It’s actually a lot like the stuff Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury was working on when I interviewed her for a Technology Review video back in 2008. In fact, when I first read about the Fitbit (thanks to friend-of-Candleblog, Robot Kasten), I assumed it monitored other sorts of telemetry too, like your heart-rate, skin temperature, the local barometric pressure, etc. As Dr. Choudhury showed me, with those additional data points and some clever software, you can learn all sorts of fascinating stuff about how you’re living your life day-to-day.

The implications for this sort of technology are pretty amazing. Yes, it can encourage us (through a combination of social-networked peer pressure and sheer geeky awesomeness) to live healthier lives, but it can also keep us honest with our doctors when they ask us how active we’ve been since our last visit. It can tell us other unintended interesting things, like how often we have sex and for how long. I can imagine Fitbit data being subpenaed in legal cases involving violent crimes or even car accidents. And this is just one data set involving an accelerometer. Imagine what these things will be like with microphones and video cameras gathering data and generating reports about our activities. Now imagine all that data searchable via an engine like Google (searchable by you — nobody is forcing you to publish this data, though there is a privacy can of worms here too, obviously) — how useful would that be?

What did I eat for dinner last week? click. What was that book the guy at the coffee shop recommended a few days ago? click. What was it my boss wanted me to do again? click. How many calories did I consume in 2012 compared to 2011? click. How many times did I ride the elevator last month vs. taking the stairs? click. What percentage of my life is spent sitting in front of a screen? I dare not click.

When we look back at the lives of our parents and grandparents, we see them through photographs, letters, maybe some home movies if we’re lucky. From here on out, the definition of what we mean by “history” changes. Future generations will have more data about the lives of their progenitors than they will know what to do with. What will your data stream say about you?

Emily and I like different things for brunch. She tends to like a sweet brunch — french toast and fruit, for example — while I prefer an eggy, savory brunch. So Emily may not agree with the following list of best brunch spots.

My bias is to stick with places that do breakfast seven days a week. The once-a-week omelets just don’t cut it. Here goes:

1. Sneakers in Winooski – best breakfast in the BTV area and has been for at least 10 years
2. Penny Cluse in BTV – a solid 2nd place. A slight southwestern flair here and when the weather turns cold they offer amazing fresh squeezed tangerine juice.
3. On the Rise in Richmond – hippy vibe, so lots of good veggie fare. Delicious breads.
4. Magnolia in BTV – lots of good vegetarian options.
5. Country Pantry in Fairfax – homestyle. The waitresses call you “hon.” Hot open face roast beef for breakfast! Killer Benedict.
6. Sadie Katz in BTV – Jewish deli with excellent latkes and a great vegan mushroom barley soup. Emily digs the challah french toast. Not sure how early they stop serving breakfast on Sundays.
7. Mirabelle’s on Main St. in BTV – a bakery with a french aesthetic. Good sandwiches and their breakfast is just fine.
8. Chef’s Corner in Williston – Sort of like Mirabelle’s but in Williston.

In response to this, Rae went ahead and made a handy flowchart we can follow whenever we want to do brunch. I present it here as a public service for those who care about their Sunday eggs:

There’s also been some discussion in the media recently about whether popular convention will shift in 2010 from pronouncing years in the “two thousand X” mode to the “twenty X” mode. Here I happen to think a natural shift will occur in popular usage away from saying “two thousand” when mentioning the year in common parlance. “Twenty” is a whole syllable shorter, after all, and people are nothing if not lazy. In fact, I happen to think we would have started calling years “twenty oh-one,” “twenty oh-two” etc. ten years ago were it not for the significant cultural footprint of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: a space odyssey. “Two thousand one” was just too ingrained in our common lexicon and as a result, the efficiency of “twenty” was lost for those ten years (nitpickers will point out that the inclusion of the “oh” syllable in the pronunciation of “twenty oh-one” makes the syllable count equal to “two thousand one” and those nitpickers should shut up).

Another meme that’s propagating about the soon-to-be-over decade is that it sucked. There are some good reasons to think so. It was the Bush decade, after all. For myself, the two thounsandsies was easily the best decade of my life. I met, developed a crush on, dated, fell in love with and married Emily all in the last ten years. I started the decade with a job in public access TV and ended it with a career in community media. The Internet came into its own in the last decade and the effect it’s had on my life has been enormous and unambiguously positive. I get why the meta-critics are down on the last ten years, I’m just sayng it’s been a good period for me, personally and professionally.

I was born in the last half of 1969 so it’s actually quite handy to think of the decades of my life being neatly divided into ten-year chunks, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the whatevers…. I turned 40 this year and at the end of the 10s I’ll have just turned 50 (assuming I make it that far). I wonder what I’ll write in that end-of-the-decade blog post. Better or worse, future-Bill? I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Two quick bits of cool news to report:

1. Nathan (Mal Reynolds/Capt. Hammer) Fillion tweeted about Emily’s frog and even took a picture of one, which I can only assume is the one that belongs to Alan Tudyk.

2. While my panel proposal didn’t rate a full panel at SXSW 2010, I have been asked to do a 15-minute lightning presentation/pseudo “TED-talk” at the conference about my panel idea on building community media scenes.

Cue the mad knitting.

And for that very special someone in your life, Robot Kasten is offering the best t-shirt of the holiday season.

Over the last several years we’ve developed something of a tradition. Emily and I host the meal and invite my mom; Emily’s parents, sister and niece; our friends Steve and Eve and Steve’s mom; and this year will be the second year we’ve added our friend Alex to the list. That’s 11 people in our little condo. And in addition to feeding everyone, we really like our leftovers, so we make sure to make more food than we can eat at the dinner table.

The menu we serve is actually pretty traditional — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, green peas, a corn and squash gratin, biscuits, gravy, etc. We really love the traditional Thanksgiving meal, when done well, but the standard preparation is complicated by the following concerns:

*We only eat local, humanely raised and killed, hormone-free meat. This includes the stock, which we use in lots of dishes, so we need to prep that early. It also means our bird is a lovely, never-frozen fresh Vermont turkey — no Butterballs on our table.

*We don’t like to use any prepared foods either — no Stovetop Stuffing. The one exception are the biscuits. We really like the Immaculate Baking Company’s pre-fab buttermilk biscuits. They’re quick and easy, delicious, and there’s no trans-fat or other nastiness in them. We’re also experimenting with a green bean casserole that adheres to our yummy childhood memories, but that doesn’t rely on condensed cream of mushroom soup and canned onions. My mom always makes the homemade cranberry sauce and she also traditionally brings her famous creamed pearl onions.

The Brine
I brine the bird the night before we roast it. I usually improvise the brine ingredients, using some combination of kosher salt (the largest ingredient by far, apart from water, in the brine), brown sugar, rosemary, molasses and aroma veggies. Then for roasting, I stuff the bird with the veggies from the brine — giving preference to the garlic. The brining process makes the bird taste yummy and helps it to retain moisture while roasting, but mostly we do it because it makes for KILLER stock and gravy, and that influences the entire meal.

Stuffing
Technically, this is “dressing,” because I don’t stuff the bird. Why? There are differing schools of thought, but I happen to think:

• Sticking bread inside a roasting bird means you have to roast it longer (in order to avoid salmonella) and that dries out the bird, as does having bread inside of it, frankly.
• There isn’t enough room in the bird for all the stuffing we need, so since we’re baking an extra pan of the stuff anyway, why dry out our beautiful bird?

My recipe for this is dirt-simple. I cut up loaf bread (any yummy brown bread that doesn’t contain high fructose corn syrup will do — if it’s local, so much the better) and let it dry for a few days (it always takes longer than I think and I try to do it really early because cooking in a kitchen filled with pans of drying bread is tricky). Then I cut up a bunch of onions and celery, mix it all together and moisten generously with stock. You don’t need much salt if you’re using stock from a brined bird, but I like to add lots of black pepper and some rosemary. Thyme is a popular stuffing herb, but I’m a rosemary guy. Your mileage may vary. Then I bake it while the bird is cooling right after coming out of the oven. Done.

Potatoes
It almost doesn’t matter how these are prepared because they’re just going to get drowned in gravy anyway. I like them with skins or without. I prefer them creamy and smooth, but I’m fine with the lumpier kind too. Lot’s of black pepper is the key here. If I’m feeling really decadent (when am I not?) I like to use generous amounts of butter and heavy cream and whip them senseless. Garlic is a nice addition. Emily prefers a drier, lumpier spud, but she throws a dollop of sour cream on them on the pate.

Sauce
It’s all about the gravy. My mom is the gravy queen of our Thanksgiving. This year we’re going to make a Marsala wine and mushroom sauce for the table too.

Now I have to go home and clean the kitchen. We’re a week out, and my Thanksgiving prep begins tonight! Feel free to add your own traditions and recipes to the comments.

It’s a far from perfect piece of fiction. The writing is a bit heavy handed. For example, everything that happens in the book — solar eclipse, rat infestation, sunset, bad cell coverage — is dripping with ominous portent and is somehow a metaphor for death. Also, there really aren’t any good female characters — the one woman on the vamp-killing team not only spends most of her time supporting the main character (with whom she has some romantic confusion, natch), she actually stays home taking care of his son while the fight with the Big Bad happens!

Still, as the pages kept turning, I found myself drawn in. The book is basically set up — the first act, as the infestation takes hold. The Big Bad is pretty great and the way vampirism works in this world is well-thought out.

There isn’t anything earth-shatteringly new here, but it’s pretty great popcorn fiction and no doubt destined for the big screen, so check it out if vampires and pandemics are your bag.

I am currently of two minds about writing this post. It is only my second post here, and I warn you now, I’m going to be tooting my own horn a bit. I’m still finding my footing in terms of how I want to contribute here, and I assure you that self-congratulatory posts are not the direction I want to go. And yet…life takes unexpected turns, and when you have access to a blog like this, you just have to go with the flow, I suppose. And with that dumb introduction/apology, I present you with my happy news!

I got a call the other day from a woman at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. They are in the very early stages of putting together an exhibit based on the concept of fiber, and are looking for artists to contribute pieces. For instance, they want to delve into the physical fibers of the body, like muscle fiber, etc… They’re also thinking a bit more metaphorically, as in moral fiber and how that might relate to the physical body. And lastly, they’re looking at modern medicine and it’s use of fiber, like fiber optics. Should this project get off the ground, she wants me to donate a piece for it!

Unconnected to the (possible) future fiber exhibit, she would also like me to donate a piece for the museum’s permanent collection! And as if that weren’t crazy cool enough, she asked if Bill and I would like to visit the museum for a behind the scenes tour — how could she possibly know that my dream since I was a kid was to get locked in a museum after hours so that I could go see all of the things that are off-limits to the public?!

I do believe that I have now used up my entire allotment of exclamation points for the day. But before I go, I’ll urge people to check out the museum’s website, as well as their blog, which is excellent and has lived in my blog reader almost since its inception: A Repository for Bottled Monsters.

Hooray!! (Looks like I had a couple exclamation points left over.)

Hello, Candleblog readers! I don’t know that I really need or want to bother with a big ol’ introduction, so I’ll be brief. I’m Emily, I’m Bill’s wife, I’m a nerd (redundant, I know…). I’m not entirely sure what form my contributions here will take. I’m interested in the intersection between nerdiness and craftiness, so I think that it is safe to expect things like this:

Your eyes do not deceive you, dear readers. The lovely stripe pattern in these socks is actually based on the first fifty decimal places of Pi! Knitting and math: the peanut butter and chocolate of my world!

You can find the pattern to make your own pair here.