Lars Pind

Her var et friskt forårstilbud, men det er nu udløbet.

I use lighttpd + pen + Mongrel to serve most of my Rails apps, and so far, I’ve been serving a blank screen to some people after having deployed a new release, and I wasn’t sure why. For some reason I thought the problem was with Mongrel, until I realized that it was probably with pen.

My theory is that when pen tries to serve a request, it notices that all of the backends are suddenly dead, so it serves a blank page. But it also ban the backend process for 30 seconds, so even though it only takes a few for the backends to come back up, they’re now all banned for 30 seconds.

The trick is to add the following two command line parameters: -b 5 -t 10.

What that does is tell pen to only ban a backend for 5 seconds, and to not time out requests for 10 seconds, leaving the Mongrels plenty of time to come back up.

Nite writeup for PublicSquare at DownloadSquad. It’s always good to get some attention. And it clearly shows in the signups.

No need to ever upgrade, add patches or worry about anything, PublicSquare takes care of all the geek stuff while you get your publishing on.

Thanks, Chris.

I’m proud to see Om Malik latest site, Found+READ, launch on PublicSquare, the un-CMS that Christina Wodtke and I built.

It’s even more appropriate when the site is about startups, and the lessons learned doing them. Something I much appreciate, after having founded or co-founded 6 companies so far. Subscribed!

The launch has gotten nice coverage, not least from Mike Arrington (who calls it a must-subscribe to resource) and Jeremiah Owyang, who covers the PublicSquare angle as well.

Good luck, Om and Charleen!

We’ve moved PublicSquare from its humble beginnings on a single server in Cologne, Germany, where bandwidth is cheap, to Engine Yard, whose fancy cluster technology will let us add more capacity with minutes’ notice.

There’s probably going to be a few hiccups, but overall, the move went quite smoothly, thanks to heroic efforts by Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Tom Mornini at Engine Yard, and Matt Pelletier at East Media.

This is all in preparation for a very special launch of a new publication on PublicSquare that’s going to happen tomorrow evening PST.

Stay tuned.

Amazing—there was a total of 150,000 H-1B visa applications filed this Monday, April 2nd, when they opened the flood gates for applications. The annual quota is only 65,000. That’s over twice as many applications as there are visas. And the visas aren’t even issued until October 1st.

There will be a lottery among the 150,000 applications to find the ones that will be granted.

Last year, that quota wasn’t filled until April 25 or so, if memory serves me. The job market really is red hot these days.

This old New York Times article recently came up in a conversation I had, but I’d forgotten the facts, so I dug it up again.

Turns out it’s written by the authors of Freakonomics, an awesome awesome book that tries to get quantitative data in support of a bunch of fun and interesting theories.

The conclusion of the article is that there’s no evidence that car seats for children over 2 are any safer than using a regular seat belt, even though they’re required by law.

Hurra for Bibendum der gik røgfri per 1. april. Tak! (Links til dem på kbh360, mitkbh og AOK).

Og hurra for Carlton, der også er røgfri. Jeg ved ikke hvor længe de har været det, men jeg opdagede det for et par uger siden. (kbh360, mitkbh, AOK).

Og så er der Ølbaren i Elmegade, som stadig er røgfri, og tak for det. (mitkbh, AOK).

Det er til gengæld de eneste røgfri steder jeg kender til i København. Der må da være flere. Hvad har jeg overset?

Jason,

it’s great that you’re doing something about your weight, and it’s even better that you’re motivating so many other people to lose weight, too, through your fatblogging meme.

I hope these thoughts will give you inspiration to try some new directions in your efforts.

Your approach to weight loss seems to me to be too focused on the physical aspects, ignoring the psychology (beyond motivational pep-talk like “you can do it!”).

More importantly, it sounds too much like a struggle.

I believe that you can achieve weight loss with more fun and less struggle. (And I’m not even out to sell you anything. What a missed opportunity ;)

For the record, I lost 12 kilos (from 83 to 71) steadily over the past year. It’s not an insane amount, but it’s still a 15% loss.

What made the difference for me was learning to listen to and feel my body.

What I mean by that is, focus on how you feel in your stomach and the rest of your body when you eat. So much food makes you feel too bloated and stuffed after you’ve eaten it. Certainly if you eat more than you need, you’ll feel stuffed. And then perhaps you quench that feeling by eating even more. Not a great recipe.

If you can fine-tune your sensibility towards how eating and drinking make you feel, try to picture that feeling before you put stuff in your mouth, and then focus on that, rather than how it tastes when you’re about to eat something, then it’s not difficult at all. Then you’ll know to eat only what you need and nothing else, and your body will start to shed the pounds it doesn’t need anymore.

Here are some more lessons I learned:

• I don’t believe in not eating bread, cheese, pasta and such. Indeed, my first five kilos I lost over 1 month in italy where I had plenty of bread, cheese, pasta, olive oil, gelato, wine, and all the rest of it. Don’t worry so much about the kinds of foods you eat. Worry more about eating rich, flavorful, good quality food.

• I’ve found that if the food tastes savory and rich (it has all 5 basic tastes in a good balance), I eat less of it. When the food is lacking one of the basic tastes, or is just not very good, I’ll tend to eat more, hoping with each bite that the next bite will have what I’m craving. Use good quality ingredients: Fresh fruit and vegetables, flavorful oils, and plenty of it, good bread, good pasta, good cheese, and all the rest of it.

• I consider fat-free or low-fat foods downright harmful: They taste less rich, making you eat more to compensate. Again, it sounds counter-intuitive, but I’ve found it to be true over and over again.

• Make smaller portions. There’s a strong tendency to eat everything on the plate, so put less there in the first place, and take 10-15 minutes after finishing the plate to see if you really need more food. Better quality, but less food.

• If you’re not hungry, don’t eat! It’s one of those things that are stupid and simple, but it’s really easy to get caught in the “it’s 7 pm so I must eat” trap. Skip a meal, or just have a snack.

• If you want to have dessert (and I’ve had dessert almost daily while losing weight steadily), don’t eat more of something else to compensate. My mom told me “if you want dessert, you have to finish your plate first”. That’s bollocks. Don’t eat only dessert, of course, and don’t eat dessert if it doesn’t make you feel good. But don’t overeat something else to compensate for dessert. Desserts are not necessarily evil.

• Focus on your digestion. If you don’t go do the number two at least once a day, you’re not going to lose weight. It has to go somewhere. Your digestion is the fire that consumes what you eat and produce the energy your body needs. It’s your engine, and it needs to operate efficiently. I’ve used green tea to kickstart ti, but more recently I’ve found that a meal consisting of just boiled vegetables and a glass of water (always drink water lukewarm, never cold), or perhaps a clear vegetable soup, can get my digestion going again when it’s stuck. It depends on your body type, and some have better digestion by nature than others. Experiment and see what’s good for your digestion.

• Go vegetarian for a period, or a few days a week. Meat, fish, and dairy products are tough to digest. Besides, pure veggies actually taste quite nice, if they’re good and fresh, and it’s really hard to overeat.

• All of the cooking stuff is easier if you’re cooking at home: You can make sure each meal tastes great, you can make portions small, you can make sure the ingredients are rich and fresh, and you don’t have to overeat because you know you can always go grab something in the fridge.

• I also took a couple months of only eating fruits until noon. I liked it because it got me going in the day with lots of energy and a very light feeling in my stomach and zero chance of overeating for breakfast, making it easier not to overeat for lunch.

• Do exercise. I just wanted to get that in there. I’ve been running early mornings (6am), which has the added benefit of kick-starting my metabolism. Lately, I’ve been focused more on the Yoga, which probably doesn’t burn as many calories, but is so much better for getting in touch with your body, and it supposedly does give you more exercise than you’d think, and it even exercises your inner organs!

• Consider your psychology. I believe that a lot of overweight people, myself included, are overweight in part because they absorb experiences in life and stash them away in their bodies. The body acts as a buffer for the mind. Of course there’s fat and calories and biochemistry involved, but so long as the body needs the armor and the buffer, it’s going to keep it, no matter what you try and do to it. So give yourself the time to listen to the emotions that come from your body, as you’re trying to lose weight, and be prepared to examine them, deal with them, and let go of them. For me there were various insecurities and fears, including fear of rejection, fear of failure, and fear of success. Be prepared to listen to your body. I think this is very important.

The overarching theme that I want to get across, though, is:

Don’t fight. Accept, and let go.

If you’re fighting, you’re working against your your body, not with it. Feel your body, listen to it, accept it, and respect it, and it will tell you what it needs. You need to accept yourself and your body as it is today, right now, before you can begin to change.

Accepting doesn’t mean that you don’t want it to be different. It means that you’re working with it, not against it. Believe me, your body wants to be slim, too, and it wants to tell you how to get there. But if you make it your enemy, it’s going to defend itself, and fight to keep its armor, the fat.

Your pal,

//Lars

Tags: fatblogging food eating weightloss eating weightloss health self-improvement

Using a computer is something most of us, our parents, our spouses, have figured out how to do: The mouse, the windows, the menus, dragging and dropping.

But how to handle the constant barrage of emails, SMS messages, files, and photos that keep coming our way, is a different matter. It’s easy to get stressed, to feel like you’re constantly behind, to feel like life is just about making things be not bold (credit to Jeff Veen).

While sending bits is essentially free to the sender, there’s real cost in time and consideration to the recipient. It is this asymmetry that causes so many problems.

Thankfully, the help has arrived.

The inimitable Mark Hurst of Creative Good, Good Experience, and GEL fame, has written a book, Bit Literacy, about exactly this: How to handle the bits in your work and your life in the internet age. (Full disclosure: Mark is my friend and mentor.)

It’s not aimed at IT and Internet professionals like myself, but rather at everyone else. Our mothers, spouses, friends, bankers, and plumbers.

You can read more about it, read the first chapter, and then order it directly from Mark (FREE shipping in the US and bulk discounts on orders of 3 or more).

(You can also get a copy of the book by attending the Good Experience Live conference in New York city in just two and a half weeks. But hurry, it’s almost sold out.)