Organic whole foods diet and reduced hunger pangs

posted by Russ | April 1 | 2 Comments

As I’ve written recently, I’ve transitioned to a mostly vegan and organic diet over the past few months. A little meat and dairy thrown in here and there, but when I do, I try to stick with sustainably raised meats and organic cheeses (no milk). If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know I’m always experimenting with diet. I’ve done vegetarian in the past, a few months raw vegan, I’ve water fasted, and so on. And it seems that I’ve always noticed that when I eat healthier, I have less hunger pangs (pains?). But just this weekend I think I’ve figured out why.

In the past I had always attributed decreased hunger with lower meat intake, thinking that the more I ate meat the more I craved it. But now I’m wondering if it has nothing to do with the type of foods I’m eating, but rather the quality. […]

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Posted in: health & diet

Improve slow WordPress page load times

posted by Russ | March 20 | 2 Comments

I had been having a lot of trouble recently with the performance of my WordPress blog, and have been experiencing very slow WordPress page loads. Compared to Blogger (which I used to use), the ease of use and self publishing to my own host with WordPress is great, but since converting the page load times have slowed down exponentially. So I spent some time trying to track what exactly was making it so slow. There is never one specific answer for everyone’s problems, but here I’ll cover briefly what I’ve learned. (Also, remember to make sure your host is not having any problems!)

First of all, for anyone new to WordPress, you need to be aware that your entire site is pretty much database driven. In simple terms this means that there is no “physical page”, instead the data is all stored in the database and each time a “page” is […]

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Experimenting with a Vegan diet

posted by Russ | March 10 | 3 Comments

I wrote about a year ago about my adventures with a raw diet. It lasted about a month, which was just fine with me since it was experimental. But in the process I did learn a lot about food, especially about how you can find plenty of food that is raw, not meat, and IS NOT SALAD. I point that out because this comes as quite a shock to some people. Yes, there is plenty out there to eat that is vegan and raw.

I won’t go into the benefits of eating raw, that is a topic for another day. Today’s post is to say that I’m at the diet experiments again, though not raw this time. This time it’s more of a wholesome, sustainable and mostly vegan. I say mostly because I still believe that eating meat is ok. Certainly not every day like some people, but if it […]

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Posted in: health & diet

Should you combine your Twitter and Facebook updates?

posted by Russ | March 1 | 6 Comments

I have been debating whether or not to combine my Twitter and Facebook updates by syncing both. I’ve seen plenty of people doing it, and I think it works for some of them. It can be a key factor in finding new readers and in driving traffic, especially since many sites get a large percentage of their traffic from social media these days.

But notice that I say it works for some, not all. For me personally, I have to say, I don’t think it’s a great idea. And here’s why. My Facebook account is about me, it’s personal and it’s been a way to keep up with old friends, some of whom are old high school and college friends and some of whom are current “real life” friends. For keeping contact with these friends, it serves its purpose. But just because I have 100 or so “friends” on here, […]

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Posted in: technology

Arrival in Bangkok, Khao San, and Grand Palace

posted by Russ | February 21 | 6 Comments

Entry #2 from Thailand Trip (see entries #1, #3, #4, #5 and #6)

Bangkok syline at night from hotel roof

Bangkok syline at night from hotel roof

We finally made it out of Guangzhou, had an uneventful but comfortable flight from there to Bangkok, and successfully made it to the Lamphu Tree House Hotel where we had reservations for the first night. Even though we had been in transit for over 24 hours, and had only slept for a few hour increments on the planes, we didn’t want to waste our first night in Thailand. The hotel was really nice and had a lovely rooftop patio, but we really were itching to get out into Bangkok. The hotel was supposedly a 10 minute walk from Khao San Road, and knowing that it has been called the Backpacker Center of the Universe, we figured what better place to […]

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Posted in: thailand, travel

Technorati

posted by Russ | February 17 | Add a Comment

I’m not sure that technorati is up to speed lately, before I migrated my blog to Wordpress it never seemed to get my latest posts. But regardless, I’m sticking with it. Obviously this post should be ignored by readers, but if you have any experience or input about the usefulness of Technorati, feel free to comment.

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Friday links of interest

posted by Russ | February 12 | Add a Comment

I haven’t posted my “Friday Links” in a while, so here are a couple I specifically had seen and wanted to share.

First, for those travelers out there, this from Matador Network
Metric Map: Which Countries Don’t Belong With The Others?

And this one I thought was pretty funny (and sad), and had seen it on several news sites a couple weeks back. Seriously, how much can kids be protected from? Removing the term “oral sex” from the dictionary? Come on now…
Finding Oral Sex in the Dictionary and Other High School Mania

And I’ll leave you with an inspiratoinal one from Chris Guillebeau at The Art of Non-Conformity. This article was a good reminder for me.
The Small Man Builds Cages for Everyone

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Blogger to WordPress conversion complete

posted by Russ | February 12 | Add a Comment

As noted in my last post, the conversion from Blogger was a long time coming. Especially since I am a developer and love that WordPress is written in PHP. For me this switch just makes a lot of sense, I have access to so many new features and finally have the flexibility that I didn’t have with Blogger.

I’ve heard a lot of grumbling about importing old blogs, and initially was planning to just start a new blog and leave the old one. Until I found this handy tool. Blogger2Wordpress conversion tool. What it does it take the XML export from Blogger, and convert it to WordPress format, so then the import works perfect on WordPress. It’s an extra step, but for those who were using FTP publishing with Blogger, the import directly to WordPress isn’t supported.

So that tool took care of that. All that was left to do was figure […]

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