So, imagine my surprise when an RSS feed came across with the following title:

Superbugs are the new Martians

Not gonna lie… Instantly, images are flashing through my mind of Starship Troopers style super bugs ripping people apart, etc.

So… not so much. It’s about antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that seem to be resulting from the overuse of antibiotics in beef (and other animal) farming. So, it’s all back to a vegan worldview, but MAN I was hoping for some huge friggin’ bugs.

In some ways I’m sorta cautious because I can’t see how some of it is legal.  In other ways, this is an amazing service and if it IS legal, then… I mean, they’re not trying to hide it at all.  Anyway, search for any book you want… find it, download it in .pdf, .doc, or even in .mp3 (read to you by a slightly-British-sounding female… it’s actually not THAT bad).

Wow wow wow wow.  This is amazing.

I just did an install of Debian Sarge 2.6kernel with Gnome as the desktop.  I prefer KDE but I am an idiot, and for the moment, Gnome is what is there… I’ll install KDE later if I find I can’t get around with Gnome…or I’ll do Fluxbox.  I’m told Gnome is nice… we’ll see.

Anyway, I want a list of your favorite (doesn’t have to be 5) apps that don’t come with the standard distro… or maybe they are included but not installed by default, or maybe deeply buried that I may not know about.  I do development, office work, etc… I also toy with networking and such… just to give you an idea what I’m into.  Don’t say The GIMP or OpenOffice, obviously I know about those… I’m looking for the lesser-known diamonds in the rough.

- 8 oz box lasagna noodles
- 1 15-oz can diced tomatoes
- 1 25-oz jar Tomato Basil Marinara (Trader Joe’s is vegan for sure, but you can look around for another brand. i got ours from walmart.)
- 2 10-oz pkg frozen chopped spinach, drained and thawed
- 20 oz firm tofu
- 2 T apple cider vinegar
- 2 T olive oil
- 8-10 small basil leaves
- 2 t sea salt
- 2 cloves garlic
- 3 T tahini
Mushrooms:
- 3 C thinly sliced mushrooms sauteed in…
-…1.5 T butter alternative (or vegan oil)

* Heat oven to 350 degrees
* Cook lasagna as directed
* Mix together tomatoes and tomato basil sauce
* In blender or food processor, puree the tofu, vinegar, olive oil, basil leaves, salt, garlic and tahini.
* In large bowl, add thawed spinach to “cheese” (tofu, vinegar, etc) mixture and stir until well mixed.
* Pour 1 C of tomato mixture in the bottom of 9×13-in baking dish.
* Layer the ingredients as follows:
1) noodles
2) “cheese” mixture
3) noodles
4) “cheese” mixture
5) noodles
6) remainder of tomato mixture

*Bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes or until bubbling

Habari is the Swahili word for News. Ubuntu is a word from an African language and no one is REALLY certain of the meaning. Joomla is an English-ization of the Swahili word (Jumla) for ‘all together’. Why? Why? Seriously… do we REALLY need more products named in African? I get it… I do, really.

I mean, it was clever the first time, it was non-annoying the second time, but now it seems like when you create a new trendy “WE NEED THE WEB TO EMBRACE THIS!!!1″ product, you basically brainstorm a list of 500 words that COULD have something to do with it, then search African languages until you find a word/language combination that creates the coolest sounding word, then you do about five minutes of research into the meaning of it, and make a marketing campaign showing how conscious you are of the global community blah blah blah. No, you’re an apologetic self-hating software developer who thinks everyone will think of you as worldly if you name your product a word you’ve likely never used in conversation and didn’t know existed until afore-mentioned name search process.

::EDIT:: All of that aside, it sounds like they have some talented people working on Habari… the name is the only thing I expect I will be disappointed with ::EDIT::

After the movie is over, Shaina looks at me and this is our conversation:

Her: “I’m a hit-person.  I kill people for a living.” 
Me: “And this cold, is that just an act?”
Her: “No, I got this cold trekking through Iceland trying to kill an Eskimo.”
Me: “You do realize that Iceland is actually mostly green for most of the year, right?”
…
…
Her: “Well, he was easy to find.”

I love my wife.

I decided to compile a Win32 app I had written a while back for my company in SharpDevelop just to see if:

1. SharpDevelop could import from a VS.NET .sln file correctly.
2. SharpDevelop would compile the (admittedly quite simple) code without problem.
3. SharpDevelop would create a similar sized binary with similar execution time.

• Compiled with VS.NET, .exe file size: 36k.
• Compiled with #Develop, .exe file size: 28k

Setting up a start-to-finish ALL Linux ALL OpenSource .NET development station.  This will include several things.

1. A Case/UML tool for modeling mono-based .NET projects.
2. MonoDevelop - a customization of SharpDevelop for compiling bit code to run on Mono rather than the .NET framework… mind you Mono is a mimic of the .NET framework supported and primarily developed by Novell.
3. A Linux ’server’ (it will be a decent laptop) serving out webpages on Apache with mod_mono installed so it can serve up ASP.NET pages.
4. The only part I’ve not yet figured out is the database.  It may run against a SQL Server 2k instance on a windows machine of mine, or it may run against a locally-hosted MySQL installation.  I haven’t found an open source SQLSERVER.NET engine, so I’ll probably use MySQL and maybe give me a reason to check out sqlyog or whatever it is.

Suggestions on Linux distro?  I’ve considered Ubuntu because I’ve used and enjoyed Debian before and have messed a LITTLE with kubuntu.  Other than that, I’m not really sure what I’ll do.  USB/Wireless support are of some importance but I guess I could run wired most of the time if need be.

Thoughts?

There are many types of vegetarians, but NONE of them eat meat… that means no shellfish, no fish, no chicken, nothing like that. It’s meat because it was an animal and therefore it is contradictory to a non-animal diet. But, here are some of the recognized types, in the order of most common to least (and funny enough, in order of least strict to most, heh):

1. Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian - Eats Eggs and Dairy products, probably doesn’t think a whole lot about other animal products and animal-tested products. The focus here is, you don’t eat things that have ever been alive. This is where I spent the longest time thus far being a vegetarian.
2. Lacto Vegetarian - Same as #1, drop the eggs, because they had the definite potential of becoming an animal.
3. Total Vegetarian or Vegan - Does not consume or use animal products of any source. Whereas the first two are mostly diet-based, this is usually a lifestyle choice. Leather is out, fur coats out, animal-tested drugs and cosmetics are out, etc. One of the many reasons for this strict adherence is that dairy cows are frequently kept in horrible conditions (the alternative of death would be a kind release), as well as chickens for producing the eggs. Obviously testing drugs on animals to see whether they lose their mind, die, etc isn’t the best for the animals either, and becoming a leather seat or fur coat isn’t in the animal’s best interest either.
4. Raw Foods Vegetarian - No foods cooked over a certain temperature (somewhere from 92 to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, depending upon whom you ask)… many Raw Foodists still eat meat, just not cooked above those temperatures, but there are Raw Vegetarians/Vegans.
5. Macrobiotic Vegetarians - Consume only seasonally available locally grown organic products… mostly just whole grain cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruit, seaweed, and fermented soy products. There is a further spiritual belief in balancing the yin and the yang (to over-simplify, the sweet and the salty) while never consuming foods that are extremely yin or yang.

My wife and I are currently somewhere between 2 and 3 with her closer to 3 than I am. I still eat some dairy because I friggin’ love cheese, but I have found that it doesn’t treat my body too well since I’ve gotten off of my constant diet of it. By and large though, we eat grains, beans, fruits, vegetables, and soy products and that is absolutely all; it’s a wonderfully simple and yet taste-filled diet. I find now that before I dropped meat, everything I ate was meat-flavored.

Okay, so our reasons for deciding to become vegetarians:

At the time, all we decided was that we would stop eating red meat because of my blood pressure. As a 25 year-old soon-to-be-father, I had a resting blood pressure of 180/140ish I believe it was. It was ridiculously high, especially the diastolic (bottom number) indicating likelihood of a stroke. I was eating red meat 1-3 meals per day, with the other 1-2 meals being other meat… almost always fried, usually with some sorta gravy or sauce, and generally with a side of… well… meat… or french fries. So that was my diet. We dropped red meat and immediately noticed that we were eating chicken/turkey 3 meals a day, every day, and for snacks. This is not overly healthy either; you can eat healthy amounts of white meat, but I cannot. The way my personality is, if meat is in my diet, it is in every meal, so without red meat, it was white meat every meal. So less than a month after dropping red meat, we dropped red meat.

In about a 3 month period I dropped 30 lbs and went down to a 140/100 resting bp. That’s still on the low end of dangerously high, but it was with no diet change and no other effort other than not eating meat. Now, over a year later, I have basically maintained that weight with no exercise, and am at like 120/80… Diastolic is still on the high end of safe, but systolic is pretty well perfect. I should have been exercising as well, but to me, this proves the power that my meat-based diet had over my health.

Now that I was a vegetarian, I still ate eggs and dairy products, and that was fine with me, but eggs did start to bother me. Some of the ’sentimental’ reasons for becoming a vegetarian had started to take hold. Regardless of the importance you put on an animal’s life, it feels pain (they scream/cry when injured/being killed), it recognizes its own (our dogs know us from other humans and each other from other dogs, and all social animals group together and have social dynamics when interacting with other groups) and are overall just not as far behind us as we like to pretend. The idea of putting an animal through immense pain and discomfort in being raised in a factory, shipped roughly to a slaughter house and then… slaughtered… just so I could enjoy a burger…. it makes me sick now that I was okay with this for so long. If you take that background for context, and add to it that I’m firmly pro-life, I think you will understand why eggs started to become a problem. I was eating a potential animal whose parent was put through the pain of living in a coop. Basically, eating scrambled chicken fetuses didn’t appeal to me any longer.

Dairy has been harder and is still a process. We are very close to being dairy free and the only time we’re not is when we go out to eat and even then Shaina pretty much is (because of lactose intolerance) and I try to avoid it if possible. With dairy it’s the fact that in cheeses and such, fat and cholesterol are still so high, and you are in fact eating/drinking the mammary secretions of another species… that bothers me as well.

The path to vegetarianism (and still on the path to veganism) was made easier by the fact that you can eat VERY well with no animal products. We eat Chinese take out, Thai food, select Mexican food (qdoba/moes southwestern grill are good places for this), Italian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, etc… we eat whatever we want. We make Tacos/Taco salad by just using TVP (textured vegetarian protein) instead of ground beef… everyone who has tried this has told us it’s indistinguishable from beef tacos. I make an alfredo sauce that is arguably identical to Olive Garden’s that is HEAVY in dairy products… recently I made an attempt at making it vegan, and it turned out fantastic. We have such a wider variety of flavor in our diet now that I truly never miss meat anymore.

Andy has asked before that I share some recipes, so I plan to post some of our favorites here in the coming days. I can’t guarantee all are healthy, but I can honestly say they are lower in fat and cholesterol than their meat/dairy twins.

So, in short, I have the diet I have because I love animals, had a health problem corrected BY my diet, eat more varied more flavorful dishes since starting this diet, and overall feel much better about myself while on this diet. It has become a lifelong diet decision/commitment for myself, Shaina, and Shiloh until she is old enough to decide for herself and by then, hopefully she will decide not to eat animal products but that will be for her to decide.