I've been a rampant soda drinker all my life. As a kid and young adult, my flavor of choice was Dr. Pepper. In recent years, to fight the mid-life spread, I've switched to Diet Coke. I like the taste of soda, but, for me, it's mostly a caffeine-delivery method. I don't have too many fears about caffeine itself, but putting down all these sodas was getting to be ridiculous for a number of reasons:

• Cost: remember when you bought groceries to save money? Seems like now they're almost as expensive as eating out. But keeping my supply of diet beverages was costing me quite a bit per week, so much so that I only bought them when they were on sale and stockpiled them in my garage. Grocery stores regularly put the twelve-packs of aluminum cans on sale at four for eleven dollars. That's about .23 cents per can, which is certainly cheaper than the .80 cents they cost out of a machine. But, when you're drinking six or more of them a day, it adds up. And it adds up a lot quicker if you forget to bring one and end up buying some at the Quickie Mart. The economy, after all, is in terrible shape right now. And I'm not alone in trying to find ways to tighten my belt.
• Environmental impact: even though I recycle all of my cans (and I do mean all of them), recycling all that aluminum is still not nearly as efficient as simply not using it in the first place. The companies themselves spend a lot of energy carting the syrupy liquid around, and liquids are heavy. So, though I'm far fro the greenest person you'll meet, I started to feel genuinely guilty about this element of my overall consumption.
• Sleep and health: historically, I always ramp up my caffeine consumption when I'm overtaxed. And the first few months of having Haden around meant that sleep was a luxury. I've never needed as much sleep as most people, and I have the ability to get by on very little for extended stretches of time when I feel it is necessary. And that--the loss of sleep--is bad for you, far worse than any side effects of caffeine itself. There's also the disturbing idea that excessive soda intake might be linked to bone loss and osteoporosis. So, even if that ends up being a wash, why risk it?

While going cold turkey has a nice tough-guy appeal, I've decided that the better bet for me is to reduce my consumption to a reasonable level and eliminate the cans by switching from soda to tea. I'm not great with fuzzy limits. So I decided that two cans of soda (or 32 oz of tea, as that's the size of the container in which I brew it) would provide a nice morning jolt. And, for the rest of the day, I drink water. As an added bit of convenience and energy savings, I found that you can cold brew tea. Most people do this with loose-leaf tea, but I find a few Lipton tea bags steeped in water overnight produces a perfectly drinkable tea that's ready for my morning commute.

So, I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and I'm feeling a lot better about it. In fact, tea is much more refreshing than carbonated drinks (so much so that I wish I didn't have to drink up the Diet Coke I've already bought).

A little ego-surfing this past weekend turned up two videos by The Tares (some mp3s here), a band I played in back in 1999. These are both with the original bassist and drummer (i.e. before I joined the band). But they're still fun. The first track is called "Corvairs." The second is "Waiver."

This pic is from back in March (we didn't take any today). But I wanted to post something to commemorate the day:

Hard-working Americans come in lots of educational backgrounds and colors (in case you didn't know). Hillary Clinton's current attempt at overtly dividing us into such neat, classist and racist categories is just one more reason she's unfit to lead the country. That and the constant lying, of course.

HC has done a good job, so far, of framing the debate in terms of Obama's weaknesses. But the framing is starting, I think, to break lose. Just yesterday--and for the first time--I heard a reporter on NPR question a Clinton handler about her lack of support from urban black voters and educated voters in general. What, after all, is the deal with that?

Of course, she'll just claim that she "misspoke." But it's a bit like the sort of misstatement a lawyer makes before the jury and then, when the objection comes, respectfully withdraws the question, knowing full well that the message was sent. We're seeing HC call out to her base here. And it's just as disturbing as it is when republicans do it. Obama has bases too, of course. But I'll take his rhetoric of unity over her rhetoric of division any day.

From an email today: I get these from time to time and always just give them away here. So, if any of you are not on the Netflix tip by now and want to check it out email/IM/FB/MySpace/Twitter/call/comment or otherwise contact me and I'll send you an invite.

I hadn't done an old-school computers wallpaper in a while, so I threw together this one honoring the computer I learned to program on in high school, the TRS-80 Model III:



Some details from old-computers.com and Wikipedia. If you want to get a hands-on appreciation for this one (or most of the others in the TRS-80 line), there's an emulator. The "Trash 80" was a computer only a mother could love, but I did learn some useful things on it.

I made a photoset on Flickr for this and the previous ones.

White Bob is 17 today:

Haden is three months old, so we had some new pix taken and uploaded some others that had been sitting around. They've all been added to his photoset on Flickr.

Really, words can't describe how cool Audiotool is. Kiss your week goodbye and get back with your old-school electronica self. At your disposal are emulations of a TR-909, two TB-303s, five stop-box effects, and a 12-channel mixer. Patching and routing is entirely up to you. There are buttons to push, knobs to tweak, and plenty of fun Roland-inspired fun to be had. This is a preview demo-type thing. So there's no way to save your composition (that I know of). But, man, it is fun.

It's from the evil genius who brought you the FL-909.

Google App Engine lands. It lets you develop and share web apps and is the same engine that runs Google's own. It runs on Python (and Django templates). Curious? Watch Google's developer Bret Slatkin code up a guestbook demo at the speed of thought.