Daley Ponderings

Food Additives: Corn Syrup, Red #40, Aspartame, and Frozen Dairy Desserts

jondaley — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:27:30 -0500

The first blog post in a long time, I realize. And I won't make any promises about more frequent updates, etc.

I have found that I am writing on facebook more often, and reviewing products online (got a Kindle for Christmas, and so have been reading and reviewing on Amazon) and generally have less time for internet stuff anyway, so haven't been blogging anywhere near as much as we were before.

But, anyway... Today's topic: stuff food manufacturers put into food that wastes my time since I have to read the ingredient labels in the store.

We aren't that picky, really, I think. We try to avoid corn syrup, especially the high fructose kind. We generally pick brands that have less ingredients on the label, all else being equal, and we pay more for some items. I try to avoid foods that have unpronounceable ingredients. We try to avoid non-sugar sugars, and foods that have 5 different kinds of sugar to pretend that that sugar isn't the first ingredient. We try to not buy anything from Nestle or its subsidiaries.

I have been happy to see that bread manufacturers are starting to get the idea - some brands put on the front label: "No high fructose corn syrup" - that makes it easier and quicker to find.

We avoid most artificial sugars, and I've gotten better at realizing what the sneaky phrases that really mean "contain chemicals".

But, it is irritating to me when companies put chemicals in our food without any mention in any prominent place other than buried in the ingredient list.

I recently bought some candy for Heather that contained aspartame. I bought some cereal that I checked for sugar content, but didn't notice the aspartame. And then today, we found out that the so-called "100% juice" Langers brands actually isn't 100% juice, but has Red #40 in it. The dyes particularly annoy me as there isn't any reason to add them, and if there was a good reason to add it, there are perfectly good, natural ways of dying food. Presumably Red #40 is really, really cheap, and so food manufacturers use it to save on cost. I'd guess that food is a pretty low margin good, and so manufacturers look for anything they can do to make the food cheaper.

We used to buy Breyer's ice cream, but once I discovered that most of their "ice cream" can no longer be called ice cream, I got pretty fed up with the whole system. I figure my standards are higher than the FDA, and so if the FDA is forcing them to call it a "Frozen dairy dessert", it must be pretty bad. I bought a Whynter ice cream maker so we coudl make ice cream with a couple ingredients. We've really liked it, and make ice cream more than we used to, since it is so much easier than with our old ice cream maker (the main feature is that it comes with an air compressor, and so generates -22 degree temperatures and can cool the ice cream without any ice, salt, or planning ahead).

Interesting? Message From Microsoft

jondaley — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:03:35 -0500

I received a free "embedded" light from Microsoft a number of years ago. I put "embedded" in quotes, because I think it is funny that Microsoft considers a lightbulb connected to a USB power source an example of an embedded device. I guess I haven't looked that carefully, but I expect there to be two wires in the device, and so not all that exciting from an engineering perspective.

But, the other day I happened across the instructions for the unit (plug into a USB port, flick the switch) and noticed that there is a message on the back of the piece of paper, and I have no idea what it means. Anyone know?

Young Adult Fiction

jondaley — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:55:16 -0500

I was going to have Jonathan read this article about the status and progression of fiction, as he sometimes questions why we don't let him read or watch certain things, but then I decided the article itself was more than he needs to know right now.

Distributed Social Networks?

jondaley — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:00:25 -0500

I came across yet another version of a distributed social network, this one with hardware. FreedomBox Foundation is working on figuring out how to make tons of tiny little web servers that take out the centralized model. The New York Times has a decent article on explaining why Mark Zuckerburg having all of your information is a bad thing.

The introduction video on FreedomBox's site was a good non-technical description, and with graphics, for all of you who don't like to read that much... :)

It mentions diaspora, friendica and buddycloud. I'd heard of diaspora, and I have an account, but it doesn't interact with me very well. I glanced through buddycloud this morning, and didn't see anything particularly interesting. friendica emphasizes being able to interact with other current social networks, which is a good thing, since it is a hard thing to get people to switch.

I guess I should spend some time in figuring out how to install one of them and see if it is worth using. I've not been clear on how much you can customize the installations, and how hard it is to add features, etc. And how open the development really is, in terms of them wanting features from outside people, etc.

Mostly, I think the problem is that I want it just to work, and so I don't want to spend lots of my own time developing a system. Maybe I could work on figuring out if I could add plugins into LifeType to make it do some interesting things with the new social networks. LifeType 2.0 (if it ever comes out) started a couple years ago adding some social networking features, and so it might fit in well; I don' t know.

But, as facebook and google are increasingly unfriendly (Facebook announced they would no longer import notes, such as this one, starting in a couple weeks) I suppose their theory is that people will manually double post, or move to facebook only, or something like that. But, that is a pain, so I'll probably just stop posting to facebook.

Inflation of "Astronomical" Numbers

jondaley — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:51:04 -0500

A good quote from Linux Journal:

There are 100000000000 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical number, Now we should call them economical numbers. -- Richard Feynman

Firefighting

jondaley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:57:24 -0400

I don't think it has been said here, other than in small mentions here and there, that I joined our volunteer fire company in Middlesex Township a couple of months ago. I am not sure of the exact number of incidents that I've gone out on, but the number is probably around 8 or so, though most of them have been cancelled while enroute to the station, or after we got the truck out, etc. It is often that case that people report a "fire" or "possible fire" when it actually isn't, and the county dispatch systems often are setup to dispatch two stations whenever there is a fire, and so we'll get paged for a neighboring township, and then once a township chief gets to the location, sees that it isn't a big deal, and is either not anything, or can be handled without help, etc.

There were two calls in the last two days (which is more than normal, the average is somewhere around 10-15 a month; and I just found out that I missed another call yesterday while we were in Pittsburgh) where I was actually useful (as opposed to the first fire I went to where I was told to, "stay with the truck", and so we (myself and a junior, defined as under 18, no matter the level of experience) just sat around and directed some other fire company's trucks where to park.

Yesterday's call was a vehicle accident who collided into the back of a bus that was stopped. The skid marks were pretty long, so he was probably going pretty fast. Though, I have no idea why the bus company thinks it is a good idea to have their bus stop (apparently every day, some sort of commuter bus) blocking a lane and have the people cross over the 5 lanes of traffic to get on the bus. I gather that the accident happened because a second car stopped next to the bus to let the people cross. I put the oil-dry/kitty litter or whatever it is on the ground where the vehicle's oil and coolant, etc. were leaking out. I picked up various bits of metal and plastic and helped direct traffic a bit (people pay a lot more attention to someone wearing fire clothes than without - I tried to direct traffic around a huge vehicle accident the other day, and some people got really upset at me holding up traffic (at a light) giving directions to folks. I hope that they finally realized what was going on when they sat in traffic for an hour, and maybe next time won't be so upset...)

Today's call was a fire in someone's yard, lots of dry grass at ~97 degrees in the sun. So, the other guys let me do the spraying and the chief gave me instructions about where to spray. It was pretty hot, and hopefully I'll get the summer clothes soon - right now I just have the full suit, which is really hot, even when inside an air-conditioned building, and I imagine really hot when inside a building on fire.

I went to my first fire class last weekend, and was joined by a bunch of kids, though there were a couple people my age, and a good number of people in between "kid-age" and myself. It was pretty fun, and I did learn some things - the SCBA (like SCUBA, without the U, which we would have been glad for) appartus class was informative, though I was paired with the least knowledgeable instructor, so she couldn't answer any of my questions. I can finally tie a bowline knot - that was a knot I never mastered in scouts. I'm not sure if it is because I am now smarter than I was 25 years ago, or if the instructor simply explained it better - I think it might simply be a different way of explaining it. We learned some good ways of lifting up various items (axes, big heavy pieces of equipment, pike poles, etc.) using some knots and lifting methods, and that was useful. The class was split up into groups, with a chief randomly assigned. Our chief did better as the weekend went on, so I'm sure he learned some things too. We got made fun of a number of times, "fire fighting is all about being made fun of", primarily for not keeping our group together, so we did eventually learn that lesson. I also learned a couple tricks about putting up a ladder against a building by myself. I didn't learn anything at the hose class, that my company hadn't taught me a couple weeks ago at a dry hydrant training, and I received one bit of misinformation that is widely believed in firefighting circles. When spraying water on a fire, you should rotate the nozzle clockwise. Why? Because of the coriolis effect. If you go counter-clockwise, it will suck the fire and smoke towards you. And in the southern hemisphere you would go counter-clockwise. I was sure the instructors were pulling our legs, but they insisted it was true. I searched around on the internet, and can find some people claiming that to be true, and one analysis where they try to figure out what is really happening, and if it really happens. And Heather and I discussed it for a while, and decided that it couldn't possibly be true, because if it did matter, you would have different rotations based on what direction you were spraying, and not only which hemisphere you were standing.

Apparently, it is now on a firefighter test though I wonder if only the clockwise part is on there, and not the reason why. I asked my guys, and one guy didn't know anything about it, and another, more knowledgeable guy, said yes, you do go clockwise, but the reason is that the fog nozzles (nozzles that can switch between straight stream, and different shower types) have a rotating piece in them that changes the direction of the water and air flow, and he says it will suck and blow the smoke depending on which way you rotate. He asked me today if I tried it out on the grass fire, but there wasn't enough smoke to test the theory.

There was a lot of wasted time, and I wish there was a better way to organize the class. It is called "Introduction to Basic Firemanship", so arguably, it should be a basic class, but it would probably be good if the group could be split, or give more direction to allow people who understand stuff to help other students, rather than force the more advanced students to crawl along.

The Red Cross was there with a therapy dog, and they asked to take my picture with the dog, and I signed a photo-release document, so I might show up in some Red Cross literature somewhere, which would be kind of fun.

My department gave me a new suit, as opposed to most of the students, who had gotten people's old stuff, and didn't fit, etc. so that made Middlesex look pretty good. My chief said my clothes are too shiny, and I made some effort to get them dirtied up, but didn't succeed very well.

Old Hard Drives from Amazon and Newegg

jondaley — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:39:32 -0400

I bought 6 Seagate hard drives from Amazon and Newegg, and both companies sent me drives that already had half their warranty expired.

Amazon, after waiting for the customer support guy to handle 5 simultaneous chat sessions, and so was quite slow at responding, did send out a mailing label with no restocking fee.

Newegg took a half hour on hold before they answered, and initially said that there is a 3 year warranty. I pointed out that there was only two years left on the warranty, so even if it were true that Seagate only offered a three warranty (which they don't - they have 5 year warranties on their drives currently), this drive is still partially expired. She then said that she could not accept a return because, "Unfortunately, we are unable to make the changes since the warranty was provided by the manufacture directly." I asked if she was authorized to refuse a warranty claim and she said she would be sending an RMA form shortly. She did, after request, provide a return shipping label and removed the restocking fee.

While on hold with the online chat folks, I called Seagate on the phone, and after waiting maybe 5 minutes on hold, got an English speaking person who offered to send out an email where I can take a picture of my invoice, with the appropriate serial numbers, and said that "usually, not always" they would update the warranty date.

She said that often vendors keep the items on the shelf and sell them with expired warranties. So - now I know to always check the warranty right when I get it.

It's irritating that companies sell old devices without mentioning that on their product specifications page.

Work Year End Update

jondaley — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:40:47 -0500

Heather asked me to give her the monthly time logs for invoices today, so I took the opportunity to run my brand new script that shows how I've spent my time over the entire year.

I averaged:

13.7 hours a week on directly billable work

7.6 hours a week on maintaining the company, phone systems, servers and any time spent at our rental house

1.1 hours a week on LifeType

8.1 hours a week checking facebook and blogs and also email (lots of which is work related, but I don't differentiate between work and personal email, and I don't get paid for anyway)

I think I've been spending more time on blogs and facebook lately, so I was interested in those numbers specifically - each of those categories come in around an hour and a half per week.

I've had a lot of directly billable work this year, and our income reflects that. I am not sure if all of that income will continue into next year. 29% of that billable income came from individuals, and another 10% came from companies that had more one-time projects in nature than on-going projects.

I am pretty happy with the "maintenance" number; it shows that I can keep the company going with 13 hours or work a week (counting all email time as "work"). And the directly billable percentage (45%) is great!

Minivan: Oldsmobile Silhouette

jondaley — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:41:25 -0500

We bought a "new" minivan last year, and it had the lowest mileage, and highest cost of any car we've owned so far. It is a 1997 Oldsmobile Silhouette, and it had 107,000 miles on it. We did a lot of driving (I hit 135,000 today, after a year and a half). Heather and I both take one trip to Pittsburgh each week, and we took a lot of vacation trips this year.

It has been a pretty expensive car to maintain, and it is not in the best shape, so I've been looking to sell it, and get a new van. However, the Cash For Clunkers program has apparently messed with the used car market, and so the sort of cars I would normally look for are much harder to find. Though, I am a little mystified by the lack of minivans, since they get more than 18 mpg, and unless someone is replacing a minivan with a tiny car that gets more than 28 mpg (which we have one friend that did that), they shouldn't have been able to trade an old minivan for a new minivan.

The best prospect right now is a used minivan from Enterprise, which I originally was thinking was a great deal, but we finally figured out what the CarFax report was trying to tell us, that the car wasn't a rental vehicle ever, but had two owners, the second of which traded it in to Enterprise when they bought a newer car. The first owner always (or at least regularly, for every oil change, etc) brought it to the dealership, so there are good records during the first 30,000 miles. The second owner did not, so the next 35,000 miles are less clear. It is a 2005 Chrysler Town and Country, listed at $9,000, and Enterprise should give us at least $2,500 for our current van.

We paid -$700, $1500 and $2100 for our first three cars (after a rebate from our credit card), so this will be our most expensive car yet, and since we just bought our current car last year, we've only saved up $500 in rebates on the credit card). But, I've resigned myself to the fact that our next van will likely be in the $6,000 range, unless we get something more than ten years old, and everything I've seen so far has either been in pretty bad shape, or else still in the $4,500 to $5,000 range, and so it seems worth a couple thousand to get a car that is 7 years newer and 50,000 less miles on it.

There are lots of nice looking minivans in the $12,000 and $18,000 range, but that seems pretty crazy to me.

The only downside (so far) to the Enterprise car is that I suspect there might be a problem with it, because it has been taking a long time for them to "certify" it, they have internal mechanics that check out the cars before they sell them, and that process is only supposed to take a couple days. One guy is on vacation, so that might explain part of the hold-up, but we'll see how it goes.

Woodstove Update

jondaley — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:28:22 -0500

Since we're now into the second year of using the woodstove, I thought I would post an update about it.

I bought five cords of wood this year, (we bought around four and a half last year, and used around three). I got around one cord of black locust each year, and that wood is really nice for long burn times. I think we've spent somewhere around $1300 on wood, and I expect (hoping at least, we've been using almost no gas heat so far, so we've been burning more wood than I originally estimated) that this wood will last into next year.

Our gas bill has dropped to almost nothing this year (November's bill was $30, which is a little higher than it is in the summer, since we use gas for cooking and hot water - our oven is inefficient, and I'm trying to decide whether to simply replace the burner, which might entirely fix the problem, or get a new oven). Last year we used a little more gas than this year, but given that our gas bill is usually $1500 for the year, I figure the woodstove saves around $500 a year, and it is nice having a nice toasty fireplace to sit in front of - I do most of my work in front of it, though sometimes I go to the "computer room" when I need to work on that computer.

The boys still love sleeping in front of the fire (though the allure of new bunk beds from the Weavers kept them upstairs for a week or so)

We have the wood stacked under the tree in the front yard, and we can fit a surprising amount (over six cords) under the tree - I have sixteen foot rows that are around six to seven feet high. My job is to bring the wood to the porch every couple days, and the boys stack it in a rack, and then bring wood to the living room each morning. They mostly enjoy that job, though occasional dawdle so much with the door open that it makes me wonder whether we are losing more heat than the wood that they are carrying in will produce... This morning they decided to try to get all of the wood on the porch inside, and so brought in probably twice the amount that they usually do, but they stacked it very nicely, so I am not worried about it falling over, which is sometimes an issue.

The rest of the house is a little cooler than it would be with the gas on, but we basically close off the guest room, and try to use the dining and living rooms as much as possible. The upstairs doesn't get heat with either the gas or wood, mostly due to not having any insulation, and since it is a finished attic, I am not sure how much can really be done to it now. I have been wondering how much the blow-in insulation for the walls costs, and that might be worth looking into at some point.