My new diet plan: the 2/3 Carnivore system

 I have had a few health problems the past few months, including SIBO ... one of the ways of dealing with this is to reduce carbs by as much as you can stand ... I started with the Fast Tract diet, which has been helpful and started a 3-month experiment the first of December with the full Carnivore Diet ...

 

Since my wife wasn't interested in joining me on this, I wound up cooking ... which I discovered I don't like. I started by cooking burgers and steaks on our outdoor propane grill, but that required watching closely (so the burgers, especially, didn't catch on fire, but steaks too) ... frozen burgers (from Costco) take about 10 minutes on the propane grill, plus time for it to warm up and a bit of time for it to burn off the grease after the cooking is done. Steaks (the way I cook them) take 15 or 16 minutes on the grill.

I tried ButcherBox, but (a) one of their packages of bacon was bad, their frozen burgers were in one package so stuck together that I had to thaw them in the fridge first. And their burgers were about 6 times as expensive as Costco's.

So I quit Butcherbox and standardized on Costco frozen burgers with cheese. Costco got a D from some consumer organization on buying beef without checking on its antibiotic use. Shawn Baker says that antibiotics are out of the cattle's system at the time of slaughter ... but he's also an anti-vax advocate But their "grass fed" burgers, which I decided to trust, say "grass-fed, no antibiotics."

So I ate pretty much nothing but these frozen burgers with cheese ... and I got an air fryer for Christmas (actually Santa came early for this one). This cooks burgers in only 6 minutes, with maybe 2 minutes warm up.

So this was mostly my diet in December ... then:

My lovely wife couldn't stand the smell ... when in ketosis, my breath and body odor became intolerable to her ... one Redditor said the smell was akin to nail-polish remover.

So every third day now instead of my normal every day, instead of a Chomp and cheese or ham and cheese "breakfast" (really just a morning snack to get a little fat with my vitamin D) I have 

and ...

and, because bread turns to sugar and with SIBO that adds to my already too-great gas burden, I have this with my first bite:

Once a week my wife and I like to visit our favorite local restaurant. This coming week we're going on Wednesday, normally a Carnivore day on my new schedule but since I'd rather order something else at this place than "two burgers on a plate" I may reduce my Carnivore percentage for the month to 63% or so ...

Modern life is complex!

Best Internet Service Provider was NOT one I already had ...

 I posted last year about my T-mobile internet service and competitors I was considering. It turned out I was wrong; there was a better alternative out there ... it's pretty new on the market and I wasn't looking for it.

My problems with T-mobile got to be bad enough that I started looking seriously at alternatives. Basically the speed would drop from Very Fast to Just Barely several times during the day. Rebooting its router usually (but not always) helped. Also its DNS was continually overloaded/slow.

I looked again at Xfinity, and others ... finally I noticed ads on a new service from Verizon, which I had ditched for cell phone service in 2003 over late "you have voice mail" prompts ... but their new service for Internet looked worth a try: $50 bucks per month, just like T-mobile.

So I signed up (since voicemail wouldn't be involved this time), leaving my T-mobile router up at the same time.

The upshot: Verizon is better. In fact, it's been almost perfect ... I've just seen one five-second drop out when I happened to be watching one day, and it's plenty fast:

Wahoo!

Bye, T-mobile ....

Not any more! And I still have my Google Fi phone hotspot Just in Case.

At Southwest Airlines it’s still 1981 ... a story about technical debt

 Remember 1981?

One of the most advanced computers from 1981

The Internet was just coming to life at a few universities. The main communication tool we had back then was the (landline) telephone. These days the phones are mobile, but if the system is still from the 1980s or even the 1990s then phone calls are still the primary tool.

Southwest Airlines had its technical debt come home to roost last week, its brittle scheduling systems unable to cope with the bomb cyclone that scrambled air travel across the U.S. last week.

I have had the experience of being on hold for Way Too Long waiting to talk to an airline (or bank employee or medical scheduler) but the Southwest employees themselves have were left on hold for hours trying just to tell the management where they wound up.

This debacle is costing Southwest millions of dollars not to mention loss of an immeasurably valuable business asset they’ve built up over the years: loyalty and affection from the legions of satisfied customers they have had over the decades. Last week a lot of it went up in smoke:

How's your technical debt doing? This should keep some executives up at night ...

How to Be Less Bored in Retirement

I got back in touch this past week with a long-time friend (we'll call him "J" in this piece) from the technology industry, who admitted he was "bored" being retired for the last 4 years.

 Here are my suggestions:

Y Combinator

This is, of course, the famous startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. J was intimately and successfully involved with 6 or 8 startups during his career, so he's well qualified and would of interest to this organization, I'd think. Maybe to start a Seattle branch?

Makeover

This is a traditional method for making oneself feel different ... 

Take up a New Game

Golf

This a traditional retirement pastime ... its characteristics:

• It's expensive (not an issue for J)
• It's time-consuming (maybe just what one wants?)
• You get "variable reinforcement" ... the same stimulus that keeps rats running through mazes
• There's a handicap system that allows differing levels of ability to play together fairly
• It takes years of practice and play to become proficient
• A good book on golf is:
  
  
  

Poker

There are at least two classes of poker play:

• no limit and pot-limit
• low fixed limit

You can see examples of play of no-limit on YouTube, for example:

Much more tractable for a beginner: low-limit poker. The book you want in this case is

A place to try either type of game around Seattle is Fortune Poker in Renton.

Bridge

I learned bridge from my mom starting at about age 8. But the game is dominated by Old People, so the retired are well represented.

My two-question qualifying survey to find if you are interested in bridge:

• are you analytical? (A bonus for techies: there's an intentionally limited communications protocol as part of the game.) J places out of this one, having worked in tech industry for decades.
• are you competitive? If you will hit a tennis ball back and forth across the net for more than a few minutes without keeping score, this game is probably not for you. 

Bridge is:

• cheap -- only cost is deck of bridge cards (make sure to get bridge cards, not poker cards as you have to keep 13 in your hand for starts)
• sociable -- you play with a partner against at least one other pair

The downsides:

• the pandemic had a negative effect on in-person play; a couple of the local bridge clubs folded
• it takes years to become proficient (for most people)

To get started: ACBL 

Try a Non-Standard Charity

The one I'm most familiar with is this one:

There are certainly more examples around, but this is the one I know best

Tack Against the Culture

Cultural assumptions suffuse everything we do. But which ones of these are wrong?

I first read this book when it came out in 2015:

I found this fascinating! Like everyone else in America, I had been bombarded with the "red meat and saturated fat are bad for you" ... but this book, by a journalist who was assigned to cover restaurants found that (a) the meats and cream sauces and whatnot she tried were delicious ... and she lost a lot of weight. (She had been a vegetarian up to this point.)

It's a pretty dense book that makes the case: saturated fat is good for us. 

I had switched from margarine to butter in 1988, but I still had red meat in a different category until reading this. 

There's also a chapter on vegetable oils that I missed the first time until I saw this discussion on YouTube:

After I saw this, I tossed my (delicious) Costco (canola and/or sunflower oil) potato chips.

My wife and I are now engaged in a lobbying effort to try and persuade a local favorite restaurant to switch from these oils to butter, beef tallow, or one of the other saturated fat oils.

Another thing I think I've learned: carbohydrates in general and fiber in particular are unnecessary to the human diet:

I could be wrong about all of this, but it makes sense to me and the lobbying effort keeps life interesting.

Get a pandemic puppy

J, I don't know if you already have pets, but this could add an aspect to life that you've missed up to this point if not. You can tack against the culture with this one, too:

Or relax and go with the cultural mainstream:

That's It ...

I hope this was helpful to J and any other readers. Comments welcome!

The Best Internet Service is ... (the one I already have, plus my phone hotspot?)

 I am visiting my wife's family in SW Michigan; they have Xfinity (aka Comcast) internet service. Late evening Wednesday night I was up discussing books with my niece and tried my computer on the wifi network in their home.

I have been using the "speed test" that just comes up when you Google "speed test" to tell when my home (T-Mobile) needs a reboot, which sometimes it does once or twice a day. But I tried it on the Michigan Xfinity service and wow, 100 megabit download; 50 upload! Really fast DNS response (one of the problems with T-Mobile) ... I said to myself: I'm getting this when I get back to Seattle!

But! Then I tried it at "prime time" (6:30 pm local time) and it ... crawled. Oh, right: Comcast back end infrastructure is shared among all users ... and Comcast has apparently oversold it based on the back end equipment they have. I was trying to do a timesheet for my job, which I do online every Friday night. I couldn't get it to respond even at 10pm ...

I then looked at Astound (formerly Xwave) ... but their online reviews were terrible ... multiday outages way too often!

I finally resorted to my phone (a Google Pixel 6) hotspot, which peaks at about 10Mb/second, got done what I needed to do, and turned it off!

So: T-Mobile is not shared and plenty fast enough when it doesn't need to be rebooted (despite slow-ish DNS response sometimes) ... so I guess I'll stick with that, of course with my phone hotspot as backup.

 

All aboard for a cross-country train trip! (See if this is for you; I think I'll pass next time!)

 I took my first long sleeper-car train trip this past week, due to curiosity about it after seeing YouTube people going on about the subject:

First: my points of agreement with this gent:

1. The scenery is largely spectacular and difficult to get to any other way. I enjoyed the mountains and even spots I'd never seen like Napierville IL, a tidy farm community.
2. The food was better than I expected.
3. Having only one power outlet is inadequate; I took a power strip with me after seeing this video.

But!

Starting with the food ... I was on for 83 hours (Coast Starlight and California Zephyr) not just 52 like this gentleman, and though the food is pretty tasty, there's no way to customize it at all (not helpful for the restricted diet I'm on for these next few weeks)... and the menu is the same, I expect for months. To get anything different, you have to pay extra for the "canteen" on the bottom  level, which I didn't even visit until the last day to see where it was.

Also: no wifi anywhere on any of the three trains I was on, nor in Sacramento station ... only when I got to Union Station in Chicago was there wifi ... which blocked the VPN I needed, making it useless. I fired up the wifi hotspot on my phone that I had been using all across the country, but inside the building there at Union there wasn't enough signal to do a video meeting that I needed to do.

Back to the physical environment: I was also in a roomette, and found it challenging to sleep even without getting the bunk bed involved. The train rattles and shakes at high speeds on part of the track, and there are often train "whistles" (horns, really) at all hours ... I blocked some of this out with earplugs, white noise and a sleep mask. But there were other sources of noise in the room like two clothes hangers on the wall that *banged* every time the train jiggled until I finally took them down and separated them.

This made me think of a NOVA show from 2017  Why Trains Crash:

Basically the most common problem was the engineer not realizing what section of track he was currently on, and going too fast for conditions. The solution is Positive Train Control, where a computer limits the speed and has a GPS link knowing where the train is at all times.

It looks like PTC  is working everywhere now (hooray!) we survived despite speeds up to 89 MPH .

The bathrooms are very much like airplane bathrooms, with one notable exception: the indicators that say OCCUPIED are all broken (on the superliners -- not so on the "local" I took from Chicago to Kalamazoo).  So it was very common to somebody rattling on the handle trying to get in and my having to say loudly "I'm in here!" Not my favorite by half.

The Announcements come any time between 7am and 10pm (in whatever time zone and everything goes to everybody ... why have the "first call for breakfast" repeated to everybody already in the dining car? And there could/should be a way for individual controls to block all except the extremely relevant ones ("this is your stop coming up in 30 minutes") and ("the train is on fire -- head for the nearest exit!")

Currently somebody on staff has to let every individual know directly "your stop is coming up" 

during these "quiet hours" ... I presume the "quiet hours" would be suspended if the train caught fire.

The staff worked feverishly to keep everything running, respond to call buttons to change out the roomettes from "sleeping" to "sitting" and back. Two things about this:

• My sinuses are an indicator that things aren't as clean as they need to be. I had a sinus infection that kept going for years until I started changing the pillow cases every couple of days ... Anyway, they went off after a day and a half on Amtrak, and it struck me that these little roomettes are uncleanable with the time and technology available.
• It turns out to be very possible to lose items under the bed when it's converted from daytime "chair mode" ... I thought I had lost my toothbrush on the Coast Starlight when I changed in Sacramento, but it turned out that it had wriggled under the bed with a couple of other "where the heck is it?" items.

Speaking of changing trains: you don't have much time, and if the change does happen early a.m. or late night, everything could be pretty much closed, unlike major airports where there are always a few facilities open 24/7. In Sacramento the station itself was open, but the only restaurant didn't open until later in the morning... otherwise there were restrooms with a code number lock (no surprise) that the Even Older Guy than I am couldn't get right in three tries and the thing locked for 30 seconds or so before allowing a more nimble-fingered person to get us in. But then there didn't seem to be any water in either of the sinks. I used most of a bottle of water I had with me just to wash my hands. (I later saw another section of the large bathroom where the sink did have water.)

Also in Sacramento, I purchased another bottle of water from the vending machine before the ticket agent approached me to scan my ticket. She then printed me a new hunan-readable one to supplement the QR code one I had up to that point. She then invited me to the "reserved seating area" for sleeping cabin passengers only, where there were exciting facilities like salted peanuts and cookies and little bottles of water free for the taking. So I grabbed a package of peanuts for breakfast along with more water to take with my morning pills ... and finally found a place to charge my phone at a power strip where the water-chiller box was plugged in. Whee!

There was a sign saying "this area under video surveillance" so I later asked the guy behind the desk if could leave my stuff (50 pound suitcase, backpack with 3 laptops + iPad, another too-heavy bag with pill bottles and other stuff) and he said "sorry, that's at your own risk".  So I wrestled it all with me into the bathroom stall, on which trip I found the exciting other working sink.

Overall, not my thing ... but if it's looks like something you want to do, my suggestions:

• Spring for the private room instead of the "roomette" like I got ... you get a private bathroom with shower with this. +$400 or so from the roomette price
• Visit the canteen earlier than I did to see what other food options they had available

Otherwise: see you at the airport!

Cholesterol: how did the medical establishment get this so wrong?

1. The Cholesterol Myth 

I've been reading about cholesterol and the failure of the medical establishment to establish the links between cholesterol levels and the diseases they asserted that these levels caused, mainly heart disease ... since the late 1980's.

It turns out we've learned a lot since the article mentioned above was published, but nothing to change the basic conclusion. Recent research is in this book:

A useful shortcut to a marker of cardiovascular health is this ratio:

                            Triglycerides /

                             HDL cholesterol

Anything 2 or below is supposedly excellent; mine was 1.31 recently when I had these levels checked.

2. Statins: the "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist

Statins like the bestselling Lipitor are supposed to lower cholesterol, and I guess they do. But what they don't do is prolong longevity, and they come with a whole host of side effects including muscle weakness / pain, digestive issues and others ...

3. Saturated fat: there's no evidence it's harmful

The book on this one is:

The author is Ms. Nina Teicholz. This one is also well worth reading.

Perhaps over your favorite breakfast?