Bodyhacking

“Hacking is the practice of modifying the features of a system, in order to accomplish a goal outside of the creator’s original purpose. The person who is consistently engaging in hacking activities, and has accepted hacking as a lifestyle and philosophy of their choice, is called a hacker.”

– whatishacking.org:

Bob Bickford, computer and video guru, defined the true essence of the hacker as “Any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.”

I get to hack computer code at work all the time , that’s one of the things I love about my job. Taking someone else’s code and bending it to my design.

Things that I regularly hack: code, electronics, dead devices, and now my own body. Don’t worry, this doesn’t involve electronic probes or anything like that.

Think of you body as a system, it has certain rules “these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system…some of them can can be bent. Others…can be broken” (-The Matrix). In order to manipulate the body and hack it, you must first discover the controls and how they operate. My focus control has been on energy and the digestive/metabolic system. My body has too many energy reserves stored as fat; I don’t need them now since I have good food security.

 

Control 1: Hunger

 

Control 2: Activity Level (the output)

 

Control 3: Food (the input)

 

Control 4: Emotion

 

With these 4 controls in mind we’re on the way to right thinking on how to hack your own body.

Potato Casserole Like Grandma

Years ago, when Eliza and I were young, we went to her grandma’s house for Easter dinner or a baby blessing or something. She made the best cheese potatoes I’d ever had and have been asking Eliza to make them for me for years. With my interest in cooking over the last few months, and morning 9am church, I decided to try and make them myself. It was kinda made up on the spot but I’ll preserve what I did here.

Brent’s cheese casserole potatoes

• 2-3 lbs Yukon golds (or other med starch white potato)
• 2 c white sauce (butter, flour, milk)
• 2 c cheese
• salt & pepper to taste

Add potatoes.

Wash and lightly peel the potatoes. Slice to about 3/8″ thick rounds. Peeling is optional and mine didn’t actually need it when done; the peels were thin enough to not affect the flavor. Lay in 3 long rows of a 9 x 13 pan. The slices should slightly overlap like a fallen-over stack of cards.

Make cheese sauce.

Melt 2 T butter, add 2 T flour, continue heating on med-high until color slightly darkens. Add 2 c milk and stir to combine until thick. Add half the cheese. Use a soft melty cheese like Gruyère/Swiss, or cheddar if that’s all you’ve got.

Pour sauce over potatoes, top with remaining cheese. Bake uncovered at 350 for 45 minutes. When done, let it cool for a bit so the sauce thickens. Yum.

How I imported my old Xanga Posts

It involves downloading some software to run some code that visits each of your xanga pages that captures and translates all the text there to a WordPress formatted file. Manually fixup the xml from the file and import that to the wordpress blog. Why would you want to do this? WordPress is open, free, and has a supportive user base. If it ever happens to shut down, they make it easy, and free, to download your blog for use somewhere else. You finally own your data again (unlike stinky Xanga).

Here’s what I did:

1. See, there’s this guy I know… Actually, I don’t know him but he’s still cool because he wrote this awesome page converter for Xanga. http://www.timwylie.com/xword.html The xword program he has is out of date and didn’t work for my blog. I had to use the command-line tool rebol-view with his xanga.r file (both listed on his page).
2. Once the program completed processing, it spit out an xml file in wordpress format. I signed up for a wordpress.com blog (http://wordpress.com) and found their import function under Tools > Import. The import failed because xanga inlined lots of stray html which isn’t well-formed xml.
3. Next came the manual fixup of the myfile.xml. I had to close a bunch of <p> and other html tags so some of the formatting got lost, especially in the comments sections. After that, I imported again and all is well. See my 57 postings from 2005 to 2008, I also categorized and closed comments on the older posts so they should be in an ok archival format.

It’s been real nice to revisit myself from 5 years ago. It’s all posted here if you’d like to browse around. I think I’ll be formally closing my Xanga account soon.

Let me know if you have any questions on the import.

Goodby fair xanga

Well xanga, it’s been a year and a day since I last updated, to tell the world of my inner thoughts. Much has happened but I just didn’t feel like typing it all out. So I thought I’d give it one last go.

Today I…, blah…

Nope, I still don’t like typing my thoughts all out. I think it’s time to just call it quits; besides, facebook is way better anyway — they have games.

Xanga Army Unite!

Today is John’s birthday, March 12th.

Everyone message him and tell him to one or more of the following:

• actually post to his blog
• stop getting older
• make new t-shirts
• make more movies
• start making chillin’s
• play more computer games
• put the Awesome back in John “Awesome”
• share his Ale-8-one stash
• stop working so much

If any of those don’t work for you then tell him to have a happy birthday anyway.

A minor post

-some thoughts need to be written so that I don’t have to keep thinking about them-

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a few weeks now. It’s a way of categorizing things that are made by their growing complexity: any one part is an aggregation of lesser parts until you reach a base unit or a complete unit.

Though it may be a little contrived, here are some of the areas of study I know a little about, or know someone who knows about them, and are similar in their organization of growing complexity.

Ork codex

Some interresting points from the new Ork codex found so far:

• painboys give the entire mob they’re with “feel no pain”, only nobs mobs can have painboys though and Doc Grotsnik is one too. Nobs with ‘feel no pain’ is sweet though
• can’t take any other race’s units (no basilisk )
• Lootas are regular boys for 15pts each, except each one has a frikkin’ autocannon, is Hd3 instead of H2 but close enough
• the battlewagon is 14 12 10 and transports 20, it can also get a cannon (s7 ap3 ord) by sacrificing 8 seats

So then I thought this: battlewagon that has an ordinance weapon with 12 capacity and which is open topped, fill those seats with 12 above mentioned Lootas and we have: ordinance weapon with 12 Autocannons @bs=2 which can fire every turn, at separate targets if wanted, all wrapped in armor 14 and doesn’t have to move and so can stay hull down.

Quick post

Today, I am an antidentite.

Here’s the little bugger, number 29, anterior. Composite filling, color = A2 (slightly yellow).

The singular point of good news from my visit was that it only required 1 shot, which is about 90% of the agony of getting a filling anyway.

8:30am arrived at office
8:37am seated in “the chair”
8:52am injection time
9:14am all foreign objects finally banished from mouth
9:21am home to seek wifely pitty
10:10am dragged my butt to work, numbness and all
12:42pm ate lunch without incident
1:30pm seek more pitty from Xanga audience

The End.

Christmas shopping warmup

This is [yet another reason] why boys (nerds) and girls (non-nerds) are supposed to like each other and get married.

Ah yes, what is “value” anyway? Now, if you’re talking Axiological intrinsic value then…

7-Dec-2007

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/bO2DwWrAoYNOumn.vW,7M7mVyZs1EGo5

:edit:

Sorry, for those of you that read the above post and/or commented, this wasn’t supposed to be a real post. I was just using Xanga to to send this link to my work so I wouldn’t have to email it to myself instead. It was supposed to be marked as private. Efficiency is intelligent laziness I guess.
I know, I know, you thought you finally had incontrovertable evidence that I was a certified Mormublican. Seeing as how that’s not the case though, in the words of Dark Helmet: “foooled you!”.

The real story is that this has been one of the best speeches of the campaign season so far. He references Kennedy’s 1960 speech on his Catholic faith. “Let me assure you that no
authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will
ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is
theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the
affairs of the nation begin”. He only specifically talks about mormons one or twice, mostly it was about how he views separation of church and state – no freaky doctrinal explanations necessary. He also gave lots of quotes from Sam Adams on the diversity of religion during the Founding Father’s day. In effect: they came together, we can come together, all different religions of faith. He also says: “My convictions will indeed inform my presidency, not direct it”. There’s lot’s more and he’s very eloquent here for a change but you should just watch it, especially the middle half.