Broken Home for Lost Passwords

Lightscoop and the Nikon D40

Let’s be real. A lot of people take pictures in their apartments/homes with pretty crappy lighting, often while sitting on their couch. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get really good pictures this way. The colors are too dark; the image is too grainy; the flash pops up and blasts away. But you can still take good pictures for cheap. You can use the Lightscoop—or just hold a hand-held mirror at a 45-degree angle in front of your flash.  

The simplest way I’ve found to take indoor shots with the Lightscoop and the Nikon D40 is to, using P-mode, just set the exposure to +2.0. (This is with the standard D40 lens.) You can set this by pressing the “info” button (next to the on/off switch), pressing the “i”/magnifying glass button, selecting the +/- option (to the right of the flash compensation option), the setting the exposure to +2.0.

In the photo above, the P-mode set my shot to 1/60 at f4.5. ISO 800. 

Other quick tip:  In your Custom Setting Menu (the pencil menu), go to option 10 - ISO Auto. Set it to ON. And set Max. sensitivity to 1600 and Min. shutter speed to 1/4. This gives you a lot of flexibility in indoor, low-light situations.

Dreamhost E-mail Retention "Policy"

I use Dreamhost. I’m actually someone who really likes them. I was just wondering, do they have an e-mail retention policy?

Not really. But they have an e-mail backup system. Basically, your e-mail is backed up, but only accessible two weeks in the past.

If you access your Dreamhost account via UNIX/SSH, in your home directory “cd .snapshot”—”.snapshot” is a hidden directory. You can’t see it with an “ls -al.”

In .snapshot, you’ll see these directories:

hourly.0/  hourly.1/  nightly.0/  nightly.1/  weekly.0/  weekly.1/

“weekly.1” will be a backup of your account from two weeks ago. In there, there’s a directory “Maildir”. Maildir is a backup of all your e-mail at that point in time, i.e., two weeks ago.

Therefore, if you’re worried about e-mail retention, Dreamhost only keeps a snapshot of your e-mail from two weeks ago. If you’re looking to recover e-mail that you’ve deleted, you’ve only got a two week window. If you *want* your e-mail to disappear, then you have to age it for two weeks after deleting it for it to be *gone*. 

Using Sugar to Keep Flowers Fresh

Never knew this. If you add some sugar and some vinegar to the water in your flower vase, your flowers should last longer. See 10 Extraordinary Uses for Sugar. Apparently the sugar “nourishes” the stems and the vinegar kills the mold and bacteria that develops around them, the stuff that makes the stems and water gooky.

(If you follow the link, the tip about using sugar as a hand cleaner sounds crappy. Sugar as an abrasive? Just use salt. Less sticky. And then the one about using sugar to keep biscuits fresh? If it absorbs moisture, just use baking soda. Or paper. Then, no sticky residue. The things people do to make ten tips instead of eight.)

Mangosteen

Last time I was in Thailand, I couldn’t get enough mangosteen. It’s sweet, slightly citrusy, and melts in your mouth at its ripest. I have never seen it in the US—apparently the US has only recently allowed importation of the fruit. But until I find them domestically, I will satiate my thirst with these memories of this amazing fruit.

Tips to More Effective Underlining/Highlighting While Studying

(An example of a bit of underlining overload.) 

When studying, it helps to underline while you read. But you *can* make your underlining more productive. 

(1) Try to limit underlining to once or twice per paragraph. Underlining (1) highlights the important part of a paragraph for later reference and (2) is a visual and physical cue to your brain, as your reading it, of the importance of the phrase. This latter step is an active learning process—you read more carefully when you focus on it actively. 

(2) Try underlining application statements—not just thesis statements. Though it’s tempting to point out the thesis/topic statement of a paragraph, often these aren’t the most useful. The most useful to learners can often be the real-world examples.

For example, which is more helpful for understanding: 

1. A valuable part of education is the behavioral component of socialization.
2. When Johnny spends time in school, he learns by interacting with other students.

The thesis sentence does summarize the author’s point. But the application makes an image concrete in your head. It often uses the active voice and produces a more vivid memory. And it shows rather than tells. 

Also note that sometimes authors have to craft their thesis sentences after the fact to summarize what they’ve already said—the “tell what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you’ve said” approach to writing. So, even in the writing process, the application is often more important than the stated thesis.

(3) Use more visual cues in your highlighting—boxes and asterisks. I underline phrases, but I box key words. Underlining highlights the key take-homes in a paragraph, but boxed key words often summarize key concepts for the entire document. I use asterisks in the margins if I find a key concept for a whole section (more than one page). If I’m doing a quick skim, then I can scan the boxed key words and asterisked sections for a refresher. 

(4) Use a fine-tipped pencil or pen—step away from highlighters. Many people prefer color-coding systems with highlighters or pens, or use dark, heavy lines for underlining. I feel that these detract from the overall text and sometimes are harder to read in the end. Fine-tipped underlining—even a more subtle pencil rather than a bold pen—allows you to spot out the highlighted text *in the context* of each section. You can easily scan a document and pick out the highlights, but it’s not so garish as to blanch out the rest of the words.  

(5) Be selective rather than expansive—edit the text while you read it. If you think like an editor while you’re reading, you’ll engage in a deeper process of understanding what the author is trying to say. Authors spend a lot of time filling pages and defending their arguments—when you’re reading to study, you’ve often already “bought” what the author is trying to say, and you’re just trying to figure out what he’s trying to say during finer points of his argument. If you think like an editor—someone who’s also already “bought” the author’s arguments—you’re just looking to trim out the fat and get to the point, a process that values selectivity over expansiveness. 

Haha, I just realized that even while I wrote the bullet points for each tip, I practiced what I preached. I wrote topic sentences, but added application tips. I used asterisks—which on the web, are like subtle highlighting cues. I even spent a lot of time bolstering my arguments—filling space needlessly, perhaps—whereas anyone reading this will probably just look to the bolded statements and call it a day! Well, I won’t waste any more time and skip any repetitive conclusion, and just wish everyone good luck with their studying!

What is an Entrepreneur?

So in my first business school class—International Entrepreneurship—the professor opened discussion with the question, What is an “Entrepreneur?” The discussion focused on a few theories—most of them in conflict with my own understanding of entrepreneurship. Other students focused on innovation and technology, on increasing profits, and elevating entrepreneurship to the realm of big business.

I held—and still hold—that entrepreneurship is mostly this: Being your own boss. That’s the main thrust of entrepreneurship. An expanded definition: Being your own boss, with your own money, and taking on ultimate risk for your ultimate gain.

Let me explain. An entrepreneur decides that he (or she) wants to be his own boss. I don’t have to answer to anyone else but myself. This entails investing your own, personal capital into a venture. Because whose ass is on the line? Yours. Why is this not a problem? Because if you risk your ass—and mostly your ass—then all the gains at the end of the day are yours.

Many people in class spoke of “intrapreneurship”—a concept which is etymologically unsound, but we’ll take it as it is. You work for a big company, say, IBM, and your boss asks you to take over a product line. It’s all yours—figuratively speaking. You build your team. You make lots of money. It’s a huge success.

But, sorry, buddy, you’re not an entrepreneur. You see, you still have a boss. You were told to do this. You were *allowed* to do this. Whose capital did you use? The company’s. What happens if you fail? You get your old job back. And in the end, if you’re successful, if you go gangbusters? Well, here’s your paycheck. Equity? Well, you get your stock options in the big company, thank you very much.

That’s not entrepreneurship. When you’re an entrepreneur, you initially answer to no one. It’s all you. If you fail at the initial stage, you lose your job. Then, you get investment, and you’re still (mostly) your own boss, and because of that you retain a percentage ownership in your product. If you fail? You lose your job. If you succeed, you make money. And not just your hourly wage. You get your equity—the value of your idea plus your blood, sweat, and tears. If you’re lucky, you make a ton. If you’re not so lucky, you should still make a lot.

And innovation? Sure, there’s usually some involved. Technology? Probably, but it’s not necessarily with computers. Great ideas don’t need computers. They need entrepreneurs, and that’s all.  

My uncle went nearly 50-50 with my dad into a dry cleaning business. They put about $400K into it. They sold it for over $2M. They weren’t major innovators or technologists or geeks with laptops. Were they entrepreneurs? Damn skippy, they were. 

Entrepreneurship has a sexy ring to it. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur; everyone wants to be their own boss. But people slated for middle-management who want to foster their own entrepreneurial spirits? Come on. You’re just trendy hipsters trying to get a cool title to make yourself feel better for being someone else’s bitch. If I give you a lot of responsibility, the chance to build your own team, the freedom to make your own decisions, and capital to run a new idea? I call that “doing your job.” If you take all the responsibility, build your own team, make all your own decisions autonomously, and put in your own capital? You’re an entrepreneur then. 

[Soap box discarded.] 

In Defense of Food: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

I recently listened to the NPR Science Friday podcast with Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food. The book can be summed up with the tagline: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. Pretty simple.

Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine article on organic food and vegetarianism changed my life. In it, he made the argument that although our meat production industry is cruel and dangerous, we shouldn’t all become vegetarians because humans never evolved as vegetarians. Rather, we should seek out humanely raised meat products. They’re better, healthier, and more akin to what our bodies are evolved to eat.

Another interesting argument he made is that while the ideal pig would live in the wild, pigs have been so domesticated that they couldn’t survive in the wild. Therefore, be satisfied with organic, free-range, humanely raised pigs from farms. It’s OK. Eat them and be happy.

Before hearing of In Defense of Food, I often would make the somewhat-facetious argument that science has been able to distill the nutritive value of natural foods into the essential elements that we need to survive. Science could condense everything we need into a pill, and we’re better off for it. It’ll be free of impurities—no organic junk—sterile with nothing dangerous in it. Chemical and process should be more sterile—and safer—than dirty and natural. So if you think natural is better, then you’re imbuing something spiritual to the liquids and fibers that hold the nutrients together. You’re saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You give plants soul, and you want to eat that soul.

Pollan takes a different approach to this. He says that nutritionists have manipulated the industry where they attempt to convince the populace that reducing our food to pure nutrients is better for us. Maybe it’s true, but it’s a scientific/marketing decision and nothing based on experiment. Furthermore, you have to combine this with the risks of human manufacture, especially at a massive, industrial level. That’s where the super bugs and poisons leech in. When you suck out the nutrients and then inject them into processed food, you create an infested Frankenstein of food mush that’s much dirtier than anything nature creates.

So while natural foods might have “soul” and nutrients might be “good enough” for us, it’s the industrial system that produces this soulless, “good enough” product that will kill us in the end.

I can buy that for now. Though I still think that you should be able to reduce a zucchini down to everything that’s good for you and throw away everything that’s not, and overall you’ll get something that’s better for you then originally. 

Squidgy: unpleasantly damp; clammy

I’m reading an article on a recently discovered 1-ton rodent that once existed in South America, oh, about four million years ago. The article comforts the reader not to be fearful of its size, since it was probably a vegetarian: “Its small grinding teeth suggest it had only weak masticatory muscles for chewing food, and probably tucked into soft vegetation, fruit and squidgy aquatic plants in deltas.”

“Squidgy,” you say?

According to Answers.com (citing “Obscure Words,” which uses the Webster’s definition): 

Squidgy: unpleasantly damp; clammy.

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it this way:

Squidgy: soft and wet and changing shape easily when pressed

Very different definitions, if you ask me. One with clearly negative connotations, the latter less so. (My dictionary research stops here, as those were the two definitions I found on-line, for free.) 

I’m trying to imagine a squidgy aquatic plant. Maybe seaweed? Maybe a clump of algae? Or maybe most aquatic plants could be deemed “squidgy.”  

Interestingly, Urban Dictionary has a definition for “squidy pyapps,” which hosts this colorful definition:

Occurs the morning after a good lash on the wife beater (Stella Artois)and doner kebab. Confident crop dusting in the office is soon bought to a halt, when ones’ kex are suddenly and explosively filled with gelatinous clarts. 

About half of the nouns in that definition may be actual words. 

Advertising Fuels TV?

I’m watching 30 Rock on-line via NBC. And it just struck me as incredible that, if it weren’t for advertisers, who would pay for TV? This is incredible because I’m not wholly convinced that advertising actually works. Will a 30-second spot on TGIFridays convince me to go there? I suppose it does if I haven’t already vetted TGIFridays off my short-list of placed to ever eat. Maybe if I’ve never heard of it, then my interest would be piqued. 

Hm. Maybe I answered my own question there. To get brand recognition, you have to bombard the mainstream. Even if that means that 99% of the people will get repeated exposures—and 90-odd percent get over-exposed.  I suppose it just takes money—lots of money—to get that last 1%, and it’s worth it for the big advertisers to spend it for that last mile, that last speck of gold.

And thank God for that. Free TV for me!