The Lemon Juice Fast: Day 1

When I wrote my quick note last night, I was unsure how much to talk about it, but I’ve had some questions, so here we go.

I’m on a cleansing diet. A lot of things have happened in the last 2 years or so that made me want to go on this fast. In May 2005, Aimee and I finally quit smoking. I’d been a smoker for 10 years prior to that, and had made many unsuccessful attempts at quitting. Last May, we just decided to quit and that was it. We haven’t looked back since.

This past May-ish, we just sorta quit eating meat. It wasn’t a conscious decision (and prior to it, we were choosy about it anyway: we preferred vegetarian fed, free-range, organic type stuff, and it was mostly chicken, with turkey here and there and salmon there and here). Anyway, we just kinda slowed down with the meat, and a couple of months passed by, and we hadn’t touched any meat at all. We met up with the Griffises at one point at a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Lowell one day for lunch (by accident, actually — we just all arrived at the same time). And their story was similar. At some point they declared themselves to be vegetarian. We hadn’t yet, but we were still eating vegetarian food, and sometimes fish (especially sushi).

Anyway, we hadn’t gotten off the fish, and I’m not entirely certain we have yet, though it’s been a month since I’ve had any, and more since Aimee has.

Then there’s the medical stuff: I have a fatty liver and some polyps in my gall bladder, and I’m definitely a bit overweight. I think I’m at least 50lbs overweight, but the doctors think I’m 15lbs overweight. So anyway, the veg. diet has been helping and I’ve been doing a bit of Tae-Bo, though not in the last month since we moved into the new house. We have been walking on the weekends quite a bit, but we’ll hopefully step that up to multiple times a week.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks that what I’d really like to do is just cleanse my body from the inside, and do a bit of detoxification. So, remembering that my Dad goes on orange juice fasts every few months for the same purpose, I decided to investigate. I happened upon the lemon juice diet, which I started last night.

I had a glass of the lemon juice and a cup of senna tea (don’t ask, just google, and no I won’t post pictures of the result). This morning, I had another ultrasound exam and some bloodwork, so I’m only now drinking my morning tea (senna again), and have made 30 ounces of lemon juice for the day.

Oddly enough, my last post caught the attention of an old friend from college, so already the good things are starting to happen.

See what happens in Day 2

Edit: Fixed the spelling of my wife’s name, and other spelling errors
Edit Again: Added navigation link

Trustee Elections 2006 Have Commenced

The elections have started. They will end on the 21st of October at midnight UTC. For the next two weeks I hope all the eligible members of the foundation will cast their votes. For eligiblenon-dev voters, the best way to do that is to email the election officials:

  • codergeek42
  • fmccor
  • gustavoz
  • nattfodd

It’s best to make sure they all get your email.

I won’t be making any campaign promises. Actually, I won’t be campaigning at all. Instead, I’d like to highlight the strengths of each of the nominees:

Renat is a budding law student. He has a knack for legalese: he wants to pour over documents and contracts and make sure Gentoo’s interests are well taken care of legally, with respect to copyrights, licenses, intellectual properties (no conspiracy theories, please, copyrights signify intellectual property in my eyes), etc. He has Gentoo’s best interests at heart.
Grant, I don’t even need to say much about. If you don’t know about him and what he does, you’ve been living in a rock since about 1998. Grant is probably Gentoo’s patriarch figure in the sense that he has the wisdom, the insight, the cool-headedness that it takes to be the lead of a large project such as this. Grant has never been mentioned as the lead, but spiritually, he definitely is: he advised every council, and he’s always been on the board of trustees. He doesn’t fight, he gets along with everyone, and he’s fair.
Paul was one of the architects of the original
metatructure project under Gentoo Linux. He was also named to Gentoo’s initial board, and re-voted last time. Now that he has more time, I think he’s in a position to serve Gentoo Foundation well. He has the insight and smarts to see the forest and the trees: he can very fairly evaluate things on technical merit and other merits — he sees the big picture very well.
Mike is a hidden hero. Mike has basically saved lives, without credit, for a long long time. Mine, especially. Through Gentoo’s many many metamorphoses over the years, Mike and I have ridden them, but he more gracefully than I. Some of those changes damned near killed me, and he saved my life in those. Mike cares so deeply about Gentoo that I can not even begin to express it. He is pragmatic and practical, and yet so very human about his approach to Gentoo (and the changes within).
Chris has already been doing the duties of his trustee-ship for a while now: he actively protects Gentoo’s intellectual properties, by spotting those who infringe upon it, and then stopping them. He’s not a bully and mean, but he’s firm and approaches people well. He also cares very deeply about Gentoo (and despite the fact that he and I have had very recent disagreements, please have no disillusions about my very great respect and admiration for him).
Stuart has a dream: he wants to gather Gentoo developers at conferences and conventions. In Gentoo, we’ve always talked about this sort of thing, but nobody has ever taken it on. This is a slightly controversial subject for some people, but I believe Stuart has some very strong points for this idea. I think it would be great to meet a lot of the Gentoo developers (and users!!) in person. I could go broke at such a thing, though, for the sheer number of beers that I’ve promised people over the years 🙂

well that’s it, ladies and gentlement, those are your trustees. My own strengths are that I am sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and I do care tremendously about this Gentoo, as though it is my own child. I can’t promise what I’ll do this year (except for put Renat, hopefully, in the driver’s seat for the legal stuff and help him organise and put it all away).

Now please, go vote your conscience.

The DevManual and all that that Implies

Stefan,
yes we can avoid it in the future. We can start by not officially hosting anything with license violations.
As Stuart noted, licensing is critical to FOSS. And quite honestly, as a trustee, I would be 100% hypocritical if the Foundation discovered someone violating any of Gentoo’s licenses, if we continued to distribute the devmanual in its current form.

To briefly outline my thoughts:

  1. The license violations — every contributor needs to be acknowledged on par with every other contributor
  2. The document, if it is to be considered official, needs to actually be official:
    • Its sources need to be on Gentoo controlled infrastructure
    • Its branding should comply with Gentoo’s branding standards

Note that being official, means that Gentoo owns it. We do not own something that resides on some other server and whose access is restricted to everyone except the people in control of that server (who are not, for the most part, Gentoo developers). Also note that the branding issue solves the license violations.

So, despite the inconvenience, I believe it was a correct thing to remove the dns pointer to it, to limit Gentoo’s own liability in the license violation. The correct fix is to implement the items I listed above.

Flame on!

Trustee Elections a little bit late

We’re going to be a few hours late on the voting, but it will be two weeks from the moment we start, regardless. I dropped the ball, and the date snuck up on me. I’m collecting a list of all the eligible voters right now, with help from KingTaco and antarus with those things. After that, I’ll get KingTaco to do the required stuff on woodpecker for the current eligible devs to vote. For eligible non-devs we’ll set up an email vote, where they’ll email the election officials their votes for counting. The nominees are posted on the gentoo-nfp mailing list. At the moment I’m still sorting out which ex-devs are eligible to vote.

I’m sorry for the delay. I’ll post an official note to gentoo-nfp with my apology and status etc.

Communities: Django is one

Once in a while, you come across a a fantastic information piece that’s top-notch in presentation. This guy had me giggling at 1 in the morning, and I learned stuff from that post (which is why I was up in the first place).

You know, all this talk about communities and getting along got me thinking about something. By the way, that segue was sponsored anonymously. I would have to say that the community that really impresses me is Django. Their user mailing list is just top-notch as is their irc channel (#django on freenode). There’s a proliferation of blogs and sites out there with helpful guides and tips, and everyone (bar none) is always helpful.

Maybe the Django devs see it, maybe not, but from the outside, it’s loud and clear: the community they’ve built around django is a great community to participate in.

I’m building a site for my wife to use at her work. It’s basically to rehash the entire thing and put a CMS around it and make it easily manageable, etc etc. I’ll put the code up once I’m done for people to criticise and critique. No telling when that will happen, but I’d like to take this opportunity to thank: praetorian and tomaw on IRC, Chris Long on irc and email, Andy Dustman and Malcolm Tredinnick and drushell on the mailing lists, and wow, everyone on the irc channel and the blog sites (way too many to name, because it’s like everybody, basically).

Momentum for Modular Gentoo

Well, looks like Mike is buying into the concept a little bit. I would point him and my readers to this comment from my prior post about it.

Thanks all for the reassuring numbers on my audience size. I think I must have at least 8 readers :p

At some point, I’ll rant about interaction design, even though some people think it to be a bunch of bull. Be warned that I’ll back my claims up with non-doctored photographs though!

Printer Suggestions

Gentoo-wise, I’ve requested xterm-218 to go stable. A few architectures have already done that and others have had their ATs verify/validate the builds. Meanwhile, I’m looking to stable gnucash-2.0.1 on other architectures, but it’s pointed out that postgresql is not really a valid back-end any more. What’s a dev to do?

Aimee is taking some classes, you see. And in some of them she has to write papers. At other times, we have forms and sometimes maps to print out (though less so in her car, which has a navigation system in it).

We probably want to print out photos at some point. I was thinking we’d get a laser black and white printer now for the papers etc and then a colour photo printer thingy later on.

So in #gentoo-dev this weekend, I got one strong vote for Samsung printers, and a couple of votes for HP printers. However, the HP printers were a little out of hand for price — I can not justify spending 300 buckaroos on it. I think my cap is 200 USD only.

EDIT: The home network is 2 wireless laptops: one gentoo and one ibook (OS X), with any of them having an equal chance of being “off the network” at any time, if that makes sense.

So, I’m open to thoughts and suggestions from my 4 readers (yes, my readership has doubled!! 🙂

Talk to me, people

Weekend Fun

Had a nice relaxing weekend. Hung out with aimee, did some chores, bought a few more items of furniture for the apartment. I also had the unfortunate opportunity to watch that “Jackass 2” movie. My god, why is that piece of crap the #1 movie in America? Why would people watch that idiocy? (I didn’t know anything about it, I actually do have an excuse). But here’s the more important question: why would people do all that stuff in there. It’s disgusting and pointless. There were a lot of scenes I couldn’t even watch. Next weekend, I’m going to see that Jet Li movie, man.

Oh yeah, I put a whole bunch of books from Guy Kawasaki finally. I’ve been reading his blog for about 6 months (and incidentally, that’s where I found simplyhired in the first place), and enjoying his insights, so looking forward to reading all his books.