How I spent my Amazon gift card

The last of my Amazon orders have arrived. This is how I spent Mom's Amazon gift card (ok, and a bit of my cash.)
The first group covers professional development. I've been a one-trick-pony for a long time. On one hand, if you need that trick, I'm your pony. On the other hand, if you don't, I'm not. This is to expand my horizons.
And because I might find myself working on corprate America again.These are for personal devleopment.Because I wanted the DVD I bought the real version instead of just downloading it.

Ron Paul on the Republican Party.

RON PAUL: Well I've been elected as a Republican for ten times. And Republicans have a platform, and had a better platform in the past. They expressed these views. Matter of fact, George Bush, if you remember ran on a foreign policy not too far from what I'm talking about. So, it's not like I'm completely a stranger to the Republican ideas of-- you know, they talk about balanced budgets and they're strict Constitutionalists.

And I think the ones who are in charge right now have left the Republican Party and the platform, which makes it more difficult, because people in the party, the hard core base, which unfortunately for the Republicans is getting smaller. But they stick their loyal to the leader. And they're loyal to maintaining power. They're not loyal to a principle or the Constitution and saying doing what is right, you know. They can't reverse their trend, you know. If we're in a bad situation in Iraq, "No. We can't be disloyal." And so they're not objective enough. So-- but I think I can be a good Republican and fight for these ideals, because they have been in the Republican Party in the past. And the question is, is will these ideas be revived once again in the Republican Party? Will people like myself be excluded? There's indeed a lot of people would like to exclude me from the Republican Party. But the party is awful small. Why would they want to exclude is, if we want to work within the Republican Party?

Now, I'm a yellow-dog Democrat, so, I'd be the same way were it the other way, but still.
Bill Moyer had Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich on his show. Highly recommended, as always.

Better Diet, Better Health

It's not news that eating better means living better and perhaps longer.

This TED talk, however, makes an interesting point. Dr. Dean Ormish says, about 1:54 into the talk, that they've significantly reduced the progression of Prostate cancer by making changes in patient's diet. Sadly, he doesn't go into details in the talk.

Doing some googling, I found this. Pomegranates, Benjamin. There must be more. But I'm throwing this out there for what it's worth.

Here's more.

(Dad had two surgeries to tame his prostate gland. I'm interesting in avoiding the same, if I can.)

Space, man.


I've got a few contracts that end on 12/31 that I should be wrapping up. And, I'm led to believe Christmas is next week and I've got a bit (ahem) more to do for that.

So, what do I do? I investigate what's using the most space on my hard drive.

The biggest file, in the upper left corner is my VMWare Windows image. The greenish bar to its right is Ubuntu.

The middle section in the top are client database files.

The right most corner is media (i.e., music and movies). Only three movies, can you guess which file blocks?

The green bar running horizontally about half way down is the photo library - presented as a single 'file' in Leopard.

The purplish file in the lower right is the sleepimage.

Please keep shiny objects away from me. I apparently have a hard time focusing.

Others Writing, so I don't have to

John Gruber, on one of the endless articles predicting Apple's at the end of the road.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/12/fastcompany

This is so tiresome. (the Fast Company article, not Gruber's response.)

Just for the record, I'm hopeful that Apple has vigorous, compelling competition. Hopefully it'll make them better.

Also, I'm playing with Google Reader as a news feed. If you want to follow along with the posts I find interesting, you can do so here: Lee's Shared Items