Those that know me know that I love Palm OS and have been using Palm top PDAs for over 10 years now. Ever since the “axe gravy soup” Newtons in fact. Anyway you also know I have struggled all my life with being overweight. I also have a Diabetic intake of no more than 45 carbs per meal. In the diabetic program they want you to eat more smaller meals per day (6 really) but that’s overkill for me. My A1C is typically less than 5.9 which is great. So anyway mix all this together with weight loss and I often have strange or complicated food intake requirements. So I went looking for a program on my Palm (which is now a Clie NZ90 by the way) which could track these factors for me. At first I wanted also to track my daily blood glucose readings but that’s less of a concern for me now since I no longer test my sugar daily as long as I eat correctly and I pretty much have that down pat. I found a host of palm apps. that track this kind of thing but for now I have settled on two applications that seem to meet my needs without being overly complicated. Simple Calorie Tracker (freeware) and Diet Tracker (shareware). SCT is a very simple program with no built in databases but enough logic and tables to get the job done. You create your own food (with categories if you want that) with it’s estimated calories. SCT tracks what you have eaten for the day and also what exercise you have done so you can see a “net” result of either the excess calories you did not burn or your calculated weight loss. Both programs start with your goal based on calories per day and expected weight loss rate (typically 1-2 pounds a week). Diet Tracker does however let you choose between tracking fat or carbs in addition to the calories consumed. I am interested in the carbs of course but not for weight loss only for my diabetic intake so I chose fat tracking. It’s the first day on Diet Tracker so I will update more after I have used it a while. The price tag is about 15 bucks.

I do not really consider myself a true roadgeek since I am not up on all the trivia like these guys are. In fact I am more of a train geek or what is referred to as a railfan. But I am subscribed to the mailing lists: Yahoo roadgeek and N9JIG list), occasionally read the MTR newsgroup and know several “hard core” road geeks. I have always been into roads and transportation systems. I love to study maps and observe unusual route numbers. This forks off into another interest of mine which is Geocaching. Recently I was made aware of the Georgia Roadgeek. He has a podcast which I have started listening to. Here are some other roadgeek sites I like:

Scott Oglesby Humble House of Roadsdom
GribbleNation
Roadgap
http://www.us-highways.com/
The Interstate List (ihoz.com been around for at least 11 years)
Violations of Usual Numbering
State Ends
3DIs that aren’t
Interstate Highway Control Cities
AA Roads
Lost Highways
Highway exit lists
Route 66
The National Highway System
Manual of traffic Signs
Road sign math
Via
Traffic and highway cams
The DMOZ site

And of course what’s life without endless highway sign pictures and videos?

I am actively looking for a desktop wiki I can use to post to my online wikis (yet to be published). They both will be where I store my note taking. I will have one for public (world view) and private (family view). Both of course need good security from hacking or defacing content which generally flies in the face of wikis since they are of course supposed to be about collaboration. I have not completely settled on server side software just yet although MediaWiki, PmWiki, UseModWiki and Oddmuse are high on the list. In advance of that I am also looking at wiki desktops that can be used to edit and publish to server side wikis. Some of the desktop tools (”Personal wiki“) I am looking at are Wiki on a Stick, TiddlyWiki and WikiPad, but I am very much in love with VoodooPad unfortunately for me it is only available for Mac.

I also also am looking how to integrate this with a mobile device as a miki.

Some hybrid products I came across include the Chandler Project and IBM AlphaWorks project QedWiki. Download is at http://files.zend.com/qedwiki/. Here is a video of it in use. Interesting but beyond the scope of what I am doing. Plus this appears to be emerging as commercial software.

Shortly after I posted about wxspot.com I discovered another spotter network at http://spotternetwork.org. Again software is even more windows centric however there appears to be a web interface this time. Obligatory screen shot:

wxspots.com is a new site and windows based software that allows spotters around the US to send severe weather reports up to a web server and can give an alert when a spot is made in either your state or county. You can choose whether to alert on only severe posts or even routine posts. Here are some screen shots I made:

Of course APRS has been doing stuff like this for 10 years now. I would like to see a Java version of this so as to be portable for Mac, Linux and possibly mobile devices as well. I would have to talk to the author Scott Davis N3FJP to see if I could get the protocol information to make that happen. I have long been a fan of his Field Day logging software but bemoan the fact it is only available for windows. I would like a Java version of that as well. We will see. In any case this looks like a very useful project and will definitely be keeping an eye on it.

I don’t normally get into podcast “novels” or audio books but this one’s description caught my eye. It’s called Republic by Sheehan Miles. Here is the feed for Republic. I have listened to a few of the “chapters” now and find it sufficiently interesting.

Ergo proxy is a very well written and drawn (2D matted with 3D) anime. Great music and very engaging story line. Probably one of the best anime’s of all time short of Evangelion. Darker than Black although celluloid also has a very engaging story line. It is a current series in Japan so eppies seem to be only available via torrents.

I added Legal Lad to my daily podcast downloads. I have my rather eclectic channel of podcasts up at Podshow. The feed is here.

I discovered recently that Radio Taiwan has podcasts. You can get the English feed at http://mediafile.rti.org.tw:8080/podcast/PodCasting/rti_english.aspx.

On my travels up I-95 Sunday I decided to try the Maurice’s BBQ in Santee. I saw all the signs and had missed Georgia Pig earlier in the day (as you all know the GA PIG is my favorite place on I-95). Yeah it’s getting pricey and they are getting stingy on the sauce but I do love their sauce. Anyway I found Maurice’s quite bland and I have to agree with this person. it was baby poo colored. And it was the most bland tasting sauce I have ever eaten. What a waste. Oh well the company picked up the tab for that one. I also found out later that this Maurice Bessinger guy is a racist. Oh well some other places to try next I-95 trip.