When I wrote about my cholesterol numbers a while back, I looked around for a graph showing studies correlating deaths to cholesterol levels.  I thought I’d seen one somewhere, but couldn’t find it, and didn’t have the time to build one from the numbers myself.  Well, I found one at Hyperlipid, in a very good post on the way the study results were slanted to give us the cholesterol myths and billion-dollar anti-cholesterol drug business we have now.  I cropped out the graph:

Deaths and CHD "events" versus total cholesterol

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photo from flickr.com

Wow, I’m glad we didn’t plant a bunch of seeds over the weekend.  They might have floated right out of the garden beds, and anything that germinated might die tonight.  I hope our little garlics survive this cold snap.

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photo from flickr.com

I’m not really hungover; all I drank at the bar last night was water.  But I’m tired, achy, and sort of foggy and slow, so most of the same symptoms are there except for the headache.

I’m going to be glad when this pool league session is over.  I enjoy playing and being there, especially when I win like I did last night.  But it makes Sunday too long a day, starting with 8am Mass and ending around 11pm after pool league, usually with a family visit or a party of some sort in between.  For an introvert like me, even if all those things are enjoyable, they certainly don’t make for a day of rest.  I feel like I need to start taking Mondays off to recover from Sunday.  That doesn’t seem right.

Oh well, seven more weeks and this session will be over.  I’ll take the summer off for sure, and then switch to a weeknight if I play in the fall.  When I used to play on Tuesday nights, that was much better.

When it was raining yesterday, I wished we’d gotten some garden seeds planted.  But it got so cold last night we might be glad we waited.  If it’s too cold for germination to start and the seeds are completely soaked for a few days, they may rot.  After this storm front moves through, we should be able to plant our early stuff just in time for the next sunny spell.

My FreeBSD-induced traffic surge seems to have dwindled now.  It’s amazing how you can write 100+ articles about all sorts of different things, and you never know which one is going to happen to catch the attention of a much busier site and get you a link that quintuples your traffic overnight.  I guess that’s why most blogging experts focus more on how to create or attract links from big sites than they do on writing the actual content.  The content doesn’t have to be especially good or original, if the right person decides to share it.

Recently we tried a new recipe I found on Jimmy Moore’s low-carb site, low-carb baked macaroni and cheese using shirataki noodles.  It was pretty good, but I made the mistake of replacing the bread crumbs with crushed pork rinds and the rinds turned out to be fairly stale, so that flavor kind of overwhelmed the mild flavor of the mac-and-cheese.  Next time we’ll get some low-carb bread for the crumbs; with those it’s still supposed to have only 5 grams of carb per serving.  Fresh pork rinds would probably work okay too, but it really doesn’t need to be lower in carbs than 5/serving.  When we get it the way we like it, I’ll do a full article on it with pictures and talk some more about those noodles.

I woke up at 2:00am, too groggy to do any serious work for long, so I might as well get a blog post in.  My latest Latin Lesson is up, #11 on adverbs and the perfect tense.  After about 6-10 more lessons I think I’ll have covered enough to start translating parts of the Latin Mass, which should be fun.

Sometimes this blogging stuff just makes me shake my head.  My last post on FreeBSD was dry and off-topic, even for me.  I even felt kind of bad about posting it, figuring it wasn’t something my regular readers would care about, but it was what was on my mind at the time.  Thanks to a couple links from FreeBSD sites, my traffic has jumped the last three days, to where yesterday’s traffic was almost double my previous record.  As of 4am today I’ve already had more traffic than I had all day Monday.  Of course, those people probably aren’t going to stick around to read my usual posts on religion and gardening, so do they really count?  Not really, but it’s still kind of cool to see.

Anyway, time to get back to bed and try to get some more sleep!

When the temperature finally got over freezing yesterday, I pulled the plastic off the garden bed where we planted garlic and transplanted some herbs last fall.  The plastic probably wasn’t necessary, but we got the garlic in pretty late, so I wanted to try to keep the soil from freezing solid before the garlic got established.  The herbs—rosemary, thyme, and sage—look rough, but alive.  Most of the garlic is sending up shoots, so we should get a good crop out of that.

Here’s the west raised bed, which has the herbs and garlic.  The east one is still bare.  (Pepper is sneaking into the picture, as usual.)

Photo by Angel, 2009-03-05

And here’s a close-up of the garlic.

Photo by Angel, 2009-03-05

Now we’re  hoping the seeds we ordered last week will get here quickly, so we can get peas and radishes planted soon.  We also need to pick up some onion sets and get those started, and go ahead and plant some leftover lettuce seed from last year.  We’re also toying with the idea of adding another raised bed or two—we already have the lumber for one more.

We’re also planning to get some chickens soon, so I’m sure I’ll be writing about that too.  Should be a busy backyard this summer!

The other day I considered switching my desktop to Linux for a minute or two.  It didn’t last long, and it would probably have been half an excuse not to work on something else, but I wavered for a moment.  I was looking at some new applications that looked interesting, but then I saw they require Adobe Air, which is apparently their new Flash platform.  It’s just recently been released for Linux, and considering they only recently finally released a Flash 9 that works on FreeBSD, I don’t suppose this new system Air thing will be coming any time soon.  Not long after that, Firefox crashed on me, complaining as it does every few days about either the Flash plugin or the Java one.  That’s when I started wondering how much trouble it’d be to switch to Ubuntu.

photo from flickr.com

I’ve been using FreeBSD for probably ten years now, since discovering it on a client’s servers and deciding I liked it.  We hardly ever need to compile a custom kernel now, but back then we did it a lot, and it was much simpler on FreeBSD.  The ports system was also far better than RPM, the most common software distribution system on Linux at the time, which would gradually develop dependency issues after you’d used it a while.  So I liked FreeBSD better at the software level.

The FreeBSD philosophy also seemed more professional and yet freer than the Linux community.  The FreeBSD license is basically, “Here, take this and do whatever you like with it (including making money); just give the person who created it credit.”  That’s much simpler and more open than the GPL.  There’s an “Information wants to be free!” attitude in a lot of the GNU/Linux camp that I guess I got too old for.

Thanks to the FreeBSD philosophy and design and a lot of hard work by serious people, it’s a rock-solid server platform.  It makes a wonderful web server, and the new stuff you can do with jails means even shared servers can let webmasters run insecure junk PHP scripts without any risk that they’ll hurt each other or the system.  It also works very well with qmail and the whole suite of DJB tools for DNS and other server purposes.

As a desktop, though, it’s still a bit of a struggle sometimes.  Market-share-wise, FreeBSD is kinda where Linux was a decade ago: used by a small, dedicated group of people who have to port programs written for other platforms before they can use them.  Now Linux is mainstream enough that big companies like Adobe develop for it, and it’s the FreeBSDers who have to do the porting of the Linux versions.  I guess I don’t mind too much because I still enjoy computers in and of themselves, so it’s okay if I have to tinker a little to get things working the way I want them.  I suppose I’d miss it if my system came ready to use out of the box.

I do wish Flash would just work, though, and not kill my browser once or twice a week.

By the way, I just didn’t have time to get a Latin lesson out last week, so I apologize to anyone who’s using them.  There will be a new one this Friday, and back to the regular weekly schedule after that.