What is fructose?

Almost everyone knows fructose is the sugar found in fruits, berries, and honey. It's natural. What if I told you that fructose is actually a poison?

Would you call me crazy?

It turns out that fructose, as consumed by the majority of folks today, in indeed a poison. It puts the same load on your liver as alcohol, suppresses you natural hunger response mechanisms (so you feel hungry even after you eat), and leads to a whole host of metabolic problems.

SweetDisguise.com, a recently conceived web site, attempts to shine a light on the root cause of the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic in our country.

Interesting articles include:
What is Fructose?
Sugar - The Bitter Truth
Will Fructose Make Your Heart Explode?
Is Corn Syrup Jeopardizing Your Baby's Health?

From the site: "Every carbohydrate we eat must be converted to glucose in order to be useful. Glucose is often called ‘blood sugar’ because it is the sugar that is in your blood. Fructose, on the other hand, cannot be used by your brain or muscles. They don’t have the cellular machinery to burn it. It turns out that to metabolize fructose, our livers have to perform several complicated chemical processes on it. This puts the same strain on your liver as consuming alcohol. But it also short-circuits our natural hunger suppression signals and creates a host of metabolic problems like insulin resistance, obesity, and elevated LDL cholesterol."

Get educated on fructose and think about it before you drink another can of soda.

-B

Prisencolinensinainciusol - Translated Repost

I'm reposting this blog entry so I can get it properly categorized for digg.

The other day, Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, blogged about this old song by Adriano Celentano.

This is a song which attempts to give an idea of what English sounds like to a non-English speaker. You can read more about it here on Wikipedia here.

I thought it might be interesting to translate the song to English and here is what me and my colleague Alan Muller came up with:

You're the cold man say one.
Prison colon ends in I choose all.
All Right!

When I sand your shoes now ho, when ya' saying,
"Better hurry Mary get your colorpulse diet!"

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

These chains of mine you keep 'em cold,
Oh baby sustain, yeah, blue choke hold.

When I sand your shoes now ho, when ya' saying,
"Better hurry Mary get your colorpulse diet!"

What is she sayin? "Mike you can call me Steam."
You never tell her never just because papers is jammed.

You're the coming up the juice, now wife are not sure,
Hope-a-hope jist getting lot of coke enough time.

All the differeces Stan, why'd you choose a rubber man?
Human trust rhythm now just causes your brain to ghost.

Awesome babe!

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

You're the cold man sailor,
Wheezing, "Colon ends in I choose all."
All right.

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

Prison colon ends in I choose all.
All right!

What else you gonna slip in,
On the kid in the scene,
to land a chisel?
Nope, I don't hope.
Have a good time.
Like phrased, goat.

We can see 'em in the stand,
Let me choose a cover band,
This is too many cars,
I never thought I wanted to drive this thing.

My eyes spy chance, let
And it feels so good with breezer.
Eyes!

You can call a man to say what?
"Freezing culmination, I choose all."
All right!

You, does she not feels he could, other men don't,
There's people that actually like bleedin' me ya'll.

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

You can call a man to say what?
"Freezing culmination, I choose all."
All right!

You, does she not feels he could, other men don't,
There's people that actually like bleedin' me ya'll.

Prisencolinensinainciusol - Translated

The other day, Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, blogged about this old song by Adriano Celentano.

This is a song which attempts to give an idea of what English sounds like to a non-English speaker. You can read more about it here on Wikipedia here.

I thought it might be interesting to translate the song to English and here is what me and my colleague Alan Muller came up with:

You're the cold man say one.
Prison colon ends in I choose all.
All Right!

When I sand your shoes now ho, when ya' saying,
"Better hurry Mary get your colorpulse diet!"

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

These chains of mine you keep 'em cold,
Oh baby sustain, yeah, blue choke hold.

When I sand your shoes now ho, when ya' saying,
"Better hurry Mary get your colorpulse diet!"

What is she sayin? "Mike you can call me Steam."
You never tell her never just because papers is jammed.

You're the coming up the juice, now wife are not sure,
Hope-a-hope jist getting lot of coke enough time.

All the differeces Stan, why'd you choose a rubber man?
Human trust rhythm now just causes your brain to ghost.

Awesome babe!

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

You're the cold man sailor,
Wheezing, "Colon ends in I choose all."
All right.

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

Prison colon ends in I choose all.
All right!

What else you gonna slip in,
On the kid in the scene,
to land a chisel?
Nope, I don't hope.
Have a good time.
Like phrased, goat.

We can see 'em in the stand,
Let me choose a cover band,
This is too many cars,
I never thought I wanted to drive this thing.

My eyes spy chance, let
And it feels so good with breezer.
Eyes!

You can call a man to say what?
"Freezing culmination, I choose all."
All right!

You, does she not feels he could, other men don't,
There's people that actually like bleedin' me ya'll.

My eyes spy senseless,
And they also go with diesel.
Eyes!

You can call a man to say what?
"Freezing culmination, I choose all."
All right!

You, does she not feels he could, other men don't,
There's people that actually like bleedin' me ya'll.

Windows 7 - Coming Your Way

Before I hunker down to work on our next engineering challenge at Microsoft, I wanted to reflect on my experience working on Windows 7.

For the last few years I've been working at Microsoft as a test engineer. I'm sometimes asked what that means. A test engineer is someone who, well, tests things. I would classify myself as a natural tester, and I take pride in what I do. I lead a team of test engineers who test Windows graphics: everything from the HLSL compiler to the display driver model.

Growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina gave me an interesting perspective on how things work; from the herding behavior of cattle, sheep and goats, to the inner workings of complex farm equipment, I've witnessed a lot of things go wrong while working hard to make them go right. Getting a pilot's license and the healthy paranoia of staying safe in a small airplane gave me another dose of tester mentality. Writing software for 15 years helped as well.

Testers that I work with, at least in graphics, are also software developers. In essence, we are the first customers that get a chance to try out a given piece of technology before it is released to the public. Our job is discover, identify and resolve flaws before they find their way out of the factory, so-to-speak. The amount of code we generate to test a given function is often times more code than the original function itself. The kinds of issues we discover are sometimes trivial, sometimes complex, sometimes bizarre.

It takes a very special kind of mindset to perform in a test role year after year, largely because we don't get the glamor of being the creator of the code that ships and our successes, a high quality product, often end up being credited to the developers. I often equate this to things I've heard about NASA and the United States space program. Apparently NASA has many times more engineers testing things than they do building things. For every astronaut up in orbit, there are thousands of folks on the ground ensuring everything is 'nominal'...and even then there are often problems anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I respect feature development, I did that for many many years and have shipped many successful products and line of business applications in many different industries. The creativity of being 'in flow' working on something new is very appealing to me. And Microsoft developers are truly the best of the best when it comes to producing world-class code. But development without testing and high quality bars generally produces sub-optimal products. And I've been quite fulfilled in this role as a test engineer, it comes naturally to me.

I've also made many new friends. The engineers I work alongside in test at my job are easily the most intelligent and gifted people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. And over the past few years we have worked very hard to produce an operating system worthy of praise.

I look back on the Windows 7 experience realizing the depth of the technical achievement, the humbling affect of the scale of the effort, of knowing my contribution is but a small fraction of much larger force, and a smile of knowing I'll always get to remember being a part of that effort.

I think you will be very pleased with Windows 7 when it hits store shelves less than 3 weeks from today. We've all worked very hard on it.

I'm proud of our accomplishment :).

-B

Learning to stop

I've been observing something in myself and in others over the last few months. What I've observed is that most human beings are always running towards the future to find happiness. They are looking towards that next 'thing' or 'event' that would make their lives more fulfilling and happy.

Thinking about this it dawned on me, what if we just 'stop'. Learning to stop, and feel each breath we take deliberately, to feel the motion of each step we take, to feel the wonder of just existing, of experiencing, of just being, is at best difficult.

I've recently begun learning a bit about Asian culture and I find that many components of this culture are more 'patient' and 'graceful' than their heavy-handed, fast-paced Western counter-parts. Take for instance gardening. Japan has the notion of a Zen Garden or Rock Garden "Japanese gardens are a living work of art in which the plants and trees are ever changing with the seasons. As they grow and mature, they are constantly sculpted to maintain and enhance the overall experience; hence, a Japanese garden is never the same and never really finished." -Wikipedia

The American counterpart? Well take a trip to a Home Depot and look at all the people buying fertilizers, and plants, and bizarre yard ornaments (like elves, and shiny balls). It seems like Americans are more interesting in forcing things into and out of the ground as opposed to garnering artistic expression from a garden.

Another example is perhaps cooking. Spend an evening with someone who cooks authentic Chinese food (not the over-oily Amercianized stuff, but the real deal) with exotic spices, wide variety of sea-foods and vegetables and noodles and soups...now compare that to an evening with someone who cooks American favorites like barbecued pork-chops and mashed potatoes. True, they're both nourishing but doesn't the American way seem a bit more 'fat'?

Granted, my experience with Asian culture is really just beginning, but so far I'm finding that I enjoy the components of peace, harmony, patience, and 'stopping' that I feel when I explore it.

If I have my wishes, as the clock moves forward, I will become more intimate with Asian culture and perhaps make it a more permanent part of my life.

Try stopping today and see if experience something that should have been obvious to you when were going...like love perhaps...

-B

The Long Way Home

This is the route a friend and I are planning to drive to get from the state of Washington to the state of North Carolina. Hopefully I'll get some sun along the way.


View Larger Map

ATI Catalyst Windows 7 Preview Driver Package

If you're alpha or beta testing Windows 7 and you're looking for drivers for your AMD / ATI Radeon series GPU you can try finding them here:
http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=39069

-B