Playing Russian roulette with the Black Jack Taco?

Recently, I was enjoying lunch at Taco Bell with a friend when she pointed out that the food I was eating wasn't particularly healthy. Normally, that wouldn't put me off too much—I knew where we were, after all—but I heard her out.

I was eating the new Black Jack Taco, which is a standard taco but with pepper jack sauce and a black (or very dark blue) shell. She said that there must have been a lot of food coloring in the shell and that it was carcinogenic—as in, cancer-causing.

Pish-posh, I said. It wasn't like I was eating a lot of them. I had only had this exotic taco a few times.

It didn't matter, she said. Even if you've only had it once, you're not off the hook. If you're unlucky, you could end up getting cancer from one drag of a cigarette, a single sunburn—or, apparently, a black taco.

Could it be true? And if so, how could the FDA allow such a thing?

I decided to find out what kind of dye was used in the Black Jack Taco and whether it was dangerous at all. But Taco Bell apparently had other ideas. Their list of ingredients of ingredients only mentions regular taco shells, not the dyes they use for some menu items:

Corn, Vegetable Oil (May Contain One Or All Of The Following: Soybean, Corn, Or Cottonseed Oil), Oat Fiber, TBHQ (Used As A Preservative).

A handy tooltip reveals that TBHQ is tertiary butylhydroquinone, but you probably knew that already. Wikipedia says it in fact may cause cancer in large amounts, but that wasn't what I was trying to find out here.

Their Black Jack Taco page isn't helpful either; it just gives nutrition facts and allergen information. (The taco doesn't contain wheat. Yay?) Google searches turn up nothing but puzzled reviews and people saying, "It's dye, right?"

I guess there's no way to know what sort of food coloring is used without asking Taco Bell themselves. I could try, but it would probably be off the menu by the time they got back to me. In fact, it might already be off the menu now. Their special offers don't stick around very long.

As for my lunch: I finished the Black Jack Taco without much hesitation, but I haven't touched one since.

And now, the links:

Clips from one episode of The Jay Leno Show raise the question: Is Jay Leno a corporate shill? (Via waxy.org)

Yet another interpretation of the Super Mario Bros. theme music, this time by a band called Gameboys. It's very well done! (Via waxy.org)

Stream of consciousness VIII

Here's something I haven't done in a while. Streamed my consciousness out for all to see. Okay, it's not true stream of consciousness because I'm not adding in stuff like gee I have to go to the bathroom every five seconds. I don't have to go to the bathroom right now, but it's an example.

On Sunday nights I tend to get philosophical. Earlier I was reminiscing a bit about the days when I used to jam with my friends. I don't feel very comfortable as a musician, but with them, it was all right. I don't know if I could ever meet people like that again. That's why I'd like to get together with them and play some music once in a while.

I haven't been playing much because my guitar is kind of shot. The frets are worn down. I do have others, but they're... well, I'll describe them. I have my first guitar, a Hohner (as in, the harmonica company) acoustic that I believe is 3/4 size and whose case cost more than the instrument itself. I have my DeArmond electric, a sort of a Les Paul copy that's held up pretty well. I have my Epiphone Dot, which I've considered my primary guitar since I got it in March 2003. It's the one that's sounding pretty sad. Finally, I have a Carlo Robelli 12-string acoustic guitar, which sounds heavenly but is nearly impossible to play because it's a 12-string acoustic guitar.

The suggestion I've gotten in the past is to sell some or all of those babies and buy a new one. But I'm not sure how much money I'd get for them, and they have a lot of sentimental (and practical, sometimes) value. Maybe I could buy one good acoustic or one good electric, but I don't know. I also don't know how much money I could sink into a new guitar considering I am a college student and all. Also, I don't play nearly as often as I used to. Is it because I'm no longer interested or because I have a guitar that sounds like crap and is musically unviable? I'd like to think it's the latter. (The poor Dot, by the way, is the only one I have at my apartment, a five-hour drive from my house.)

I don't want to buy a new one, so I'll probably do what I can to fix the Dot. All I can think of doing is changing the action because I don't think that having the frets redone would be worth the money that's been spent on it. It's already had a costly repair a few years ago.

Speaking of things not working, I've mentioned that the memory card I bought for my camera in anticipation of my big European trip (you know, the one that broke during the trip)... umm... broke. It turned out that it worked in my dad's camera, so I figured the issue was with the adapter that I used to fit it into my camera. Apparently that's not the issue, I've found out after my dad bought two new adapters for me. The memory card and the camera just don't get along. I'll have to have the thing reformatted, I guess. Or buy a new one. Actually, I don't want a new one because I've been locked into Sony (we're talking Sony cameras and Memory Sticks here). I think I'll just wait for my current camera to bite the dust, be it in one week or ten years, and then buy all new stuff. And no vendor lock-in this time.

From my dad's camera, I did manage to get 10 photos that I thought were lost when the memory card crapped out. That brings my total number of photos taken during the trip to 4,012.

Creepy video of the day: Barack Obama's Amazingly Consistent Smile. (Via The Presurfer)

Here's an epic song directed at Lily Allen, who apparently has been concerned that file sharing will rob her of her income in the future. (Via waxy.org).

Sharing is caring, it can be fun

The World of Stuff's first original video in almost three years is hardly original at all... but that's okay!

Here's the skinny: Copyright law gives you the exclusive rights to the works you create, as evidenced in the familiar phrase, "All rights reserved." Creative Commons is an organization that provides various licenses that you can apply to your works if you only want "some rights reserved." Some licenses allow commercial uses of the work, others allow creating derivative works, etc. The Attribution and Attribution-Share Alike licenses are the most permissive.

Jamendo, one of my favorite web sites, allows musicians to post their Creative Commons-licensed songs for people to download at no cost. And a lot of it is is good stuff. I've rolled a custom RSS feed that lists the latest albums uploaded to Jamendo under either the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-Share Alike license. It lets me stay on top of things.

Recently, an artist named Josh Woodward released an album called Breadcrumbs on Jamendo. He followed up by releasing an instrumental version with the vocal tracks removed. Both versions were released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. It wasn't long before another artist named Sean Wright added his own vocals to one of Woodward's songs, and released it on Jamendo under the Attribution-Share Alike license. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going!*

Both songs are really great,** so I wondered what it would sound like if I synchronized them. I spent much of Sunday working to share the result. Hence The World of Stuff's latest video, Creative Commons in Action: Josh Woodward and Sean Wright. Have a listen! They sound even better together. The best part is that I didn't need to seek anyone's permission to make the video; the Creative Commons licenses already granted it.

Here's a bit of a technical background for the curious. I haven't really worked with editing video since I was just starting out with Linux almost three years ago. The truth is that video editing software is the last frontier that Linux has yet to conquer. For this video, I used Pitivi, which is finally pretty stable and lacking only video effects (in my opinion). In the past, I might have used Kdenlive, the only other working video editing program for Linux that I've encountered, but it's a KDE application, and I use GNOME. Other Linux users will hopefully understand this.

Also, it's interesting to note that the video was produced entirely with free software and free formats. I started with Ogg Vorbis versions of the two songs (licensed as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), combined them in Audacity, and saved the result as FLAC audio. The visuals were created using the similarly-licensed album artwork and Bitstream Vera Sans in the GIMP before being saved in PNG format. The video itself was produced in Pitivi and saved as Ogg Theora/Vorbis. I've licensed it as CC-BY-SA, and it's available on YouTube as... Flash. Yeah, I know. But I have the original file if you want.

Just today, Sean Wright released more songs based on Josh Woodward's instrumental tracks. If you enjoyed "From Your Lips," do check them out!

This post is already running long, but here are a few links:

An instructional video: How to Make Your Own Soda. (Via Lifehacker)

Here's a map showing the distance to the nearest McDonald's for every point in the contiguous United States. The "McFurthest Spot" is somewhere in South Dakota. It's a 233-kilometer drive from there to the nearest Golden Arches. (Via J-Walk Blog)

* Not the only stuff that gets me going
** I like the original better

Reboot

My Halloween was good; thanks for asking. I went to my friend Andrea's to watch the football game with her and some of her friends, and we hung out for a good while afterward. No one yelled at me for not wearing a costume! Now that's what I call a good time.

I upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu on Sunday. I'm always a little wary of upgrading because there's the possibility that something could go wrong and screw up your system. It never happens to me, though.

Well, it never did until this time.

To finish the installation, I rebooted. During the boot process, a certain daemon was being turned on and off in an infinite loop, and I had to kill the power to turn off the machine. I was able to get to a root terminal with networking in safe mode, and I made it to the login screen by booting with an older kernel, but I didn't want to go farther than that.

I used an old live CD to get on the Internet and ask the Ubuntu Forums people (and anyone who saw my status on Facebook) for help. Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu; I didn't think I could diagnose the problem, and this would have been my fifth successful upgrade in a row, which any sensible person would tell you is too many.

So, I downloaded and burned a CD from the command line and then reinstalled Ubuntu from that. Next, I spent six hours trying to restore from a backup I had made the day before (back up regularly, and always before upgrading!). For six hours, tar was dominating my CPU without extracting anything from the archive I had made. It turned out that I had an option wrong. The main argument that tar takes isn't the directory where you want the archive extracted; it's the file(s) you want from the archive. Doesn't explain why it would take so long to extract /, which wasn't even in there, though.

Since I had backed up my home folder, all of my personal files and most of my settings remained intact, so it was a relatively painless process getting back up to speed. Now it's almost like I had upgraded, except that I'm enjoying the benefits of a clean installation. This new version has some minor annoyances, but it's a lot quicker to boot up (and shut down), and the new default icon theme is pretty slick.

Overall, I am pretty pleased. I just don't want it to happen again. To that end, I created a separate /home partition during the installation. That means I'll be able to do a clean install in the future without having to restore my home folder.

From Wired: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Hot dogs come in packs of 10, while hot dog buns come in packs of 8. Some guy got fed up with that decided to take matters into his own hands. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The Gainesville experience

My parents came to visit my sister and me for the weekend. I hadn't seen them since the start of the semester two months ago, so it was nice. We had a good time going to some restaurants and doing some shopping. Usually, I'm the one who's visiting them, but they like Gainesville. It's a unique place.

Yesterday, I was walking through Turlington Plaza when a guy tried to get my attention. He was dressed like an extra in a biblical epic. I had seen him standing there many times before, and other UF students will probably know who I'm talking about. I wasn't really sure what his deal was, but I was about to find out.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he had a British accent. Next, I realized he was a Krishna guy. I wanted to be on my way, so I let him say what he wanted to say and get it over with. He said he only talked to the smartest-looking people. And so he told me, a smart person, a little bit about why his Hare Krishna beliefs made so much sense.

He said that people place too much importance on their physical bodies, and that even though I'm a good-looking version of George Harrison, I won't always be. He asked for a donation, and I couldn't think of how to get myself out of giving him a dollar. In exchange, he gave me, now a smart and attractive person, a book on meditation that had interviews with George Harrison and John Lennon.

With that, I had a chance to continue on my way. If his religion is so great, couldn't he have tried to win me over without schmoozing? In any case, I need to work on saying no.

Later, I missed my bus home and had to wait for the next one, which was, of course, late. It was dark by the time the bus arrived. I had already read most of the newspaper and done the crossword puzzle, so there wasn't much to do on the bus except look out the windows. I couldn't even do that because it was too dark, so I had to be content with listening to people.

During the ride, a guy started talking to the woman sitting next to me. He said he had been to one of her poetry readings on campus a few weeks before and wanted to compliment her on her work. She mentioned that she had one book out and was working on a second.

I was pretty sure that she was a particular woman I had read about several times in the newspaper, a local resident who had turned to a career as a poet to lift herself out of poverty. As soon as I struck up a conversation with her, I knew. She was missing some of her teeth, a detail I remembered from the articles. She had a pleasant demeanor.

I had wanted to buy a copy of her book ever since I had read about her, so I asked if she had any copies with her. As it happened, she did, so she signed one for me, and I gave her the money. Not long afterward, the bus reached my stop, so I thanked her and left.

Here's a browsable map of London from 1868. (Via The Presurfer)

See the first cell phone, digital camera, digital music player, and more: World's First Gadgets. (Via The Presurfer)

Get databased

As you may know, I volunteer for Get Carded, a student group that raises awareness about organ donation on Florida college campuses. It's my third year with them, and this time, some things are different. One of the two co-directors of the group has graduated, and his would-be replacement is no longer around due to some drama that apparently occurred over the summer. It's unfortunate because we'd all been a friendly bunch for as long as I'd been a member.

But that wasn't the only big change to happen the summer. Get Carded's parent organization has been put in charge of Florida's organ donor database, and it's now taking registrations online. In the past, we distributed organ donor cards, but now we just tell people to go to the web site (or to mail in a form). Our first tabling event was last week, and I had to update my spiel.

The tabling was part of a week-long PR blitz for homecoming week. It started on Monday night when we painted the 34th Street Wall, the only place in town where graffiti is tolerated. Our tabling was Wednesday, and the group also made itself present at the homecoming parade on Friday, although I pulled out of my commitment to that one due to unforeseen circumstances. (I'd been at probably every event for the past two years, so I felt I had the privilege. Also, the co-directors didn't care.)

Incidentally, the new database makes the name "Get Carded" go from confusing to completely inaccurate. We were told that there was a strong push to change the name, but one of the better-established chapters wouldn't have it. Branding, y'know.

Are you a Florida resident? Are you an organ donor? (Check your driver's license if you're not sure; it would say "Organ Donor" under your signature.) If you're not, go to donatelifeflorida.org to sign up right now. It just takes a minute, and you'll be able to edit your personal details whenever they change. (For the question "How did you learn about Florida’s donor registry?" we ask people to select "College campaign" and then specify "UF." It make it sounds like a cheesy competition, but that's really how the state organization judges our success.)

And if you have any questions about becoming an organ donor, just ask me.

Remember when people used more than one search engine? A lot of those old ones are still around. See Popular Search Engines in the '90s: Then and Now. (Via The Presurfer)

For the people who are older than I am: Old Operating Systems Don't Die.

Review des extensiones

Two months ago, I wrote about some Firefox extensions I had installed. Now it's time to check back in and see if I'm still using them!

• BetterPrivacy: I'm still using this one. It's one of those set-it-and-forget-it extensions, and it's doing its job well.
• Ghostery: I uninstalled this extension and subscribed to the EasyPrivacy filterset for Adblock Plus instead. The filterset is updated regularly, and I was already using ABP anyway.
• Perspectives: This one hasn't come in handy yet, but I like to think it will be useful sometime.
• Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO): I uninstalled this extension for reasons I will explain below.

Since then, I've installed the following security-related extensions:

• CS Lite: A simple extension that lets you manage your cookie settings from the status bar and offers more options than Firefox does by default. I have it set to block all cookies except from sites I've specified. For some of those sites (e.g., Wikipedia, The World of Stuff), I've allowed cookies to remain till they expire. For others (e.g. Facebook, my bank), I allow their cookies to stay until my browser session ends. CS Lite also lets you allow cookies from a site for the current session only, which can be useful for sites like nytimes.com (which still makes you register to read certain articles) or my high school's web site (which ingeniously redirects to itself if cookies are disabled). Since I now use CS Lite and EasyPrivacy, I don't feel TACO is necessary.
• NoScript: One of the most popular Firefox extensions, it blocks JavaScript on all sites and allows you to set exceptions for sites you trust. It takes a little while to set it up if you visit a lot of script-heavy sites regularly, but after that, it's not too much trouble. In fact, it makes many sites zippier, particularly blogs that are weighed down by tons of crap scripts. NoScript contains a lot of other security features like protection from cross-site scripting attacks. It also lets you block plugins like Flash and Java on untrusted sites, which makes sites like my high school's web site a whole lot more bearable. I never installed this extension before because I thought it was incompatible with Greasemonkey, but NoScript now allows most Greasemonkey scripts to run.

I could probably get used to using CS Lite and NoScript, but some web sites that rely on JavaScript or cookies don't tell you to allow them, and that can be annoying at times. Web designers shouldn't just assume that visitors will have JavaScript and cookies enabled.

I haven't actually tried this, but it sounds interesting: Omegle lets you chat with a random stranger. Exciting?

This is pretty epic: a non-traditional visualization of Beethoven's Fifth, showing each note and instrument. Of course, there's audio too. (Via The Presurfer)

Mind mashup

One of the organizations I'm involved with is Florida Free Culture, UF's chapter of Students for Free Culture. On Tuesday, we had an event called Mind Mashup. It took place in the main library on campus and was organized with the help of the librarians. Thanks, librarians!

At the event, we explained the concepts of the public domain and Creative Commons, demonstrated some free software for editing photos, audio, and video. We also presented a list of public domain and CC-licensed resources for people to mash up. In our advertising for the event, we had suggested that people bring their laptops so they could follow along and start right away. Some people did.

The event was actually pretty well attended, particularly by student journalists. I got pulled aside to talk to an Alligator reporter's microphone, and an Alligator photographer got some shots of me.

The brief article appeared the next day. Of course, the only photo they published was of our only demonstration of a non-free program, viz. Adobe Premiere. I wasn't quoted, but they did post some of my sound bites with the online version of the article, so you can hear my all of my hemming and hawing.

When the Mind Mashup was over, I hurried to the building next door to get to the Esperanto Club meeting, where Andy was giving a lesson in my absence.

In other news, I met my new roommate on Monday night. I haven't seen too much of him around, but he seems like a good guy. I think we'll get along well. But here's a funny thing: remember how I said, like, last week that people shouldn't assume that everyone is straight until proven gay? Well, I assumed my roommate would be white, but he's black. All I can say is: daaaang.

Pretty interesting: some irate messages hidden in old video games by their developers. (Via waxy.org)

What the Internet Knows About You can tell you what popular web sites you've recently visited. Find out how it works for the details of this clever exploit. (Via waxy.org)

License and registration

Last Wednesday, September 16, my roommates and I each got a notice from the management:

This letter is to inform you that as of Thursday, September 17, 2009 in the afternoon, Pavlov Media will be changing its network formatting. As a result, you will be required to register. Registration is a simple, one-time only process that takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. ...

The letter went on to give a URL for registering and a phone number in case there were any problems or questions. Naturally, I thought this sucked. I was looking forward to getting away from these shenanigans when I moved out of my dorm.

Pavlov, the company that provides cable and Internet service for my apartment, doesn't actually seem that bad. Prior to last week, I ran the Glasnost test to see if they were screwing around with BitTorrent traffic, and it seemed that they weren't. But still, having to register your hardware is a bad idea. Real ISPs don't make their users do it. (Oooooh!)

Nonetheless, I had to do it. It actually took longer than 15 minutes. Registration consists of identifying yourself and the devices you plan to use to connect to the Internet. And apparently, you can have only two devices authorized to connect at any given time. You have to provide their MAC addresses, which you're told how to find on Windows, Mac OS X, and every Internet-capable smartphone and video game console in existence. Yep, that covers it!

Despite this infantile infantility, I haven't noticed a degradation in service since handing over my information. I was going to repeat the Glasnost test right now for the purposes of journalistic integrity, but they've changed the test so it takes way longer. I'll do it later.

I write about a lot of stuff all the time, and sometimes I don't tie loose ends, so I'd like to do that here. Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter to a Marine in Iraq. The followup: well, there was none. I never got a reply, and that makes me sad.

Is the Internet making our kids dumb? Wired's Clive Thompson points out evidence that they're better writers than previous generations.

Is there anything shell scripts can't do? Linux Baby Rocker. (Via The Presurfer)

The Beatles again

The Beatles' entire catalog was reissued on CD on September 9. Each track has been remastered, supposedly to make it sound better in digital formats (and, no doubt, to keep up with the loudness war). I'd been looking forward to the release for months. It coincided with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, which is probably what more people were looking forward to. As for me, meh.

Anyway, I was anxious to hear the new albums since whoever did this remastering job supposedly spent four years teasing out an unprecedented amount of detail from the original tapes. As it happened, one of my roommates bought Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road the weekend after the remasters came out. He let me have a listen.

First, a disclaimer. The following comparisons are meaningless. I listened to the new discs through headphones, while I usually listen to lossy copies of the 1987 CDs through speakers.

I didn't notice a new level of detail at all. Also, the new mixes are very faithful to the older ones. The only real difference is that they sound somewhat louder and possibly a little punchier, but not distractingly so. I'm (possibly) known among my friends as the crazy guy who can discern compression artifacts. My overall conclusion is that if I can't notice a real difference, then nobody else will.

But come on, some of you can tell a low-quality MP3 from a high-quality one, right? I can't be the only one.

Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are among The Beatles' later albums, so maybe that accounts for the sound quality not being very much improved. (In fact, Dolby noise reduction was used on Abbey Road, prompting George Harrison to decry the sound of the album as too harsh. Also, I know too much about The Beatles.) If I had to guess optimistically, I would say that the earlier albums should sound proportionately clearer. But I don't know.

On Abbey Road, I did notice that some anomalies were fixed. Most notably, in "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," the distortion on the microphone during John Lennon's "Yeeeeaaaah" has been (mostly) removed, with only a faint patch of background noise to suggest it was there. I'm a bit disappointed about that. Everyone knows that if you sing loud enough to cause distortion, you're doing it right.

I'm looking forward to hearing the other albums, especially the White Album because the original CD version wasn't very well done. Also, the first four albums are finally available in stereo, and I'm interested in finding out what they did about the few songs that only exist in mono.

The packaging for the albums is also kind of interesting. They've done away with jewel cases in favor of cardboard sleeve-like cases. In keeping with standard CD case dimensions, this leaves a little extra space on the left side of the front cover. They stuck The Beatles' and Apple's logos there, which is kind of lame. Imagine if The Beatles had to put their (second) logo on every album cover back in the day. The impact of Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and Abbey Road just wouldn't be the same. If I were in a band, I'd make sure we wouldn't have a logo. It's too limiting.

As it happens, I did get to see The Beatles: Rock Band in action yesterday at my friend George's apartment. I didn't feel like playing, but I got to see other people play some songs. My first impression was that The Beatles looked kind of creepy as video game characters. My next impression was that having people "play" the song made the listening especially enjoyable (well, it was either that or the layer of reverb added to some of the songs).

One thing really confused me. On "Come Together," the singer is supposed to say "Shoot me" where John Lennon does the "shh..."/clapping thing. I couldn't believe it. I've heard people claim that John was saying "Shoot me," but I've always wondered what they were smoking. Is that in Lewisohn? He wasn't right all the time.

There's a "sh," a clap, and that's it. No vocalization is audible. And, as I recall, in the liner notes for Love, Beatles producer George Martin states that John made the sound by clapping his hands and breathing into the microphone, or something like that.

The Beatles: Rock Band might get me to play Rock Band, but it's still kind of a weird idea.

A really trippy video: 8-Bit Trip. Do not watch under the influence of drugs. (Via waxy.org)

The Wall Street Journal asks: How Long Does It Take an Athlete to Make 100 Grand? The answers may depress you. (Via J-Walk Blog)