Barnson.org

So I’ve decided it’s finally time for this nerd to step forward in the digital age with a PVR: Personal Video Recorder. Looking at TiVo, I think it’s really cool. What’s not cool are the price, the cost, and knowing that if TiVo ever goes out of business I might lose both my listing service and the functionality of my device. I got looking for alternatives and found MythTV.

Now, MythTV looks like it has all the ducks in a row, but man is it hard to wrap your head around at first. Unlike a traditional PVR, MythTV dissociates “boxes” from the front-end viewing functionality you might want. Instead, you have various resources, typically divided into two types: front-end and back-end.

A front-end is something that faces you, the viewer. It can be a PC, a little device, or whatever… the only requirement is that it has a display, sound, and maybe a few games loaded if you like. It looks to resources on your home network. In a way, it might be considered like a Media Center Extender, for those of you used to Windows Media Center. A front-end can talk to as many back-ends as it likes, but has one master back-end that it basically belongs to.

Then there’s the back-end. This is where it gets confusing. The back-end is some type of service provider in your house. If it’s a PC with lots of storage, maybe it just provides storage for archiving old videos. If it has a video tuner card or two or three, maybe it provides real-time viewing as well as recording services.

So let’s say you have three spare PCs laying around your house, like I do. Because they are older boxes, you want them to do one job apiece. Set one up as the master back-end with a TV tuner card. Set a second one up as a secondary back-end, with another TV tuner card and lots of storage. Set up the third as a front-end.

Let’s say that each tuner card can only tune into one station at a time, and you want to watch live TV with the ability to pause and fast-forward. First the back-ends will check if both tuner cards are already in use; if they are, unless you tell MythTV to allow disruption of recording, it will tell you you’re SOL because all tuners are in use. Anyway, let’s assume one tuner is recording and the other one is free. It will buffer a bit on the free one and start streaming that data to your front-end over the network.

Basically, you end up with a pool of back-end resources accessible via any front-end. MythTV will decide what resources are free and allow you to maximize your TV-watching time however you like.

But in the meantime, as I spend Day 2 mucking around with conflicting IRQs and machines that don’t have enough power to run a back-end and front-end at the same time, I’m a little frustrated at the complexity. If I had three sparkling-jewel brand-new PCs with at least a gig of RAM apiece, this would not be a problem. Given that I’m trying to cobble together a MythTV setup using hardware that ranges from four to eight years old at this point, it’s been a little off-putting.

–Matt B.

Mid-week motivation time for me.

Even when I was 178 pounds in high school, I had a little pudgy gut. I was “skinny fat”. The only time I remember being really fit was back when I was a Mormon missionary (not Mormon anymore, nor a missionary) and riding my bike constantly. I rode my bike so much that I got stretch marks on my butt from the muscle development. Some of that leg development has stayed with me as an adult, and I’ve always retained the ability to lift heavy weights that make other people at work balk.

But this morning for the first time ever, my Wii Fit showed a straight-up (that is, no adjustment for clothing) weight of 220 pounds this morning when I took my weight in my shorts and T-shirt. Shortly, I’ll be down into the teens, and another ten pounds gone! The next weight goal is 215 pounds, and at my current rate of weight loss that’s 2-3 weeks away. Sure, the ultimate goal is 190 pounds or so where I’ll be below 10% body fat, but it took me many years to get this fat; it will take a while to get myself into better shape than I’ve ever been before. I’ve never been lean and muscular before. Sure, I’ve been skinny, but had basically no muscles and didn’t eliminate my pot belly at that low weight.

A decade and a half of holding babies, and working a job that required me to sling around 70-pound boxes regularly has kept my muscle mass up a bit; I tend toward muscle, while my identical-height co-worker weighs seventy pounds less than I do. He’s on the low end of the BMI scale as a tall, skinny guy, while I’m toward the high end as a somewhat naturally muscular fellow.

Well, I’ve lost thirty-one pounds total since starting low-carbing in September, accelerated by deciding to join a gym mid-October. Since I’ve packed on muscle as well, that means according to my latest body-fat readings I’ve lost exactly forty pounds of fat.

Do you know how huge that is? That’s not small, that’s not some insignificant change that can be attributed to water weight, or that can be disguised in a photo by “sucking it in”. That’s the weight of my smallest child! I’ve lost a person worth of weight. People told me I looked my age at thirty-five; could I possibly look younger? I dunno, my wife says the lack of body fat on my face makes me look years younger. One of my best friends, Matt, (yep, same name) had the reaction of “Holy Crap!” when he saw me because he hadn’t seen me in so long and my weight had gone down so much.

Whatever level you’re at, wherever you are in your fat-loss and muscle-building goals, you can always find at least one thing to move up a notch to the next level. That’s what I’m learning, that there’s always room for improvement no matter how hard I’m working. I just have to always find that one thing I can do to move forward rather than stagnating.

–Matt B.

My wife recently purchased a game for our iPhones: “Bejeweled 2”. It’s a great little puzzle game with 3 modes: Classic, Action, and Endless. Classic mode is all about planning ahead, trying to conserve your resources and taking as much time as is necessary to set up the ideal plays so you can continue to play without running out of options. Action mode is fast-and-furious, all about how fast you can make matches, and the game will always provide you with more opportunities as long as you can find them in time. Endless mode is a kind of combination of both, allowing you to practice as long as you like.

I’ve found the Action mode to provide some profound life-lessons that have application far outside of the game world, particularly if I think about the puzzle jewels like people.

1. Good things happen when similar things move together.
2. Move in ways that enhance similar things moving together.
3. Often, the best course of action isn’t the ideal move, but one that will keep you in the game long enough to get to the ideal move.
4. Sometimes you need to make any move just to stay in the game. Sometimes that move is wrong and you get screwed out of an opportunity.
5. Perfect matches come along rarely.
6. You gotta stay in the game long enough to see a perfect match.. and for that, you have to be quick enough to recognize “good enough” fits that let you keep playing the game.
7. You never know what’s coming along next. That match that may not have looked worth playing may save your bacon in a few minutes.
8. Sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t rational but are based on your first reaction to the problem.
9. If you’re playing well, you make so many decisions so quickly that attempting to justify them later may prove very difficult.
10. Your early victories set the bar for higher skill levels later.
11. It’s possible to do better by slowing down a little bit to make sure you aren’t playing well above your skill level.
12. It’s a great feeling to move ahead after you’ve stalled out for a while.
13. You’re going to stall out. Just keep playing, and eventually you’ll be back in the game.

Got a question regarding the metabolic processes of ketosis/lipolysis vs. ketoacidosis on a forum yesterday. Thought I’d post my response here, since it’s really a frequently-asked-question by people who are modestly familiar with diabetes and confused by the similarity of terms.

1. In a low carb diet consisting of less than the required carbohydrates the body enters Ketosis. What in a normal healthy person prevents this from developing into a state of ketoacidosis?

Corrections to your question: 1. There is not necessarily such a thing as “required carbohydrates”. Your body can manufacture all the glucosal needs of your tissues via gluconeogenesis, or the process of converting protein into glucose. Also, some tissues which prefer carbohydrate metabolism to ketone metabolism — like your brain — will eventually convert to at least partial ketone metabolism. That said, some carbohydrate is necessary for the phytonutrients (plant-only nutrients) required by your body. Humans are omnivores, after all.

2. Ketosis/lipolysis and ketoacidosis are two completely different metabolic processes which share only the same by-product and unfortunately similar names. The state of ketoacidosis is due to wildly high blood sugar and a failed pancreas, whereas ketosis is the result of the body manufacturing glucose to prevent low blood sugar.

I would restate your question: “In a low-carb diet the body enters ketosis/lipolysis for extended periods. What is the difference between ketosis/lipolysis and ketoacidosis?”

So to be clear: you simply cannot get into a state of ketoacidosis by eating low-carb. In fact, even Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics cannot enter into a ketoacidic state by eating low-carb. You can only get into that state by consuming too much high-glycemic food and producing little to no insulin to stabilize this out-of-control-high blood sugar (or by being so insulin-resistant that the insulin does no good… and low-carb eating fixes insulin resistance).

Viewed in that light, the question of how a healthy person prevents ketoacidosis while low-carbing is a non-sequitur. The two metabolic pathways have nothing to do with each other except the by-product of possible ketones in the urine. It’s much like asking how much gasoline would a person have to drink to create a carbon dioxide profile similar to that of a motorcycle. Humans don’t contain internal combustion engines even though we produce carbon dioxide — like a motorcycle does — as a by-product of oxygen consumption.

2. Is there or is there not a threshold of carbohydrate intake that will essentially pull you out of Ketosis? Or in other words if you have entered a state of ketosis but then gradually increase carbohydrates after the switch is made to a suggested amount that is below the norm of suggestive carb intake, what prevents your body from coming out of ketosis and utilizing the conversion of carbs into glucose for energy?

This is a common low-carb fallacy. You aren’t “kicked out” of ketosis by breaking through a certain magic number, nor are you kicked into ketosis by the same. Your body has a sliding-scale of fat-burning metabolism dictated largely by your insulin and cortisol levels. However, there is a certain level of carbohydrate and protein consumption at which the level of ketone in your blood is low enough that your kidneys no longer filter ketones out. The point at which my Ketostix stop turning purple is around 40-50g of carbohydrate per day.

So let’s distinguish here: Yes, there’s a certain carbohydrate (and protein) consumption level at which your body no longer excretes a measurable amount of ketones into your urine. If you are in lipolysis — losing fat — your body is always secreting some level of ketones into your bloodstream. This is why the Ketostix are a nice morale-booster, but little else. The real clue is your shrinking waistline, reduced body-fat percentage, and more-defined musculature to allow you to track your level of ketosis/lipolysis.

Even the low-fat dieters enter ketosis/lipolysis. They just enter it while they are sleeping, or several hours after each meal, while we low-carbers are in it all the time but might be metabolizing dietary fat for ketones and protein for glucose rather than carbohydrates for glucose. We’re not mobilizing body fat all the time, either, but we are always mobilizing fat of some sort.

I am just trying to understand, to the most of my ability, what exactly occurs during the process and how it is really balanced.

The take away message here: 1. Ketoacidosis and ketosis/lipolysis are two completely different metabolic processes on opposite ends of the dietary spectrum. A healthy person cannot have a ketoacidic bloodstream while consuming a low-carb diet. 2. Whether or not you are in ketosis/lipolysis is not a black-and-white game. It is a sliding scale of function, dictated by your own dietary needs, and if you are losing fat you can be certain your body is producing and using ketones for energy. Measurement of ketones in urine, however, tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition as your kidneys filter out excess ketones.

Note none of this applies if you are in acute renal failure; you must carefully manage your protein — and thus urea — quantities if you don’t want to be hooked up to the dialysis machine 24/7. Also if you are hospitalized due to extreme insulin resistance, or near death due to multiple organ failure, this doesn’t necessarily apply.

As usual, I’m not a doctor, YMMV, etc. However, I read WAY too many science books for my own good. Recommended reading: “Good Calories, Bad Calories”. It describes these metabolic processes in excruciating detail.

Regards, Matthew P. Barnson

In other news today, it appears that a flying car is finally going up for test flights. There have been several other attempts to create personal air commuter vehicles over the past several years, all of them unsuccessful. This one, however, with a price point at $200,000, appears to be in within the price realm of “imaginable” for the upper-middle-class who might spend a similar amount on an aircraft… and a big loan for said aircraft.

All that said, $200,000 is a lot of money for a two-seater. For comparison, you can pick up a second-hand Robison R-22 two-seater helicopter for considerably less, and with the $80,000 you save you can afford the maintenance and fuel for a few years. Sure, you can’t drive it around town after you land it, but it sure as heck can land a lot more places than a flying car can.

Heck, it’s even cheaper to build or buy yourself a brand-new RV-4 two-seater, and buy a couple of really nice economy cars for that price, too.

I think it’s sort of like the Space Shuttle problem. Originally, the Space Shuttle was pitched to the American population as a cheap, re-usable launch platform. The reality has turned out that it’s much cheaper to use disposable launch platforms than to worry about trying to use the same shuttle over and over again… and we’re not talking about a small difference, either. The difference in price between launching a disposable platform into space vs. the Shuttle re-usable platform is HUGE.

Similarly, I think it will be much cheaper to own an aircraft and a couple of cars than it will be to own a combination vehicle for many, many years to come.

That said, though, NOTHING would beat the cool factor — or nerd factor — of pulling into the corporate parking lot with your automobile/airplane hybrid.

So it turns out that tiling a floor is a 3 or 4-day job. The work isn’t long during the “work” time, but you have to wait for stuff to dry before you do the next step, so at a minimum it’s 3 days, and 4 if you want to be careful.

The first step is the underlayment — called “backer board” — whatever sort you are using. You spread thin-set (another name for concrete) on the floor, then lay your underlayment, let it dry, then start laying tile on top of it.

I’m not entirely sure I should have taken on this project, but I’m doing it anyway.

Demolition begins. Yeah, that black stuff is the reason we’re doing this. It hadn’t destroyed the sub-floor, but had swelled it some.

Floor’s ripped out, thinset is mixed, making a mess, I’m cheerful.

That goop is the thin-set, with a 1/4×1/4 trowel atop it. I ended up wishing Home Despot hadn’t been sold out of margin trowels by the time I was done. And that orange stuff is a plastic type of backer-board that I’m trying out. It’s very light and convenient.

So today, I am about to embark on a grand adventure: attempting to tile a bathroom on my own. I’ll be documenting it in photos, and will post them here after I’m done!

–Matt

When I was a kid, my dad was talking about trying to lose weight. My flip response as a high-school student was “Dude, just eat less and exercise more”. While that’s true, I’ve learned there’s a “most effective” way to lose weight… and that most other ways are much less effective.

The more I eat right, the more I read, the more I listen, the more I exercise, the more I realize there are just a few basic rules to almost all diets. These nearly-universal principles form the backbone of the easiest way to lose weight for almost everybody, except perhaps people on dialysis. If you follow them, even without a strict plan, you’ll win.

1. Eat six to eight small meals a day.
2. Include a serving of protein in every meal. Eating plenty of protein is the only way to spare muscle while losing weight. Eat at least 60g/day for a woman* and 100g/day for a man.*
3. Closely monitor your serving sizes. Once doled out on your plate, a serving of vegetables is around the size of your open hand; a serving of carbohydrates is around the size of your fist; a serving of protein is around the size of your palm.
4. Cut out all foods from your diet which have sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, white flour, white (polished) rice,
5. Take baseline measurements and photos of yourself, and compare them every week or month so you can remind and motivate yourself with your progress.
6. Don’t eat carbohydrates near bedtime; they’ll just turn to fat.
7. The principal purpose of cardio is to accelerate your metabolism. The amount of calories burned during the exercise itself is only a fraction of the amount burned due to a faster metabolism. The timing of your cardio doesn’t matter much; just do it 3-5 times per week.
8. Dietary supplementation is important when you’re on a restricted diet of any sort. Figure out your nutritional deficiencies — if any — and come up with a supplementation plan to address them.
9. Don’t make your program too complicated.
10. Plan “time off” your program regularly. Maybe it’s one meal a week, or the weekend, or once a month. Whatever it is, plan for the time off so that you can re-start shortly thereafter if you fall off your program. Long dietary marathons are difficult, and not having a plan to get back on the horse if you fall off is discouraging.

I got one part of the formula back in high school wrong. I realize now it should be “Eat more often. Eat less food. Exercise more.” Sure, you can have just one meal a day and still lose weight, but it’s a lot harder than a lot of small meals.

* If you are extraordinarily short, tall, or muscular, this number will vary substantially. Also, this number can be adjusted downward once you have achieved your target weight.

In response to a recent forum post on a bodybuilding forum I frequent, I proposed the following response to the question "What’s the purpose of carbing up on the weekends on a low-carb bodybuilding diet? Also, how are proteins metabolized into glucose?"

For more details about how protein is metabolized into glucose, please Google "gluconeogenesis". It’s a well-documented process, and Wikipedia has a great article introducing the concept. For its application to low-carb eating, Google "gluconeogenesis low-carb". You’ll find a lot of useful links.

For a great article on what carb-loading does in a cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD) like MANS, check out this article: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/keto2.htm . CKDs been very popular with bodybuilders for many years because they give you results similar to old-school anabolic steroids without the steroids part: the ability to diet away body fat while maintaining or gaining skeletal muscle.

Basically, we have two biologically opposed processes that we’re trying to maximize with a CKD like MANS:

1. Lipolysis, or your body catabolizing (that is, reducing structure and stored energy from) fatty tissue.

2. Hypertrophy, or your body anabolizing (that is, adding structure and stored energy to) muscle tissue.

Your body is catabolizing or anabolizing on a sliding scale dictated by:

1. The amount of insulin secreted by your pancreas in response to blood glucose levels. Key to remember is that when insulin is high, it’s a purely anabolic process: all your tissues are storing raw materials from your bloodstream. Fat cells are storing glucose and glycerol as triglycerides, while muscles are storing the same stuff as glycogen, which we’ll get to in a minute.

2. The need of your tissues. If your muscles need protein, amino & fatty acids, they’ll grab it from your blood. Muscles can’t grab glucose in large quantity without the presence of insulin, though… and your fat cells are just as eager for the stuff.

OK, so 5.5 days out of seven, you’re low-carbing. Insulin is very low and only present in more than tiny quantities after a really big helping (around 40g+, varies by individual) of protein. The anabolic process is very slow for muscles and fat. Your metabolism, however, is running rock-steady, and your liver is converting lots of fat into ketones and lots of protein into glucose to power those tissues which require those food sources. Usually, your fat cells are giving up a substantial amount of triglycerides to the liver, which converts them into glucose and their fatty acid components. This is the heart of the low-carb fat-loss process, and we spend most of the week in this state because to spend too much of the week in an anabolic state results in gaining large amounts of fat more than large amounts of muscle.

1.5 days a week, you’re high-carbing, and on MANS you can really eat whatever you want. Seriously, just eat whatever you’ve felt deprived of for the week, and it will still work for you.

However, if you’re interested in maximizing fat loss, you want to keep the carb-ups "clean" by eating slow-digesting carbs. Keep away from white rice, white flour, refined sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, and soda pop. Get your carbs instead from fruits and starchy vegetables. Also, if you’re trying to maximize fat-loss while still carbing up, glycogen storage will account for roughly 2% of your lean body weight when you’re "full" of glycogen. My lean body weight is 171 pounds, so I’ll gain around 3-4 pounds on a carb-up. This is very typical, and is around 1/2 water, 1/2 sugar in the polysaccharide called "glycogen". This glycogen storage is the majority of the so-called "water weight" people refer to: an easy 3-5 pounds that is lost as easily as gained in any given week, and illusory weight loss.

Note that means you’re only eating around a pound to two pounds of carbohydrates while carbing up for the most efficient, non-fat-gaining carb-up. That’s around 800-1000g of carbs for an adult male of my size; your amount will vary based on your lean body weight.

The purpose of the carb-up is:

1. To provide glycogen for your real heavy lifting. You’ll notice your ability to push heavier weights for more sets goes up with glycogen storage. Glycogen is purely short-term muscular energy storage, and won’t help beyond the first mile or two of a marathon, for instance.

2. To provide an anabolic environment for muscles to grow with insulin as a transport for several essential nutrients.

3. To increase the glycogen capacity of muscles by depleting and refilling, which also equates to muscle growth.

Hope I’ve been helpful!

Regards,

Matt B.

I took some body measurements two days ago. My waist is forty inches. My neck is seventeen inches. Now, I knew about the neck, and I’ve worn a 17″ neck on my button-up shirts for years. Yet I wear a size 34 or perhaps 36 pair of jeans. What’s going on?

Once again, I turn to the resources of my fellow humans on the Internet to determine if this has already been researched, and once again I found that people have already done the leg-work!

From http://www.jeans-and-accessories.com/jeans-sizes.html :

…the fit guide of some makers is a little on the generous side, so that we can “fit” into a pair one size smaller than our actual size. The psychological effect is obvious. Who wouldn’t swear that these are the best fitting jeans they have ever owned for their size 10 body, even though they are really size 12!

Well, OK, that covers the women’s side of the sizing dilemma, but why on earth is a forty way too big for me, 38 is falling off my buttocks, and a 36 is about right with a 34 fairly snug when I have a straight-up forty-inch waist? I can confirm my butt is much larger than forty inches around.

As far as I can tell, jean sizes seem to vary a lot by manufacturer. eBay to the rescue! They have a handy sizing chart.

SIZE XS S M L XL XXL XXXL XXXXL WAIST 27-28 29-31 32-34 36-38 40-42 44-48 50-52 52-52

Well, OK, so that gives me an idea what “standard” size I should be: a Large. Yet I have a slightly-less-than 40″ waist, which would be XL, and the sole XL jeans I own fall off me unless I cinch up the belt. I just measured the waist of the size thirty-six jeans as thirty-eight inches.

Is there more to this mystery? Most of my jeans are from Wal-Mart or Costco… do they engage in jeans “branding” for men like for women, trying to make the perfect fit? Why on earth do they size jeans two to four inches larger than marked?

I dunno, but all I do know is that once I’ve lost all this body fat, every pair of jeans I own is going into the dumpster or goodwill. And I’m going to buy me some slim-fit Wranglers to go with a nice pair of boots.