The other day, just shy of two years later, my second generation Kindle failed. This one was rather goofy. When I first received my 2G Kindle, I noticed a little diagonal “scratch” on the 5-way button. Apparently, this was actually a hairline crack. After having the unit for just over a year, last week I pressed the button, and it fell apart into two pieces, making it very difficult to use, particularly when picking a book from the menu.

I called Amazon, and once again, they were quite helpful. Even though I was slightly out of warranty, they overnighted me a new 2G Kindle, and sent me a link for a pre-paid UPS label to send my broken one back.

Obviously, I’m still very happy with my Amazon customer service experiences, particularly as regarding the Kindle. As always, though, your mileage may vary.

Amazon Kindle E-Book Reader

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Nobody ever accused Ruhlman of not being passionate about cooking, but honestly people, if you don’t cook, you may be personally responsible for the end of civilization as we know it…

Also be sure to catch his blog post about this video here.

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Lately, I’ve been carrying around more bulk than I’m comfortable with, and it’s time to make a few changes. I’ve never eaten a lot, and while I don’t get a vast amount of exercise, I’m not getting any less than I usually do, so (as is typical for me) it was time to do a little investigation as to what’s going wrong.

Unfortunately, if you line up all of the nutritional experts in the world, they still point in all directions — and finding honesty (in this as much as anything) under all of the spin and agendas gets harder as information (and its evil cousins, disinformation, agenda-laden opinion, and information-like material) becomes easier to acquire.

So, what to do?

Well, first off, screw “absolute truth”. If it’s out there, it’s hiding. Instead, let’s work with the old Rich Bandler standby of “A useful model is one that works most of the time”. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be useful. I seem to have kind of stumbled upon one such model.

I’d read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma awhile back, and (having grown up in farm country during much of the lead-up to the situation he describes) it made a lot of sense to me.

More recently, I stumbled onto Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, and it made a great deal more sense — it had an explanation that seemed reasonable to me as to why “low carb” diets always seem to work, and (more importantly) why it seems like the more we focus on “low fat” diets, the fatter we get.

This model largely matches what you’ll find in Pollan’s In Defense of Food (or the much shorter straight to the point version of the recommendations from the preceding, Food Rules).

In short, where I’ve landed is the following set of general rules:

• Buy mostly ingredients
• Cook them myself
• Avoid processed foods and other food-like substances
• Favor protein over carbohydrates
• Avoid refined carbohydrates (white sugar, white flour, etc.) like the plague
• Eat the majority of my carbohydrates as breakfast
• Eat when I’m hungry, and don’t eat when I’m not

I’ve been doing this increasingly over the last month, and have lost about 20 lbs in the process, all without ever feeling “deprived”, or like I’m “dieting”, or noticeably increasing my exercise level.

So, there we go — useful model. If you want to argue about the reasoning behind it, take it up with Pollan and Taubes and the rest of them. As long as it’s working, I don’t see much reason to worry about it.

As a bonus, while I’ve always enjoyed cooking, I’ve been letting my kitchen geekery run wild here lately, and it’s something I’m interested enough in to blog about (which I obviously haven’t been much interested in doing lately), so expect to see more posts about cooking and kitchen gadgetry and the like.

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My favorite mashup of the week — also available as an MP3 from Bootie’s Top 10 for April 2009…
                 
                                                                       

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If you asked me what was the craziest thing that I thought the Welsh did with sheep, this wouldn’t even be in the top ten…
                 
                                                                       

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I was hungry, but maybe I’ll just find something to fix around here…
                 
                                                                       

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Would-be rocket scientist decides to bail off of a ski lift with nothing more than his awesome brain power and a snowboard.
                 
                                                                       

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Relatively smart and funny re-telling of Battlestar Galactica. Warning, contains spoilers, and is probably responsible for Freddy Mercury spinning in his grave at 33 1/3 RPM.
                                                           

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“Got it!”
“It was Darwin…..”
“In the Alley…..”
“With the Vending Machine!”
                                                                                   

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The Kaspersky anti-virus kitten — almost cute enough to make me want to run Windows again…
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
      
      
      

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