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Friend Network Pr0n

So if you're a regular reader of this blog you'll know I love infoporn, especially when it's network maps. Facebook now has a couple applications that will traverse your sets of friends and see how they're interconnected, or produce Venn diagrams of them based o various attributes.
As you can imagine, I love this and would like to see linked-in offer this kind of functionality because raw multivariate data analysis is interesting, but well supported by big data analysis tools (like TIBCO Spotfire). Community network analysis tools that import from social networks are hard to come by. I'd also like to see the ability to generate some better graphs of my friend network ( like the facebook friend wheel, only in a 3d space where I could rotate it and move nodes to see how people are interrelated as well as add wighting for the quality of the connection like orkut used to allow. Then you could start to do some really interesting personal network re-engineering/planning.
Another interesting thought that came out of this, and discussions with my friend Nina, was a discussion of how facilitate connections between sparsely connected groups of friends, or attempt to prevent Worlds from Colliding! (said in exasperated jason alexander voice). These will have to be explored later and with more subtlety

De-Tox

I've been hearing a lot of people talk about all kinds of detox diets with all kinds of crazy stuff in them ranging from nothing but maple syrup to some olive oil lemon juice concoction. Whenever I come off a long stint of travel or a weekend of junkfood excess I do my own super reliable detox diet which I've decided to share cause it actually works and really isn't that tough to do. If you can keep on it for a couple weeks your colon and skin will love you, but the key is making your own food, and making it taste good otherwise you'll be off the diet in a flash


Here are the basic pieces

1. Hydrate, you have to drink a ton of water, minimum 3 liters a day ideally 4-5. You don't realize it but you get a lot of sodium in your diet regardless of how well you eat, especially when eating packaged foods. Drinking lots of water takes some strain off of your kidneys and liver since everything's more diluted
   
2. Get some exercise. A lot of detox can be assisted with good cardio health because your body works it's way through everything faster. It also helps your body regulate stress which can make the whole process easier
3. Manage your blood sugar. This means a lot of little things but the basics are don't eat refined sugars and starches because they cause your blood sugar to spike which is rough on your system. If you're going to have starchy or sugary things make sure you get some nuts or seeds or olive oil with them to slow down the sugar processing. Also eat many smaller meals over the course of the day instead of 3 bigs meals
4. Be nice to your kidneys and liver- avoid alcohol, caffeine, tylenol, kava, etc.
5. Eat fresh foods- most prepackaged food has been designed for taste and shelf life, not nutrition. Whenever possible go for raw fruit and veggie snacks over packaged ones and stay way way away from processed meats. Cooking your veggies is okay, but you're gonna want to lightly steam them if possible just to make sure you still get most of the vitamins
   
6. Eat clean proteins- chicken, fish, eggwhites, soy, are all excellent sources of protein.
   
7. get your fiber- leafy vegetables, fruit, bran cereal, undercooked oatmeal, etc.
8. Eat some bulk starch but stay away from the refined stuff. White rice and pasta are bad, and small boiled potatoes are borderline ( lots of skin, high water content), so brown rice, cracked wheat (tabouleh), quinoa, and whole wheat cous cous are the way to go
   
9. Misc extras: don't drink too much water with meals ( do it before or a couple hours after), avoid dairy and fried foods. Make sure to adequately season your food!!! lemon, salt, pepper, onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, chicken broth, fish stock, etc. All of these add a whole lotta flavor without making things bad for you, but remember with more salt you need to drink a lot of water
   

Example menus

breakfast:

• all bran with soy milk and apple slices
• eggwhites with spinach, onions, and mushrooms
  

midmorning snack:

1-2 pieces of fruit
home roasted almonds ( just toss em on a cookie sheet with no oil)
preservative free dried fruit

lunch:

• Salad with oil and vinegar dressing with grilled chicken or fish and fruit
• brown rice sushi (sad, I know but sushi homma has made a name doing it)
• Chicken Wrap on whole wheat tortilla/chapati
  

Afternoon snack:

Carrot/celery sticks, fruit, homemade jerky

Dinner:

• Steamed black cod w/ ginger
  wilted peasprouts with garlic
  brown rice
  
• sashimi
  raw tofu with ginger (go easy on the bonito flakes)
  cucumber sunomono
  
• Grilled chicken w/ a little rosemary and olive oil
  lightly steamed french green beans ( with salt pepper and a squeeze of lemon)
  boiled potatoes w salt a little fresh garlic and just a little olive oil

You get the idea. It's tricky to follow when going out with friends, but you can usually do okay by sticking to a salad with grilled chicken or fish. Eating at home gives you the option of customizing the meal to make it a little more interesting.

Internet stalking tools

I know this roundup has been done before, but I was amazed today how much things have moved past the usual goog, myspace, facebook, linked in search.

So hop on your browsers and check out spok, wink, pipl, zoominfo, wikiyou, and peek you. See all the content there is about you on the internet, and systematically destroy it. Now that my life has changed a little, I personally am considering reviving the MHP to protect my privacy and my identity.

Gadget bag revisited

So I may be back to posting occasionally rather than just dumping a photo on from my phone. I figured the best way to kick this off was dusting off what's in my gadget bag, since it's changed enough that I thought I might as well drop it on you again. There are some gems for the road warrior, that you might not have thought of.

• The laptop- still rockin the Thinkpad line, but the office saw fit to upgrade me to the t60 a while ago. I still haven't seen a laptop that's as good for the road warrior as the thinkpads are
  
• Biz phone- still with blackberry only now it's the 8310 GPS is a nice tough, but the trackball interface is not quite there
• Personal phone- I caved and bought an iphone, I still hate many things about it, but the N95 it's nearest competitor is too heavy and has worse battery life :(. I wasn't going to jail break it because I figured the SDk would drop faster, but I need to get me some mms, a bluetooth keyboard, and some copy and paste so I might be forced to
  
• 3G Internet- I went with the Sprint U727 usb modem cause the terms of service allow for rebroadcast ( cluch), it stores the drivers in the device, it can hold microSD cards, and it can be used by the next gadget in the list
• Cradlepoint PHS 300 -This thing is awesome, it's a battery powered wifi hotspot that can be used with my usb modem for dsl like speeds across my computer and iphone at once. The battery lasts for 2 hours of hard usage which is enough for most times
• APC usb battery pack- everything else on this list but the hotspot charges/runs off usb, so this thing is a no brainer easy to charge, easy to use. Better than the macally one because it has an LED indicator, major con is that to use it you have to hit a button every 15 mins to wake it up
• Sony Ebook reader- I bought it two days after it came out and it's still with me every trip. I've got a lot of free books loaded on the thing and when I'm caught somewhere it lets me catch up on some classics
• Creative portable speakers- still great when you wanna play some music or watch a movie on the laptop

You may have noticed I lost the camera from this list. I realized I don't really care about image quality and both my personal and work phones have acceptable cameras for capturing fun moments