I hate food.

There, I said it. Queue the jokes about my weight in 3..2..1..

Joking aside, this is a serious and somewhat interesting problem I have that I’ve never really heard anyone else talk about. It’s something I’ve felt since I was little, but have only recently been able to identify and come to terms with. Normal people love food. Normal people love to eat. Why then, does the thought of having to eat give me the same feeling I get when I think about having to wash dishes or clean the house? Why does it feel like a chore? Well, I don’t know the answer to that, but hopefully writing about it will shine some light on the problem.

It’s strange for me to think that people seem to legitimately lust after food. It’s strange to me that there exists an entire channel where people cook food on TV, and people love to watch it. What is this attraction to food that so many “normal” people seem to have, but I very rarely feel?

It’s not that I hate all food. In fact, there are some foods I very much like to eat. Pizza, buffalo wings, steak (You know, anything that will shave a few years off my life). However, I never feel like I need to eat those foods. I never feel like I need to eat any food. Food, to me, is something that’s simply necessary to continue living, but doesn’t bring me all that much happiess. It’s quite a lot like breathing, only more annoying.

Every day my wife nags me to “Eat breakfast!”, “Eat lunch!”, “It’s time for dinner!”. Okay, I say, in as unenthusiastic a tone as I can muster. Breakfast, for example, is the absolute worst for me. I never feel genuinely “hungry” until at least noon time. When I wake up in the morning and think about the fact that I should eat breakfast, I literally get a sick feeling in my stomach. Think about the food you absolutely hate the most, then think about having to eat an entire serving of that food. That is the way I feel every morning no matter what I have to eat for breakfast. To be fair, I quite like breakfast , it’s one my favorite tasting meals. I just prefer to have it for dinner instead of in the morning.

Pickyness

One of the main reasons I think I hate eating is because I hate the taste of most foods. I’ve always been a picky eater, anyone who’s ever sat down to a meal with me knows that. It’s actually quite embarrassing for me sometimes. You should see some of the looks I get when I order food at a restaurant with a laundry list of things I don’t want in it. Want to feel humiliation? Try ordering Thai food with “no veggies”. Oh, the looks you get…

Somehow I never grew out of that “phase” children are said to go through. I’m a 27 year old who hates just about every vegetable except corn and potatoes (and even those are often classified as non-vegetables). Onions, for example, are my kryptonite. Most foods I simply don’t like or wouldn’t choose to eat if I don’t have to, but onions are a whole ‘nother beast. I can taste the faintest hint of onion in anything and once I do it’s game over. I cannot physically finish a meal that I’ve found has onions in it, and it doesn’t matter if it was mixed in by accident and there isn’t a single other piece. My gag reflex will kick in and each bite starts to taste worse and worse while my ridiculous brain searches for another hint of onion that’s not even there.

Am I a super taster?

What’s a super taster? Unfortunately it’s not a marvel super hero who can “taste danger lurking around every corner”. But it is a real, scientifically proven condition and one I’ve often wondered if I “suffer” from. Super tasters generally experience taste and flavors (Yes, there is a difference) with a much greater intensity than an average person. This is especially prominent in bitter tastes, which could explain why I can’t stomach beer or coffee.

There are some tests you can take at home to see if you might be a super taster, but they’re all notoriously inaccurate. The only true way to know is to have your genes sequenced and I don’t have an extra $400 laying around to do that. Would it really change anything if I was? Sure, it might validate some of my neuroticism when it comes to food, but in the end knowing doesn’t solve the problem.

Interruptions.

The other major contribution to my disdain for culinary creations is geared toward the physical act of eating rather than the food itself: Interruptions. I hate interruptions. I could write a whole ‘nother blog post about this (and maybe I will), but it’s a pretty well documented phenomenon for people who have jobs that require deep mental focus such as writing software.

I’ll digress a little bit here. There’s no easy way to explain “Flow” to someone who’s never experienced it (Though I suspect most people have, they just have trouble recognizing it). Wikipedia has this to say:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

Another way I’ve heard it described is to think about building a mental house of cards as you dive into solving some problem. You start constructing this house of cards with each piece of the puzzle you’re trying to solve and create a sort of “mental map” of the problem as a whole. When someone interrupts you, even if it’s just for a split second, that house of cards begins to fall and you have to rebuild it all over again when the interruption is gone.

Anyway, my point is that having to eat food is an interruption and it often interrupts my “flow”. The fact that I have to rebuild my house of cards just to go eat food that I probably won’t like anyway drives me absolutely crazy.

In fact, I just heard the oven beep indicating dinner is just about ready, and now I have to stop writing this blog post to go eat it. Chicken cordon blu casserole with no veggies, if you’re interested.

The solution

I wish I had a solution to this problem, to be honest. It really has a negative impact on my day to day life, my job, my health, and my marriage. Speaking of my wife, she is amazing. She forces me to take breaks, eat breakfast and cooks quality meals without all the normal “crap” (vegetables) people usually put in them. She does that at her own sacrifice, since she enjoys the occasional salad or stir fry. Unfortunately, on top of all of that, she is the one who takes the “heat” when I snap at her for being interrupted. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably eat once a day before bed and be seriously malnourished.

Or dead.

Gun Control

The recent events in Newtown, CT, where 20 innocent elementary school children and six of their teachers were gunned down in cold blood by an obviously mentally ill assailant has once again sparked an understandable outrage over guns by the general populace. Many have had enough of this kind of thing and feel we need to introduce legislation to prevent it from happening again.

The issue of gun control is one that I have always had an internal struggle with. Even now, at age 27, I don’t really have a good grasp on what I truly believe about the issue.

There are two schools of thought. Those who believe it should be illegal (or extremely difficult) to own a firearm and those who stand by the second amendment and believe it is our constitutional right to bear arms.

Many who know me know I tend to lean left on most social and political issues, but gun control is one that, if anything, I actually sit closer to the right on. One thing I do know for sure is that an outright ban on weapons is, for lack of better word, ridiculous. I don’t know how anyone could seriously expect that this is within the realm of possibility in this country. I also don’t know how anyone could possibly think it would be effective.

But there’s one thing far right gun owners don’t seem to understand either, and it’s that gun control does not necessarily mean anyone wants to take your guns away. There’s a difference between banning firearms and regulating firearms. We already have “gun control” in this country, it’s why you can’t go down to Walgreens and pick up an assault rifle. I think any reasonable gun enthusiast would agree there’s probably room for additional measures.

So where does that leave us? As with most things: somewhere in the middle. And that’s where I sit on the issue. As I said, I don’t think a ban on weapons should even be considered. It’s foolish. However, I do believe we could benefit from stricter regulations and background checks when purchasing a gun. There’s no reason it needs to be “easy” or “convenient” to obtain a weapon. Certainly not if you or someone who may have access to the gun (like your adult son, for example) suffers from a known and identifiable mental illness.

On the flip side, one thing I whole wholeheartedly agree with is that if you make it too difficult (or impossible) for a law abiding citizen to obtain a firearm, you end up with a dangerous balance of criminals with illegal guns that they’ll get one way or another and innocent, law abiding citizens who can’t defend themselves if they need to. It’s illegal to possess heroine and other controlled substances in this country, but we all know it’s abundantly available. Criminals are called criminals for a reason, it’s because they don’t follow laws.

I don’t really know what specific reforms to suggest. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know the exact gun laws that exist in this country today. I think the firearm enthusiasts of this country should spend less time whining about Obama wanting to “take deyr gunz!” (Which is about as far from the truth as you can get) and more time offering potential solutions or explaining why the existing regulations we have today are sufficient.

Mental illness

Following a tragedy such as the one at Sandy Hook elementary school this past Friday, many gun advocates claim that mental illness has more to do with the problem than the availability of guns and suggest an overhaul to the way we identify and treat the mentally ill in this country. While I’ve yet to hear any specific suggestions on what we can do differently from these people, I think this idea has some merit. However, I also think we’re a long way from being able to implement such policies effectively. Our scientific understanding of mental illness is still shaky at best and our ability to treat mental illness is notoriously ineffective.

What we could benefit from are more resources to close the gaps in our scientific understanding of psychosis and provide more funding to research in brain science. Simply throwing the mentally ill in institutions or loading them up with prescription drugs and sending them home is not the answer. We need to better understand the underlying reasons why people like Adam Lanza end up doing the things they do. As with any science, this is going to be a slow and steady work. No amount of policy change is going to help us solve the problem over night, but we could potentially help it progress faster.

How do we prevent mass shootings?

I don’t know. You don’t know. No one knows. Perhaps it’s a bit pessimistic, but I don’t hear many people consider the possibility that there simply isn’t a solution to this problem. We all, understandably, want an easy answer (or any answer at all). We’re all frustrated and tired of hearing and reading about crazed gunman taking innocent lives. But this is human nature. This is who we are. You can take away all the guns, you can treat all the mentally ill people in the world, and you’re still going to read about massacres.

Humans are resourceful, we will always find a reason and a means to carry out such unthinkable acts. It’s been this way since the dawn of human civilization, and it will be that way for the foreseeable future. The best we can hope to do is try to prevent this from happening where we can. But let’s not take drastic measures like banning firearms just so we can say we’ve done something. Let’s understand that this is a complicated, potentially unsolvable problem and make smart, calculated decisions.

Here’s how I just saved ~$300 by fixing my HP Photosmart C4680 printer/scanner.

The Problem

After I risked everything and moved to Florida, I found that my HP printer was having a little…issue. It seems liked it had a mind of its own. The touchscreen panel in front that’s used to control the printer would select menus and options without even going near it. It would cancel itself in the middle of printing and scanning and generally became unusable. I figured it was busted in the moving process and we would have to buy a new printer.

Luckily I did a little research first. I found this discussion thread that appeared to be the exact same problem I was having. The printer being “possessed by the Devil” sounded about right.

Thanks to user “CamelJockey”, I learned that it was a fairly common problem and had a relatively easy fix as long as you didn’t mind “getting your hands dirty” a little bit.

It turns out the problem was a blown capacitor on the control board. You could verify this by opening the top of the printer and looking at the little green capacitor. If the top of the capacitor is “bowed” at the top, it’s probably blown.

The Fix

To fix it, I ordered a 330uF 6.3v capacitor on Amazon for a whopping $0.92 cents.

1. Disassemble the top of the scanner (there are four, black Torx head screws holding it down).

2. Reach behind the control panel where the power button is and release the clip holding the panel in place. It will come free. There is one screw behind the panel that’s a bit difficult to get to.

3. Disconnect all the cables and connectors from the logic board towards the back of the printer where the power and USB cables plug in.

4. There are three silver torx head screws holding the logic board in place. Remove those and gently remove the board.

5. Identify the blown capacitor. It’s green and should say TEAPO on the side. Here it is circled in red.

   

6. Fire up your soldering iron (it doesn’t have to be anything fancy) and heat up the leads to the capacitor underneath the board.

7. Pull on the capacitor while you heat up the leads and it should pop free once the solder is melted.

8. Insert the new capacitor leads into the board. Make sure the negative side of the capacitor lines up with the white shaded part of the logic board.

9. Heat up the capacitor leads and apply a small amount of solder to each lead.

10. Re-installation is the reverse of removal. Enjoy!

I recently decided to try and migrate one of my rails apps to Heroku. It was my first Heroku app, and I’m learning a lot in the process. One of the first gotchas I ran into was that I needed to convert my app to use postgres since that’s what Heroku seems to work best with and has the most documentation around.

I figured I would try and get this working locally before messing around with getting it to work on the Heroku server. First I had to modify my local config/database.yml file to connect to the postgres server. [Hint: Heroku will overwrite this file so your local copy doesn't matter over on the Heroku server]

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: pg_tcj
  username: postgres
  pool: 5
  host: localhost

Next I wanted to load my database schema into the new postgres database, something I’ve done a thousand times with other database connectors:

rake db:schema:load

To my surprise, I got the following error:

PG::Error: ERROR:  relation "pages" does not exist
LINE 4:              WHERE a.attrelid = '"pages"'::regclass
                                        ^
:             SELECT a.attname, format_type(a.atttypid, a.atttypmod), d.adsrc, a.attnotnull
              FROM pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef d
                ON a.attrelid = d.adrelid AND a.attnum = d.adnum
             WHERE a.attrelid = '"pages"'::regclass
               AND a.attnum > 0 AND NOT a.attisdropped
             ORDER BY a.attnum

I spent more time than I’d like to admin trying to figure out what was going on. In my web searches I consistently found the same two suggestions:

1. Simply run rake db:migrate:reset (or similar). Obviously this didn’t work since I was getting the error while trying to run rake db:migrate or rake db:schema:load!

2. The other suggestion was that something in the rails environment was trying to use a model before it was created. ActiveAdmin is a gem that came up frequently. This is was probably the more likely scenario for my code.

Armed with that knowledge I tried to figure out what could possibly be trying to use my pages model before it was created. One line in the stack trace I got from rake db:schema:load --trace stuck out to me:

/home/eric/dev/rails/tcj/config/routes.rb:56:in `block in <top (required)>'
/home/eric/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/actionpack-3.2.1/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:272:in `instance_exec'
/home/eric/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/actionpack-3.2.1/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:272:in `eval_block'
/home/eric/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/actionpack-3.2.1/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:249:in `draw'

Ah ha! Routes is a pretty good suspect for something that runs early in the rails loading process. In my routes.rb file, I have the following:

Page.all.reject{|x| x.slug.blank? }.each do |page|
  match page.slug => 'pages#show', :id => page.id
end

Bingo! In my application, which is a sort of pseudo CMS, I’m setting up routes for custom slugs on the pages that are added. Here I was trying to reference the page model before it was ever created.

Simply commenting out the three lines above temporarily solved the problem.

Hopefully this saves someone some time someday!

It all comes down to regret

It’s the single question I’ve been asked the most over the last couple months. It’s been asked by friends, asked by family, I’ve even asked myself a number of times. It’s been phrased many ways, but the implied question is always the same.

“Why on earth would you want to risk everything you have, everything you’ve worked so hard for, to just pick it all up and move 1300 miles across the country?”.

Look, I have it pretty good. I’m not blind to that. I have an incredible job (Which I complain about far more often than I should). I work with an insanely awesome team of people much smarter than me who have evolved into close friends outside the walls of EMC. I have an awesome boss that could give the “Most interesting man in the world” a run for this money. Outside of work, I have been lucky enough to marry my high school sweetheart Valerie, adopt a beautiful, well tempered Siberian husky named Jayna, and was fortunate enough to purchase my first home at the age of 23. I live the American dream every day.

So why risk it all? Why put everything you have in jeopardy? It comes down to one word. Regret.

George Takei posted something to his widly popular Facebook page the other day that inspired me to write this blog post becauset it put into words what I could not:

Making a big life change is pretty scary, but you know what’s even scarier? Regret

I think the only thing worse than losing everything, having to start from scratch, would be to not do anything and spend every day wondering what if?.

Valerie and I are 27 years old, intelligent, highly educated and more driven than anyone else we know. There is not a doubt in my mind that should things go south (pun intended?) we will rebound.

Why Florida?

Before I go any further, here’s a fun fact: Did you know that it’s hot in Florida? Surprising, I know, but It’s true. Every person we told we were moving to Florida gave us a lecture about how hot it is in Florida as if somehow it was something we hadn’t given any consideration to. In case you were wondering, it’s also humid and there are a lot of old people here. There are also plenty of alligators and right wing religious fanatics to go around. All earth shattering facts, I know.

Now that I’ve got that condescension off my chest I can explain the real reason we settled on the sunshine state.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, weather was a driving factor. I hate the cold. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t just dislike the cold or find it mildly uncomfortable. I hate it. Give me a humid 100* summer day over the bone chilling winds of an 18* winter night anytime. With cold comes snow, and I hate that too. I hate shoveling it, I hate driving in it, I hate when it gets in my shoes and makes my socks wet.

But there are a lot of places in the country where it doesn’t get very cold, where it doesn’t snow, so why Florida specifically? I can recall the exact moment in time when I decided this is where I wanted to be.

In February of 2011 Valerie and I took a trip with my awesome Uncle Chris to Daytona Beach to watch the Daytona 500. He was kind enough to let us stay with him in his nice timeshare in New Smyrna Beach for the week and it was one of the most enjoyable vacations we had ever been on. At one point we found ourselves at “Citywalk” in Orlando near Universal Studios. It was a Saturday afternoon and Valerie and I decided to watch the NASCAR Nationwide series race at none-other than the “NASCAR Cafe”. We had our meal inside and eventually moved to the outdoor bar to watch the rest of the race. It was in that moment, sitting outside on a February afternoon sipping a frozen drink and watching my favorite sport that I knew this is where I wanted to be. This was home.

There are other reasons as well. Picking somewhere in the eastern time zone was important for work. Not having state income tax was a huge plus with regards to my internet business. No car inspections means owning modified cars is less stressful and the racing and convertible season is essentially 365 days long. There’s just something about warm sticky weather, palm trees and nicely paved roads that makes me happy.

Why Parrish? Why the Gulf coast?

A lot of strategy and planning went into picking Parrish, a really small town in western Florida that in Val’s words sits “between cows and trees”. Parrish is almost perfectly situated adjacent to Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota. All of these major cities offer potential job opportunities, including technology jobs, should I ever find myself without work. Our realtor Sharron recommended Parish specifically because it’s a nice town away from some of the nearby areas hit hard by the economic recession. Copperstone, the community we’re building our house in, is nothing short of Amazing and is growing at a rapid pace.

Time will tell whether we made a good decision, whether we’re truly happen in the years to come. One thing is for certain though, we’ll never be burdened by wondering What if?