As far as snack foods go, popcorn is near the top of the list. Thanks to a friend this morning I learned about Popcorn Workers Lung:

The study, conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, (NIOSH) concluded that diacetyl, a chemical that gives microwave popcorn its butter flavor, needs further study so that workers in the flavorings and snack industry are no longer at risk of the fatal disease, also known as Popcorn Workers Lung.

The article goes on to report a consumer contracting Popcorn Workers Lung by consuming “several bags” of popcorn daily over a 15 year period which contained diacetyl. Watch those popcorn box ingredient labels the next time you go to the store.

Or buy one of these:

Coscto sells several different popcorn machines. The Elite Popcorn Maker Model EPM-400 sells for $229 USD and requires 15 minute assembly. This will make popcorn just like the movie theater.

Now the only thing you need to get that authentic movie theater taste is the butter and salt.

Any other popcorn fans in the house?

Having graduated from high school in Wisconsin, I cringed when I heard that a study found that the badger state ranks at the top of the drunk driving states list.

Wisconsin, with its prevalent drinking culture, was rated the state with the most drunk drivers in the country Wednesday. Over one-fourth of drivers said they drove under the influence at least once in the past year.

It’s not that surprising that a lot of Wisconsinites like to drink. It gets fricking COLD back there and it seems like every town has at least one bar. At the same time, note to my friends in Wisconsin: start using more designated drivers, please. If 25% of the people on the road are drunk that means 75% are not drunk and likely don’t want to die tonight.

Our 20 year reunion was last year and though I didn’t go, I’d like to think there will be enough people alive to attend the 30 year one. One of my classmates that I came back into contact with recently indicated she had gone through a divorce recently. Why? The guy drank too much.

This sucks. Switch to water, green tea or something else that’s better for you. Doing anything to excess is bound to shorten one’s life: stress, drinking, working too much, too much sex. Ok, maybe not the last one

I’m not into ‘why I haven’t blogged’ posts and try to spare you the exercise. For future reference, I write when:

1. I have the time
2. Something external (another blog post, news story, new site/service, etc) moves me and/or
3. I have something (fresh, preferably) to say or share

With #3 I’m being more challenged lately. This blog has well over 1.5 million published words and has covered a lot of different web terrain. Fortunately it isn’t niche, so finding something to make us both go hmm for the rest of my lifetime shouldn’t be rocket science. It’s not as easy any more, though because I keep getting literary deja vus. I’ve got to get back to more deeper web exploration.

You don’t care, I get it, just publish mon, publish!

I’ve found the editor in me getting much more picky about what gets published though. That’s really the problem. I just looked in the draft queue and see I’ve written around a dozen posts since April 2. Blame the editor, that’s it.

I digress. Recommendation: use the Hmm search or click the archive links from the home page to revisit the keyword(s) of your liking. There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills. I’ve been thinking about creating a couple pages with links to heavily trafficked past posts. Maybe one for the highest rated ones too, as that function is getting used more than expected. We tried a rating post feature here before and it bombed. I wouldn’t say the second time is a huge improvement, but more readers and visitors are using it. That helps determine what you like and dislike, so please take the time and rate every post that you read all the way through.

Providing fresh material should be every writer’s goal and I’m seeing — right or wrong — this blog as more like a book than a place to repeat something said days, months or [gasp] years ago. The five year anniversary for this site is fast approaching (July 4, 2008) and then I’ll need to make the call what to do the next five years, health willing of course. A few ideas are percolating. I might bring in some hired guns, what do you think of that?

Missing you
I do miss reading some of my friends when they don’t update their blog for awhile and wonder what they’ve been up to. I’ve been asked: hey, why no Hmm? Is everything ok? What’s going on? Those are questions that a 21 day off period don’t answer. I remember giving blog buddy Kent a friendly stick shake when he went AWOL and he’s been kind enough not to return the favor during my blackjack period.

The picture at the top of this post should answer where I’ve been — at least in part. Yes, I’ve been practicing playing my guitar instead of publishing blog posts. I have been writing a little bit here and there, but time where I’d normally be doing the blog exercise, I’ve been practicing so I can jam with the boys on Sunday nights offline. I’m hoping we get good or bad enough to shoot some compelling video because the Hmmcast is starting to grow some nasty looking cobwebs. It’s not much fun watching video, even in HD, of an average garage band, so that footage might never come to fruition.

The calluses on my left (playing) hand haven’t been there and needed to practice time to build up. This has turned me into one of those guys you see carrying around their guitar everywhere. I’ve always thought that was neat when I see people doing that. Every musician knows that practice is the only way to get better. Heck, any skill takes lots of practice. I’m stealing my writing practice time for guitar practice.

Oh, and couldn’t stand for playing live my 20+ year old electric guitar any more, so threw down for some Gibson Les Paul studio action at one of my new guilty pleasure stores: Guitar Center.

I’m a sucker for red guitars and this red wine style is a beauty. Oh, and it comes with a sweet case too.

What do you think? How many Hmm readers play guitar? I must admit with some embarrassment that despite buying this new guitar a couple weeks ago, it is still unplayed. I brought it home, told my kids they’d be cursed for life if they touched it, set the lock on the case and stored it away in a safe, dry place.

Now before you get on me too much, I bought it to only play live, not for practice. Maybe I’ll feel differently later on, but I’ve never owned a pro quality guitar. All my gear has been fairly low budget. I’ve wanted a really good guitar since I was 14 years old and the timing was right.

I also had a pickup installed in my Washburn acoustic guitar and it sounds great. I’m planning on bringing both of these guitars to our next jam session this coming Sunday night. I’m hoping to become regularly invited to the group which involves three other guys (two are younger, one is older). They asked me to play back after the first session so that’s a good sign. Much too premature to speculate on if we’ll ever get out of the garage. Last time I played in a band was back in high school, so lots of rust to knock off for me.

I’m compiling a list of songs I can play either in part or all the way through. Here’s the current list as of this writing:

Electric
AC DC - Back in Black, Dirty Deeds, Walk All Over You
America - Horse with No Name
Ben E. King (on bass) - Stand By Me
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Blue Oyster Cult - Don’t Fear The Reaper
Dokken - Alone Again
Iron Maiden - The Trooper
Judas Priest - The Hellion, Livin’ After Midnight
Metallica - Fade To Black, For Whom The Bell Tolls
Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train, I Don’t Know
Styx - Suite Madam Blue
Ted Nugent - Cat Scratch Fever
Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak

Acoustic
John Mellancamp - Pink Houses
Five Man Electrical Band - Signs
Ritchie Valens - Donna

Have you got some good guitar song suggestions to add? There are a bunch of songs I’d like to learn how to play and, in some cases, learn how to play again. The song list shrinks if you don’t keep practicing.

Bought a bass for son
You might have noticed in the list that I snuck a song on bass in there by Ben E. King. Stand By Me is a great bass riff and fairly easy to play. My son was having trouble learning the guitar so I bough him an Ibanez bass. He’s learned a few songs on there and seems to find it easier to play with his smaller fingers.

Our third Guitar Center purchase was a set of Simmons electronic drums and drum amplifier. They sound great and we’ve been jamming a bit with bass, drums and guitar. My son who plays bass is also working on playing the drums too. We got a double bass pedal for it.

Rock Band full albums
I think what has gotten me started back into this was the game Rock Band which I’ve given high marks in the past. And speaking of Rock Band, Harmonix which makes the game yesterday started offering the first complete album: Judas Priest most excellent Screaming For Vengeance available for 1,200 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live. We bought this and played last night for a little while. Great stuff, this could give the music industry something to cheer for as I can see fans buying their album multiple times.

Worked for Judas Priest. Last night we took our youngest to dinner for his birthday and then we went and bough a CD. Which one? Screaming for Vengeance, of course.

Not sure I mentioned it, but we’re on our third set of Rock Band drums now. The newest one seems more heavily reinforced and maybe (hopefully) will last more than a month or two.

Time for me to jump back into my reading list which shows 1,000+ in Google Reader and 1,446 in reBlog and grows by the hour. Before the day is done, I might cheat and mark all as read, but we’ll see how things go.

Please share in the comments below what you’ve been up to, especially if you’re a blogger. Are you publishing less blog posts these days? Playing music or some other hobby offline? It’s good to have some variety in your life.

Sites where you can review/rate just about anything are all the rage these days. I like the tagline for RateMyCop.com: "You have the right to remain informed." Despite the catchy name, I found the data didn’t run very deep in our area. Seattle had listings for over 1,200 officers but smaller towns resulted in a list of no officers being listed. 

But what if the officers in your area are overwhelmed with cleaning up the city? Do you believe in vigilante justice? A bar owner who turned a BBQ smoker into ‘Robocop’ seems to, at least in part:

It’s a barbecue smoker mounted on a three-wheeled scooter, and armed with an infrared camera, spotlight, loudspeaker and aluminum water cannon that shoots a stream of icy water about 20 feet.

The city is saying if his creation actually hits people it’s "assault" but it sounds like he’s using it to just spook away the drug dealers who probably don’t want to be caught on camera. As for using it to spray the homeless to make them move along, I hope Robosmokercop isn’t being used that way.

Maybe he should take it a step further and let people on the internet control the voice of Robosmokercop (not the water cannon). It would be cool to have it be able to play Charles Bronson lines from Death Wish. Or maybe Yul Bryner’s classic line from Westworld: “Drawww.”

It’s about time government gives up the fight against marijuana. Long time readers of this blog know my position on legalization of marijuana: I’m for taxation and regulation, period.

I’m also for taxing and regulating online gambling. I see both these as a matter of economics and destiny. The government could take the money from this and help pay down our mounting debts. I want there to be some kind of future where America is not completely poverty-stricken. If you think these concerns are too premature, do some research on the subject.

America being bankrupted won’t happen in my lifetime, even if Republicans are in office for the rest of my years, but I’m looking for generations beyond. We have to make some sort of economic changes today, now, soon. Even if some changes are radical.

There are a lot worse things in the world to be focusing energy and resources on than chronic.

At least 11 states have figured out that pot, at least for medicinal purposes, could be helpful. Why are we telling the sick and infirm what they can take for pain? For that matter, why are we telling people in the privacy and safety of their homes that they can’t break out a bowl and light up?

BOOMj posts that Calfornia courts ruled that employers can fire workers who use medical marijuana with legal doctor approval. Is it just me who thinks this is wrong? Meanwhile, the American Medical Association is still labeling pot a "tightly controlled and dangerous drug that should not be legalized until more research is done."

Please.

Pot is dangerous how? I’m not talking the obvious dangerous like driving a motor vehicle stoned, which is stupid and should be prosecuted like DUI. I’m talking what the drug actually does to users. It makes them hungry and mellow. When was the last time you heard some maniac went on a serial killing spree stoned?

My wife has been in pain since being hit by a car in a crosswalk on November 2003. Surgery helped her for a little while, but the winter months really bother her. She’s looking at all sorts of options to help her get past the pain. I see that Washington is one of the 11 states (Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.) where medical marijuana use is allowed with doctor’s approval. I don’t know if my wife would be for smoking pot if it helped her because she has asthma, but I’m saddened seeing her live in pain.

When we started an experiment to cancel all our credit cards 232 days ago several people warned that this could negatively impact our FICO credit scores. This seemed like a reasonable concern and now that some time has passed it’s time for a status check.

With the declining interest rates we decided to see if we could get a better interest rate for our existing credit line. Didn’t want to borrow any new money, just went fishing for a better rate. We were able to get almost two full percentage points lower and found out that my credit score has gone up 38 points since the last check before we canceled the plastic demons. Nice!

Before getting too excited, I don’t know if this positive change was because we canceled the credit cards or a normal fluctuation in credit score calculation. I do know, whatever the cause, the direction it’s going is the right one.

An October 2007 article in Kiplinger strongly refutes that there is any benefit to your credit score by closing credit card accounts:

There are two key reasons why closing old credit-card accounts can hurt your credit score: The move affects your credit utilization ratio and your credit history.

Credit utilization ratio is how much of the available credit you are actually using. The lower the better, but less than 10% doesn’t really help you, according to the article. So if you have a credit card with $10,000 credit line spending $1,000 (10%) would be better than spending $8,000 (80%).

Before checking the score I reopened my Bill Me Later account. Why? I’m seeing a number of 12 months no interest deals through Bill Me Later while looking for a computer to replace the one that was stolen and might want to take advantage of that deal. Also, I wanted to see by reopening the established account what impact that would have in the future. Several different sources have pointed out that the age of credit accounts is important. If this is true, while we’re saving 2% by canceling old credit line in favor of a new one with better interest rates, we could be hurting our credit scores.

If I do use Bill Me Later my plan is to keep the money in my money market account, earning interest for me instead of some third party, and before the 12 months is up payoff the total balance so I don’t incur any finance charges. Seems like a good plan, although the downside is we needed to have the account open with them. Bill Me Later isn’t a credit card, so not going to stop the canceled credit card counter on the home page, but this got me thinking about how spending the credit even if I never pay any finance charges might be impacting my credit score.

source: myfico.com

According the pie chart pictured above, simply paying your bills on time, every time, can have a huge impact on your credit score (35% of overall score). What have you done to improve your credit score?

Crazylaws.com details dumb laws by U.S state. Some of the laws were taken from dumblaws.com which offers more. Below I go through some of the silliest ones in Washington state where we call home and Wisconsin where I graduated from High School.

Washington
“All lollipops are banned.” Even blo-pops?
I’m sure regular Hmm commenter Condom Man will love this one: “You need a license to sell condoms in Washington State.”
“Auburn: Men who deflower virgins, regardless of age or marital status, may face up to five years in jail.”
“It is illegal to deflower a virgin even on their wedding day.”

What’s the deal with virgins and Washington state legislation?

“It is illegal to pretend that one’s parents are rich.”
“Spokane: TV’s may not be bought on Sundays.”
“People may not buy a mattress on Sunday.”

Wisconsin
As you might expect, there are a number of dairy-related laws in Wisconsin history.

“In Wisconsin you need a cheesemaker’s license to make any kind of cheese, except Limburger. To make Limburger, you need a master cheesemaker’s license.”
“Car dealerships cannot sell cars on Sunday.”
“Condoms were considered an obscene article and had to hidden behind the pharmacist’s counter.”
“In Wisconsin you are allowed to marry your house.”
“It is illegal to kiss on a train.”
“Kenosha: No male is allowed to be in a state of arousal in public.”
“State Law made it illegal to serve apple pie in public restaurants without cheese.”

What are your favorite dumb laws in your state?
I didn’t consult Snopes to see which if any of these laws are bogus, but whatever the case, they’re funny. Also I’d imagine if any of these laws are still on the books, no prosecutions are taking place.

Know somebody who might like some paparazzi attention of the likes of Paris Hilton, Britney and Lindsay Lohan for the day?

Ok, maybe not that bad but the next time you want to torture pamper that special someone in the Los Angeles area, just hire them their own Paparazzi from celeb4aday.com.

Packages start at $499 and go up to $2,499+tax USD. Heard about this on KIRO710 radio earlier tonight and smiled. Look, I put this under the humor category. Think extreme gag gift.

True celebs don’t need to pay, they can just tip off the real paparazzi allegedly like Britney and they’ll come running.

Due to a burglary at our office over the three day weekend, my Tablet PC ownership has come to an abrupt end. To be exchanged for drug money, what a bitter exit.

Do I miss the tablet already? Yes. Will I be buying another one? Not one from Motion Computing and probably not a slate. Won’t buy from Motion again because they operate with too short a cycle retiring their older models. Have I switched to the convertible tablet crowd? If going with a full-size tablet as opposed to UMPC and as the Magic 8-ball might say: outlook is good.

Something smaller appeals to me as well, perhaps as a replacement to my aging Pocket PC. I’m leaning toward the UMPC but those never really came down in price as promised. Would also like something that works with my Sprint EVDO USB. What UMPC work with Sprint EVDO? I’ll have to do some digging.

My tablet ownership experience took a dark turn on March 4, 2006 when I started having some hardware problems. At first, I tried to work around the USB ports not working reliably any more, but eventually this frustrated me because there were times I needed to use my USB keyboard in my business. It was still a great sales illustration tool, but companies we deal with had put our applications in a format that almost demanded a keyboard. This would require me to carry two laptops on outside sales appointment which became awkward and cumbersome. A few months later I shelved the tablet and returned to using a traditional laptop.

Over the holidays I started thinking about how I missed using the tablet. Also it seemed silly to have spent a couple thousand dollars on a tool that’s gathering dust. So at the start of this year I began using the tablet regularly again, this time not for outside sales appointments but as a second PC at my desk. It was used almost exclusively for handwritten notes with OneNote and quickly discovered a rhythm that worked in our business. The good tablet experience times had returned.

And then we came in yesterday morning and saw that our office had been violated. Thieves broke in and stole the tablet from it’s spot pictured above.

I had been working on an after New Year’s resolution post of sorts that showed my new work area flow including the tablet. The keyboard tray was a handy place to store and use the slate tablet to take handwritten notes and the pictures above are the last photos taken of the tablet. I’ve always found it more comfortable handwriting notes from phone conversations versus typing. Quieter too as I’m a noisy typist.

According to the police officer who responded to the burglary call, the likelihood of getting the tablet back is small, so those pictures might be the last ones ever taken. The police have the tablet’s serial number but the officer told me the pawn shops aren’t required to and usually don’t check serial numbers.

My best hope of getting the tablet PC back is if it’s recovered as part of an arrest. Imagine, my tablet thrust into a world of trades for a quick drug fix. Or maybe sitting on a pawnbroker’s shelf with a sticker well below the value to me.

Sad.

Backups and after the burglary
When filing the insurance claim, we learned that another office like ours had been hit recently. I posted about the burglary to Twitter yesterday and was asked if there were backups? Yes, there were backups of everything except for OneNote. I know, stupid not to include a OneNote update to the regular backup schedule.

The files were all protected by fingerprint, but in case the tablet ends in the hands of a skilled cracker I changed passwords for anything associated with the tablet, including any passwords that would have been saved in the browser. Also changed FTP and SSH passwords.

Emotionally I went from mad at myself for leaving the tablet at our office over the three day weekend to angry at the thieves. Based on the investigation of the crime scene the policeman believed there was more than one criminal in play.

Lestat asked me if I LoJacked the tablet?

In fact your laptop has a 1 in 10 chance of being lost or stolen this year and according to the FBI, 97% are never recovered.

Bummer.

And unfortunately no LoJack, but that sounds like a worthwhile service. Lestat said his company uses LoJack for all their laptops. At 50 bones a year with a software refund if the laptop isn’t returned within 30 days of being stolen, I’ll strongly consider doing that with all future laptop purchases.

This morning I asked on Twitter if others had used LoJack service and their experience, if any. Took two messages to generate this non-serious response from mjkeliher:

Not very scientific, but perhaps most Twitterers I follow (and follow me back), aren’t into LoJack’s service? I remain curious how others are securing their laptops? I’ve never secured any of our laptops but now that I’m part of the 10% victim, I’ll be thinking about it more. I welcome your feedback in the comments below.

As for office security? We’re investigating options for adding monitored security. ADT is in the pole position although they seem a bit spendy at $40/month with $100 activation fee. I could buy a new tablet every three years with their service if the burglars didn’t return. In the almost 10+ years we’ve had an office in town, we’ve never been broken into before. One side of me says we should just add security cameras that monitor and record remotely.

End of line?
This could be my last post as a Tablet PC owner for a little while. I’m going to hold some hope I’ll get my tablet back, yeah, even if there is only a 3% chance. You never know. I stopped the counter on the blog home page. Frozen in time on January 22, 2008 Day 1135.

As far as our computer owner history goes, the desktop machines don’t last very long. Either they are obsoleted (we buy mostly cheap desktop hardware) or break, but I’ve only purchased a few laptops through time. The Sony VAIO I bought back in 2000 (for over $2,000) still gets a little use from time to time.

The Motion M1400 specs, despite being dated, are still relevant and I believe would have run Vista. After reading through my history above and below as well as current needs (primarily interested in digital notetaking with OneNote), which tablet PC or UMPC would you buy?

History of Tablet PC Ownership
July 26, 2003 - December 15, 2004: Chronology of tablet indecision (pre-tablet ownership)
December 19, 2004: First full week of ownership complete
February 13, 2005: 60 days after buying a Tablet PC, was it worth it?
March 3, 2005: Day 78 bought external CD-RW drive
May 3, 2005: Day 140
June 27, 2005: Day 196 incompatibility of EVDO Kyocera cards
August 12, 2005: 241 days of Tablet PC Ownership
September 1, 2005: Day 261: Tablet PC sales projections being downshifted by market researchers
September 15, 2005: Day 276 Current office main configuration includes Tablet PC, 3 PCs, Mac
October 12, 2005: Day 302 as Tablet PC owner: email, chat and gaming
December 13, 2005: Day 365: looking back at one year with a Tablet PC
January 22, 2006: Day 405: Dual monitor on Tablet PC alert!

Hardware problems begin
March 4, 2006: Day 445: Tablet I/O board problems
May 5, 2006 Day 508: 10% broken and easy to forget about Bluetooth
Day 577: New Tablet PC purchases being caught in the Vista waiting game
Feb 2, 2007 Day 780: The amazing disappearing wire smell act
January 22, 2008 Day 1135 (R.I.P): Office burglary, Tablet PC stolen.

I’ll be 82 years old in 2050 and, good health willing, able to see if artificial intelligence researcher David Levy’s prediction about robot marriages comes true or putters to the earth like my Simpsons movie prediction.

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”

Levy’s prediction isn’t nearly as juicy as Henrik Christensen, founder of European Robotics Research Network who says people will be having sex with robots by 2011. If by now you’re not saying Bicentennial Man aloud you lose sci-fi geek points.

Indeed the movie with Robin Williams playing a robot who’s 200 year journey to become a human belongs in this story. While we think about what humans want to do with robots, when will robots want to become humans? I’m not expecting that question to be answered in my lifetime, but it’s conceivable happening in one or two generations of my survivors. With the massive amount of storage space continuing to come down in price, it won’t be too long before we can carry around enough storage to record our entire life.

As for robots becoming more human-like in not only appearance but desire? It’s not a question of “could” to me but when? And if they become more like us as in the movie with Robin Williams, will they also want to face our mortality? On its face the robot sex and robot marriage thing seems a bit weird, but it’s the underlying social questions that are more intriguing.

Would you want to live forever if you could? It’s a fascinating subject whether or not we might want to be immortal I covered a bit back in June 2006.

Robot sex or robot marriage seem weird? Nah, those topics aren’t that futuristic, let’s talk about robot sentience. AI still has a long, long way to go.