From a few days ago, Slate on the decline in milk's popularity, Milk: How a wholesome drink became a villain. There are some interesting facts in there about how Americans began drinking milk so much in the first place.

Milk reform began as soon as milk drinking became an entrenched American habit — during the mid-1800s, as Americans moved to cities. But the early reformers wanted Americans to drink more milk, not less…the early reformers blamed rising infant mortality on city life: The new cities, they argued, caused women to become morally degenerate and physically weak, and they transmitted those ailments to the infants they breast-fed. The solution: Feed babies cleaner, purer cow's milk.

A perfect solution, if I may say so. Everyone knows that cows are the most morally upright citizens in the barnyard! The other sins against milk, according to Slate: its high cost, its racist inability to be digested by peoples other than Northern Europeans and Saharan nomads, and its agribusiness, Frankenfood tendency to get all drugged up with hormones.

While I don't agree with all the arguments against milk, I will admit to being a soy milk drinking since 1998. And I'm happy to report that soy milk is gaining in popularity. Once an obscure beverage relegated to a back aisle in a San Francisco health food store, I can find it right next to milk in the dairy section at nearly every supermarket I shop. Yay yummy delicious soy!

RSS, Atom, Typepad, Movable Type, Blogger, blogs, weblogs, XHTML, software, Google, feed, any number like "2.0" etc., and computer.

* Right now, with the caveat that maybe in the future I will care about them again but maybe not.

This is a just a note from happy ol' me saying I'm back in the land of the connected! The cable modem has been successfully installed, the wireless hooked up, and the annoying files and settings hoisted upon my computer by the Comcast cable modem installation program have been deleted. While it's been quite nice to be pretty much disconnected for the past two weeks, it will also be nice to be able to connect again when I want. Yay!

If you can see this message, it means you've arrived at the new home of megnut.com. Alas, not everything is perfect and there is still some work to be done, but in the coming weeks I'll try to straighten it all out. First thing you may notice is that I've changed the style of my permalinks, which means a lot of old permalinks have broken. I've tried to do some redirecting where I could, but for the really old links (from Blogger days and hand-coding days) the links are just gone. Also, I haven't been able to import all of my hand-coded entries in Movable Type yet, so about a year's worth of posts from mid 2001 – mid 2002 aren't here yet. I'm working to get that stuff back online. Aside from that, I think things are OK. Shoot me an email if you're getting some wonkiness.

In doing this whole process, I discovered something about megnut.com: if it were a house, it would be one of those houses that's got a lawn full of old cars, porches piled high with broken bird cages and sofas with the stuffing coming out, and hallways crammed with books, boxes and dust. By which I mean, what a mess! Five years of haphazard placement of files and random uploading resulted in a directory structure that would make a librarian cry. On the new server, I've tried to be more organized. We'll see how long that lasts.

For all you Bay Area readers who are interested in a Computer Science career, here's a lecture you may be interested in: It's Never Too Late: Careers in Computer Science.

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Google are pleased to co-sponsor an all-star female panel on education options for entering and re-entering Computer Science and IT on Wednesday, June 2 at 6:00pm at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Attendance is free but space is limited and you must pre-register.

Look like it should be interesting.

Back before I left Kinja, Gina and I made a bet about the ads on the Kinja site — how long before non-text ads appear? Advertising has never been one of my favorite revenue models for a web site, and when we made the decision to go down that road at Kinja, it was with reservation that I agreed. Too often web sites allow the ads to run amok, ruining the experience of the site. But in discussing the ad approach, we agreed that we'd use text ads, and limit their placement. It sounded like a way that ads could work without ruining the experience of Kinja: reading.

But all you have to do is look at Nick's Gawker Media properties (Gawker, Gizmodo, Wonkette, etc.) to see that our view of advertising — and belief of when advertising has run amok — are not aligned. And I knew it was simply a matter of time after my departure that gaudier, flashier ads would appear on Kinja. So Gina and I decided to place a wager on exactly how long that would be. Alas, there were no winners, because we couldn't disagree about how long it would take. We both knew it would be fast. And we both bet it would be less than a month. I've been gone two weeks and two days from Kinja, and there's already a giant CNet ad right in the middle of the digests. Blech.

How broken is email? It's so broken. It's so so overwhelming destroyed by spam that I may give it up entirely. After less than 72 hours away from my computer, I have over 5,000 messages, and it took three hours to download them all. A week away from the computer could mean a full-day of downloading and digging out. And anything more time off than that could be an irrecoverable situation, where I could just never get through all the old crap and get back on track. Argh. (And yes, I'm using SpamAssasin and all kinds of complicated filtering, etc.)

An interesting post about Where Bugs Come From — the computer kind, not the creepy crawly kind (we know where those come from).

…[A] classic tale of slippery assimilation, trying to find that ridiculous cut-off point where a program went from being short enough to be bug-free, to long enough to be inevitably buggy…This, of course, is the promise of structured programming, of functions, of objects. If we can write 137 lines of code without a bug, then we can structure our programming style so that were always writing units of fewer than 137 lines. We can build those units into components, and voila! No more bugs.

If only it were so simple! Having used various approaches to programming — from the by-the-seat-of-the-pants methodology to hard-core unit testing for each and every class that's written — I can say that there's no magic bullet, no magic number of lines, no magic anything. It's just freakin' work, and lots and lots of testing, to get your software to the point that it does what it's supposed to, and when it doesn't, to gracefully alert the user that something's gone amiss.

I talked with Dan Kreiss the other day. He's working on a Master's at Stanford and is writing his thesis on blogging. He's posted notes from our discussion on his blog. It was a lively conversation, and gives you a bit of an idea where my thinking is these days. The best part of talking with him was discussing what I'm interested in doing next. The answer of course is lots of things! But in particular I got all jazzed up again about some ideas I've been thinking about for a while. When you've just finished a job, and you're spending you days alone at home, getting jazzed up about ideas is a really great thing.

For ages and ages now this site has been hosted by the very generous Matt Haughey. But the load on the server (it hosts Metafilter, among other sites) has been heavy from the beginning. And I think it's time for megnut to find a home of its own. So I'm looking for recommendations for great hosting plans.

My requirements are fairly straightforward: I need to host more than one domain and want the ability to create sub domains. I want Apache/Linux. I would like MySQL, PHP and Perl. I'd like something that's very reliable and can offer a fair amount of bandwidth. Oh yeah, and customer support that's not staffed by assholes. That's it. Do you have someone to suggest? Do you love your hosting provider? Is there someone you think I should avoid? Tell me.