Month: December 2006

The Master Cleanse: Day 4

So, things did change today. Aimee’s cold stepped up in intensity. She’s been achy and throat hurty all day. We decided it was best she go off the fast, and onto some soup. She had some veggie soup tonight for dinner (carrots, celery, red potatoes, white potatoes, mushrooms, squash, onions, and tomatoes). Smelled great. I helped her with the veggie chopping.

Now, I know why this time around has been so easy: there wasn’t any food smell in the house! Tonight was a definite struggle for me. Not that I was craving anything in particular (though I did crave chocolate for a little while this afternoon), just that I wanted to eat something. I decided to, um, stay the course, since I’m almost halfway through the fast anyway. Aimee’s feeling bad and guilty for leaving it, though she has absolutely no reason to. It’s better, I think, she take the soup and stuff to help her body fight the cold.

We’ll probably do another cleanse in January or February, and we’ll do it together then. I’m rather inclined to wait till the worst of winter is over, because frankly this fast does make you a little cold anyway. Granted, the cayenne’s heat helps to warm one up a little, but it doesn’t last overly long. It’s especially cold after a flush.

Speaking of flush, I didn’t even do it this morning, because I woke up so damned late. I have a thing against public toilets, as I may or may not have mentioned in a prior post (I’m pretty sure I did), so I wasn’t going to go to work with a full flush still to go.

Tomorrow will consequently be a big flush, I guess, because it’s been 3 days since I’ve really flushed anything. Here’s hoping.

New and Improved StreamBase DevZone

Pretty much from the second week of my employment, I had made it my mission to make the DevZone area of the website a lot friendlier. For those of you that had checked out that site when I first mentioned it, you would have noticed that the http://dev.streambase.com link took you to a register/login page. Say what? So, in a nutshell, you had to fork over the 411 to get the 411, which in my mind was not a fair trade.

Now, however, is a new time and a different story. We’ve spent a few weeks rehashing the DevZone. Among the changes:

  1. No longer on a subdomain — the new DevZone is off the main site at http://www.streambase.com/developers/
  2. The DevZone is now a link on the main navigation bar on the corporate pages
  3. Documentation is opened up entirely — that’s right folks — 900 odd pages of it, free to see
  4. We’ve put up a small training video — essentially it’s StreamBase in 6 minutes (a getting started guide)
  5. a contrib area with code and articles and FAQs and contest winners

There was a lot of work by a lot of people to get that in and going. My favourite change is the disappearance of the .php suffixes on most pages in the DevZone, towards future-proof URLs.

Please go in and check it out. Leave me comments here or on email (or the devzone feedback email) about your thoughts. I hope that we’ve succeeded in making it a friendlier, more inviting and engaging place for people to check out StreamBase, and explore its awesome stream processing power. I hope at least 4 of my 8 readers check it out :p

The Master Cleanse: Day 3

And then there were three…

My sister’s fiance backed out of his master cleanse programme. They went to the mall, and he went through the food court, with all its smells of pizza and who knows what else, and that did him in. They got home and he made pasta with garlic bread. He feels guilty about it, of course, but he’ll try again the next time. It’s definitely a difficult thing to keep at, especially in the first few days. Those cravings!
And more so than the cravings is the simple desire to put solid food into your mouth. Chewing and all that.

For Aimee and I the day started ok. We lay in bed till late, and then got up to do the flush. Again, for me, there wasn’t much flushed. She had a lot more success. I wonder what’s going on with me. I’ll try again tomorrow morning. If nothing happens, I may reconsider this cleanse this time and reschedule it for January.

The cold that came over me in Oklahoma last Saturday hit me pretty hard. It wasn’t till Thursday that it finally subsided. And now, as of this evening, it hit Aimee. I don’t know if it is the same cold, or a different strain (in which case, should I now be looking forward to another cold?). She’s in bed with a fever. She had some peppermint tea and she took some NyQuil before hitting the sack. She had a slight fever at bedtime. I’m more inclined to take her off the fast, but she’s going to pull it for another day at least and see what it’s like.

Now, because we were so late this morning, she did get a little weak from low blood sugar. A glass and a half of lemonade later, she was feeling much improved. It’s weird for her, because the lemonade does actually cure her hunger, even though it’s not so satisfying. It doesn’t give you a “full” feeling. Or at least not one that lasts more than a few minutes. Being mostly water, it pretty much goes right through you.

So, let’s see how tomorrow goes. This whole fast may come to a halt, or it may not. Will our heroes make it, kids? Tune in!

The Master Cleanse: Day 2

Today was a pretty good today. I have had no cravings at all. I’ve been hungry — or rather, I’ve had the inclination to eat — several times today, but nothing overwhelming at all. In fact, I’ve not even had overwhelming urges to drink the lemonade. Since this is Aimee’s first time, she’s had cravings pretty much all day: cinammon rolls and deep-dish chicago style cheese pizza in the morning, and homemade spinach/tomato pizza this evening. And, we stopped by this new plaza near here that has a really good ice-cream shop in it. As we walked by it on our way to a gift shop, she was quite tempted by it. She’s being strong though, which is great. We’re done with Day 2 now, which means that we have a little over a week left!

Oh yeah, remember how I said the salt water flush tasted posionous. Well, it’s no wonder. Remember kids, don’t do things when you’re lacking sleep. Instead of two teaspoons of salt per quart of water, I put in two tablespoons per quart. That explains the nausea, the incredible thirst, etc. Today’s flush was very light — I think my body absorbed all the water instead. Weird, because I did drink quite a lot of water yesterday all day.
Aimee had early morning class, so she skipped the flush. The senna tea did have a painful effect on her this morning though.

It’s weird to see what she’s going through with familiarity from having been through it myself. I’ll say that so far, this second cleanse is going a lot more easily for me.

No More Gentoo-flavoured s.herbert

A few people have talked about Stuart’s departure already. And I didn’t read any of the planet yesterday, when I posted.

So that means it’s been 2 days since his official announcement, and I’ve been suspiciously quiet about it 🙁

Well, no longer. A few of us knew Stuart was going to retire a little bit before his resignation from the board. I will be honest here: I did not even try to talk Stu out of it. I wanted to. I felt the pain of his leaving pretty strongly. Over the years, however, I’ve learned a little bit about him, and so I knew that I’d not make a dent in his decision. He didn’t resign in a fit of rashness or anger. He’s most certainly exasperated/frustrated and probably a little angry, yes. But his action was not impulsive. It was thought-out. His mind, what I’m getting at, was made up. And nothing I or anyone could say or do was going to change it. So when he confided his intention to me, I could but accept what I was hearing.

And, in a way, seeing him resign took some wind out of my own sails. I guess, ladies and gentlemen, that that made Stuart one of my rocks in Gentoo. I need not paint a picture of Stuart, because anyone who’s used Gentoo for a few months will recognise his work. He was an integral part of the overlays project, the Seeds project, the webapps team (which includes apache and its sexy configuration, and php which is not so sexy, but that’s just me), and a lot more.

The thing about Stu is that he always tried to build and mend bridges. He had this uncanny ability to swallow pride and make the first steps to peace. He’s human, of course, and so he’s not perfect, but I’ll tell you this: if 80% of Gentoo developers did that, we wouldn’t see as many dismal and sad blog posts on this planet.

He’s going to continue the Seeds project as much as he can outside of Gentoo. And there’s certainly a fair share of us who will champion it within. So my tiny comfort is that at least Stuart Herbert is still involved, in some way, with Gentoo.

Farewell, Stu.

The Master Cleanse: Day 1

Day 1 went off fairly well without a hitch. We started the day bright and early with a yucky salt water flush. I’d forgotten exactly how yucky it really is on the tongue. I remember it being fairly salty last time, but this time it almost felt like salt-poisoning or something. To boot, it made me feel a little ill to my stomach for a while (until the flush part of it). Aimee had similar symptoms. Strange effect, and I’m thankful it’s a one-a-day type situation. I’m almost dreading tomorrow morning.

Turns out my sister and her fiance started on Thursday, then ate out Thursday night because, well, they got hungry. They realised that that’s not how this works, so they restarted today.

I did not feel hungry today at all. There was free pizza at work for the company meeting and they even had cookies and eclairs for dessert. The pizza smelled great, and the eclairs looked fantastic, but both failed to induce thoughts of fast-abandonment in me. It’s just Day 1 though. Aimee, meanwhile, had a different experience. Her colleague brought in coffee cake, and that did lead to thoughts of abandonment, but she stayed strong. She was definitely hungry by 17:30 (5:30pm) when I got home, so we had our 5th glass each soon thereafter. Our final glass of the evening was at around 20:00 (8pm) and we had senna tea 2 hours later. She stayed strong. My prediction is that the next 3-4 days will be really rough on her. I don’t know how tough it will be for me, but it’ll certainly help to know that we’re doing this together (and hence neither one will have food cooking).

In summary: salt water flush tastes nastier than I remember; it’s as flushy as ever; lemonade tastes great still; cayenne gets hot the longer it sits in the drink; Yogi Tea’s senna tea tastes better than this other brand we bought. (More details + links on the teas tomorrow).

The Master Cleanse: Day 0

So the thing about blogging is that when you stop for a bit, you stop for a bit longer. And then a bit longer and on. Well, that’s what happens to me anyway. Take Rach, for example. I owed her a letter probably 6 months ago. And then I’m thinking of what to write, and more and more, then I wait, because there’s more to be thought of, and then I realise it’s getting later and later, and so I get more and more sheepish. And 1 week becomes 6 months. So, I’ll be catching up on my letter writing this weekend, because there’s so much to tell.

Meanwhile, we’re back from Thanksgiving vacation. At work, we’re wrapping up the final bits of the new Dev Zone (not yet published, but at least the docs have been opened for a couple of weeks). We’ll be ready to unveil it soon enough. I also put in the new xterm release into portage this evening. So those of you on stable profiles waiting for xterm-222, your architecture team should be putting that in for you soon.

I wasn’t going to do another Master Cleanse till the new year, but a few things have happened. We’d started running, if you remember. And we took our gear to vacation with us. Before we left we ran the first 2 days of Week 4 here. Kinda. The first day we couldn’t do the last five-minute block at all. The second day, we did 4 and a half minutes of it. The third day was in LA. The park there is on a bit of an incline (a slight one, admittedly, but you can feel it). So we were struggling again, and couldn’t do the last five-minute block again. Then we got to Oklahoma, and the first morning there, I felt the beginnings of a cold. My glands swelled and my throat closed up painfully. That did us in. I couldn’t run like that, because swallowing was painful. That lasted till yesterday more or less (ie, our first day back in Boston). I even missed my first day back at work, due to fever and throat-achiness.

Today, I’m much much better, and because of all the food and stuff that was consumed during the holiday, we decided to go on a 10-day Master Cleanse. This time, Aimee is doing it with me. And also, my sister and her fiance (both in Rochacha) are doing the Master Cleanse right now!

So anyway, we had a dinner tonight (order-in Chinese), and it’s a few minutes to bedtime, so we’re drinking senna tea. Tomorrow morning: the first flush. Aimee’s nervous. I’m ambivalent (about the flush). We have a truckload of lemons, a boatload of maple syrup, a tonne of cayenne and we’ll need to refill on water tomorrow afternoon.

I’ll keep the blog updated with the progress on both of us.