Greg Davis

Thought to post a pic of our ziploc bag drying setup before we move apartments again. Just find a good twig/branch and you’re all set.

I’m currently reading (and loving) Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

In chapter six his discussion of “Dwarfism and the Importance of Mothers” gets really interesting, especially in the context of an ongoing debate about whether or not “a calorie is a calorie” with regards to weight gain/loss. The attention the debate has been given can be largely attributed to Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories, in which he makes the point that the relative inputs of carbs vs. fats makes a big difference. I find myself wanting to believe Taubes’ side, which seems to be advocated as well by others that I respect such as Arthur De Vany.

On page 94 (2nd edition) there is an interesting citation of a study where a kid’s growth rate seemed to sway drastically independent of calories eaten, and implies that in this case it was actually dependent on stress hormones affected by one’s emotional state.

I haven’t read through all of Taubes’ book or much of the existing literature but this stands out as pretty good evidence that hormones do matter when it comes to the body’s energy balance. To borrow Sapolsky’s terminology, stress “liquidates” the body’s assets and this is an expensive process.

Seems like a pretty good idea if you already use Google Calendar and you have any inclination to keep a journal of some sort (ie. training log or work journal).

Using it as a journal

I’ve already begun using it as a personal journal – recording anything from how often I use the health club, to personal feelings or ideas that I wish to jot down somewhere.

It works by simply creating a new “event” as an individual journal entry. The events are automatically date and time stamped, so you always know when you wrote something. And, obviously, since it’s a calendar – the events are organized by “day,” keeping a chronological archive of all entries ever written.

The event name is the journal entry headline, and you can use the description part of the event as the body of the journal entry.

via Matt Thommes / Using Google Calendar for other purposes.

I’ve been using Dropbox for the past year and while I’ve been really happy with it (and introduced it to more than a few people), I had heard the buzz about Sugarsync being a superior option.

I read “I made the switch because SugarSync, in every way, shape, and form, is superior to DropBox,” and looked at Sugarsync’s feature comparison which shows several advantages for Sugarsync.

Why I still prefer Dropbox after giving Sugarsync a whirl:
- transfer speeds are significantly slower than dropbox
- while it is nice to be able to put more than one folder on to the cloud, the “magic briefcase” of files available everyone is still limited to one folder (it would be more compelling if you could “tag” files/folders to be available locally on all devices versus having to move it in to a special folder)
- the simplicity of dropbox lends itself to someone (ehem me) not wanting to pay for the premium accounts (i.e. if I’m limited to 2GB anyway, I’m likely to keep just putting good old “My Documents” on the cloud)
- Sugarsync’s iphone app didn’t impress me.. the music streaming didn’t seem to work and I have faith that Dropbox’s recently announced app will be superior (especially the ability to tag files as “favourites” and have them available locally)

More links:
Sugarsync vs Dropbox: The Battle Of The Cloud Storage Titans
SugarSync Vs DropBox : File synchronization war is on!