Bill Barnes

I get a new laptop every two to three years. My laptop doesn’t stay on my desk - it gets toted around almost every day, often across the country and around cities. Three years of constant use would destroy the old plastic laptops (the polycarbonate MacBooks dissolved even faster) but the metal ones last a lot longer. So the main reason to trade up is speed, memory, and storage.

Two years ago I got rid of my then-two-year-old 13” MacBook Pro. There wasn’t anything wrong with it - it was in perfect physical condition, and plenty fast, and had lots of memory and expandable storage - but I’ve always been an ultraportable kind of guy, and I found myself leaving this fine piece of aluminum at home because of size and weight, then wishing I had it with me.

So I got a 2011 11” MacBook Air and never looked back. Except that isn’t true, because I had to compromise both memory (8GB -> 4GB) and storage (500GB -> 256GB). Less memory means more swapping, though the speed of the solid-state storage helped mitigate that. But 256GB just isn’t much storage these days, and I waste a lot of time managing free space. On top of that, the battery life is pretty sucky, because there’s just not much room for battery.

So I’ll be looking hard at the revamps of the MBA expected to be revealed at WWDC on June 10. The last round of upgrades got 8GB and 512GB, but I’ve held out for Haswell, Intel’s new chipset which should bring substantially increased battery life at similar speeds.

(There’s some buzz about Retina displays too, but I’d rather have the battery life)

UPDATE: I’m taking the plunge, even though every voice in my head is letting me know that the lack of other changes to the MBA means that an entirely new version is probably coming next year. But I have a lot of work to do between now and then.

vegansanfrancishet:

So, I paint my nails pretty regularly these days. I also work as a barista/cashier pretty regularly these days. A few weeks back, I had a customer come in, a fairly typical, sheltered, suburban soccer mom, and she ordered a latte from me. She saw my brightly colored nails and said, “Wow, you’re so brave! My son asked me about painting his nails, and if it’s okay for boys to do that. Now I’ll tell him there’s a cool guy who does it too!” It was a nice moment, very cute.

Then, last week, she came in again, and said, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re here! I want you to meet someone!” She then brings her son forward, and says, “Okay sweetie, show him what you did!” And he throws his hands up, showing off his bright, sparkling blue nails. He shows them off, and I show mine off to him. He smiles. We fist bump.

Guys, I’ve only wanted to cry once at work before, and that was when someone ordered a large dry soy cappuccino on ice.

This time, though. This was a good cry.

I’m coming to the end of my fourth month eating Paleo (high fat/low carb, meat & vegetables, no grains/starches/sugars). Here’s what I have to report.

It’s easy. It helps that our whole family is eating Paleo, and so there are no special meals to prepare and, more importantly, no off-diet food in the house to tempt me. It also helps that my wife is a great cook. The only time I feel cravings is when I’m both tired and hungry, so on days when I’m low on sleep I make a special effort to eat more, and especially increase the amount of fat in my diet so I feel satiated.

I thought it would be hard to eat well on the road, but it just takes a little discipline and a certain amount of forethought. I’ve had a couple of paleo holidays (pizza in NYC, ice cream in Disney World) but I planned these out ahead of time. Again, so long as I’m eating sufficient quantities of fatty food I don’t experience much in the way of cravings.

I’m losing weight. I’ve dropped fifteen pounds so far. Just for the record, I haven’t exercised a wit, and I’m eating very fatty, calorie-dense meals. So that whole “eat less, exercise more” thing does, indeed, seem to be a sham. Another fifteen or twenty pounds and I’ll be as thin as I’ve ever been as an adult, so it will be really interesting to see what happens after that. Will I just get leaner and leaner until there’s nothing else to lose? I’ve wanted to be two-dimensional ever since I read Flatland…

Other health benefits. I was experiencing regular, painful indigestion, but within a week of cutting out carbs that went away and has stayed away. That, in turn, has made it much easier to sleep. And sleep is the number one key to weight loss and overall health.

It’s not a panacea. I had hoped that cutting out most carbs would dramatically decrease my levels of inflamation, but so far I’m only seeing modest improvements, if that. I’ll give it more time. I also plan to get back into cold water therapy.

It’s hard to mind my own business. It’s especially hard when I see overweight folks eating low-fat foods and complaining about counting calories. I am deeply empathetic because I’ve been there. I want to tell them that they’ve been lied to, and give them a copy of Taubes’ book. But aside from a few heated Twitter conversations about portion control, I’ve mostly kept it to myself.

I’m in it for the long haul. This isn’t a diet, it’s just how our family eats.

(via unshelfeed)

Today Gene and I announced something new - @bookblrb, a teeny tiny book recommendation every day. It’s a little thing, but it took us a long time to get there.

We spent the last couple of years chasing a book-oriented social networking project around in our brains. One day we were sure we had nailed it, the next day the holes in our approach became clear. We would put it on the shelf, then unshelve it a few months later, and start all over again. Repeat.

It was during the eighth or ninth iteration that the idea of a tweet-sized book review popped out of our brainstorming process. This wasn’t anywhere near our main idea, but we quickly realized that here, at least, was something new that we could do well. And that, maybe, we were uniquely skilled to do it. After all, as cartoonists we are in the business of brevity, and we’ve been writing concise book descriptions in our Unshelved Book Club for eight years now.

So rather than create a giant social networking project, we’re shipping a single Twitter feed. And I have to admit that I’m incredibly relieved.

Source: unshelfeed

There was a time when I would have told you that all I ever wanted to do was to read, and a perfect life would be me on a beach with an endless pile of books. And really the beach was optional. A few years later, I would have said the same thing, but added “with a cute girl reading next to me”. Even more years later I would have added “and our kids reading around us.”

But I’ve gotten derailed, distracted from the One True Path by instant access to TV and movies, and Twitter and the rest of the Internet. The truth is that I don’t read a fraction of what I used to. This is particularly galling because I help run a popular book review site, and as such have almost unlimited access to free review copies. I am dying of thirst while drowning in plenty.

And this makes me sad, because I still think of reading as one of the most powerful and important things I can do in terms of happiness and personal growth. And, ignoring these aesthetic and philosophical concerns, and the fact that I’m supposed to be contributing a significant number of reviews, my growing pile of books to read just weighs on me.

So I’m going to make a bit of a stand. This month I’m putting a hold on my video watching, cutting my tweeting down to a bare minimum, and recommitting to books. When I’m not making things, spending time with my family, or taking care of myself by exercising or meditating, I’ll be reading.

You are invited to join me.

My wife Sara and I have a tendency to take the path less traveled by. We homeschool, adopted a child of a different race, quit our jobs to work at home on our own businesses. It’s not that we’re out to be different. We just do what’s right for us, and don’t worry too much about the status quo. We joke that we are freaks, although we live in Seattle and surround ourselves with folks much like ourselves, so in our little bubble we’re fairly conventional.

I’ll be the first to admit that Sara is responsible for the majority of our freakisms. She is a great information gatherer, and is always delving deeper into ways to make life better, especially in the field of nutrition.

There have been a few detours.

I proposed to Sara over a steak dinner. Two weeks later she was eating vegetarian, and I eventually followed (mostly because she did most of the cooking). We ate practically fat-free for a while, then sugar-free. We eventually returned to meat eating with a vengeance, and then tried a variety of solutions to the various food allergies in our family.

Then we both read Good Calories, Bad Calories and things have never been the same. There’s nothing like coming to face-to-face with scientific realities (and the political and financial forces which often conflict with the science). From that point on I’ve never wavered from my conviction that fat is good, carbs are bad, and exercise is unrelated to weight gain. Now I’m reading Taubes’ follow up book Why We Get Fat which just underlines these facts.

With those convictions under our belt we both slid easily into the Paleo movement, which jibes nicely with my predisposition to respect evolutionary biology.

Now it’s one thing to know what to do, quite another to actually do it. I like my sugar. I like it a lot. I got rid of more and more grains from my diet, but I had trouble pulling the trigger on all carbs. Not so Sara, who went full-on Paleo, and later brought the kids with her. I watched them all get leaner and healthier (sickness has become rare in our home). Meanwhile I struggled with increasing levels of obesity and various body-pain issues all brought on by inflammation, knowing all the while what I needed to do about it.

Finally, with random hand pain plaguing my work, I decided that enough was enough. I can do anything for a month, and this is the shortest month of all. So I’ve been eating Paleo, and focusing on sleeping more. And because the rest of my household was already there, it’s been super easy. When February ends I plan to renew for March.

But that’s not the freakiest thing. The freakiest thing is standing in cold water.

You see, there are some people who believe that temporarily dropping your body temperature quite a bit can dramatically reverse inflammation issues. And several friends, and now my wife, have tried this and reported extremely positive results.

Today I went and stood in Lake Washington for 3 minutes, legs and forearms immersed. My body turned the most interesting colors! It’s the first step in a path that will result in my fully immersing myself for 10-20 minutes at a time.

So yeah, I’m freaking out.

P.S. Got differing opinions on nutrition? Great! But don’t tell me about them. I’m not out to convince you, or be convinced. Go do your own research, come to your own conclusions. That’s what I did.

Regional Humor

Seattle is a more employed, less hip town than Portland. It may not merit its own TV show, but it did get a pretty funny Twitter meme in #SeattleNoir. Collected here are my contributions. If you don’t get them, please don’t move here.

Birthday present from @ambaum.