Bob Vila Would Not Eat Low-Carb Ice Cream

There is no experience as heart-breaking as coming home from Europe to the US and then eating. I have made this fall from food grace five times now, and it's painful every time. The five steps are:

1. Denial. The food in the US can't really be that bad, can it?
2. Anger. Why the hell is our entire country's food supply such a disaster. Why are there hormones in the milk? Why is their E Coli in the meat? Why doesnt' a tomato have any flavor any more? Why is it legal to sell a baked good that can go unrefrigerated for four years?*
   
3. Bargaining. So you make a plan - I'll make my own bread, I'll go to whole-foods, I'll give up Doritos, anything!
   
4. Depression. What's the point of eating?
   
5. Acceptance. Let's go to Taco Bel..

If you haven't been to France or Italy, here's what I have experienced: food is of better quality all the way up and down the spectrum. From the sandwich you buy on the street to a restaurant meal, the ingredients are better, the preparation is better, the experience is just better.

Now if I may tangent slightly, Lori and I made a really really good pizza the other day. The dough was made from scratch (thanks to our bread-maker this is really easy), cooked on stone, with caramelized onions and fresh Mozzarella, it was just a really good pizza.

But if you buy into the latest "healthy eating" trends in the US, what we did was not healthy because it's high in carbohydrates.

So here's my rant: back in the 70s, fat was the evil food. Americans ate a ton of processed food. So the food companies did their best to remove as much fat as possible from processed food. We kept eating processed food (now jam packed with carbohydrates) and we continued to get fat.

Then the Atkins diet gets all trendy*, and the processed food companies try to remove all carbs from processed foods, we keep eating processed foods, and we keep getting fat.

Perhaps we should just stop eating processed foods?

* I had a science teacher in 7th grade who took a Twinky, injected it with water from a local pond (read: water with a heavy concentration of microorganisms) and then left it on top of the blackboard on a shelf. Several years later he took a job in another state. Before he left, he unwrapped the Twinky and cut it in half. There was absolutely no sign of organic growth.

** I know many people who have lost weight from the Atkins diet. But the trend I see is that it really really disrupts your regular eating habits. I can't help but wonder to what extent the Atkins diet causes weight loss by either (1) lowering total caloric intake or (2) eliminating "empty" foods like processed snacks.

Houston, we have FIOS

No matter how grumpy I was with Verizon I was about the complete slurry they made out of my order, I just can't stay angry while connected to the Internet with 2 Mbs of upload. (Compare to less than 400 Kbs with Comcast.) For my work we use CVS, and CVS has the design flaw^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H charming property of uploading everything and letting the server do the real work - it is thus really sluggish on asymmetric home connections, and is a lot more usable with FIOS.

We also have a new DVR, sort of. Comcast and Verizon use the same dual-tuner Motorola DVR (I think it's the 6412), but the software is different. A comparison of the two (this is with Verizon's newly revised software):

• The layout and navigation of the Verizon DVR is a lot simpler. It's still not Tivo, but it's a lot closer.
• The Comcast software was a bit of a mess to use - it had a way of changing channels on you surprisingly, or asking you if you wanted to change channels in ways where the right answer wasn't obvious. The Verizon DVR will be a lot less surprising.
• On the other hand, the Comcast DVR provided access to both tuners for TV browsing...it wasn't easy to do, but you could have "history" on two shows at once. (This wasn't real useful - the Comcast DVR's tendency to drop live TV for recordings without warning means you lost your history a lot.)
• While the Verizon DVR doesn't provide both tuners for live TV "browsing" (a feature that's confusing at both), it also seems to lose your recording history after just about any operation, which is a bit annoying.

Overall I think for anyone who's not a programming nerd, the Verizon DVR provides a better interface - it comes closer to the princple of "least astonishment."

It's Official - The RAZR is no longer l33t

...because...I got one. My old phone, which I was determined to keep forever, finally stopped working. Here's a side-by-side comparison.

Of course this picture doesn't do justice to two things:

1. How insanely thin the RAZR is and
2. How insanely beaten up my old Sanyo 4700 was. Yes, that is duct-tape holding the back on!

I still think the Sanyo has a lot going for it...it's frickin' indestructible. (Well, it did break, but the amount of abuse it took and the number of years it lasted are beyond the call.) The battery lasts forever, and it's cheap enough that I didn't feel bad leaving it on a DC bus once.

Odds are I won't even use most of the RAZR's cool features...web browsing, text messaging, an MP3 music store, TV, etc. What I am excited about is: it runs Java. We'll see if I can convince it to take some JARs I built out of Sun's J2ME SDK. A RAZR may be cool, but a RAZR with a number puzzle...I have to go towel myself off.

Here's the obligatory picture of the cat for the day...the color is funny because I try to avoid using the flash - she always looks away when the pre-flash hits.