Cholesterol has improved

I've had my cholesterol measured March in 2006 and just recently, in May of 2009.

My total cholesterol went from 129 to 126 mg/dL. My HDL or "good" cholesterol went from 50 to 63 mg/dL. My LDL or "bad" cholesterol went from 65 to 52 mg/dL. I find this encouraging. I don't know what the error margin is for these tests, so the change might not be as significant as I think.

I correlated these improvements with improvements in my diet. In 2006, I was eating a lot of fast food, college food, and Denny's. Lots of sugar. In the Fall of 2008, I met with trainers Bruno and Adriana, and they pointed me toward simpler whole wheat grains, nuts, and vegetables.

Estee, my landlord, works near Los Angeles as a physical therapist. She says that greater than 3 out of 4 of her patients are taking medication for either high blood pressure or high cholesterol. I would like to avoid joining that group of people.

How to install software despite a broken CD rom drive

Problem: I bought Adobe Creative Suite for $1500, and I want to install it on my laptop. However, the CD Rom drive on my laptop is broken. What should I do?

Assumptions: The optical media are conventional CDs, not DVDs. I have a working Linux and Windows boxes at work. I have the software keys.

Rejected Solution: Download install media from Adobe.

Adobe calls this "Electronic Software Delivery" (ESD), and this doesn't work, because Adobe doesn't seem to carry installation media for old versions of their software. I found a page on their website saying as much (can't find it now). This is business-shady.

Working Solution: Create ISO images of the optical media on a computer with a working CD drive. Transfer these to the laptop via network. Mount them with cd emulation.

Creating the ISO images is a matter of copying all the bits off the media, for which software exists. Copying the data is fast. Assuming a CD is, at most, 700 MB, an that modern CD drives (c2004 and onward) can transfer data at a rate of 2 MB/s, we have:

700 MB * (1s / 2MB) * (1m / 60s) = 4.2m

About 5 minutes transfer time per CD.

For Windows software, use LC ISO Creator. For Linux software, use dd:

sudo su
dd if=/dev/scd0 of="Desktop/Adobe Creative Suite Extras Disk 2.iso"
chown mrmike:mrmike Adobe\ Creative\ Suite\ Extras\ Disk\ 2.iso

I used both. My Linux box was a c2009 installation of Ubuntu.

To mount the ISO images, use Daemon Tools Lite (I heard about this application through Martin). Note that this software feels invasive and its creators seem a little business-shady.

Use Syncplicity to transfer the ISOs to the laptop. Note, Syncplicity currently doesn't support Linux, so I had to first scp some of the ISOs to the spare Windows box.

To test the solution out, I tried mounting and installing merely Photoshop on my spare Windows box. It worked.

All I need to do now is give my laptop time to download these new ISOs. In total, I just created about 3GB of ISO data, so that will take awhile. Assuming I can transfer 3MB / min on my home cable internet line (which seems reasonable to me), that will take about a day:

3004 MB * ( 1m / 3MB ) * ( 1h / 60m ) = 17 hours.

Related Work: For data backup, I used to use a combination of rsync scripts and Dreamhost. However, Dreamhost no longer guarantees data backup (indeed, I'm not sure if they ever did). For drive emulation, I used VirtualCD about 10 years ago, though I don't see the advantage of it over Daemon Tools. I'd be interested in finding something less invasive than Daemon tools, though. Syncplicity is a special case of online data backup, which in turn is a special case of home user data backup, which has been an extremely saturated market, both presently and historically. I know that as of late 2008, Megan was using Mozy, for which which I've seen commercials on Hulu.

Future Work: Setup a "portable USB application drive", and buy an external hard drive to support my growing data store. This could reduce upload/download times. My Syncplicity account is up to 48 GB now - at least 25% of that is installation media.