This is the presentation that spawned the above segment. Some convincing arguments to cut out as much sugar as you can.

I was thinking if I win the Mega Millions lottery tonight at $640mil what I would do to piss people off (just for fun). My first thought is to give my enemies $100k each in pennies. So I did the math:

A penny weighs 2.5 grams

100 pennies in a dollar

So in $100k of pennies there is 25,000,000 grams = 55,115.5655 pounds

Which is 27.5577827 short tons!

The average armored truck can carry 1.25 tons. So it would take 22 armored trucks to deliver $100k in pennies!

The FitBit

Recently I came across a newer gadget called the FitBit. It is a small clip on device to track your steps, calories burned, miles walked, and flights of stair climbed. The devices uses an accelerometer and a altimeter to determine the steps taken and logs the data to be synced when you are near the base station. This uploads the data to the FitBit site which has a nice SaaS  site to monitor and chart progress. You can manually enter food, water, exercise, weight, and other data points. FitBit also offers a robust API to tie in with 3rd party services like Endomondo, which tracks workouts via phone GPS tracking. Another interesting thing the FitBit does is measure one’s sleep by coming with a strap you put on your non-dominate arm which monitors restlessness to get a picture of how much restful sleep one gets.

Along with the FitBit I have also decided to give a targeted regiment of supplements and diet a try to see if it helps with my sleep and any other health complaints. So I am breaking it down into key parts:

• diet
• exercise
• sleep/relaxation
• supplements

These are the four high-level things I will be covering and looking at in this experiment. I have been using the “Paleo Diet” as the basic underlying for my food intake. Along with various supplements I will outline shortly.

Diet

Being that I am following the basics of the Paleo Diet (with the exception of a cup of coffee a day) it is basically just eating various meats, vegetables, and fruits. The main things is organic, grass fed beef, and as natural as can be foods basically. You eat no bread, legumes, and milk which contain bioactive things like gluten and casein. Along with cutting out foods with nitrates and other preservatives. So I am basically cleansing myself of 35 years worth of fried foods and additives/preservatives.

Along with the type of diet I am also limiting myself to 1852 calories a day. This is to lose approximately 12 pounds while converting what is left to more muscle than fat.

Exercise

I am currently ramping up my fitness by doing dumb bells, crunches, and other basic exercises to build up to a more strict routine. Being that my fitness level to start this experiment was pretty much non-existent. Once my regiment is more streamlined I will update in a later post the exact things I am doing and when. Along with it being inputted into my FitBit page.

Sleep/Relaxation

I have been using the sleep monitoring the FitBit offers which is rudimentary but gives a good general idea of how much I am getting. Along with the basic tracking I am also noting how much stress and relaxation time I am getting to see its baring on my overall fitness and health.

Supplements

As I said earlier I have been trying a regiment of supplements. The following is a breakdown of what I am taking:

Fiber Fusion – Enzymatic Therapy - fiber plus probiotic for healthy digestion

Planetary Formulas St. John’s Wort Extract 600 mg, 120 tablets - naturally helps mood and fight depression (more)

Source Naturals Alpha Lipoic Acid 300mg, 120 Tablets - antioxidant and many beneficial medical uses (more)

Nature’s Bounty Red Yeast Rice 600mg, 120 Capsules - used in Chinese medicine as far back as 800 AD to aid digestion and revitalize blood (more)

Doctor’s Best High Absorption Coq10 w/ BioPerine (100 mg), 120 Soft gels - helps in a myriad of medical issues including heart, migraine, and more

Vitacost Resveratrol + Grape Seed & Red Wine Extracts — 240 Capsules - Resveratrol/Red Wine Extract (more) and Grape Seed Extract (more) have many antioxidant effects

NOW Foods Gaba 750mg, 100 Vcaps - natural anti-anxiety (more)

Jarrow Formulas Primrose Oil, 1300 Mg, 60 Count - (more)

Vitacost Phosphatidylserine Complex — 1,000 mg per serving – 120 Softgels - vital brain nutrients

Vitacost Ubiquinol CoQH Featuring Kaneka QH — 100 mg – 60 Softgels - antioxidant and cell food

Other Data Acquisition

I have also ordered a blood pressure and heart monitor to track daily my stats to input into my FitBit tracker.

Some other options I am looking into are the Zeo since it records actual sleep patterns as opposed to movement over the night. This would give me a much more accurate picture of my sleep quality.

I will be posting additional things once I get more into this experiement.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a doctor or health professional. All this information is provided for informational purposes only. Be sure to consult your doctor before doing anything that may help/hinder your health. I am not responsible for inaccuracies or misinformation. I am just a guy doing his own thing.

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

Read more. . .

I have always been a die-hard paper book lover. Nothing to me smells better than a old used book store. But I have recently finally given in to the eReader boom. I have had a Viewsonic gTablet I hacked with Android Honeycomb for about 6 months. On it I have Kindle and started playing with it, downloading sample chapters and a few full books. It quickly grew on me. Then with the release of the Amazon Cloud Reader it has put me over the top.

I enjoy being able to highlight and notate things in the mostly non-fiction books I read. Along with being able to access the books from my phone, tablet, and desktop. Most books I read are technical or startup/business related so my notes come in very handy with the research I do.

Some things that won me over:

• Notations in-line of the books with notes
• The ability to make black on white text and vice versa (big plus when reading in bed)
• Ability to make multiple bookmarks to reference things previous
• Access to books from many devices at once
• Saving a tree or two
• Lightening my load when it comes time to move to another residence

My biggest complaint about Kindle books is the disproportionate pricing compared to hardback or paperback books. Many times the price is only a few dollars less.

The only real downside to the Gtablet is the bad viewing angles on the screen but this does not bother me too much since I am not using it to watch movies with others or something that would require more than just me looking at it.

I have finally got Honeycomb on it and am happy with it even though it is an Alpha release since it is a hacked ROM being that Google is not releasing the source for Honeycomb. So aside from a few bugs it is great. You can also over-clock the CPU to around 1.5Ghz with no real impact in terms of overheating using CPU Master. Once you over-clock the tablet screams compared to a Xoom.

I have been compiling some notes on ways to foster innovation and help turn around the lack of innovation in companies I have seen first-hand. This is a working copy basically that I will add to and tweak as needed:

• Have no more than 3 governing rules for a team
• Follow the Lean Startup ideas of Build -> Measure -> Learn and repeat
• Create an environment of experimentation
• 6 people tops per team
• Do not keep teams in a vacuum
• Promote cross-pollination between teams (openly share ideas free of fear)
• Customers decide on what the MVP is not the stake holders. Double down on what the customer wants and uses. Drop the rest.
• Ask the right questions (don’t put the answer before the question)
• NEVER allow process over innovation!
• Remove barriers to teams getting new products/features
• Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do
• 98% of meetings are a waste of time
• Just in time not just in case.