Tag: 59’th year

Roasting coffee

Some of my homebrewing
friends have been experimenting with roasting their own
coffee. I’m not able to taste the results of their experiments,
because I’m extremely sensitive to caffeine, so I only drink
decaffeinated coffee, and that isn’t what they brew.

But the smell of what they do is certainly tantalizing, so I
spent some time drooling over the Sweetmarias.com website. I
ordered some coffeemaker cleaning stuff, and a new
German-engineered coffee grinder, and found I was enjoying
spending a bit more time on my coffee-brewing method and getting
better results. So last week I took the plunge and ordered a Fresh
Roast Plus 8 Home Coffee Roaster and eight different kinds of
decaffeinated green coffee beens.

If you want to try this without spending money and kitchen
space on a single-purpose gadget, you can read the instructions
for doing it in a popcorn popper at SweetMaria’s, or this instructable.

Anyway, I have roasted one batch of Kenya AB
Auction Lot WP Decaf coffee and I can
report:

  • Next time I will follow the instructions to do the roasting
    under the stove hood, or outdoors on the fire escape. Compared with how
    good all the other smells to do with making coffee are, the
    smell of beans roasting just isn’t the way you want your house to smell.
  • But once you’ve roasted it, and are handling the beans, it’s
    definitely worth it to smell the fresh roast. I like opening a
    new bag of commercially roasted coffee, and this is much
    better. The description of this coffee on the bag is:

    Lively, bright cup with citrus, meyer lemon,
    caramel and floral sweetness.

    You can really smell
    most of that without brewing the coffee at all.

  • I knew I was going to have to make adjustments to my brewing
    method when I changed my buying and roasting methods. This
    first batch is definitely not as strong as I like my coffee, but the
    flavor is really good.

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The Boston Marathon

The marathons I like are the ones where the winner runs across
the finish line looking like he or she isn’t even breathing
hard.

Of course, it’s more exciting when there’s more than one person
at the end and they have to sprint. Yesterday’s women’s race had
the first and second place runners separated by a second, and
the second place woman collapsed and had to be taken to the
hospital immediately afterwards. The TV announcer said, “She
gave it everything she had,” like that was a good thing. But in
my opinion, the point of sports is to produce a healthy mind in a
healthy body, and it can’t possibly be healthy to abuse your
body like that.

The only runner I’ve known personally who finished the Boston Marathon spent the
next few weeks on crutches — he’d sprained his ankle at
about mile 15 and finished anyway. I don’t think this is
healthy either.

Following up

Spring

I mentioned that I’d retired my winter jacket for the Spring on
Good Friday. This turns out to have been a
couple of days early, as there was a cold, raw wind on Easter
Sunday morning. Since then, my lightweight spring jacket has been
fine, though.

Baseball

Immediately after the Opening Day game that I wrote about, the Red Sox all (except first baseman
Kevin Youkilis) went into hitting slumps, and the starting
pitchers all had trouble getting hitters out. Luckily, the
defense and the bullpen were solid.
Amalie Benjamin of the Boston Globe wrote an article saying:

So the day after Beckett said the Sox have to pitch
better, have to play better, have to do everything better, nothing
was better.

And a disgruntled fan commented:

I fully understand that it is early but like Yogi
Berra once said It can get late early!
sportsbozo1

This week they seem to have gotten everything better, and the
starting pitchers are pitching for 6 and 7 innings and the hitters
are hitting the way we expect them to.

More transcription woes

I didn’t get the corrections to Upon a hill right the first
time. All the parts ended at the same time, but for every
cadence, the cantus part cadenced later than the other two parts.
I didn’t notice listening to the MIDI file, but
when the woman singing that part, who’s a very experienced singer,
was having real trouble making it sound right, I looked at the
score, and made some more adjustments.

Handmaid’s Tale

Read the Mccarthy review after posting my review, I think the
book has gotten a lot more scary since 1986.

Chocolate Chip Brioche

I went to a large party last night and baked two batches of my
bread machine brioche, one with fruit and nuts
and one with chocolate chips. People liked both of them, but I
don’t know that I’ll repeat the chocolate chip one. One of the
points of that recipe is how much fun the dough is to play with,
and with the warm chocolate chips in it, it isn’t as much fun.

The Handmaid’s Tale

The book by Margaret Attwood is
one of my favorites. In fact, it’s the first Margaret Attwood I read — the
New York Times ran a review by Mary McCarthy
which as I remember it was a bit snarky, but it convinced me I’d
be interested in the book, so I went to Harvard Square (probably
the late, lamented Wordsworth) and bought it. Then I read and
mostly bought all her other books.

I wasn’t getting to the movies much in 1990 when this one came
out, so it wasn’t until looking at Natasha Richardson‘s filmography after she died that I remembered
that I wanted to see it and put it on my netflix list.

It’s a good movie — visually quite beautiful, with two stellar
performances by Natasha Richardson and Robert Duvall, and good
acting and writing all around.

It’s mostly pretty faithful to the book, with the amount left
out that you have to leave out to keep a movie under two hours,
and things made explicit that are implicit in the book to make
it easier to comprehend in two hours.

The big disappointment, though, was that they changed the
setting. The book is actually one of the great Cambridge novels
— as a long-time Cambridge resident, I can almost tell you
where the Red Center and the Commander’s house are, and the
Savaging takes place in Harvard Yard. I also know exactly what
store is currently on the corner in Harvard Square where the “Prayer
Store” is, which Ofglen can’t remember what used to be there.

My theory while I was watching was that Harvard had decided it
didn’t want to have a state-sponsored lynching filmed on its
precincts. IMDB says that filming in Harvard
Square would be too difficult, and Harvard has a “no filming”
policy in general. This is probably not quite true — weren’t
both Paper Chase and Love story filmed there?

In any case, read the book, if you want both Cambridge local
color and a chilling reminder that it can happen here.
If you want a beautifully filmed experience that
causes you to be able to really feel what it would be like to
plunge a knife into a powerful man’s neck, watch the movie.

If you haven’t read any Margaret Attwood, they’re all pretty
good. I would start with either this one or Cat’s
Eye, if you can stand remembering elementary school that
well. Her essays and poems are also worth reading.

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Recorded Music Library on Linux

Compared with people who use ipods, I’ve been late getting my
music on line and computerized.

The reason I don’t use ipods,
or some more open version of the same thing, is that I don’t
really enjoy listening to music through earbuds or
headphones.

So when I’m home or in the car, there’s no problem playing CD’s
through speakers. When I’m somewhere else, I either listen to
whatever music is playing there, or don’t listen at all.

But of course, one of the things computers are good at is
organizing and cataloging things, and CD’s are especially suited
to being catalogued that way, because they usually have all the
information on them, in the metadata.

So in the last few months, I have compacted and catalogued my
cd’s on the computer. They now sit in two large notebooks on my
living room bookshelves, most of them are in a directory on an
external hard drive in .flac format, from which I could recreate
the CD if I needed to, some of those are in a directory in MP3
format which I could play on my cell phone if I wanted to, and
my home network is set up so that I can play the music off the
upstairs computer on either the laptop or the media center
computer in the living room.

SOFTWARE

Here’s the LINUX software I use to do this:

  • sound-juicer takes the CD’s and reads them into the
    directory on the computer. I use flac as the output format. It
    turns out to be important to set the preferences to “strip
    special characters”; otherwise you end up with directory names
    with commas in them, and most of the programs that want to do
    something with the directory (like back it up, or convert the
    flac’s to mp3’s) are going to have trouble with that.
  • I use rhythmbox to play the music on the computer. If it’s
    running on the upstairs computer, you can play the music it sees
    on the downstairs computers automagically, without configuring
    networking drives or anything. It has lots of options for
    having the computer make pretty colored patterns based on the
    music and getting the lyrics off the web (this seems somewhat
    unreliable for the music I listen to) and accessing internet
    radio stations like last.fm. I turn out to actually sort of
    enjoy putting “shuffle” mode on and listening to random songs
    from my entire collection, as long as I’m close enough to the
    “next” button to skip something I”m really not in the mood for,
    or that really doesn’t make sense out of context.
  • I use brasero these days to write CD’s. It definitely beats
    remembering the options to mkisofs and cdrecord, like we used to
    have to in the bad old days. I haven’t been
    making mix CD’s from the music, but I’m pretty sure I
    could.
  • If I just want to play one song and I know where it is in
    the filesystem, I usually use mplayer from the command line.
  • soundconverter converts all the .flac files in a directory to mp3 files in a different directory.

I installed all of these programs from the Ubuntu repositories.

CAR

I did try out one of those devices that transmits music from an
MP3 player on an unused FM frequency that you can tune your car
radio to. It didn’t work consistently enough, so I gave the MP3
player and the radio transmitter to a friend who lives where the
radio spectrum isn’t quite so crowded. I don’t know if she uses
it or not.

One of the binders I put all my CD’s in came with a cd holder
that velcros onto the sunshade in my car, so I just put a few CD’s
into that and play them when there’s nothing good on the
radio.

If that ever seems too restrictive, I might buy a new car radio
with an input jack or an SD card reader. But I think that’s a
ways down the list for the toy-buying budget.

Other places

I can use either my phone or my Nokia N810 to carry music with
me. I also have a small portable Sony speaker that I can plug
into either of those devices. (They do both have speakers, but
certainly you wouldn’t want to listen to music on the phone for
any length of time; the Nokia is less tinny but still pretty small.) So when I buy music from the Amazon
MP3 store, I can still play it to my friends, although not quite
as easily as bringing a CD to a house with a CD player.

Exercise

I usually get a burst of energy for improving my exercise
habits sometime in April. Often it’s after watching the Boston
Marathon, but this year it happened a couple of weeks
before.

I have occasionally been someone who goes to a gym and puts on
funny clothes and works out on a machine for 20 minutes to the
terrible music they play and then
does some yoga. This has always been when there was a gym in the
building I worked in and it was a way to take a break from my
job. I actively like rowing on a rowing machine, and would have
one if there was room in my Cambridge apartment, but there isn’t.

Now that I work at home, there’s a lot less incentive to put up
with the travel time to the gym and the clothes and the music.

I have a clothes rack in my bedroom that if unfolded correctly would be a
Nordic-trak ski machine. I’ve never really liked the noise it
makes, and while unfolding it and folding it back up doesn’t
take as long as getting to the YMCA would, it’s still a fair
amount of overhead.

Anyway, when I have had the aerobic exercise habit, I’ve been
just as obnoxious as other people about its benefits. One that
doesn’t get mentioned very often, but I’m pretty sure it’s true
for me, is that my hair grows longer.

None of this prevents me from getting out of the habit for
years at a time. Since my most common mode of exercise (when
I’m not taking breaks from work at a gym) is walking, I most
recently lost the habit when my hip arthritis got too bad, and
then I didn’t take it back up after the surgery in January of
2008.

Even with my April exercise energy, and even though my ability
to walk (at least on flat terrain) is roughly back where it was
before the arthritis and the surgery, I still haven’t been able
to get back to walking anything like aerobically because I do
most of my walking with the 12 year old dog, and his hips seem to be about
where mine were before the surgery.

I occasionally get an idea for how to do aerobic exercise that
doesn’t depend on equipment or going somewhere you don’t want to
go. I’ve done a certain amount of
dancing to my recorded music collection. A couple of years ago,
when the hip was getting bad, I decided you didn’t have to get out
of your chair if you waved your arms vigorously enough, and I did
some conducting to my recorded music collection. If you do yoga
standing poses with downward dog in between, it’s aerobic.

This year’s idea comes out of this article in the New York
Times. When I actually read it, I didn’t think anything except
that the typical office building stair well sounded even worse
than the gym as a place to exercise. But then a couple of weeks
ago, I realized that I have two flights of stairs in my own
apartment, and if I just go up and down them a few times at a
reasonable clip, that would be the exercise, without going
anywhere I don’t want to go or changing clothes or anything.

So I hum Souza marches and go up the stairs at that tempo.
When I get too out of breath to hum the march, I stop.
Sometimes I do this twice a day. I haven’t been doing it long
enough to grow my hair longer, but it does seem to be having the
normal short-term effects. A new one is that my fasting blood
sugar is much more reliably under control when I’ve done even a
short stair-climbing stint.

Primary Care Providers and the death of Bonnie Rogers

This is part of my series of posts about the death of my
friend Bonnie
Rogers.

As I reported in the post Timeline of
Bonnie’s death, she was having unusual problems with lack
of energy for a couple of months, and serious problems breathing
for a couple of weeks before she managed to call her doctor and
make an appointment.

I had urged her to talk to the doctor as soon as she told me
about the breathing problems. I didn’t feel vindicated by her
doctor’s response, which was in fact a complete misdiagnosis,
and not at all what they do on doctor shows on TV (except occasionally
House).

She wrote me:

The doctor says I have mild anemia and should take an iron supplement,
but she has ordered some kind of test for pulmonary hypertension as
well as a colonoscopy some time in the near future. Pulmonary
hypertension is relatively rare, but from the descriptions on the
internet it makes sense that it might be the underlying problem. I
don’t remember what the name of the test is.

Please avoid mentioning pulmonary hypertension [to the group]. … I’d like to avoid it at least until I
really know what’s going on. I’m going to try to just speak
nonchalantly about anemia if the subject of my health comes up.

I was quite sure that Bonnie’s breathing problems weren’t “mild
anemia”, and in any case even mild anemia in a post-menopausal
woman usually points to something else wrong. (That doctors accept it in
menstruating women is a problem, but that’s another post.)

But the doctor had never seen Bonnie before, and she was obese
enough that it wouldn’t surprise someone who didn’t know her that
she should get out of breath easily. Those of us who knew how
seldom she complained about anything, and how active she managed
to be even with major disabilities, knew that her complaining
about being out of breath meant that something serious was wrong.

I like to think that my own doctor, whom I’ve been seeing since
1995, knows how seriously to take my complaints, but she might
well do only the minimum testing on someone she didn’t know with
an obvious diagnosis of obesity compounded with anemia, too.

But to continue Bonnie’s story, when she went to the emergency
room the next day, she was admitted to the hospital with a
diagnosis of blood clots in the lungs. The testing in the
hospital lead to a diagnosis of cancer in the abdominal cavity.
When they released her, they made appointments with both the
primary care physician (PCP) and an oncologist, neither of which was she
able to keep because she needed to go back into the hospital.

After I got the power of attorney and started getting Bonnie’s
mail forwarded to me, I got several notices of appointments, and
postcards saying to call for checkups, even after she had died.
So the record system leaves something to be desired.

This is a clear case of a managed care system not managing a
serious illness very well. I personally have always used managed
care when it was available to me, and I think it works very well
if you do some of the managing yourself. As I said, I’ve kept the
same doctor (actually a nurse practitioner) for well over a
decade, and when something serious happens that she isn’t involved
in, she seems to get records and ask me questions about what she
wants to know that isn’t in the record.

Bonnie had had to switch
plans in the year previous to this story because of going on
medicare, and had not been especially aggressive about getting an
introductory appointment with her new doctor. I’d say one of the
morals of Bonnie’s story is that this was a mistake, and she
should have tried to establish an ongoing relationship with a
primary care provider. Then she would have felt better about
making the appointment when she first noticed problems, and maybe
the doctor would have known to take her complaints more
seriously.

I should add that the obesity probably contributed to this part
of the problem, too. When Bonnie saw a new doctor, she was
usually given some fairly routine advice about weight loss, which
she had of course heard and thought about many times before, and
usually didn’t find she could communicate her disagreement with
its application to
her own case very well in that context. So she didn’t look
forward to the initial encounter with a PCP.

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How I post these entries

There is a problem with all these web-based communication
tools (websites, webmail, twitter, facebook…) for people who
learned to use computers back in the good old days. The easiest
way to type information into a computer is to use emacs, and many
of the people who design these things don’t seem to understand
that.

Of course, the people who use emacs are very clever at getting
around this problem, and there are by now good solutions for the older
tools:

  • Gnus will read and
    write email with any mail technology that uses standard POP or
    IMAP interfaces.
  • Tramp will let you
    edit a file on any computer that you can get to via any normal
    protocol.
  • Psgml is pretty
    good for editing html pages.
  • SQL
    mode     will let you manipulate a database on any machine you can
    get to.

Blogging isn’t as old a technology as the things above, and
while there’s been some work on packages that will let you open
a buffer and then post its contents directly from emacs, I
haven’t made them work successfully. I’m not alone — this
post by a frequent contributor to the emacs newsgroups
suggests that he ended up with the same solution as I did, after
much the same problems with the packages.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to work posting besides
doing it directly from emacs. For a while, I was invoking an
emacs client from firefox via a program called mosex, which is
hard to find on google because the Museum of Sex in New York
uses mosex as a nickname. But I think mosex stopped working on
some firefox upgrade, and having emacs clients hanging around
was a bit of a nuisance.

So what I do now is just open an html file on my own computer,
edit it using psgml, and then mouse the results into the normal
WordPress admin page, trying to remember to set the category and
the keywords every time.

MBT Shoes

I bought these
shoes a couple of weeks ago, and thought I’d tell you about
them.

The hype for MBT
shoes is pretty aggressive, but at least some of it is
true. I haven’t lost thirty pounds in two weeks, or gotten to
really like standing in one place for hours at a time, but I
do feel there’s less strain on my joints when I walk and I
have better posture and I can
stand for a few minutes more easily.

Before buying them, I worried whether the rocking back and
forth would make me feel unbalanced. This is in general not
the case, but it is a little harder to walk on really uneven
terrain.

I also worried about whether the oddly shaped sole would be a
problem for driving. It isn’t, but the first time I went to
stop at a red light, the extra height at the middle of the
sole did make the stop more sudden than I wanted. It’s easy
to get used to, though.

Some people have reported aching all over after their first
long walk in their first pair of MBT’s. I haven’t taken a
really long walk, but 2 and 3 miles doesn’t seem to do this to
me.

I also thought they might look wierder than they do — the
oddly shaped sole isn’t really obvious from above, which is
how most people see your shoes. I never wear high-fashion
shoes with heels anyway, and there seems to be a fairly wide
range of styles and colors if you don’t need women’s high fashion.

It’s probably a good idea to find a place to try them on before
buying them cheaper by mail order. I didn’t do that, and I’m
not absolutely sure that a 38 wouldn’t have been better than a
37. In US sizes, I take a 6 1/2 women’s. This seems to be
much better standardized than most sizing — some 6 1/2’s fit
me better than others, but a 6 1/2 always seems to fit better
than a 6 or a 7.

However, if you convert to European sizes, I take a 37 in a
Birkenstock, which many sizing charts claim corresponds to a
US women’s 7. So I ordered a 37 for the MBT. It fits really
well through the heel, but is a little bit tighter than I
really like in the toes. So before I order another pair, I’ll
go somewhere and try a 38.

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Memorizing Poetry

This
essay by Jim Holt about memorizing poetry in the New York Times Book Review reminded me of the way
I got through all the standardized tests when I was in high school.

The advice about test taking skills said to never go back and
have second thoughts, and I was a fast enough reader that I would
often have as much as 10 minutes after I’d gone through and
recorded my first thoughts. My family was impressed when I
memorized poetry (not to the point of paying for it), and I’d been
at the tail end of when you could impress a teacher by doing it,
so I knew several fairly long poems by heart, so I would use the
ten minutes to recite them.

I knew The Raven and The Bells by
Edgar Allen Poe, and The Man against the Sky by
Edwin Arlington Robinson, and lots of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.

I don’t do this often enough these days that I can still keep
the order of all the similar but different stanzas straight, but I
do remember enough to while away a few minutes waiting for a train
or bus.

Jim Holt says he now memorizes a couple of lines of poetry a
day, and has learned lots of good poems since he started doing
this. I briefly considered doing that, but my life still hasn’t
settled down from trying to post to this blog every day (the house
cleaning and the publishing are both suffering), so I won’t take it
up just now.

But if you’re someone who’s worrying about your memory
declining with age, this seems like a better way to exercise it
than some of the games people play for that purpose.