401(k) - Roth vs. Traditional Smackdown

Our company will be offering a Roth 401(k) option starting in February. While trying to decide what to do with my personal money - choose the traditional 401(k) or switch over to the Roth, I've been looking for 'calculators' that will allow me to play with various scenarios.

The search has been futile - the few that I have seen are really too basic to help make a decision.

So I built my own spreadsheet in Excel to help decide.

The big think lacking in most calculators is this: The Roth costs real money up front - in taxes. In my way of thinking the fairest way to calculate a true comparison would be to take the extra money that the Roth costs, and add that to the traditional 401(k) - as a 'side' investment account. The gains would be taxable, probably at divident or capital gains rates. This evens the playing field quite a bit.

You can download my spreadsheet calculator here.

Comments or criticisms welcomed!

Wash Clothes Without Water

Researchers at Singapore's National University have developed a prototype clothes washer that uses puffs of air containing negative ions.

The ions cause dirt and dust to clump and be carried away by the air. The benefits seem great: No dryer needed, sensitive fabrics that normally must be dry-cleaned can be "washed" at home, and of course no scarce water is used and polluted with soap.

Keep your eyes open for this one...

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17965878^11869,00.html

Wired Mag: 10 Best Geek Gatherings in North America

1. Rocket Racing League Inaugural Event
Las Cruces, New Mexico, October 21-22
Think Nascar - but 5,000 feet off the ground and with rocket engines. The new racing series, from the founders of the X Prize, has pilots navigating GPS-created aerial routes at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour.
Las Cruces is a place we are considering for retirement - this just bumped it up a notch...

2. World Championship Punkin Chunkin
Millsboro, Delaware, November 3-5
Every year, 45,000 spectators gather to watch competitors hurl pumpkins for distance. Categories include air cannon, trebuchet, centrifugal toss, and catapult. The longest shots travel a gourd-splattering mile.

3. LDRS 25
Amarillo, Texas, June 29-July 4
LDRS - short for Large Dangerous Rocket Ships - celebrates its silver anniversary. Keep your eyes on the skies (and be prepared to take cover) as amateur rocket builders launch hundreds of massive, high-powered, extremely volatile model missiles.

4. Trinity Site, White Sands Missile Range
White Sands, New Mexico, April 1 and October 7
Twice a year (the first Saturdays in April and October) the US government opens the birthplace of the atomic bomb to visitors. Slip deep into the secure confines of a missile range to see where the end began.
New Mexico is cool - we drove past this site not too long ago, and also Los Alamos Labs...

5. The Montreal International Fireworks Competition
Montreal, Quebec, June and July
Join nearly 3 million fireworks enthusiasts at Canada's premier pyrotechnics contest. Ten of the world's greatest explosion makers will compete in the ultimate­ show of decorative blasts set to music.

6. Jet Propulsion Laboratory Open House
Pasadena, California, May 20-21
Chat up JPL scientists and engineers at Nasa's party for the public - the only time the masses are let inside the gates.

7. The 58th Annual Speed Week
Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, August 12-18
The most daring drivers on earth get together and go really, really fast. Tricked-out Toyota Priuses hit 130 miles per hour, and far-less-sensible vehicles travel more than three times that speed.

8. RoboGames
San Francisco, California, June 16-18
Robots get ready to rumble in a heavy-on-the-metal smorgasbord of competitions, including robo combat, robot soccer, and art bots.

9. Defcon 14
Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, August 4-6
Defcon continues to be the largest noncommercial celebration of hackers, programmers, and other digital cognoscenti­. As Linus Torvalds once said, "Software is like sex; it's better when it's free."

10. Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race
Baltimore, Maryland, May 6
Monster Garage meets MoMA in a 15-mile race of half-machine, half-art contraptions that slog through mud, sand, and water. Pimp my ride, Pablo.

Scientists use www.wheresgeorge.com to build model of disease spread

From the Washington Times
via fark.com

California scientists using an Internet game that traces the movement of dollar bills have created a model for tracking the spread of infectious diseases.

"We were confident we could learn a lot from the data collected at the www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking Web site, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations," said Lars Hufnagel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and co-author of the study.

Historical pandemics, such as the 14th-century plague, moved slowly since people could typically only travel a few miles daily. It took the plague three years to move up the European continent, with an average rate of spread of about one mile a day.

"But today people move great distances in short time periods, as well as short distances, and they use variable means of transportation," said Hufnagel.

At the Web site, participants register a bill of any denomination and then monitor its geographic circulation. Analyzing data from the game, the scientists developed a theory that represents a major breakthrough for mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

An article describing the research appears in the journal Nature.

Finally - Anatomically Correct Soap

Just in time for Valentine's day - a heart-shaped soap you can respect!

Via BoingBoing

Short Your House

Fidelity's eNews has an interesting interview this week with Jeremy Siegel, of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, and Robert Shiller, of Yale University School of Management.

In the interview, Shiller mentioned something that caught my eye:

Q: What advice can you share with American investors for the coming year?

Shiller: Most American portfolios are underweight in foreign investments. But I'm particularly interested in housing opportunities. Some of my colleagues and I have made an arrangement with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to start trading futures on single-family homes in April. Because there is so much volatility in the housing market, we think this structure may create an opportunity for property owners to hedge risks.

More info:
Betting the House
Futures Contracts for Ten US Cities to be Based on Case-Shiller Index

Could a Parasite Cause Schizophrenia?

I'm in the middle of reading Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer... Today I stumbled across an update by the author, that should give you a taste of what the book is about. Its fascinating...



The Return of the Puppet Masters
Posted by Carl Zimmer

Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away.

I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Those parasites were weird enough, but then I got to know Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled parasite lives in the guts of cats, sheddding eggs that can be picked up by rats and other animals that can just so happen be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts throughout its intermediate host's body, including the brain. And yet a Toxoplasma-ridden rat is perfectly healthy. That makes good sense for the parasite, since a cat would not be particularly interested in eating a dead rat. But scientists at Oxford discovered that the parasite changes the rats in one subtle but vital way.

The scientists studied the rats in a six-foot by six-foot outdoor enclosure. They used bricks to turn it into a maze of paths and cells. In each corner of the enclosure they put a nest box along with a bowl of food and water. On each the nests they added a few drops of a particular odor. On one they added the scent of fresh straw bedding, on another the bedding from a rat's nests, on another the scent of rabbit urine, on another, the urine of a cat. When they set healthy rats loose in the enclosure, the animals rooted around curiously and investigated the nests. But when they came across the cat odor, they shied away and never returned to that corner. This was no surprise: the odor of a cat triggers a sudden shift in the chemistry of rat brains that brings on intense anxiety. (When researchers test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to make them panic.) The anxiety attack made the healthy rats shy away from the odor and in general makes them leery of investigating new things. Better to lie low and stay alive.

Then the researchers put Toxoplasma-carrying rats in the enclosure. Rats carrying the parasite are for the most part indistinguishable from healthy ones. They can compete for mates just as well and have no trouble feeding themselves. The only difference, the researchers found, is that they are more likely to get themselves killed. The scent of a cat in the enclosure didn't make them anxious, and they went about their business as if nothing was bothering them. They would explore around the odor at least as often as they did anywhere else in the enclosure. In some cases, they even took a special interest in the spot and came back to it over and over again.


The scientists speculated that Toxoplasma was secreted some substance that was altering the patterns of brain activity in the rats. This manipulation likely evolved through natural selection, since parasites that were more likely to end up in cats would leave more offpsring.

The Oxford scientists knew that humans can be hosts to Toxoplasma, too. People can become infected by its eggs by handling soil or kitty litter. For most people, the infection causes no harm. Only if a person's immune system is weak does Toxoplasma grow uncontrollably. That's why pregnant women are advised not to handle kitty litter, and why toxoplasmosis is a serious risk for people with AIDS. Otherwise, the parasite lives quietly in people's bodies (and brains). It's estimated that about half of all people on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma.

Given that human and rat brains have a lot of similarities (they share the same basic anatomy and use the same neurotransmitters), a question naturally arose: if Toxoplasma can alter the behavior of a rat, could it alter a human? Obviously, this manipulation would not do the parasite any good as an adaptation, since it's pretty rare for a human to be devoured by a cat. But it could still have an effect.

Some scientists believe that Toxoplasma changes the personality of its human hosts, bringing different shifts to men and women. Parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered psychological questionnaires to people infected with Toxoplasma and controls. Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

It's controversial work, disputed by many. But it attracted the attention of E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Torrey and his colleagues had noticed some intriguing links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia. Infection with the parasite has been associated with damage to a certain class of neurons (astrocytes). So has schizophrenia. Pregnant women with high levels of Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood were more likely to give birth to children who would later develop schizophrenia. Torrey lays out more links in this 2003 paper. While none is a smoking gun, they are certainly food for thought. It's conceivable that exposure to Toxoplasma causes subtle changes in most people's personality, but in a small minority, it has more devastating effects.

A year later, Torrey and his colleagues discovered one more fascinating link. They raised human cells in Petri dishes and infected them with Toxoplasma. Then they dosed the cells with a variety of drugs used to treat schizophrenia. Several of the drugs--most notably haloperidol--blocked the growth of the parasite.

So Fuller and the Oxford scientists joined forces to find an answer to the next logical question: can drugs used to treat schizophrenia help a parasite-crazed rat? They now report their results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (press release). They ran the original tests on 49 more rats. Once again, parasitized rats lost their healthy fear of cats. Then the researchers treated the rats with haloperidol and several other anti-psychotic drugs. They found that the drugs made the rats more scared. They also found that the antipsychotics were as effective as pyrimethamine, a drug that is specifically used to eliminate Toxoplasma.

There's plenty left to do to turn these results into a full-blown explanation of parasites and personalities. For example, what is Toxoplasma releasing into brains to manipulate its hosts? And how does that substance give rise to schizophrenia in some humans? And even if the hypothesis does hold up, it would only account for some cases of schizophrenia, while the cause of others would remain undiscovered. But still...the idea that parasites are tinkering with humanity's personality--perhaps even giving rise to cultural diversity--is taking over my head like a bad case of Toxoplasma.

------------------

Wow. link

Photo of the Day

Photo of the day

Squidoo - Movin' on up

Our Squidoo Lens (Walking While Working - How to Take Your Cubicle from 'Fattening Pen' To 'Fitness Center') is now ranked #36 out of 12,001 lenses.

Internal ideas lead to sharper outside messages for five finalists

My company - Lancet Software, took home the hardware in a little business building contest promoted by a local magazine. We won an award for best practice in communications and marketing...

I got to make a speech... I hadn't done one for some time, and this one was limited to just 4 minutes - I couldn't afford much stumbling. I did an old trick - I recorded the speech, timed to the second. Transferred it to my iPod, and listened to it about 100 times in the 2 days leading up to the event. I've never been so confident, or gotten so many good laughs because my timing was "on" before.

Here's a bit of the article... the picture of me (with Tika) on the blog is from the article's photo shoot.

Loud and clear
Internal ideas lead to sharper outside messages for five finalists

by Elizabeth Martin

When it comes to communications and marketing, five finalists show that a little creative thinking can create a big business advantage.

To wit: Connecting with customers in a new way landed Bard Advertising a finalist position. When a prospective client asked to learn more about the firm’s capabilities, but specifically begged not to see another PowerPoint presentation, the company knew it had to put its best creative foot forward. The end result was an interactive game in which prospective clients are asked to guess how the company obtained measurable results. Bard won the business, and a new sales tool.“In all cases of our presentation, people were amazed at the results,” says Barb Stabno, founder.

Employees rule
California Closets uses plasma TVs within its Bloomington store to showcase its new sales displays at the beginning of each year. But after the displays were revealed in the beginning of the year, the TVs sat idle. So, the company decided to use the TVs to better communicate with its employees. Today the TVs are installed throughout the company’s offices and display financial information, success rates, and bonus updates as well as information submitted by employees. “The fun part is throughout the important information we pop in pictures of company functions,” says Michele Skjei (pronounced Shay), vice president and franchise co-owner. Using the TVs to communicate and acknowledge employees helps engage people with different learning styles as well, she says. Some employees want to read information, while others want to see or hear it. “People get turned on, they get stimulated, they want to be part of the company,” when they’re engaged, says Skjei. She adds that when the TVs are appropriated for their original purpose of showing the new sales displays, her 32 employees tell her that they miss the steady stream of company information.

California Closets has a unique take on its employee newsletter, as well. Instead of a long missive drafted by executives, the company distributes a brief newsletter written by the employees themselves.“Less is more in my mind,” says Skjei. “One page, one side, that’s it. ”Having employees draft the newsletter gives management an insight into morale and other issues. “If you let them write the newsletter as though it’s not the company newsletter, you get a different perspective.”

'Addicted' clients
Tom Niccum, president of Burnsville-based Lancet Software Development Inc., got to his latest marketing strategy through lateral thinking. His firm decided to market its Web design services for small and mid-sized companies through a stored value card, much like the ones used at many coffee chains. So what is lateral thinking? And how does one begin to see the similarities between coffee bars and Web design?

Niccum describes it this way: “What if Web design was like fast food? It would be cheap, fast, reliable,” he says. And, he adds, you don’t haggle over the price of fast food. The card allows customers to pay for a certain amount of Lancet’s Web development time and then use the time as they see fit. The LancetCard is targeted to micro and small businesses at which, Niccum says, an employee’s brother or niece is often hired to do Web design.“Our first big challenge was how to create an offering that would make someone fire their relative,” he tells the audience. Lancet now gives its card-holding customers a Web site where they can see how much work has been done on their site and how long it took.

The benefits to Lancet go beyond simply marketing. The fact that the cards are pre-paid allows the company to anticipate its workload and staff accordingly.“Like Starbucks, we now have addicts,” jokes Niccum. He told the audience that the company now has customers who are constantly tweaking their sites because the stored value makes it so easy to do. But the stored value has differentiated them from other Web design firms too. “We wanted to do something, rather than just say something, about why we’re different.“We think the paradigm has a lot more to be squeezed out of it,” says Niccum, whose firm posted $2.88 million in revenue in 2004. He envisions a “Domino’s model” in which “your Web site is done in 24 hours or its free.”

Plan B, fast
MetroConnections in Minneapolis is a full-service meeting planning company. But the company discovered that its clients were overwhelmed by the variety of services available through the company. So, beginning in 2000 MetroConnections gave each of its divisions a separate identity and logo. But then came September 11, 2001, and the entire hospitality industry was turned inside out. MetroConnections lost $1 million in business in the week after Sept. 11, says Tom McCulloch, vice president of marketing and conference services.

“We decided we needed to figure out what our customers were thinking,” says McCulloch. Working with an industry publication they discovered that the majority of meeting planners were proceeding with plans to hold meetings, but they were no longer holding these meetings in locations that involved travel. So, MetroConnections, which had marketed itself nationally, decided to refocus its efforts on the Twin Cities. But its rebranding efforts paid off as well. “Because we had developed our independent brands, we learned that there were a lot of people that hired us for transportation that knew nothing about our other services,” says McCulloch. Metro Connections refocused its sales database and marketing efforts on cross-selling to existing clients and has been reaping the rewards ever since. McCulloch says that Metro Connections is on track to make 2005 its best year since 1999.

High notes
Musical performers The O’Neill Brothers have been able to harness the power of the Internet to sell more than 1 million CDs. The company now sells $1,000 of wedding music per day through their site, says Tim O’Neill, half of the eponymous duo. Sales have increased 40 percent in the past year.“Marketing today is the easiest that it’s ever been,” O’Neill tells the audience. “The Internet allows small companies to look like big companies.”

As an example, O’Neill tells of the company’s efforts to find a female vocalist for The O’Neill Brothers’ upcoming concert tour. O’Neill says he sent an e-mail along with a link to the duo’s Web site to the management of 1980s pop singer Deborah Gibson. Shortly thereafter, O’Neill received a call from Gibson’s management and an agreement was reached to have Gibson join The O’Neill Brothers for this year’s tour.

So how did a 10-person company out of New Prague, Minnesota, create such a Web marketing success story? “Because we have embraced the Internet, because we realize that 90,000 people per month go to Google and type in ‘wedding music,” explains O’Neill. Previously, the company had directed hits from Google directly to its home page. But when the company realized that it could use the demand for wedding music to increase sales, it began directing those searching the Internet to a specialized landing page featuring The O’Neill Brothers’ wedding music.

Apple iPod Customer Support gets an "A"

After hauling my new iPod w/Video 60gb unit all over India in November and December, it failed on me. It was odd - the device got pretty warm, I could copy songs and files to and from the iPod, but it wouldn't play any music. Bummer. I went to the website and followed the diagnosis and return instructions, on a Saturday.

I was rewarded with an email saying a special box would be delivered in a few days.

On Monday, a bright yellow DHL truck showed up at my office with a shipping box, pre-addressed to Apple's repair facility. So Tuesday, I called DHL for a pickup, and off my iPod went. On Wednesday I received an email indicating that the iPod had been received at the repair facility. I checked the website daily for status. Thursday it moved into "Diagnosis" status, where it remained over the weekend. Monday, it moved to "Return Pending," and it showed up today.

I received a new (or refurbished) iPod. Which is great since I had scuffed the old one pretty badly by dumping it in my photo bag during our trip. So now I'll try to keep it nice with a case.

Photo of the day

From our recent trip to southern India. I found the colors fantasic there - a building would be painted and fade into so many shades...

Things the Make Me Laugh - The Flickr Song

This one totally kicks my butt. Flickr is a quicktime movie - so you need quicktime to watch, and it takes a while to download and start playing. Be patient.

Computer History

I don't remember how we heard about it, but I still remember the day in January 1975. We drove from the 'burbs to downtown Minneapolis to Shinders to get a copy of Popular Electronics with the sexy MITS Altair on the cover. The personal computer revolution was on, we drooled over the possibilities. Now the old stuff seems pretty funny, and I'm enjoying finding bits and pieces of old computer stuff on the internet, like here.

Good times, good times.

Things the Make Me Laugh - Stairway to Gilligan's Island

Gilligan's Island (Stairway) is a brilliant mash-up of Stairway to Heaven with the words to the love theme from Gilligan's Island... Made in 1978, it belies the notion that mash-ups are the new new thing.

Movie of the Week: Grizzly Man

Netflix brough Grizzly Man to our mailbox this week. Its an great look at someone on a noble mission that just isn't thinking quite straight about it. Ex-addict Timothy Treadwell loves bears. Maybe a little too much. `For thirteen years Treadwell spent most of every summer living on the Alaskan penninsula, with his beloved bears. Until they ate him.

His love causes him to have a lot of interaction with them - thus habituating them to human contact. Not good. His long rants about poachers and other threats to the grizzlies are contradicted by the fact that he rarely sees anyone in his remote part of Alaska - let alone people interested in hurting bears.

That's not to say bears don't need protection. But his type of protecting, maybe not so much.

It appears that he was filming his own Jeff Corwin Experience or Crocodile Hunter style documentary. Over 100 hours of footage was available, allowing Treadwell to tell much of his own story. Director Werner Herzog narrates a bit and interviews friends and family members to allow us to understand Treadwell better. I don't think I understand him, but it was a very interesting movie.

Mr. Colbert - you need to move bears back to the number 1 spot on your threatdown list.

Associated Press is the number one threat facing America.

As reported by the Associated Press, Stephen Colbert has launched a vendetta against the associated press...

Colbert: AP is America’s ‘number 1 threat’
Comedian wants credit for coining ‘truthiness’

Joel Jeffries / AP file

NEW YORK - Stung by a recent Associated Press article that didn’t credit him for coining the word “truthiness,” Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert has struck back.

The world’s oldest news organization, Colbert says, is the “No. 1 threat facing America.”

On Wednesday evening, Colbert placed the AP atop the Threat Down segment of “The Colbert Report” show. What was No. 2?

Bears.

In October, on Colbert’s debut episode of the “Daily Show” spinoff, the comedian defined “truthiness” as truth that wouldn’t stand to be held back by facts. The word caught on, and last week the American Dialect Society named “truthiness” the word of the year.

When an AP story about the designation sent coast to coast failed to mention Colbert, he began a tongue-in-cheek crusade, not unlike the kind his muse Bill O’Reilly might lead in all seriousness.

“It’s a sin of omission, is what it is,” Colbert told The AP on Thursday. “You’re not giving people the whole story about truthiness.”

“It’s like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what ‘Hamlet’ is about,” he said.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for “truthy” dating back to the 1800s. It’s defined as “characterized by truth” and includes the derivation “truthiness.”

Michael Adams, a visiting associate professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, pointed to that definition and has said Colbert’s claim to inventing the word is “untrue.” (Adams served as the expert opinion in the initial AP story.)

“The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don’t get the idea of truthiness at all,” Colbert said Thursday. “You don’t look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.”

Though slight, the difference of Colbert’s definition and the OED’s is essential. It’s not your typical truth, but, as The New York Times wrote, “a summation of what (Colbert) sees as the guiding ethos of the loudest commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.”

Colbert, who referred on his program to the AP omission as a “journalistic travesty,” said Thursday that it was similar to the much-criticized weapons of mass destruction reporting leading up to the Iraq War.

“Except,” he said, “people got hurt this time.”

Nikon to Stop Selling most Film-Based Cameras This Year…

The Nikon UK website dropped the bomb - only the super high-end F6 and the retro, all-mechanical FM10 film cameras will continue to be produced. I'm sure the numbers make a lot of sense. I made the switch from film to digital over the course of about 3 years. Starting with a Nikon D1, while still shooting most of my travel photography with an F100. After a trip to Vietnam and the resulting hours spent scanning the slides, it felt time to switch over. I did my research and went with a Nikon D70. Its at a nice point in the price/performance curve.

Almost Famous...

BookofJoe had a nice mention today of my website and the newly created squidoo lens walkingwhileworking.

I'm very curious to see how much buzz it will generate..

Tired Legs - The Treadmill Desk Rolls along

At the end of the day yesterday, my desk had 6 Miles on the odometer... I'm a bit skeptical of that - but its still somewhere around 5 miles that I walked while doing my emails, reports, budgets, and taking phone calls. This morning my legs feel a little tired... but I'm looking forward to clocking another 5 miles today.

The desk experiment - Details

Above is my current "desk", as it sits at Lancet Software's world headquarters and nerve center. It started with a part of my office furniture that you see in the foreground - which was a perfect work surface for standing while working. In that incarnation, I slipped my HP notebook under the desktop (there's a perfect gap between top and some drawers for this) and added a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo. I also added a Plantronics CS50 wireless headset to my IP Phone. This allowed me the freedom to roam around the office and still be able to take phone calls easily.

When the treadmill arrived certain adjustments had to be made. The monitor had to be raised about 12 inches to get back to eye level. I'm currently using a case of printer paper to perform that duty while I look for a more permanent solution.

Two other problems demanded solution - a keyboard space that was solid, and auxiliary desk space for phone, in-box, coffee cup, etc.

I solved the keyboard problem with a trip to Home Depot - where I bought a 12"x36" piece of black (to match the treadmill) shelving. I added a 1 1/2" pipe strap, drilled appropriate holes and attached the shelf securly to the handgrip of the treadmill.



The auxilliary workspace has only a temporary solution at this point.



I'm using a trash can with a board on top - "holy college dorm room, batman!" It works for now, but I'm on the trail of a permanent solution.

Walking While Working: The Lens

From bookofjoe comes an artice he found in yesterday's Washington Post Business section. Seth Godin, internet guru, and author (I've read 4 or 5 of his books), has introduced "Squidoo" - a new way to build content on the web.

Here's the article.

Squidoo.com
Type in "best" and "espresso maker" into Google, and you'll have to sift through more than 200,000 results in your quest to score the perfect machine.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a know-it-all you could turn to for a speedier answer?

That's the idea behind Squidoo.com, where, as the slogan says, "everyone's an expert on something."

The Web site's concept: Enthusiasts and aficionados create free single-page blogs called "lenses" dedicated to their favorite subjects, be they coffee makers, cars or calypso.

"If there's a passionate person, they can have a lens," says Squidoo founder Seth Godin.

Having launched to the public last month, the site already carries more than 10,000 such pages, devoted to subjects including microfinance, giraffes and the Dandy Warhols.

Godin says that he hopes to see 100,000 by year's end.

But if anyone can be a self-appointed authority, how do you know that the information you're getting is good?

The site doesn't offer any official evaluation of its lenses, but Godin is confident that the information economy will naturally sort the wheat from the chaff.

"If we have a hundred lenses on a topic, the highest ranked will be the freshest, the most popular, the most useful," he says, "and the junk lenses will sink to the bottom."

Thanks to Squidoo's easy-to-implement template, creating a page of your own requires little effort -- and could offer a big payoff.

Godin says that the company plans to start a profit-sharing system for participants based on ad sales and affiliate royalties from sites such as eBay and Amazon.

If your lens includes links to buy stuff, you'll receive a commission.

----------------

Squidoo has called, and I have answered. Dr. Joseph Stirt (www.bookofjoe.com) and I are collaborating on a Lens that we're calling "Walking At Work." The lens is inspired by the ideas (and has the blessing of) Dr. James Levine, of Mayo Clinic's NEAT Laboaratory.

Dr. Levine advocates that anyone in a "desk jockey" type job could do much of it while walking. Joe and I have reoriented our workspaces to accomodate treadmills so that we can walk all day. We'll be posting as much content as we can scrape up at http://squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking

This Week's Movie: Murderball

On the surface
Murderball is a look at about 2 years in the life of the US quad rugby team as it gears up for the 2004 paralympics in Athens. Prior to watching this movie I didn't know there was such a thing as "quad" rugby... The title "Murderball" is the sport's original name, changed to quad rugby, as one participant wryly notes, for marketing purposes. But Murderball it is. Its rough, tumble, and hyper-competitive. These are serious athletes. The film really works to get you to see these guys as guys, normal in every respect, their disabilities are part of them for certain, but maybe not that important. The film explores in a natural and frank way difficult themes of post injury recovery, depression, sexuality, relationships, and dealing with the world.

I found it absolutely fascinating in nearly every respect.

The Areas of His Expertise

I just finished John Hodgeman’s “The Areas of My Expertise”

If you’re a fan of “This American Life” on NPR, he should be familiar to you – his best known segment was asking people on the street “If you were a superhero and had a choice, would you choose invisibility or the ability to fly as your super power.” Revealed deep psychological truths…

The book is probably a love it or hate it thing. The reviews on amazon are pretty much 5 stars or 1 star. I laughed very very hard at some of the stuff.

Here’s an excerpt, published in LA Weekly…

The Areas of My Expertise
by JOHN HODGMAN

Greetings, Los Angeles. As you may know, we are at the beginning of another Gregorian year. In New York, where I live, the ball has dropped. The rivers of champagne have run dry. Over 3,000 pounds of confetti, broken promises and shredded Justinian calendars have been removed from the canyon of Times Square. Now it is time for sober, hung-over reflection — and of course for failed palindromes. Because amongst the momentous turmoil of 2005, the de- and re-Poping, an amphibious assault on our shores by hurricanes, I am humbled to report that my small book was published: The Areas of My Expertise, a compendium of fascinating trivia and historical oddities like any other, with the distinction that in my book, all of the amazing true facts are made up by me. I make no claim that this small book is important, or even amusing; but I do hope at least that it is distracting in a year when distraction was needed. May these small, good-natured lies help you forget the facts for a moment. And to the “Failed Palindromes” below I may add two more:

1. 2005

2. THE YEAR 2006, READY YET?

When Writing, Please Avoid These Failed Palindromes
Slow speed: deep owls
Drat that tard
Two owls hoot who owls hoot too (owt)
Sour candy and Dan C. roused
Desire still lisps: Arise! D.
A man, a plan, a kind of man-made river, planned.
Hobos! So!
Eh, s’occurs to me to succor she
Tow a what? Thaw!

Idiosyncrasies of the Great Detectives

• Miss Millicent McTeague This elderly spinster is not as senile as she seems! Also, she eats cats.
  
• Juno Dix This refined, morbidly obese attorney solves crimes without ever leaving his own bathtub.
  
• Inspector Franz Duvet-Perez This fastidious foreigner refuses to say exactly what country he is from, thus keeping everyone guessing.
  
• Buddy Jimmy Smith This freckle-faced fourth-grader is actually the reincarnation of an Egyptian slave whose ancient memories of embalming techniques mystically guides him as he cracks “The Case of Janey’s Kitten, Who Has Been Missing for Days.”
  
• Brother Metrigon This 10th-century monk actually believes he is a ninth-century monk.
  
• Sergeant Demonicus Rex This uniformed police officer is also a high magus in the Church of Satan.
  
• Dr. Kathleen Pietro This brilliant medical examiner occasionally wears the victims’ skin in order to “see the crime through their eyes.” This habit becomes something of a liability when she begins wearing the victims’ skin to nightclubs and restaurants.
  
• Lord Miles Overstreet This debonair, mentally ill aristocrat does not realize that he is his own nemesis, the mad Dr. Craig Kittles.
  

Nine Presidents Who Had Hooks for Hands

• Jefferson (who designed his own hook)
  
• Van Buren (known as “Old Kinderhook”)
  
• Garfield (when President Garfield was shot, Alexander Graham Bell attempted to locate the bullet with a crude metal detector of his own invention; instead, he discovered “a curved, metallic sharpness in the vicinity of the wrist’s end.” Historians agree: hook)
  
• T. Roosevelt (first draft: “speak softly and pierce their eyes with a golden hook”)
  
• F. Roosevelt (note: his hook was actually a wheelchair)
  
• Nixon (many believe that the sight of his horrific hook lost him the first televised debate with Kennedy, who was hookless)
  
• Bush I and II (however, Bush II replaced his hook with a chain saw in an effort to seem less privileged)
  
• Edward “Thach” Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard (although technically, President Blackbeard was only president of the pirates)
  

Colonial Jobs Involving Eels

Eels, as any schoolchild knows, were the true main course at the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving, largely because the eels themselves had eaten all the turkeys. While it’s difficult to imagine now, our nation’s rivers were once glossy and black with majestic herds of eels. And the eels played a critical role in the economy and culture of colonial New England.

Paling Man A legitimate eel merchant.

Eel Picker A person who sorted through the village trash to find reusable eels.

Eel and Bone Man An itinerant merchant of eel carcasses and especially eel teeth. (See Scrimschonger, below.)

Eel Crier A young man who was posted to watch at the edge of a town or settlement for eels. Often an unintelligent person.

Eelwright Maker of false eels as decoys or for decorations.

Ratter Someone who caught rats to throw at eels to distract them. It was well-known that an eel would stare at a rat for hours, allowing a human a quick escape.

Eel Checker Once the eels were first spotted on land, an eel checker was often employed to check a home for hidden eels and to check under wagons for the same. This was not a skilled job and should not be confused with an eelsmeller, who was an artisan trained in the art of detecting eels that had disguised themselves as Dutchmen.

Eel Almanacker Many printed almanacs predicted the eel seasons, those periods when the eels would be plentiful, and when they would disappear for months on end to spawn. An eel almanac would also include a calendar of when eels would be wistful, secretive or accusing.

Scrimshander or Scrimschonger An artisan who carves scenes of daily colonial life in delicate, small etchings upon eel teeth. Many family portraits and early images of colonial life were immortalized on eel teeth.

Toothsmith A dedicated eel-tooth polisher and seller. The best eel teeth were those found lodged in trees, which eels would often attack at night.

Eel Meterer One who wrote poems about eels. When the eels proved amphibious and began walking on land, they became objects of deep and fearful fascination. And so many folktales were spawned of Dan Crate, the Brackish Man, who tied eels together to build a rope ladder to the clouds, and at the same time of Sleek Cynthia, the noble eel who stared down the sea.

Eel Tonguer One who learned the language of the eels.

Eel-Orphan A human child raised by eels after his parents had died or willingly given him up to become an eel tonguer. The eel tonguer’s parents were usually held in high regard for their sacrifice, though one printed memoir by an eel-orphan, The Eel-Boy’s Confession and Spelling Handbook, suggested that the author was much happier with the eels.

Rod-Man Also known as an eelpoker. Self-explanatory.

The desk experiment... Part II

The Smooth Fitness 5.25 treadmill arrived today - great customer service. I ordered it from their website. The contacted me immediately via email to discuss shipping options. The treadmill arrived today, a week sooner than promised in the initial order. I like it when that happens.

Took me about 20-30 minutes to assemble in my office, and i've been playing around with rearranging my (stand-up) desk, monitor etc. to make it usable. I'm walking as I type this - not too bad - i thought it would take a long while to get used to, but its working pretty well.

To do's: (1) secure board where my keyboard and mouse are sitting - need to bungy-cord it so it won't slip off the treadmill grab bars. (2) find better place for phone - i use a wireless headset, so that's not an issue - but I still need to reach the phone to dial; (3) better access to my desk drawers; still need a staples and tape occaisionally...

all in all a good way to end the week.