From the page Hall of Fame: THE MAS TRIBUTE Gallery:

AT&T and MCI 7/21/96

Yes, the two largest long distance phone companies are worthy of the TRIBUTE award. Do they call me and ask me to switch over while I’m eating? Yes they do. Do they whine about all the savings I’m going to experience? Yes they do. But, they pay me way more money to “switch over” than I ever spend in long distance. Bless their hearts!

Last fall I moved to Tampa and started with MCI. AT&T called me up and said they would give me $40 to switch over. Sounds good to me, I don’t even make long distance calls. A few months later MCI calls and said we love you MAS and would like to give you $35 to come back. I said I love you too MCI and would be happy to come home.

A few months pass and then AT&T calls. They are concerned that they have lost my business and would like us to get off on a fresh start. Me too I echoed. How fresh of a start do you want? Would $40 be fair to you MAS? Give me a hug you big lug!

Not one to throw in the towel, MCI called me and let me know that maybe AT&T had tricked me with their confusing promises and maybe I wasn’t seeing the savings. Sounds horrible, what should little ‘ole MAS do? Accept this $25 to switch back to MCI. Thank you MCI for looking out for MAS and making sure I don’t get tricked in the future.

Well……….. AT&T it’s your move.

UPDATE! (7/26/96) – Just 1 week later AT&T calls up with a $15 check and free switch over. What a great country! 

UPDATE2! (8/9/96) – Opened the mail today and MCI had a check made out for $15 for me. Is that beautiful or what? They aren’t even wasting my time with a phone call any more. Just cut a check and send it, I’ll switch!

From the page Walk in Shame: THE MAS SLAM Gallery:

WMTX and WUSA 1980′s Mix shows 7/21/96

“I knew the music of the 1980′s, the music of the 1980′s was a friend of mine, and WMTX/WUSA your shows are not representative of the good music of the 1980′s.”

When I first heard WMTX do an all 1980′s show I was ecstatic. Here I was just 25 years old and already I was able to hear the sounds of “my day”. I always thought I would be 40 before I would hear a show dedicated to the sounds of 1980′s.

To say I that I’m let down would be an under estimate, to say I’m angry would be more accurate. These shows decided to take the “classic rock” attitude and just play just the top radio and video hits. Basically condense an entire decade into 50 or so songs that get heavy rotation. Sure, every now and then a little known gem may sneak through, but that is very rare.

Also, I’m tired of hearing these on the air requests. The 30 or so people that hear their voice on the radio may giggle with delight, but the 20,000 other listeners would prefer to stay on the dance floor than hear about how your doing nothing in Plant City tonight.

And another thing! Any club DJ understands that songs need to compliment each other. You don’t whip your listeners into a frenzy by playing Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell and then throw on Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl. Seems like common sense to me, but both of these shows are guilty of such crimes. Can these shows be saved? Yes, but they will need to follow the steps below:

Stop taking user requests on the air. If I want to hear listeners on a Friday night, I’ll switch over to Lassiter on the AM dial.

Give the DJ total power over the show. Trust me, the DJ’s know a lot more about music than we do, IT’S THEIR JOB. The mix will suddenly be unpredictable and exciting.

Eliminate any songs from a must-play-every-week-or-we-all-die list. We don’t need to hear Robert Palmers Addicted To Love every show, do we?

Different versions of popular songs. Why play the same vanilla version of every song when many songs have really cool remixes that most of us have never heard. Have you ever heard the extended mix to Cyndi Lauper’s She Bop?

Educate the listener. If the DJ plays some gem then tell the listeners who it was and when it came out. On the flip side, don’t break up a show to tell us that it was Michael Jackson that sang Billie Jean.

Make it a total 80′s show. Play TV and movie sound clips from the 80′s. Maybe even do a few “time capsule” news reports.

So, until these shows treat the 1980′s with the respect they deserve I hear by SLAM them!

I did write 4 Tributes and 3 Slams before July 21, 1996, but I don’t have a date for them.  They weren’t that good anyway.

The DC Medfly just flew in from the Tampa Bay area. While in Florida, the DC Medfly (then known as Critical MAS Tampa Bay’s Digital Informant) provided local information via radio scheduling and coffee house guides. The site also featured a few satire pages that poked fun at the South Tampa powerful, elderly drivers, and the un loveable Canadian tourists. The guides are gone, but the satire pages have been moved to this site for archival purposes.

Over time this site will present a more DC feel. Will a new radio guide appear? Maybe. Will a new coffee house guide be developed? Doubtful. Will the infamous Tributes & Slams get resurrected? No. New satire? Most certainly, but give me a few months to meet my new neighbors.

12 year old pixels.  Kind of feels like Antiques Roadshow for the internet. 

Well, two weeks ago I did it correctly.  Dill, garlic, sea salt and patience.  The result was much better tasting.  Some of the best pickles I have ever had.

If you are interested in learning more about making fermented foods, I recommend the book Wild Fermentation.  This book also has the foundation I started with when I began making kimchi.

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz

Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells is about the effects of civilization.  It wasn’t too heavy in the science.  The writing was very conversational and the topics were quite varied.  Although some of the reviewers didn’t like that, I did.   By not digging too much into the details, the author was able to express his own theories and opinions.

Most people that pay attention – even a little bit – to evolutionary nutrition know about how societies are getting fatter and less healthy.  Pandora’s Seed also goes into the mental health aspect.  As bad as things are physically, things are equally bad from a mental health aspect.

Pandora’s Seed is an excellent book that is also a quick read.  This is the type of writing I like in pop science.  I plan to read the author’s other book called The Journey of Man.

Instead of changing the layout, font or navigation for INeedCoffee, I am taking another approach.  I’m going to replace the boards that I see as rotten with brand new boards.  A little internal renovation.  There are several articles that make me cringe when I see them.  It is not as simple as just removing them either.  Many of these bad articles actually get decent traffic.  Redirects aren’t the cleanest solution.  I could rewrite a better article and then hope over time that the user finds the new one.  My experience with the french press articles on INeedCoffee tells me that doesn’t happen.  Google likes the oldest one best.

What to do?  My solution is to do a Reverse Indiana Jones.  Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy replaced the Golden Idol with a bag of sand?  I plan to go through INeedCoffee replacing the worst articles with better ones.  No links will break and hopefully the users will find an article that meets their needs better than the one being replaced.

What articles are candidates for replacing?

1. Anything that is a reprint.
2. Articles with embedded links to commercial sites.
3. Content that is poorly written or inaccurate.
4. Missing or terrible photos.

I’ve replaced four articles already.  I’ve got a lot more work to do.

Almost all weight training programs treat the human body like a butcher treats an animal.  Workouts are broken into muscle groups.  Do legs on Monday, Chest on Wednesday and Back on Friday.  Or something similar.  Now isolation movements make this more obvious, but even compound movements tend to be focused around muscle groups.  How does this fit in with an evolutionary model?

In the book, How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! author Paul Check takes a different approach.  The body has 7 Primal Movement Patterns.  He lists these as:

1. Squat
2. Lunge
3. Push
4. Pull
5. Bend
6. Twist
7. Gait (Walk, Jog, Run)

The exercises are then constructed based off that primal movement and not the muscle group.  I totally I missed the importance of this distinction on the first read.  It is possible to do a classic muscle group workout without engaging all the primal movements. For example, I injured myself on both the squat and dead-lift, so I have figured out alternate exercises for my legs and back.  The problem is I no longer do the SQUAT or BEND Primal Movements.  And I don’t think I’ve ever done any exercises for the TWIST movement.  The result is I’ve gotten A LOT stronger on movements such as PULL (pull-ups, 1-arm rows) at the expense of other movements. That’s a problem.

I don’t think I am alone.  We tend to do more of the things we are good at and as a result we get better in the things we are already good at.  The downside is we shy away from the movements we are weak at and the result is fragility builds up over time.  Once I started getting good at pull-ups, I did fewer bending exercises.   Now I’ve built up such an imbalance that is easier for me to do a set of weighted pull-ups than bend down to put dishes away on the bottom shelf.  Not good.

My goal now is to focus more on the movement and less on the muscle group.  This week I started doing TWIST exercises using cables.  Next week I’ll add in some BEND work and the week after I’ll go back to SQUAT.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Primal Body-Primal Mind: Empower Your Total Health The Way Evolution Intended (…And Didn’t) by Nora Teresa Gedgaudas is another great book on nutrition.  As I continue reading more about this topic, I find that I’m being exposed to less new information.  One thing this book helped me focus on was the possibility that I had some level of adrenal fatigue.

For the past 20 years, I have consumed on average 4-5 coffees a day.  In recent years, it has been espresso.  Before that is was mostly french press.  Primal Body – Primal Mind alerted me to the fact that I was actually craving stimulates in a way that some people crave sweets and this could be negatively affecting my leptin, cortisol and even insulin levels.  To test the theory, I decided to cut back on my coffee intake.  I contacted the author and she suggested taking the amino acid L-Tyrosine on an empty stomach to help.  It has helped.  My coffee intake is down considerably, but more importantly I am losing my craving for the stimulate.

Every book on nutrition I read provides another piece of understanding to the puzzle.  For me this book showed me how my love for coffee could be affecting my leptin and cortisol hormones.  I’ve cut back on coffee in the past, but I usually did it much faster and I never established a “new normal“.  I just felt bad until the detox was over and then I resumed coffee loading.  This time I am taking it much slower and allowing my adrenals time to heal.

If you are interested in reading an excellent nutrition book, check out Primal Body – Primal Mind.

Larger version of bee photo

Photo taken on the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry.

Irrational Exuberance by Shiller, Robert J.  – This is still one of the greatest books ever written on investor psychology.  Highly recommended.

I was told by many people that:

1. Real Estate never falls in value.
2. Once you sell in California, you are forever priced out.
3. I was making a mistake.

Well the house sold in early 2006 and I escaped to the rental market where I have been ever since.  We all know what happened next.  Real estate prices fell hard.  However, up until yesterday I did not have a hard number to tell me what would have happened to me personally had I not sold my home.

My old house was sold in February 2010 for $200,000 LESS than what I sold it for in 2006.  And this is after the new owner put $100,000 of upgrades into the home, including a swimming pool.

On March 9, 2006 in the post Won the Lottery, I said this:

Yesterday, I received the money for the sale of that house. It was A LOT of money. The amount of profit was insane. I am another winner in the California home seller lottery. The reason I’m a winner is because I’m not buying another home. More on that topic in another post.

Well that “another post” I referenced 4 years ago is today.   The reason I didn’t buy another another home is because I believed a price collapse was coming.  Prices did collapse and I got away clean.  Vindication.