gwax's rumblings

I am not a reli­gious man but I have found, at times, that peri­ods of abstinence/asceticism can be good for one’s body and spirit. Of course, as with any absti­nence reg­i­men, what one is abstain­ing from and the rea­sons for the under­tak­ing play a very large part in what one can get out of it.

This month marks the sec­ond time that I have under­taken a month of asceti­cism; the first hav­ing been March of 2009. Last time, I took a straight edge approach, abstain­ing from caf­feine, alco­hol, and all other psy­choac­tive sub­stances. This year, I am repeat­ing the same absten­tion of caf­feine, alco­hol, and drugs but adding high-fructose corn syrup.

As I men­tioned, I feel that the what and why or any ascetic reg­i­men plays a large part in what one gets from the expe­ri­ence. My first bout of asceti­cism, last year, was prompted by the feel­ing that my caf­feine con­sump­tion had reached unrea­son­able lev­els and, if the degree of caf­feine with­drawal that I went through at that time was any indi­ca­tion, I was cor­rect in my feel­ing. At the time, I decided that if I was going to go off caf­feine for a month, cold-turkey, I might as well do the same with any other mind-altering sub­stance. This time, my rea­son­ing is largely derived from the feel­ing of home­osta­sis obtained dur­ing my last run of asceti­cism. I am adding high-fructose corn syrup this time around because I am under the (mar­gin­ally sci­en­tific) impres­sion that high-fructose corn syrup is unhealthy to con­sume and do not nor­mally main­tain any level of aware­ness over its consumption.

As we’re near­ing the end of my first week of absten­tion, I can report on some of the specifics of the expe­ri­ence thus far:

• Caffeine — Oh, how I miss caf­feine; I am an addict and I crave my fix. Actually, as of today, I find myself crav­ing caf­feine far less than I did even yes­ter­day. Thankfully, this year, my caf­feine con­sump­tion was far lower before the under­tak­ing than last year. Last time, I had mon­strously intense migraines for nearly a week due to caf­feine with­drawal; this time, I had mod­er­ate migraines on day two (Sunday) but the major symp­toms had cleared by day three (Monday). Cravings, as I men­tioned, are sub­sid­ing and I hope to be back to base­line some­time next week.
• Alcohol — Abstaining from alco­hol is mostly a social nui­sance for me. I usu­ally drink socially, as is the case with a great many, if not all, of my friends. On its own giv­ing up alco­hol isn’t a huge deal but, when one’s absten­tion from caf­feine and high-fructose corn syrup means that you can’t even have “just a Coke,” things get annoy­ing. Abstaining from alco­hol also makes me aware of the fre­quency with which I will go to the fridge for some­thing to drink and grab a beer; this has largely been replaced by grab­bing a glass of milk or Ovaltine (thank­fully free of high-fructose corn syrup).
• Drugs — Not really a sub­stan­tive change, mostly here to round out the list and allow the clas­si­fi­ca­tion to be sim­pli­fied to psy­choac­tive sub­stances and high-fructose corn syrup for dis­cus­sion purposes.
• High fruc­tose corn-syrup — Fuck! This shit is in every­thing! High-fructose corn syrup is really hard to avoid; I’m sure that I’m miss­ing things that con­tain this stuff. I went into a gas sta­tion mart on Saturday to get a bev­er­age and the only things that I could find with­out caf­feine or high-fructose corn syrup were water, milk, and Diet Sprite. I didn’t put ketchup on my french fries at lunch today because ketchup con­tains high-fructose corn syrup. For Christ’s sake, they even put high-fructose corn syrup in Saltine’s. The addi­tion of high-fructose corn syrup to my absten­tion list is both mad­den­ing and some­what enlightening.

That’s where we’re at for now; I’ll keep you posted as the month goes on.

So as to be totally clear, , which is to say this is pretty much the three­est birth­day that I’m going to have until either ever or arguably 54 years from now. Three being my favorite num­ber, pre­sum­ably, makes today some­what note­wor­thy in a numero­log­i­cal sense. That is all.

A cou­ple months ago, I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes, specif­i­cally a pair of KSOs. I’ve been wear­ing the shoes pretty reg­u­larly and, to be entirely hon­est, they are prob­a­bly the most com­fort­able shoes that I have ever worn. The shoes don’t pro­vide sup­port in the way typ­i­cal shoes do so it takes some get­ting used to and rebuild­ing strength in mus­cles that have been under-utilized since child­hood. Once your feet get used to the FiveFingers, it becomes a truly fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence to redis­cover walk­ing, jog­ging, sprint­ing, and the like.

Additionally, recent research shows that bare­foot run­ning is low impact in a way that shod run­ning is not. Apparently, run­ning bare­foot changes your gait, which I can anec­do­tally confirm.

Worth not­ing, in the neg­a­tives col­umn, you can­not wear tra­di­tional socks with FiveFingers and they will start to smell if you wear them reg­u­larly with­out socks. FiveFingers shoes are machine wash­able, which is an option, or one can pur­chase toe socks from Injini (or oth­ers), which is the solu­tion that I’ve cho­sen. Sadly, the toe socks solu­tion is some­what expen­sive but, for me, I’m suf­fi­ciently hooked on my FiveFingers that it’s worth it to me.

I guess that we’ve fin­ished a decade and moved into a new one. On account of pre­dic­tions are fun, I’ll give you a few that are all but guar­an­teed to come true in the fol­low­ing decade:

• We’ll all get per­sonal jetpacks.
• Hoverboards will make it to market.
• Everyone will start dri­ving fly­ing cars.
• Jesus Christ will return to us.
• Skynet will be born.
• We will reach the singularity.

This is just a few of the won­der­ful things that are going to hap­pen within the next decade; I’m really look­ing for­ward to all the fun.

Happy new decade!

As I just recently sug­gested I might do, I have made a script for auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­at­ing color cycling ani­ma­tions of arbi­trary sizes and speeds.

The script can be used at: http://blog.gwax.com/files/rgbanim.php

The script accepts the para­me­ters height, width, and delay, so it can also be used in more inter­est­ing ways. Feel free to play around (if you crash it, let me know).

Ex.: http://blog.gwax.com/files/rgbanim.php?width=100&height=100&delay=7

Or, bet­ter still:

 - Width
 - Height
 - Delay

For the curi­ous amongst you, the rel­a­tively sim­ple code follows:

< ?php
if(isset($_GET['delay']) && is_numeric($_GET['delay']))
	$delay = max((int)$_GET['delay'], 1);
else
	$delay = 10;
 
if(isset($_GET['width']) && is_numeric($_GET['width']))
	$width = max(min((int)$_GET['width'], 1920), 1);
else
	$width = 320;
 
if(isset($_GET['height']) && is_numeric($_GET['height']))
	$height = max(min((int)$_GET['height'], 1080), 1);
else
	$height = 240;
 
$out = new Imagick();
$out->newImage($width, $height, '#FF0000', 'gif');
$out->setImageDelay($delay);
$out->newImage($width, $height, '#00FF00', 'gif');
$out->setImageDelay($delay);
$out->newImage($width, $height, '#0000FF', 'gif');
$out->setImageDelay($delay);
 
header('Content-type: image/gif');
echo $out->getImagesBlob();
?>

My pre­vi­ous arti­cle on Unsticking Stuck LCD Pixels hav­ing been rather a hit and hav­ing been asked for an alter­nate gif image, I fig­ured I should revisit the topic briefly.

The ani­mated gif images were cre­ated with ImageMagick. Having long since for­got­ten how I did it last time, I reac­quainted myself with ImageMagick and have devel­oped this lit­tle one liner:

convert -delay 20 -loop 0 -size 100x100 xc:#FF0000 xc:#00FF00 xc:#0000FF rgbanim.gif

This com­mand will gen­er­ate an ani­mated gif to use in attempt­ing to fix stuck pix­els. Key para­me­ters are:

Image size can be changed by chang­ing the size para­me­ter.
ex.: -size 640x480

Cycling speed can be var­ied by chang­ing the delay para­me­ter.
ex.: -delay 7

So, if my orig­i­nal images don’t serve your pur­poses, go grab a copy of ImageMagick and make one of your own. (If I feel ambi­tious, I might hack together a script to auto-generate these gif images)

UPDATE: Apparently, I was suf­fi­ciently ambi­tious.