guys like dolls

We went to Orland again this year for Thanksgiving for the Turkeys. Here are a few of the photos that I took. I also included a photo of Oliver, a calf who we met in 2010 and 2011. Oliver was abandoned and left to starve before ending up at Farm Sanctuary because male Jerseys are worthless to farmers except for veal production. You can see how much he grew in just a year – actually being fed will do that to you.

The newest member of our family, a six year old yellow Lab named Kelvin, would like to say:

Many Stanford classes are posted online as part of SCPD. Occasionally I get the hankering to learn something new and think that it would be great to download all of the videos from the past quarter and watch them at my leisure long after they’ve been removed from the SCPD website. Unfortunately, SCPD doesn’t go out of its way to make it quick or easy to download the videos.

Luckily, someone named Jon went ahead and wrote two scripts that are very useful. The first is a python script that uses mencoder to download the videos if you pass it a list of links. Getting the video URLs by hand is tedious though, so Jon wrote a Greasemonkey script that grabs all of the links for you.

Unfortunately, Stanford updated its SCPD page format at some point since the script was first published, so when I tried using it the other day it kept on throwing errors. I fixed the Greasemonkey script and posted the changes back as a comment to the original blog. But the scripts are really useful, so I decided to mirror them here just in case they ever vanished from the original author’s site.

So without further ado, here are slightly modified scripts (original versions here) that you can use to magically download all of the video lectures at the end of the Stanford quarter. I want to emphasize that they will only work *for current Stanford students* because you need to authenticate to get to the links page. If you are unsure about how to use Greasemonkey or python, please ask The Google.

Greasemonkey: scpd_links.user.js
Python:  getSCPD.py

We came across a newt while hiking a few months ago. It happens surprisingly infrequently so I took a picture to identify it later. When we got home, I realized that it was a rough skinned newt, which was especially cool because one of my ‘sense of touch’ collaborators at Stanford studied the newts in her graduate work and we’d talked about them a few times. In her graduate work, she researched a tetrodoxin arms race between the rough skinned newt and garter snake. Here’s a newspaper article that nicely summarizes it. What it all boils down to is that if you come across a brown newt around the Bay Area, don’t lick it. Here are some more photos and videos.

Cassie, Lola and I went camping near Lake Pillsbury in Mendocino National Forest the weekend of May 8th. After we got there, we realized that there weren’t any hiking trails and lots of motorized vehicles, so we mainly wandered around, napped and relaxed. Highlights include climbing a big rock, seeing a herd of tule elk, and doing absolutely nothing for hours on end.

Because I completed my 30 mile hike, I needed to come up with a new goal to accomplish.

It took some thinking, but I finally decided I wanted to do a triathlon. I knew I could run, and I could bike, but unfortunately, I couldn’t swim at all. I mean, I wasn’t going to drown, but .5 miles? (the sprint tri swimming length) was way beyond me.

But then I found masters swimming!
(ie swimming for old people)

We have a pool about 2.5 miles away from us which is run by the Santa Clara Swim Club. They offer a masters program for swimmers of different levels.

Group 1 is people who used to swim in high school or something and might even compete in competitions. Group 2 is just a little bit below that, maybe people who aren’t quite as good. And Group 3… well, that’s for people like me. A bunch of people who can’t swim, training in the 3 ft deep kiddie pool.

I started off not knowing any of the 4 main strokes and I could barely swim 25 yards. After only 2 weeks I’m up to a 100 and I can now swim every stroke (except for butterfly is still pretty difficult). I look pretty funny in my swim mask and cap, but I can swim!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll keep increasing my distance so that I can do a test triathlon out of Joey’s mom’s pool over thanksgiving. If that goes well then next will be braving a freezing cold lake.

I’ve got 3 others ready do a triathlon, so it’s definitely going to be a party. Ping me if you want to join in! (or if you know of a good first tri to try)

Last Monday I walked 30 miles.

View in EveryTrail

Because I was on my own, I decided to opt for a hike through the bay area rather than in the hills so that I was both phone and car accessible if I ran into any trouble. This made the route rather flat, so it was much easier than previous hikes and I was able to keep around an 3.8 mph pace. I was still pretty drained by the end though.

I headed from our house to Stanford with a quick stop at Google for lunch with my brother. Through a lot of Google Maps tweaking I was able to keep my route mostly on the various pedestrian/biking paths in the cities – San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, the SF Bay Trail, 3 pedestrian bridges, Steven’s Creek Trail, 2 Baylands Parks, and even a trail next to Sand Hill Road.

It was awesome.
Resolution done.

Joey and I are now vegan. About 3 weeks ago we took the final step, following through on something that we had known was the right thing to do for quite a while.

Most people ask me exactly what being vegan means. Generally speaking, we try to avoid all usage of any and all animal products. More specifically, the first thing that people think of is food. We don’t eat meat, honey, milk, butter, eggs, gelatin, etc. Food is probably the most important aspect, because it serves as a cheap source of animal carcasses for everything else. But non-food animal products are also incredibly common. Clothing, shoes, and furniture are the biggest. They can contain wool, leather, cashmere, silk, fur (or fake fur), feathers/down, mohair. Bone china (which is actually made from bone), baseball gloves and various sports balls, sleeping bags, some chapsticks, and it goes on and on. It is fairly amazing when you actually think about it. Mostly, being vegan just means being more conscious of our choices and their impact on the world. Being conscious, and then opting for synthetics – which are by and large equivalent to their animal counterparts and have the added advantage of not hurting anyone.

The food part seems more difficult, but hasn’t actually been very hard. We’ve been vegetarian for almost two years and had stopped using most dairy products (cow milk, eggs, etc) a long time ago. Our only holdout had been cheese, mostly because I was addicted to it. After reading more about the reality of dairy farms though (hint: they are not happy cows), I was newly convinced that it had to be done. Since then, I actually don’t miss it at all. The cheese substitutes are very impressive – but you don’t even end up needing them. I think it is sort of like candy – the junk food kind – snickers, kit kat bars, twix, etc. I probably haven’t had any candy in 2 years or so, not that I’ve been particularly avoiding it, but just because I don’t really encounter it very often. If you see candy all of the time, you start to have cravings, and after eating some, you just want more. This seems to spiral in on itself until you think that candy is something you love, and couldn’t see yourself with out. However, the same is true in reverse. If you don’t encounter candy at all, you don’t really miss it. It just becomes like any boring food – you could eat it, but eh, you could live without it.

Cheese is exactly the same. The first couple of days after not eating it, you have heavy withdrawal. But if you just don’t buy it at the store, and reduce your other encounters with it, you really don’t notice that it is gone at all. (Now, of course, if someone comes and waves your favorite candy bar in your face, you are going to be tempted, but don’t do that!)

Anyway, food substitutes are pretty easy, and we almost always cook at home so that part hasn’t actually been too bad. I’ve also been working my way through Veganomicon, a vegan cookbook which is filled with delicious recipes. It has helped me learn how to cook from a new perspective; teaching me how to use beans, lentils, tofu, various oils and so forth. I’m actually blogging about all of the recipes in the book (which explains all of the food photos).

Going vegan isn’t just about food though. It’s about not exploiting animals in any part of your life. And once you start thinking about it, you realize that animal products are everywhere.

First comes the clothes. For the first time, I actually read all of the labels on my clothes, and realized that a very large percentage had some form of animal in them. Most shoes don’t disclose their materials, but looking online, most use leather. (Zappos has a vegan section though!)

And next comes everything else. This is a work in progress for us. Some of our more expensive things (hiking boots, sleeping bags) will take time to replace. Most importantly though, we no longer purchase anything new with animal products. Overall, it’s a really good thing I stumbled upon minimalism because it has made this process much easier.

So that’s veganism. If you want to know more about why we made this choice you can check out many sites on the issues.

I went outside early on Monday morning and realized that we have a large bee nest in our orange tree! I only saw the nest because the bees were extremely active – flying from our flowers to the hive over and over again.

We usually don’t get outside until the afternoon and they seem to get sleepier, so you can’t tell they are there unless you know where to look. This morning it was raining, and that also seems to keep the activity fairly low.

I find bees fascinating. And I love them because they pollinate my vegetables. They’ve been doing an excellent job with the fava beans and the newly planted tomatoes. Lola chases them. This is very destructive, but it’s funny to watch her spinning around in circles after a seemingly invisible foe.

Everybody is peacefully coexisting, so there is very little chance that we’ll remove the nest – which means we get to watch the bees all year long!