Chad Things

LA Riots Rock. I saw them last night at rickshaw stop in san francisco, and this DJ Duo kept us on our toes mashing it all up – punk, electro, rock, hip hop, booty bass – including a lot of annoying yet polished static (bring earplugs) to produce an incredibly energetic fun show (altho a fight between two drunk girls erupted around midnight). I also saw LA Riots when they opened for MSTRKRFT at Mighty on March 1, 2008, which obviously kicked ass. And the best part about last night – it was free, part of scion’s 20th CD sampler release party – the second one i’ve rocked here in SF. Read more on LA Riots, download MP3’s. Go Team.

Oh, and there was this one killer track last night that went something like “back it up” or “backup” .. I need a copy.  Ya feel me?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrTwg06FXe4

Did you know 1 out of 3 Americans is obese? 2 out of 3 are overweight? Yep, according to a 2007 CDC study. And according to a 2007 worldwide study, 40% of adults are overweight, with 25% being obese. Holy crap. More people are obese than underweight worldwide (WHO 2000). And don’t forget the childrens – 15% of those ages 6-19 are overweight according to 2000 CDC data, triple what it was in 1980 (more stats).

But how much do you have to weigh to be considered obese? Well, you are considered obese if you have a BMI greater than 30, and overweight if its greater than 25.

What is BMI? Body Mass Index. It’s the most popular, accurate way (heh, way, pun) to measure obesity (sort of). It’s a simple formula based on your weight (lbs or kg) and height (inches or meters). According to CDC, the BMI formula is 703 x (lbs) / (inches^2), or if you are from metric land, its just weight (kg) / [height (m)]². For me, I have a 23.7 BMI, thats 703 x 175 lbs / (72 inches)^2 = 23.7, or 79.4 kg / (1.83 meters)^2 = 23.7 in metric talk. Heres my BMI results from this BMI Calculator, which gives you a nice chart like this:

If you’re 20 years or older, its the same for men and women. Here’s a BMI Calculator for those under 20. If you ain’t feeling this math or the BMI thing, don’t worry – I crunched the numbers and made this reference chart.

Weight Chart, Over 20 years old

Notes:

I’m not sure I trust CDC entirely. This 2006 CDC study said no change in American obesity since 2003-2004. But by their own numbers, obesity went up 2% overall, almost a 7% increase (males up 7.1% from 31.1% to 33.3%, females up 6.3% from 33.2% to 35.3%). At that rate the number of obese people will more than double in 11 years. Yes, no-increase means double in 11 years. Hello? Is this the new Bush-Era Science?

You can avoid paypal fees entirely if you do these:

1. Setup personal account (not business)
2. Only receiving payments for Services. For the other types (eBay Items, Auction Non-eBay, and Goods-Other), there is a $500/month receive limit on personal accounts.
3. Notes about the person sending you money –
   • No fees if sender has enough money in paypal account to cover sending amount.
   • No fees if sender’s balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a US checking account
   • Yes fees if sender’s paypal balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a credit card – Paypal charges 4.9% + $0.30 USD, plus limited to only 5 of these per 12 months.

Sources (must be logged into paypal to view):
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_show-limits

I get lots of Parking tickets, and I’m happy to pay them when I’m at fault (altho it is hard to remember to move your car before street cleaning, or when your parking meter runs out of time, etc). But when I feel that I am wronged, I fight. Here’s my story:

• 2/2/2008 Had discussion with DPT agent regarding the red zone, no ticket issued to me.
• 3/30/2008 Received DPT citation mail date 3-27-2008, parking in red zone on 2/2/2008, $100 fine.
• 4/4/2008 Mailed certified letter dated 3/31/2008 contesting citation. Note: This was a request for an Administrative Review, as allowed by California Vehicle Code 40215.
• 4/20/2008 Received mail from DPT dated 4/11/2008 indicating request was too late, as per 40215
• 4/23/2008 Mailed certified letter dated 4/22/2008 saying 3/31 letter was not too late, within 14 days, as per 40215. Note that SFMTA gives “twenty-one (21) days from the mailing date of the first mailed notice of the citation, to protest.” (DPT Protest)
• more to come ..

DPT is the Department of Parking and Traffic, part of SFMTA, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the same wonderful people that bring us that always on-time, never broken, citywide coverage transportation organization called ‘MUNI’.

Now that i’ve had my iPhone a while, here’s some tips and tricks i can share.

• Get a case to protect your iPhone. Following most apple store employees, i bought Agent 18 eco-friendly.
• MegaPhone – mac application – see your call log, SMS/TXT log, iphone filesystem, read/write to iphone notes from your MAC, etc.
• Disk full? 8GB or 16GB iPhone actually has 2 filesystems, first is only 300MB and might fill up if you install lots of apps. In addition to moving /Applications to bigger partition, and chmod +s Installer, i did this
  cp -Rv /opt/iphone/lib /var/root/lib
rm -rf /opt/iphone/lib && ln -s /var/root/lib /opt/iphone/lib

• Geek? Dual Boot your iPhone
• Use iPhone’s internet on your laptop (slow, but useful in a pinch)

If you’re iPhone is freed/jailbroken, get these (best items first)

• fring – finally a found a google talk client (blog). Also does chat/IM with yahoo, aol, MSN, ICQ, Skype, Twitter, SIPwith others apps
• Productivity/WebSearch – shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
• Multimedia/MobileScrobbler – last.fm client – like internet radio, but need good wifi
• iLog – view details about missed/received/dialed calls (with call duration!), individual SMS, etc.

Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB – once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 – that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.

Here’s the deets:

1. Bought four 500GB drives for about $100 each,
2. Copy data from Terastation to one of the 500GB drives – mounted via USB on windows xp, could also work with IDE inside PC (4-6 hours)
3. Disassemble Terastation, pull out 250GB drives (<1 hour)
4. Copy data from 500GB to 2 of the 250GB drives on windows xp PC (6-8 hours)
5. Partial Reassemble Terrastation with 4 new drives (10 mins)
6. Upgrade Terastation firmware to 2.16 (had trouble with disk format till I did this)
7. Format each disk (5 mins) (had to reboot a couple times to get it to work)
8. Create Raid array 1 (RAID 5) using all 4 disks (2 mins), raid “checking” took 13 hours
9. Create shared folder
10. Copy data from the 2 250GB drives back to terastation.

More on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Terastation_FAQ

My last backpacking trip to Sykes was great, but my GPS watch ran out of juice after a second full-day of use. Sigh. I figure if I ever do any multi-day backpacking trips and want to record the GPS waypoints the whole time, i’m gonna need a way to recharge. Plus I like being green, so I looked into a solar panel charging device.

My goals for a device, most important ones first:

• Recharge my Garmin Forerunner 305
• Recharge my 5G iPod
• Recharge my iPhone
• Can’t break easily
• Lightweight, small
• Under $100
• Bonus: works with AC outlet and DC car cigarette lighter
• Bonus: work like my current iPhone AC to USB charger
• Bonus: minimal attachments

This roll-up solar charger looked cool – It can recharge a laptop – but was too big and expensive. Solio was pretty popular on the ol’ google search results, and they have 2 models that met my goals – the Solio Classic and the Solio Hybrid 1000. Looking at the tech specs, the classic has a bigger battery and more juice, but the 1000 is a bit more rugged, as this guy suggested. The H1000 doesn’t charge as well as the other Solio products, but I liked that it was the most durable and cheapest. We have a winner that meets all my goals. Watch video. I paid $74 including shipping/taxes at thenerds, and it arrived 2 days after I ordered it. I confirmed it worked as expected with my GPS watch, iPhone, and iPod. Hurray.

It’s on. Shayna and I are volunteering this Saturday 9am-1pm, it goes 2pm-2am, and tons of our friends will be going to south bay to check it out. But chad, what is it? Well, lets let Yuri’s Night Bay Area do the talking:

“Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration—and mankind’s curiosity, scientific ingenuity, technical achievements, and spirit of collaboration that have made it all possible. This year, NASA’s 50th anniversary, the Bay Area will be home to the largest Yuri’s Night celebration ever, with 8,000 people joining astronauts, artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians to pay tribute to our global space heritage and to celebrate how much more is out there to be discovered!”

Personally i’m going to have fun and listen to music – one of my favorite DJs ever, Tipper, will be playing a twilight set. But there will also be fun costumes, interesting art, fascinating science, and friends. What more could you want for a saturday? Buy your ticket now!

I just signed up for my first marathon – the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday, August 3, 2008. It seems only appropriate to run my first in my favorite city ever. I’m not sure how much real training I’ll do – I ran a half-marathon over thanksgiving, and that went well. So i figure i’ll stick to my hour runs 3 times a week, using my gps watch and heart monitor, with the occasional long run every now and then. If anybody else out there is running it, lemme know !!

My 2 years are up – I am now actively looking for a job. The last 2 years have been great, as planned. I’ve done lots of traveling in the US and around the world, I’ve spent time with family and friends, I’ve enjoyed music in many forms, got more into cooking, hiking, photography, green business, and tried new things. The only thing that didn’t happen that I wanted to happen when i quit my job in April 2006 was to “find myself”. That is, figure out what i wanted to do the rest of my life. But in a way, I did. I figured out I’m not the type to do some thing for the rest of my life – I’m the type to do many things. For instance, I loved traveling and want to do a lot more, but after 6 months around the world I wanted somthing else – I missed sinking my teeth into a project. I also figured out that I like challenges and learning more than I like any one specific field. So on that note, back to job search post …

Specifically, I’m looking for a job that will advance me towards my goal of learning more on the business side of things while harnassing my 10+ years experience in the internet architecture and computer engineering space. I still love programming and hacking, always will, but the last 3-4 years I’ve found myself reading more business articles, trying to understand why from the business perspective, looking at financials and how they motivate companies and affect global markets. I would love to get my feet wet in a job on that tip – either marketing, sales, business, or management, as long as I get to use my techie experience – and not compete with MBA’s fresh off the block. I’ve considered getting an MBA (when I researched Green Business), but I concluded it would be better to get a “transition job” – one that will teach me, pay me, and still let me use what I’ve learned so far in my career.

I welcome all suggestions. If you know any people or jobs that might be a good fit, email me – chad at chadnorwood dot com. For more info about working chad, check out my resume or my linkedin profile. Click on ‘About’ up top to learn more about me. Thanks for helping out!