Gideon Hayley Review

I’m having a really frustrating problem with my new iMac. The jack for the speaker cable I had plugged into it broke off inside the port, so now there’s a tiny bi of metal in there that I can’t get out becaause Idon’t have a teeny-tiny pair of tweezers and I don’t have sound on my computer because the internal speakers won’t work when it thinks there are headphones plugged in to the speaker port. The best solution I could think of was to buy a Griffin iMic from Ebay, but I’ll be grateful to anyone who can help me fix the actual problem. I’ll then be able to use the iMic for higher-quality recording from my laptop for when I get around to starting podcasting again.

Had a really great visit with Justin yesterday. We hung out at his place for the afternoon and then went to Razzy’s and ate lots of greasy food and stuck around and had great conversatoins about the usual topics; music, music and music, with a little contemplating the universe in between. It turns out that the world’s biggest Kurt Cobain fan lives in Charlottetown and works at Razzy’s Road House. She was enjoying sitting and talking to us, seemed like she was starving for interesting conversation.

Probably goiing to see Fuck the Facts at Baba’s tonight. I love when they do the Sunday night heavy metal shows. The band is has quite a dirty sound, hardcore-influenced grind and some trash elements thrown in. My ability to sling obscure heavy metal genre names like a pro has slipped sinc my metalhead days. I wonder what it is about metal fans in particular that predisposes them to such ludicrous lengths of dtail when categorizing the exact types of music they listen to. Maybe it has to do with an appreciation for structure and order that might have attracted them to metal in the first place, since the music itself can be quite complex. On a side note: apparently gifted kids are more likely to be into metal than other kids. Go figure.

My DVD player can play DivX movies that I download and burn to DVD. Being able to fit 13 episodes of Heroes onto one $0.50 disc is beyond sweet.

I seem to be encouraging all of my friends to move away. What’s up with that? The fact that I actually like it here most of the time seems to make me a rarity to hear most people talk.

I’m starting to listen to the audio book of Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Even though I’ve already read it it’s en even better experience to have it read by a skilled reader, the bitterness and wry humour come out so much better.

Confession: At first I was unsure about my decision to date my now (amazing!) longterm boyfriend - G. we will call him – to protect his identity.

Although, G might as well be short for Gee Why Did I Ever Hesitate?

Actually – Gee Come To Think of It — One Of Those Reasons Was That I Wasn’t Sure About Dating Someone Who Came with A Child.

As it turns out, the old me (who I guess was actually the “younger

From The Times, UK | February 28, 2007

Stop art schools from turning into posh white ghettos

Written by Grayson Perry

The Government wants Britain to have a highly educated workforce so that we all can get well-paid jobs in service industries and afford to buy more of the lovely products that they make in other countries. To facilitate this they want a much higher proportion of schoolchildren to carry on into further education. Most middle-class children already go on to university so any significant expansion in numbers will need to come from the roughly 45 per cent of us who used to be known as the working class, but in this politically correct age are known as “people of restricted taste”.

The visual arts is one of the least diverse sectors of further education. The University of the Arts London, which comprises six of the most highly regarded arts schools in the country, is in danger of turning into a white, middle-class, female ghetto. Britain’s creative industries make up one twelfth of our economy, the highest proportion of any country in the world. Chances are that the hot talent that will power this vital sector does not exclusively burn in the breasts of nicely brought up young ladies, so initiatives have been launched to get students from different backgrounds into art school.

The National Arts Learning Network held a conference last week. It is a body set up to implement pragmatic solutions for the current situation. It is hoping that formalising routes for students to enter BA courses with vocational qualifications such as BTECs and National Diplomas rather than the traditional, more academic path will go some way to remedying this class imbalance. It also aims to support these students throughout their time as undergraduates and beyond.

Why working-class youth is underrepresented in art schools is multi-determined. Students, or nowadays “customers”, of universities, particularly from poorer backgrounds, want to know that their investment in education is going to lead to a lucrative job. Many arts courses, no matter how glossy the brochure, cannot guarantee that. I am a successful artist and I did not make a living wage until I was in my late thirties, hardly a glowing advert for a career in art for a generation growing up with their noses pressed up against the shop window of hyperconsumption.

When I was at college the grant gave me a freedom to become a trainee bohemian far from home; I learnt to survive on little money and plough my energies into making art and student life. Creativity often thrives on a ridiculous unconcern for the economic. Nowadays, with loans and tuition fees, poorer students often need to remain at their parents’ and have a job on the side, all of which makes it harder for them to develop their own culture and shake off the cloying mud of the old home town. Understandably, for these reasons people from a poorer background are more likely to be put off from pursuing a career where the real rewards cannot be read on a bank statement.

Students from working-class backgrounds are also often saddled with what is known as “impostor syndrome”. This is a deep-seated sense that the world of culture, particularly so-called “high culture”, is not for the likes of them, a feeling that at any moment they will be tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave. I still experience the odd twinge of this unease when my confidence is at a low ebb.

The big factor in preventing applicants from poorer backgrounds getting into art school is prejudice at the interview stage. Highly talented oiks are always going to get in. The Alexander McQueens and Damien Hirsts probably had an energy that shone through. But anyone who has sat in on degree-course interviews, as I have, will tell you that most of the task consists of sifting through mediocrity. At the age of 19 most talent has not blossomed so interviewers are looking for glimmers of potential.

Faced with a choice of two equally promising portfolios — one from a charming girl who reads The Guardian over her croissant, who has good eye contact, and quotes all the expected cultural references, and one from a monosyllabic youth dressed for CCTV whose passion for culture is hidden beneath a cloak of impenetrable cool — who do you think they choose? Who will they look forward to spending time with over the next three years and who do they expect to give them grief and give up because of impatience, debt or drugs?

All these forces conspire to exclude a large proportion of the talent available. Organisations such as the National Arts Learning Network are important not just for individuals but increasingly for our economy. I do not want our art colleges to turn into finishing schools.

There is a poignant sight I sometimes see at art-school degree shows. It is a middle-aged couple looking bewildered and dressed as if for a cheese-and-wine party at the local PTA. They have come up from the provinces to witness the fruition of their child’s three years study. At home they have one of his weird paintings hanging in the back bedroom. He introduces them to his bright and beautiful fellow students. The parents do not feel equipped to understand or judge the achievements of their offspring, but they are surely proud of him.

Trash that gives me a belly laugh

The cultural landscape is eroding into a plateau devoid of peaks or valleys. It is fashionable for highbrow types to confess to the sin of enjoying some trashy culture. So I have a peculiar postmodern pride in admitting that one of my TV highlights of the week is You’ve Been Framed. If I want a full-blown belly laugh I tune in at Saturday teatime to Harry Hill and a succession of drunken weddings, ingenious cats and fat aunties falling off garden swings. Hill’s surreal observations about the irrelevances in the background of the clips have added another layer of comedy to the ancient appeal of the pratfall.

I get annoyed at the obviously set-up scenarios. Why would anyone make a video of someone mending a shed roof unless they knew it would collapse? It would be good to have myself filmed all the time so when I do trip over a paving stone I can get £250 compensation without troubling the council.

Sticking with slim

The debate around size-zero fashion models drags on. I once had the chance to chat to two of my heroes, the avant garde Dutch duo Viktor and Rolf. I asked them: “Why, even though you have experimented with many aspects of the fashion show, such as having an an entire collection layered on to one model like a Russian doll, do you still use thin beautiful girls?”

Their defence was interesting and one I have not heard voiced anywhere else. They said that classic slim models are to the fashion show what plain white walls are to an art gallery. To paint the walls a different colour is always making a statement. To use different-sized or shaped models would distract from the already challenging concepts of their clothes.

Top 10 tips for your e-commerce website - CreativematchTop 10 tips for your e-commerce websiteCreativematch, UK - May 30, 20071. Have a bank account specific to the e-commerce site and merchant account e commerce be certain you have the correct merchant account information from your bank. The bank account is …Source: news.google.comWorry-Free Online Transactions - CBS NewsWorry-Free Online TransactionsCBS News, NY - Jun 16, 2007Also, when receiving payments, the merchant will also need to set up an account on the same e-payment service. Which is best in terms of cost and merchant account e commerce fees? …Source: news.google.comPayPal Teams with mPoria - Red HerringPayPal Teams with mPoriaRed Herring, CA - Jun 18, 2007PayPal has more than 100 million accounts worldwide and merchant account e commerce is looking to continue to adapt its services for e-commerce merchants moving into the wireless space …Source: news.google.com

I recently went with my mom and sister to a week-long chamber music camp at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. What kind of people go to adult classical music summer camp? Out of about 45 people, 10% were normal musicians (a bit of an oxymoron), 40% gnomes and trolls, 20% men who were about to keel over and die, and 30% women who had never lived.

As we drove up to the University of the Pacific and I saw the tower of Saruman the White, I thought that my mom had tricked me into attending Lord of the Rings camp (best trick ever!)

My suspicions were further substantiated when I ate my first meal with all of the gnomes and trolls, but I was disappointed when I showed up to breakfast on Tuesday wearing my elf ears, only to find that everyone else had brought their instruments.

There was little time to focus on the other campers, considering the drama I had brought with me. My cello, Leighton, and I have been having problems ever since I cracked his base a few months ago. I’ve tried apologizing, but he doesn’t want to hear it. I thought that camp could be a fresh start for us; a chance to get away and rekindle our sweet music. Things went well the first day.

By day two it was back to the same old squeaking and complaining.

On day three, Leighton went water skiing without me, which was not only rude but also a complete lie.

It took a week, but we worked everything out.

I promised to keep an eye on the crack and get it fixed if it spreads and/or begins affecting the tone. Leighton promised to cut the attitude and starting working with me instead of against me. Classical music camp? More like relationship camp.

My father’s always been a classic car nut. Back when he was going to Michigan State, he actually put himself through school by buying old cars that were having problems, fixing them, and then reselling them. Of course, this was long ago, back when you could actually take a car apart with common tools and fix things, something which my father constantly complains about any time one of our minivans breaks down. Still, to this day whenever we pass a classic car out on the road, my father is able to identify the make, model, and year with such accuracy that it’s kind of astonishing. Not that I don’t have my own hobbies and obsessions and stuff where I can identify similar things that most people wouldn’t even think to notice, but somehow my father’s ability to identify classic cars never fails to amaze me.Being that we’ve never been a tremendously rich family, we’ve never really owned that many classic cars, and those that we’ve had we’ve usually sold later for other purposes. The only one we really held onto for any length of time was a 1947 V-8 Ford, which we’d had for as long as I can remember, probably before I was even born. It was coloured this weird ruddy peach — nearly flesh-tone, actually — and it had more than its fair share of problems (mainly no way to defog the inside without rolling the windows down, a huge pain in the winter), but back when I was a kid my father took me out on drives in it all the time, and even though I’ve never particularly been that interested in cars, it was still nice to go out driving in it.After my father started his own business, though, the Ford just sat in the garage collecting dust. It wasn’t that my father didn’t have time to go out driving in it, but he just seemed to lose interest. I also think he was kind of disappointed that neither of his kids wound up taking an interest in classic cars. After the house fire we actually had to keep the Ford in a garage ten minutes away, and even though no one said anything about it, we all kept wondering what father was going to do with the Ford. Well, this past week my father finally sold the Ford, and in what I hope is not an ominous foreshadowing, he sold it to the owner of the big local funeral home here in Toledo.Even though I probably haven’t even been inside the Ford in over fifteen years now, and I never even laid eyes on it after the fire, I still feel a strange sense of loss now that the Ford’s gone. I guess that if nothing else, it’s forcing me to think about me and my packrat mentality, and all of the strange things I hold on to. Some of them I can justify as investments — particularly my old video games — but I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen to all of this stuff when I die. Even if I take a partner some day, I really don’t want kids, so I have to wonder what would happen to all of my stuff. Maybe it’s time for me to get serious about writing up a will here.

Easy question! The best diabetes diet is the diet that keeps your blood sugars within the normal range after every meal.

What foods you eat to achieve this goal will vary greatly since your own personal blood sugar response to food varies depending on a lot of factors. For almost all Type 2s it is the carbohydrate in their foods–both sugar and starches–that raises blood sugar. What varies is how high and how fast those blood sugars rise in response to carbohydrate in the meal.
Factors Affecting Your Tolerance for Carbohydrate
Your Weight. Many people don’t realize this, but the amount that a gram of carbohydrate will raise your blood sugar depends on your size. If you are 300 lbs, you’ll get 1/2 of the rise in blood sugar from that gram of carbohydrate as would a person who weighs 150 lbs. This is one reason why the “one size fits all” recommendations for how much carbohydrate you should eat are deeply flawed.

What Physiological Problem Causes Your Diabetes. There are many different physiological problems that cause Type 2 diabetes and different causes can give you a very different response to the carbohydrates in your meals.

That is why you have to test the different foods you eat to find out whether they fit on your own, personal, diabetes diet. What works for one person may fail miserably for others.

Most notoriously, the supposed “low glycemic” foods and “healthy whole grains” recommended so heartily by people who don’t have diabetes can raise your blood sugar very dramatically if you don’t have a strong phase 2 insulin response.

If this term isn’t one you are familiar with, you can learn about the phases of insulin response HERE.

If you do still have a strong second phase insulin response, which some Type 2s do, you will be able to eat these slower carbs. If not, they’ll cause blood sugar spikes every bit as damaging as those from supposedly “faster” carbs.

Your Meds. People have very different responses to every diabetes medication, again because the underlying cause for their abnormal blood sugars can vary so widely.

For me, without any meds, eating 60 grams of carbohydrate would reliably put my blood sugar at 250 mg/dl or more at one hour after eating. With Metformin alone, that would drop to maybe 200 mg/dl, with metformin and 3 units of insulin, it would drop to about 140, maybe less, but I’ll end up in the 80s at 2 to 3 hours later making it a bad idea for me to use any more insulin–or eat any more carbohydrate. With Januvia my blood sugar would rise to 129 mg/dl and then start dropping, though because of my concerns about the side effects, discussed elsewhere I avoid Januvia for now.

Thus you can see that my “diabetes diet” is going to be different depending on what meds I’m taking. Yours will be, too.

It is because people vary so much in what their own bodies can tolerate that you see the vicious online “diet wars” where people who can eat a lot of carbohydrate accuse those who can’t of being fanatics, and those who can’t accuse those who can of living in a dream world. Throw in dietitians and doctors who have never tested their own blood sugar in response to food intake and know only what they’ve read about nutrition in studies, often conducted among people who do not have diabetes and you can see why diet becomes an area fraught with myth and controversy.

That’s why the only way you can find out what your own diabetes diet should be is by using your meter and testing the foods you eat–starting out with the understanding, that there is going to be a limit on how much starch or sugar every person with Type 2 diabetes can handle. If you could eat all the sugar and starch you wanted and get normal blood sugar readings, you wouldn’t be diabetic, would you?
Straight Talk about Safe Blood Sugar Targets
There’s a huge difference between truly safe, normal, blood sugar levels and the blood sugar levels too many doctors and diabetes educators tell you are “okay for a diabetic.” This is because the ADA has, for years, told people with diabetes that they should settle for dangerously high blood sugars so as to avoid hypos.

Since Type 2s controlling their diabetes with diet alone are incapable of experiencing dangerous hypos, this is flawed advice. Type 2s taking all oral drugs except for Sulonylureas like Amaryl and Glipizide are also incapable of experiencing dangerous hypos.

When you are not taking insulin or a sulfonylurea drug, feeling a bit shaky as your blood sugar gets to a normal level–anything 70 mg/dl (3.8 mg/dl) or higher–is not an actual, damaging hypo, just a sign that your body isn’t used to normal blood sugars. That kind of “hypo” feeling will go away as your get used to normal blood sugars.

This means that there is NO reason for you to avoid shooting for truly normal numbers if you are a type 2 not sulfonylurea drugs. If you are on these drugs, you may have to talk to your doctor about reducing the dose as you bring your carb intake down to the level that gives you normal blood sugars.

Even Type 2s using insulin can shoot for these normal numbers, too, if they are taught how to adjust their doses correctly. A study presented at this past week’s ADA conference found that patients instructed properly can adjust insulin levels better than their doctors. Read about it HERE.

I shoot for normal numbers with mealtime insulin and and I know plenty of others who do, too. Type 2s on insulin usually do not have the same problems with dramatic swings in blood sugar that Type 1s have, but many doctors do not realize this. (We’ll discuss how to make sure your doctor is teaching you the most modern techniques of insulin dosing for type 2s in a future posting.)
What Blood Sugar Levels Should You Aim For?
I’d suggest aiming for blood sugar levels low enough not to damage your organs!

You can learn what science has found out about normal blood sugars HERE. You can read some of the better research that connects blood sugar levels with organ damage HERE

I’d suggest you start out by shooting for the following blood sugars after meals:
One hour after eating: Under 140 mg/dl (7.8 mmol/L)
Two hours after eating: Under 120 mg/dl (6.7 mmol/L)

Lower is better, but these are a great level to start with.

Don’t obsess about whether you should count from when you start eating or afterwards. There’s a natural variation in when the peak will occur but fifteen minutes in either direction won’t make a significant difference in your health.

With some foods, like pasta or pizza that take a very long time to digest (or if your stomach for some reason doesn’t empty at a normal rate) you might want to look at your blood sugars a few hours after these suggested times as the blood sugar peaks may be postponed.

There are going to be plenty of times when you don’t hit these targets. Don’t panic, just by attempting to hit them, you are making huge improvements in your health. And if you can hit them more than you miss you’ll see a dramatic improvement in not only your A1c but in any early diabetic complications you might have picked up, most notably neuropathy.

NOTE: I’ve written a longer piece explaining some of the tips and tricks that can help you make a diabetes diet work over the longterm on this page:A Diabetes Diet is Different from a Weight Loss Diet

Getting the public’s attention on issues like global warming and the environment is not easy. In fact, agenda building can be an outright dangerous business. That’s what Greenpeace activists learned when they tried to outrun German police boats during the G8 summit Germany in order to deliver a petition to the leaders of the world’s richest nations, urging action on global warming.

Given the apparent lack of public attention to the negotiations in Heiligendamm, Greenpeace decided to go back to its roots and create some free media coverage by entering the restricted space around the summit with speedboats carrying “G8: Act Now!” banners. And the strategy worked.

In recent years, of course, Greenpeace had relied more and more on their extensive media contacts and fundraising machine rather than the often illegal and highly newsworthy run-ins with corporations and police that had established Greenpeae as one of the leading environmental organizations in the 1970s and 1980s.

But Greenpeace apparently decided that it would take more drastic measures again to get public attention away from TB travelers, incarcerated hotel heiresses, and the war in Iraq.

German police unfortunately refused to play along and arrested the protesters and confiscated their boats. But in the process they also produced spectacular and highly newsworthy crashes with two of the Greenpeace boats that ended up catapulting this issue into most of the evening news shows in Europe.

Here is Greenpeace’s own description of what happened:
The Greenpeace speedboat action finished at 12pm this afternoon 24 Greenpeace activists came in 11 boats to the waters around the G8 summit, with the message “G8: Act Now!”. In total 11 boats were involved, 5 inflatables, 2 inflatable catamarans and 2 six- metre long inflatables. 6 people were injured when they were knocked into the water by the police boat, they have bruises all over their bodies. One activist is being kept in hospital for further observation. …The activists tried to deliver a petition calling for clear commitments on climate change, which governments have so far failed to agree at this Summit.
____

All rights reserved
http://www.nanopublic.com

And so ends the week-long experiment where Jane got to be the car user, and I joined the massed ranks of the pedestrians.

(An as aside: isn’t pedestrian a strange word? It means simultaneously “a walking person” and “a bit slow and boring”. Which is a bit of an insult to pedestrians, if you ask me.

I have a great joke that makes use of this dual meaning. I’m waiting for someone to ask me “how do you like the new zebra crossing?”

So I can reply “quite frankly, I found it rather pedestrian.”

…

I have a feeling I might have to wait a long while.)

Anyhoo… back to my fascinating musings on being sans-automobile. I should start by saying that I’m not a car fanatic. I basically see motor vehicles as a means from getting from A to B without having to look at, listen to, or smell, C.

I can’t get excited about cars because I don’t have enough money to buy a car that’s exciting, and if I did have that much money I’d find a lot more exciting things to spend it on.

But it’s been an eye-opener this week just how much my quality of life relies on my four-wheeled friend. Take shopping, for example. I live in a nice-ish new housing estate on the edge of a much larger estate of mostly council houses. The old estate, built mainly for London Overspill (quite how they managed to get spilt this far isn’t really clear), was planned with an central convenience store, because it’s quite a way from the town centre. When they bolted on my housing development, even further out of town, the planners obviously thought we’d get in our cars and drive to proper supermarkets, supposedly because we’re wage earners and can afford cars, unlike those workshy council house types.

That means that the only shop within walking distance of me is the estate convenience store. That would be fair enough if it was anything like convenient. I went there on Wednesday, to do the kind of mid-week shop I’d normally hop in the car and do at the local Tescos that Steg practically lives in (go on, deny it!) ;-).

I’m trying not to sound snobbish about this, so I’ll avoid mentioning the 3 separate gangs of hoodies in the shop, or the man filling his basket to the brim with cans of lager. They’ve got just as much right to go shopping as I have.

What I do have a problem with is a shop marketing itself as a “grocery store” and not stocking the most basic forms of grocery.

I found myself in what appeared to be the “cook-in sauces” aisle. A fine selection of ready made cooking sauces greeted my eye. Great, I thought, I’ll have something in sauce!

I then spent a fruitless (and more importantly veg-less and meat-less) ten minutes trying to find the something. There was no fresh meat, no fresh fish, and the fresh vegetables consisted of a few sad potatoes. There was some frozen meat and fish, but it was the kind of stuff that comes in bags and has already been processed in some way. I have a fairly broad palate, but I draw the line at Chicken Nugget Tikka Masala.

So basically, the cook-in sauces were there to fill shelf space with things that don’t go off too quick. Everyone has the odd jar of Dolmio or something tucked away in their kitchen cupboards for emergencies; if the shop owners were truly trying to run a convenience store they’d have stocked the stuff to go with it. But no. Shit shop.

Anyway, all this has gone to show me just how much I realise I need a car in this neck of the sticks, unless I fancy catching a bus to do even a basic shop, and practically cutting myself off from my friends and relatives. Which I don’t, so sue me.

Bloomberg previously shed a bit of light on the “uber-informed” goings on with credit default swaps in the context of buy-outs and take-overs. See here. Now they turn their lights on similar goings on in the equity side of these things.

Insider-Trading Ring Bust May Fuel Hedge-Fund Concern (Update3) By David Scheer
Prosecutors in New York and Washington yesterday brought criminal charges against 13 people, claiming that an executive at UBS and a former compliance lawyer at Morgan Stanley tipped off hedge-fund traders and brokers to new analyst ratings and secret takeover talks. Bear Stearns was home to at least four professionals who traded on information leaked from inside the two firms, according to a complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Hedge funds are private pools of capital that allow managers to participate substantially in gains on the money invested. That pay structure creates an incentive for employees to trade in non- public information.

The temptation to cheat extends to the securities firms, which collect $10 billion a year in fees for providing prime- brokerage services to hedge funds.

At least two studies show that stocks and derivatives regularly rise ahead of takeovers, and in the past week trading of options to buy shares of TXU Corp. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. surged in advance of announcements that they agreed to be acquired.

A study by Measuredmarkets Inc. in August showed that insiders may have traded illegally in advance of 41 percent of the largest U.S. acquisitions the previous year. Two months later, Credit Derivatives Research LLC found that credit-default swaps based on the bonds of 30 takeover targets, including four of the five biggest leveraged buyouts by that point in 2006, rose before deals were announced.

Earlier this year, the SEC asked at least 10 Wall Street firms to turn over stock-trading records for the last two weeks of September, seeking to determine whether they leaked details about big stock trades to favored clients.

The government said yesterday that it broke one of the biggest insider-trading cases since the 1980s. According to the SEC, which brought a civil suit against 14 defendants, the scheme stretched over five years, included hundreds of tips and produced more than $15 million in illegal profits.
“Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox are siding with Wall Street and Corporate America insiders in an aggressive push to kill section 404 disclosure provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).”