DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Research released Monday at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association showed that in a pound-for-pound contest, people on the Atkins low-carb diet lost more weight and had better cholesterol and triglyceride counts than people on a traditional Heart Association-approved low-fat diet.

Welcome to this week’s nutrition controversy. Here’s the Chron article: Knives drawn over Atkins diet study

The Atkins Diet is truly an American phenomenon: you can lose weight by eating all the greasy meats and cheeses you can pack in your face, and you don’t have to eat any vegetables, and you don’t have to exercise. What could be better than that?

And it even works — people who stick to the plan really do lose weight.

And yet, even the doctor in charge of the latest study has reservations. “While we’re impressed with the weight loss of this diet, we still are not sure about the safety of it,” says Eric Westman, M.D., of Duke University. “More studies need to be done in order to be confident about the long-term safety of this type of diet.” (Westman is quoted in Duke Health Briefs, 7/15/02.)

Here’s an interesting quote, from nutritional expert Joanne Ikeda, MA, RN of UC Berkeley: “I think this stuff makes money for Dr. Atkins and not much more than that. If he was right, the Italians who have twice as much carbohydrates in their diet would be worse off than we are. But they have half the obesity compared to us. The epidemiological evidence is just not there.”

So, no easy answers. I wish these folks would figure out the truth, and soon. They’re making it really difficult to be immortal.

Biomorph recently bought back a truck-load of their “personal” ergonomic desks from a failed dot-com. The company is selling them (with a full warranty) for ~30% off. They’re still obscenely expensive at $895, and the only surface finish available at this price is the clearcoat, which is the least visually appealing in the catalog. But you’d still get the benefit of adjusting keyboard height and monitor height independently, and besides, the old door-across-two-file-cabinets look is so 1990s.

If you don’t like the clearcoat finish, you can still save $100 off the regular desk price by opting for a pre-owned frame. Also, I understand that some of Biomorph’s other, regular, inventory will be going on sale for the holidays.

Here’s how to justify home-office upgrades: you probably spend 50-60 hours a week there, so you ought to be comfortable. Most people think nothing of having a multi-hundred-dollar monthly car payment, even if the car sits idle in the garage 95% of the time. If it makes you feel better, you can haul your new desk out to the curb on weekends so your neighbors can admire it too.

A friend with an iBook just upgraded to Jaguar. Afterwards, at her request, I made a change to the network preferences to fix her wireless connection. Then I powered the machine down, because that’s what she usually does.

She phoned me the next day, because the laptop would not boot up. She reported that she’d pressed the power button repeatedly without any response. That’s always disconcerting.

First I thought the thing might be asleep, so I walked her through some wake-up rituals. I figured this would not help, because I was the last person to touch the machine, and I’d shut it down. But I had to suggest something, and I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, superstition is 90% of the hardware-repair game.

Needless to say, the iBook wasn’t sleeping, so we couldn’t wake it. But it wouldn’t turn on. The battery showed a full charge. And, the unit was plugged in.

I was beginning to worry. It’s hard to maintain one’s reputation as the neighborhood Mac expert after killing someone’s new iBook. I kept a confident tone in my voice — if superstition is 90% of the game, confidence is the other 10% — but the problem was that after having dealt with all varieties of weird hardware and software problems for most of my life, I’ve developed a sense for how serious a situation is, even if I’ve never seen the particular problem before. This one smelled wrong. I was afraid there would be a warranty claim in her immediate future.

Completely out of reasonable suggestions, I still had to say something, so I segued smoothly to an unreasonable suggestion. “Unplug the laptop,” I said, “remove the battery, and wait five minutes.” I could have added, and wave your arms in the air while dancing topless around the desk and making a sound like the horn on a 1947 Chrysler. Either process would be equally effective; I was making it up as I went along. “Then put in the battery and turn the machine on. Call me back if it doesn’t work.”

I knew the phone would ring in five minutes. But I didn’t expect to hear her say what she did: “It worked!” So, I don’t know, maybe I really am a computer expert. Anyway, the lesson here has nothing to do with being confident in the face of challenge, or having courage to proceed against difficult odds. The lesson, as far as I’m concerned, is never touch a friend’s computer.

Here’s my free advice for the day: befriend a gourmet.

We were invited to the City for a birthday celebration. The hosts have a serious talent in the kitchen, which we knew, so we’d prepared for this party by starving ourselves all day. Man oh man… what a spread. I ate everything in sight. I threw off the shackles of veganism, or really non-lacto-pescatarianism, with relish (and they probably put butter in the relish).

Their recipes come from a series of wondrous books. If you like to cook, or want to give a gift to someone who does (like me, for example), you can do no better than to check out the bound volumes of Cook’s Illustrated magazines. I don’t own any of these myself (but soon! but soon!) but my understanding is that the writers test countless variations of each recipe, publishing the one that works the best. And they explain why. If my friends’ results are any indication, these recipes are exceptional.

After upgrading to Jaguar, my TiBook refused to mount my workstation’s disks. The error message was a lot less than helpful: “Connecting to afp://… An error has occurred (error = -1028).”

I couldn’t mount the TiBook from the desktop machine, either, because I’d made the unwise decision to format the laptop’s filesystem as UFS rather than HFS+, and OS9 (the desktop’s OS) won’t read UFS disks. This means I had two computers that wouldn’t talk to one another. Basically I was suffering from the inverse of Metcalf’s Law: the value of my home network had decreased in proportion to the square of the number of nodes that were refusing to join. Or, assigning values, 1² = 1.

While on hold with Apple’s tech support group, I poked more at the laptop, assuming that the solution was something simple. And, I soon found, it was: within the network prefs, I’d disabled AppleTalk by mistake. Re-enabling it made my network happy once again.

Still: lousy error message, no?