things that Grandma Dowdel does (which are, let’s face it, illegal) are morally correct; certainly there was no moral confusion in Grandma Dowdel’s mind.

We just finished reading A Long Way from Chicago for the second time and it still evoked the same laughter (and occasional tear) as it did the first time we read it. I suspect the biggest reason was my greatly improved voices, but I will allow for a bit of ability on behalf of the author.

There is nothing like having similar circumstances continually reappearing to make me believe I am either a) the poster child for déjà vu, b) living a somewhat haphazardly written version of the movie Groundhog Day, or c) in a bit of a rut.

Today’s reoccurrence came through my recent Music-Coffee-and-Code-in-a-basement life. As I am beginning a new project using Windows Mobile I chose the New Project menu item and followed the appropriate step to create a new mobile project (yeah, I know, this kind of riveting storytelling keeps me alive … I will be unboxing Happy Meals soon …). The result of these straightforward and previously effective acts was a little tiny failure message and a very disconcerting beep (not your standard disconcerting beep either; this was a new and ugly beep).

The reason for said disconcerting beep and lack of new project was a problem that occurred as a result of the security in Internet Exporer 8. I found this while drinking my iced addiction and listening to the CBC Radio 3 track of the day: “The Prisoner” by D.O.A.

There is no way that I can listen to D.O.A. without a flood of memories that bring me back to struggling up some gruesome hill (I always tried to stop and look at the lake for its beauty and not because I could scarcely draw an unlaboured breath). My suffering and panting (I am gravity enhanced and prefer the ride down to the ride up any hill) would always camouflage the stealthy cranking of those riding behind until the gutteral refrain of “my old man’s a bum … uurgh” would appear in my left ear as I would be left trying in vain to dig down to find enough energy to grab the aerodynamic advantage of the rear wheel quickly spinning ever further ahead.

I never caught the wheel and I always knew I would hear the lyric. The very occasional time I managed to summit anything greater than an on-ramp without hearing the whizzing of passing tires and D.O.A. lyrics (it was sometimes worse … Tom Jones’s “it’s not unusual to be loved by anyone” can stay in a person’s head for hours) was a victory savoured at least until the next hill. Of course, the downhills were their own reward.

In celebration of finding a way around a tedious problem I am pouring myself a little more coffee (be careful filtering that stuff … it is very easy to drop the strainer into the coffee bowl and have to do it all over again and be forced to wait for a second straining) and putting D.O.A.’s Just Play It Over and Over five songs (one with Bif Naked doing some singing as well) on high rotation. The code mines were never better.

Okay, so maybe digging out old footage of the Dead Kennedys early shows is not the best way to deal with insomnia. However, living in the two-channel universe with one channel not working and the other showing the tail end of a hockey game that is already out of reach for my team tends to limit my passive entertainment options. So I found a DVD of early Dead Kennedys shows and watched it … twice.

I am happy to report that I still like the Dead Kennedys. I do not like them in the wow-these-guys-are-really-politically-cool-and-they-don’t-care-what-people-think-blah-blah-blah sense. I used to. I like them now more because I enjoy looking back on them and remembering that the late 1970s and early 1980s were a lot more than Air Supply and soft rock. It was difficult to imagine that a band who had an anti-racism song called “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” might be capable of some subtlety in scathing commentary but after watching “California Uber Alles” (that is a link to the YouTube version of the video I was watching–my DVD even had the sing-a-long version with the lyrics underneath it) for the third time (I started through the DVD a third time) I enjoyed having Jello point out what should have been obvious. I could also see why people were offended–metaphors to totalitarian regimes and using organic poison gas (it is California after all) might be a tad off putting.

   

I also realized that Jello Biafra is Rick Mercer. I know this is going to be difficult to accept because both are currently alive and each have their own Wikipedia page and differ in age by more than 10 years, but it is true. I saw the truth just as I was fading from consciousness having just flipped between the Dead Kennedys and a CBC commercial for the Mercer Report. It was as plain as day (night). Of course I can never watch the Dead Kennedys and not see the Mercer Report.

Time for a jittery update on things that should not be so simple and so good. Okay, maybe it is not quite as simple a pleasure to other people, but drinking iced coffee (the simplest, yummiest brewing and drinking experience yet invented–from the The Internet Food Association via Lifehacker) after just finding an amazingly difficult bug (a subtle overwriting of a function pointer in the vtable of a C++ object) while Thunderheist hones my fast-twitch muscular response is damn fine in my world.

   

You can experience this joy for yourself by making iced rocket fuel using the method above and listening to Thunderheist (CBC Radio 3 Sessions podcast). You are on your own to find C++ bugs.