Vacation in Floriday Keys

Shirley and I took this past week as vacation, and popped down to the beautiful Florida Keys. Pics are posted on Flickr. We decided that Key West was not really for us, but we were only there for a quick day trip. Most of the time we spent in the Marathon area, which is halfway between Key Largo and Key West. It was exactly a 6.5 hour drive from home, including a couple of stops. We stayed at Hawks Cay on a deal we booked through TravelZoo (thank you Howard & Michelle for telling us about that site!). This meant that we paid about half of the posted "rack rate".

The good part was almost everything :) ...perfect weather, great scenery, wonderful food, plenty to do and learn in the area.

The bad part was that the confirmation we were emailed from Hawks Cay stated that we had "Ocean View". They lied. None of the townhouses have an ocean view (unless one or two have a partial view). And they couldn't even find our reservation! I showed them the email (via the BlackBerry), showing that it was from them, booked weeks ago. First they tried to put us in a unit with a view of a narrow canal with other buildings on the other side. We complained and asked for what we were promised. They tried to move us a few doors down (same view) and after being a bit more assertive, they put us in a unit with a nice water view...just not the "ocean view" that the confirmation had listed. Oh well ...Caveat emptor. I'll post a fuller review on Travel Advisor at some point.

Hawks Cay IS a beautiful resort. But it is my feeling that they exaggerate (at best) some of their description. But after the initial disappointment and anger, we calmed ourselves down and did have a truly wonderful time :)

Still off caffeine - mostly :)

During the past month or so, I've consumed a total of about 2 full cups of caffeinated coffee. I had originally stopped drinking real coffee because I thought perhaps I was having PVCs brought on by too much caffeine (even though I typically had only 2 cups of coffee a day, and never more than 3). Well, increasing my dosage of CoQ10 seems to have done the trick. Normally I take 200mg of CoQ10 each day, and I upped that to 400mg for a couple of weeks. And there's been no more of the "fluttery" kind of sensation that I'd had. I've also had a cup (or partial cup) of real coffee a couple of times when I was dragging in the afternoon, with no ill effects.

Since I've found a very nice decaf coffee - Seattle's Best Organic 'Twilight' Swiss water process whole bean - I've decided to stick with this decaf for most of my coffee drinking. I like the taste, but usually do not really 'need' the caffeine. And once in a while, if I do feel that I need to bathe my heart in a little adrenaline, then I'll grab a cup of REAL coffee :)

Say it ain't so! A decaffeinated Joe?

I've been off of coffee for a week now - except for that experimental cup Wednesday morning. More on that in a bit.

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the smell of coffee. Given that I was toilet-trained by the age of 18 months, and quite clearly remember my mom changing my diaper, that means that for at least half a century (I'm 52) the aroma of the first dark brew of morning has excited my senses.

It was 1970 (9th grade) when I had my first cup of coffee. I was watching a football game and was freezing, so bought the only hot beverage they had - coffee. It was terrible stuff.

The first year of college somehow passed with coffee still not on my list of consumed beverages; all of that changed by the second year. Fast-forward to post-college, then marriage, then an infant son and a tanking economy, and I went back to school to become a geek. For 2 years I worked full time and went to school more than full time, and consumed (literally) 20 cups of coffee a day (one per hour of wakefulness) plus periodic caffeine pills plus diet coke. It was 4 hours of sleep a night for 6 nights a week, and an all-nighter once a week. For 2 years. That was 20+ years ago and I can still lay down anywhere and enjoy a 10-minute nap :)

Once those 2 years were done, and for the next 20 some-odd years, I would enjoy 2 to 3 cups of coffee most days. Typically on vacations or if sick, I'd skip coffee. Once espresso had been discovered by the Littons, our coffee love affair blossomed. We purchased a Pasquini Livia semi-commercial espresso machine, a Rancillio Rocky burr grinder, and for the past 7 years have bought green (unroasted) coffee beans and roasted much of our consumed coffee to our own preferences.

Ah, bliss in a steaming cup of black elixer!

A week ago I noticed a bit of a 'fluttery' feel in the heart area. Not constant, but relatively frequent throughout the day (10 times?). Exercise was not affected... strenuous workouts are no problem at all. I can work up a healthy sweat and keep going on the treadmill or other workout for an hour and the body feels great. It was only when stationary that I'd notice it. Could it be that decades of bathing my heart in twice/thrice-daily adrenaline baths was having an effect? Inconceivable!

So I decided to experiment. I had no coffee last Saturday, none Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. By Wednesday, there was no more of that fluttery thing, so I tried a cup of coffee to see what would happen. Our bodies are truly wonderful laboratories ...within reason, of course. Well, before the morning was done, there was that flutter. So I've not had any coffee since that Wednesday cup, and the flutter has diminished more each day.

I can't say that coffee is definitely the culprit. Perhaps it's a deficiency of CoQ10 or something else. But such a seemingly direct correlation between the coffee consumption (or lack thereof) and the odd heart thingy sure seems to point to coffee.

Now, as far as the suffering that some coffee addicts endure - primarily killer headaches - when coming off of caffeine... Well, I'm quite fortunate there. I've never been bothered much with headaches when I've stopped coffee for a week or whatever, and this time is no different. The only 'side-effect' I've noticed is that I've had to make sure to get 7-8 hours of sleep each night, I've been taking a nap pretty much every evening after work, and my brain seems to be slowly emerging from a mild fog that seemed to have started sometime around last Saturday morning. In fact, yesterday was probably the first day in this post-caffeine world that I felt as clear as I usually had.

So this morning I'm about to pop in and do an hour on the treadmill (a mix of brisk walking on the flat, alternating with periods of running on incline ...always leaves me soaked), then I'll get cleaned up and head to the store for some Seattle's Best organic, Swiss water process decaffeinated, 'coffee'. The taste should still be there. The wonderful aroma will be there. The caffeine? Well, that will be about 3mg of caffeine versus the 85mg+ of a cup of regular coffee. But at least I'll be able to enjoy the weekend morning ritual of a cup of hot black coffee and the newspaper :)

Dell Mini 9 - my new netbook /main machine

I've put a couple of posts (1, 2) about this over on my tech blog. And I've tossed some pics up on this Flickr stream. My Dell Mini 9 arrived last week, and I am digging it!

Before ordering the machine, I was chatting online with Dell Support. At work and at home I use an HP L2045w 20-inch monitor running a 1680x1050 resolution. The Dell Mini 9 displays 1024x600 on its little screen. I wanted to know if the Mini could display 1680x1050 on the external monitor. The person with whom I was chatting went off to ask someone else and came back with the answer: no. Well, guess what? I'm blogging this using a wireless keyboard / mouse patched in to one of the 3 USB ports on the Mini, and viewing the blog post in 1680x1050 resolution on the HP monitor. The Mini is doing the computing and communications, but it is sitting closed on the desk.

So that was one discovery: the Dell Mini 9 does handle higher-resolution when hooked up to an external monitor. At least in my particular setup.

My Mini is running Ubuntu 8.04. I paid extra upfront for 2GB of RAM and a 60GB solid state hard drive (you can do this cheaper after the fact, but I just wanted it to be done and working). I added a 16GB SD card to hold my tunes. I use Amarok to download podcasts and manage the tunes (now on the SD card) that used to be my iTunes library on a hard disk. And I use Amarok to update my iPod.

For word processing, spreadsheet, I use OpenOffice, which I've been using on Windows and Ubuntu systems for at least a couple of years now. Graphics is via GIMP. Twitter is TweetDeck (runs on top of Adobe Air). Skype recognized the built-in webcam and mic right away. Pidgin is what I use for IM, just as with other Ubuntu and Windows systems at home and work.

Web browsing is done with Firefox (with a number of extensions). Because I make my living developing in the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino arena, I've loaded Notes 8.5 on (running natively on my Ubuntu linux).

I cabled my old HP Scanjet 3970 to the Mini, and XSane recognized it and did my test scan with no issues. Likewise, I popped the USB cable from the Canon PIXMA iP4000r printer into the Mini, and printed a perfect test page.

Our home network is wireless, and the Mini was configured for our WPA2 setup in about 2 minutes (just provided the SSID and password if I recall correctly).

So the point is that (with the exception of Notes), I'm using free open source software for all my computing needs, the Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu has connected with no worries to our network and peripherals, and I now have a very small and lightweight machine to replace my aging laptop ...with a 4.5 hour battery life and a 20-second boot up :)

Cool.

Utah #1 for online p0rn consumption

As reported in this Salt Lake Tribune article, Utah is the number one consumer of online p0rn of all of the states in the USA. Why?

Well, there could be several reasons. My own unscientific suspicion is that desire for something increases as that something is judged to be forbidden. The Harvard analysis mentioned in the article alludes to the same.

I attended Catholic schools for the first 9 grades. While my then shy, short, round self never experienced it, rumor has it that it was not uncommon for parochial school girls to be somewhat, um, forward. If true, could the reason be the repression. As the late George Carlin described, the nuns taught us that if we liked it - it was bad. And if we thought about those bad things that we liked - that was bad too. And, by the way, God knows if you're thinking about it, so there's no escape. Ever heard the expression, "Don't think of an elephant"?

I was tortured by some of these thoughts - and thoughts about my thoughts - and fear of what God or others might think about what I was thinking and then the potential ramifications (eternal and otherwise) and what family / friends / clergy would think about me if they knew all the sinful thoughts in my pubescent little brain. Of course, now I know that those thoughts - compared to what's available online - were like comparing a spitwad to an RPG.

Anyway... my main thought is that I find this amusing, and I was quite happy to read this article instead of another article about things that really are bad.