Fat, Sick, Juicy, and Almost Dead

Drink This.

Rescuing this post with way too many links, from the drafts folder, but after a year sitting there, the topics are coming up again. This one's for Papa Ho Ho.

The Juice:

The Juicy People at work and my extended family were interested in the movies we've been devouring about food, so it was time to dust off this post and prep it for release. Welcome back, SFDada.

We're on our 3rd device for juicing and think we've found a great gadget. A little mortified by the infomercial, with David Wolfe, but the Nutribullet is just so fast and easy, it really allows for no more excuses to juice up.

David Wolfe is in a few of the movies I'm listing below, so even though the infomercial was a bit repellant I at least knew who he was and knew he has a lot of interesting things to say about nutrition and the health of your skin.


I ordered ours at Amazon, but my mom picked one up at Macy's with a big %-off coupon and got the best deal for about $70. I don't know this guy, but he does a great job talking about the thing in 8 minutes.

The old post on the movies:

A few years ago, Red1 wanted to go vegan. Over the years we've been watching a lot of documentaries on Netflix on the subject of food and health. A good friend at work also writes a vegan blog, "Healthy Living on a plant based diet", so we seem to have really good support now. I think we're now in the market for a good juicer.

Red1 has enjoyed them all. She became quite over the top after watching Food, Inc. So much so, her friend's mother asked us to try to get her to stop lecturing their family about the cows who stand in their own poop and the sad little chickens and turkeys the fast food farms in America.

Today we spent a good amount of time at the supermarket buying some good fruit and vegetables to restock the kitchen properly. Last night, after watching a double feature of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Forks over Knives, I went through the kitchen and cleared out some of the worst junk on the counters and cupboards.

A good list of films to add to your Netflix queue:
Food, Inc.
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
Forks Over Knives
Hungry for Change

Gerson
The Beautiful Truth... which is the one about the Gerson Therapy, if you haven't really heard about it, it's worth looking into. It's pretty much the cure for everything. The film will lead you to more related films available at Netflix.

Here's a copy of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead that's currently streaming at Hulu with no account needed. (and still is.)

Science Fiction Curriculum

Image via Wikipedia

on our big big list

Getting back to the originally promised topic. The girls. Due to some county school board issues, mostly zoning, we're going to start up the home school wagon this fall.

Having crazy-awesome kids is a blessing that I'm proud to share about. I'm looking forward to being a huge part of their education. I know it's something most parents don't get to do.

I do promise not drone on about all the details unless they pertain to my Science Fiction Daddy topics. And because I'm me; some of it will.

Red1 and I have already started planning out her reading lists for the year. We are making a plan to include a unit on all the Wizard of Oz books, play, films, etc. and another unit on Science Fiction. We're going to look for some award winning sci-fi standards but are open to suggestions. Remember we're in the fifth grade but at a very high reading level. Her favorites right now are the Rick Riordan novels about that Percy guy.

A couple of articles that we wanted to keep track of here:

• Inside Nova - family-tech-science-fiction
• NPR - mind-bending-sci-fi-books-for-a-fantastical-summer

Red2 who is going into second grade, is excited about the Paul Bunyan phenomena. I say phenomena, because after doing some research his story is pretty amazing. He's got it all. Humor and stories mostly, but look at all the geography packed in there. This is going to be fun.

A Box of Clouds

• This post was originally scheduled for May, but fell off the schedule. A lot has changed in the cloud, as it is known to do. {Insert your own aside as to how you feel about Google+ now that it's opening and Google's plans to rebrand Blogger. Does any of it matter?}

If anything's magical, it's the cloud.

Image via Wikipedia

In Start Trek, you simply asked the computer to answer a question and it would compute the answer.

In Star Wars, you'd enter coordinates for you jump to light speed and the Navi computer would get you there.

We're getting there. Google borrowed the name "Wave" from Joss Wedon's Firefly universe. The Wave was a lot like the internet and broadcast networks rolled up together.  {Now, the wave is still waning, but working it's way into Google Docs... very nicely done.}

Our Google + Hulu + Cable television + Wikipedia, etc. is all content, but what about online storage? There you have your YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos {Picasa/Google Photos}, but how do you put your other files in the cloud?

Macintosh people like Apple's MobileMe or (me.com) and I suppose Windows people like the Microsoft version of that. But there are other very cool online storage and backup tools, but don't confuse the two.

The online back up tools scan your files and quietly in the background back them all up for you. There are a ton of competing services that I'm currently investigating. Which ones do you use?

Image by futursimple via Flickr

Is everything going to 'the cloud'?
Will we live in the clouds?

The online or cloud storage services are like extra hard drive space that you can access from any internet connection. You can access the files from your desktop, laptop, tablet or smart phone.

I really like the free-ish DropBox.com service. We've been using if for several months now and it's very handy for a small company and coworkers sharing files between mismatched computers. {If you don't have an account, clicking the link and signing up will expand my storage capacity.  I will be magically granted a few more megabitxels of storage.}

Amazon is bursting with innovations in cloud storage and hosting features for the ubertechy, but they're starting to play with us regular people again now too. When you purchase music from Amazon.com, you now have the ability to store in your CloudPlayer.

Explore that and tell me that it's not cool. Not only are they cool, but a lot are free and they have some really worth-while albums for only $5.00

They allow you to upload your music library to stream from anywhere... at work, from the laptop that you don't want to copy all the music to, from your parent's house when you're visiting on vacation.

Apple is also doing their version of this with iCloud. But that's a whole other post.

You may be spending a lot of time online. Does that mean that you are already in the cloud? Is your head in the clouds along with your files, videos and music? Will they charge us extra to store our heads there? Would that be a flat rate or recurring fee?