Hypercritical Dan Housman

Long time no blog

2010-08-23T01:22:44Z

I somehow fell away from writing blog posts. It must have happened for many people now that facebook, flickr, twitter, and SMS can consume the bits of creative energy. But I felt like returning here after getting enough sleep for the first time in a long time. Trying to keep a growing start-up happy along with two little kids take a big chunk of sleep out of my life. So in general I have been in a form of stupor when it comes to the times when I might write a posting here. But I don't like that things have gotten so stale. As usual there is no hope for a massive encyclopedic update. The pictures of life may resolve some of what happened in the past few years. I have noticed that videos are more useful than still shots to give a flavor of life. When Sarah and I look at our digital picture library we say that we never have enough good pictures and never have enough videos.

I have this nightmare that I figured I'd document. It has recurred more than once so I am now used to it. In the dream I am driving a car on a highway. But at the same time I am driving the car by remote control. The "me" that I am conscious of is the one driving the car. I can see the car at first but then I am driving it remotely with no way to see what is happening to it because it has gone behind a hill. Since I am stationary it keeps getting further away. After a while I wonder how I can keep driving the car without seeing what it looks like from where the car is or being in the car itself. The car starts to swerve into traffic on the highway and eventually at a rapid speed flys off the highway. In this case I am aware that the crash was severe. It was fatal. The me in the car had died. But the me driving the car while feeling a terrible pit in my stomach for having died is still alive. So I walk about and think about how I am still alive although I have died. I go into a town and speak to some people. The can see me and I can see them and we are therefore all ghosts/spirits of people who have died. The town is not special or heavenly. We talk and I realize that I have been wrong my whole life about death. That people can live beyond their own death in spirit. I see that there is this other next world that is not much different from this one. And if I were to die in that world there would be more and more universes that I could pass through as a controller of myself through remote control. I awoke a little confused but remembered that there was a world or two that I was living in my dream.

I don't need to analyze this dream much. It underlies the typical fears of a father and an entrepreneur. Much of what I try to do is not fully under my control. My children will be what they will be and my business is in the hands of employees and customers more than it is in mine. As things go forwards the feelings of control that come from youth slip away the more I work to establish situations that I can control. In the end I am like the remote controller trying to drive fast cars. I need to let the driver drive their own car. If I can't see what it looks like from the car it will crash.

Madeline's questions of the day

2009-11-24T01:43:33Z

Madeline and I played some question guessing games today. In the morning over breakfast I asked her some questions like "what fruit becomes a raisin". At night before bed she asked me questions. Her questions were as follows:

Why are the colors of the rainbow red-orange-yellow-green-blue?
If a lion is in a cage then will it be sad?
What do lions eat? A: Meat
Are our insides made out of meat?
Why do bees have stingers?
Will a bee like it if I leave honey for it on the ground?
Why is lava hot?
Why are moths attracted to light?

I was able to handle most of them but I was definitely stumped by the moth question

Autism links to xmrv retrovirus - interesting theory

2009-11-11T10:22:41Z

I was thinking about autism research since I find the science around the unsolved areas to be interesting and was especially interested in theories regarding viral infections and autism. My basic thoughts were relating to reading about how the polio virus operates to invade and compromise the central nervous system. The effects are so obvious in that paralysis and in many cases death occurs that it was easy to hunt for and find a viral cause. Measles is also CNS related in that it can cause specific CNS issues including auto-immune issues like acute measles encephalomyelitis. Again it is not so hard to find a viral cause to people who appear with spots and severe symptoms and often fatal symptoms. Measles and Polio are viral diseases that are hard to hide. There is plenty of speculation although mainly discredited around the link between vaccinations for MMR and Polio. The general issue is that autism is a developmental disorder that appears at the same time in development that the vaccines are given so causality is very difficult to establish.

But what if there are other viruses that impact children at the same developmental ages as Polio and Measles and they are ones that aren't near lethal or obvious? These viral infections of other viruses may be causal to autism by also affecting the CNS. I can hypothesize that the virus, if one existed, should be findable within a stable population with a clear autism diagnosis (non genetic) that has been hard to explain with pure genetics by looking for linkage between antibodies to a new or poorly characterized childhood virus and autism.

So I did a quick search on autism and viral causes and found something new and interesting. There is new information announced in October Nature and through NCI about a retro virus called XMRV being implicated in an adult disease called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. CFS is a CNS disease where the patient is very lethargic because of some neurological issue. The potential that a virus causes the disorder is very interesting in it's potential to be similar to how polio and measles can reach and compromise CNS functions. Furthermore there have already been people who have linked CFS with autism in terms of treatment strategies and pathologies.

David Kirby reported in the Huffington Post on some forward thinking thoughts about links to autism from the researchers studying the linkage between XMRV and CFS in that there was a preliminary study and thoughts about how XMRV might operate in children with the phenotype of autism as well as some theories around viral activation when the immune system is operating in response to immunizations.

In all I find this line of inquiry of interest because it does lead to some rational outcomes and actions if the answer is that there are mechanisms by which autism and related disorders can be caused by a virus. Mainly that the viral infection can be tested for, possibly treated in a manner similar to HIV with anti-retroviral agents, and that a vaccine can be created to prevent new infections in the population, maybe there are genetic biomarkers that confer susceptibility or liability to the infection mechanisms causing certain damage and tests can help determine risk. This is all speculative but the speculation seems less off base with a little evidence.

I joined TripIT

2009-10-11T11:27:53Z

I decided after seeing all the little tidbits of TripIT updates in my LinkedIn network that I should join and track my travel on TripIT. Hopefully now I'll know where I am going. I am waiting for that magical moment where I suddenly realize that I am travelling to some weird city and someone I know is either living there and reaches out to me to go out for a beer (by the way this is the real value of TripIT) or I realize I am in some co-incidental travel with an old frat buddy who wants to shake down Las Vegas for a night.

Wrestilicious problem

2009-10-03T08:11:36Z

As an entrepreneur I can't help find the lottery irksome. I don't mean to pick on this guy who won the lottery recently featured in the article Downside of winning the lottery. But can these people please direct their money to some ventures that have a chance of being useful and successful.

Now, the young entrepreneur is dabbling in the creation of a reality television show that melds two of his dreams: professional wrestling and beautiful women. He spends all his time promoting the project called "Wrestlicious."

I too dream of "professional wrestling and beautiful women" but this does not sound like a great use of capital.

New pictures posted

2009-08-30T19:43:33Z

I posted a bunch of new pictures on Flickr from August. They include shots from yesterday when we had some fun in the rain with umbrellas and rain boots.

mashing-up twitter and flickr

2009-08-29T22:53:39Z

As I was taking photos and wandering at the mall twittering once or twice I had a thought. Given that pictures get taken onto cameras with date stamps for the "date taken" and twitter stuff gets posted with date stamps. It should be possible to use a combination of twitter and flickr to annotate photos with text. Basically the idea would be to have a mash-up service which looked both at a flickr stream and a twitter stream and found times where there were pictures taken closely in time with twitter posts. It would then associate that information graphically such that the text of the tweet was included to annotate the images taken on the photo. You could use eye-fi if one was inclined to have no latency. It is probably a major abuse of technologies but isn't that mostly what people do with flickr and twitter.

swimming and the ocean

2009-08-10T01:41:22Z

We went to the beach at the end of the day today with the kids. Madeline and I stood at the edge of the water where small wavelets were crashing into our feet. She would get her hands dirty in the sand and then need to wash them again. We threw rocks and she handed me ones to throw as far as I could. One time she handed me some tiny rocks to throw and they rained down into the water making thousands of small splashes. She wanted me to pick her up when bigger waves crashed and because it was fun to be lifted up and spun around she wanted me to pick her up even when there were no big waves. I told her we needed to be brave and I felt empathy with her confronted with the incredible power of the ocean compared with being so small a person. Looking into the water I felt like we were having a family reunion with some ancient embryonic ancestors that long ago split with my genetic tree. Madeline and I came from the ocean some time ago and now we were back with our family to splash around before returning to land again to have a chocolate chip ice cream cone and look at our digital photos.

Among the big developments over the past week - Madeline has learned enough confidence to jump into the water and try to swim to me without a life jacket. It is a lot of flailing and always eventually requires a rescue but it classifies as swimming so I feel like some major new milestone has been reached.

Finally joined Twitter

2009-07-25T10:56:36Z

After a billion people joined Twitter I finally decided it was time for me to check it out. I have yet to write a Twitter post but I intend to do so at some point soon. I am a bit intimidated by the obvious advanced culture of tagging that will require me to understand the etiquette and policy for jacking into a discussion. In general I think Twitter may be more my style these days given the hectic schedules with the kids and the start-up. I have been doing the frequent facebook status update so I have some idea of what a tweet is. It is a big risk for me to do such things since I tend to do them in moments when I am not in meetings. This generally falls into times like "crossing streets" or "driving between meetings". So I will have to be careful to not Twitter myself to death if I ever get into doing such updates on a regular basis. At Recombinant we are starting to get rolling to output a blog and engage in thought leadership. It is proving tricky to get momentum to say much since in healthcare we have been infected with the natural fear of being perceived as cavalier that comes with the responsibility of holding onto private medical information. I think in many ways this has caused me (along with Madeline and Zach) to be very bad about writing blog posts when as a person involved in less sombre matters I felt more free to communicate.

There is this awful unfortunate nature to the Internet and public broadcast of thoughts relating to the work / private life mix. I generally don't want to have to adulterate my private lifestyle in order to be perceived the right way in my work. But there is no easy way to avoid someone who is looking (not that there are that many folks) at my bio from a work perspective from quickly switching gears into looking in the content I write about my home life and thoughts about it. So being in a role where I might be judged (sales, marketing, consulting) there are risks to communicating about my life. So I have resorted to mainly flowing pictures through Flickr about the kids. It isn't quite as fulfilling or cathartic as writing out a full set of thoughts and sharing them with those friends interested in reading but it seems safe provided I appropriately delete pictures that might be considered to be a poor choice to be shared. Maybe as I get older I'll go back to caring less and having more time to think and write.

Anyways - My twitter name is "danhousman". I'll probably get into it for a while and then move on to the next thing.

Pretzel rolls

2009-07-25T10:43:50Z

While in my hotel in Chicago I was offered a new innovation in rolls. It was a normal dinner roll but the outside was coated with a pretzel like substance. On top of that brown stuff the roll had rock salt on it. I love that sort of stuff so I ate both of them as my colleagues feared the innovation.

Pandora blue tooth blackberry test

2009-04-14T08:17:55Z

I have been listening to Pandora on my laptop for a few months now as a way to avoid the many other forms of obtaining cataloging and dealing with music. It does tend to repeat itself on channels but that is probably my fault for not investing more time in defining my tastes. But that's not the point. I bought a blue tooth headphone/headset at the airport a month or so back as part of my "get fit" campaign inspired by the biggest loser. Note that I don't really want to exercise or get fit as much as I want to play with gadgets but that the desire to come-up with overly complex reasons not to exercise does improve my life anyways. So I bought the blue tooth head set and hooked it up to my Blackberry Curve figuring that I could use it for 5 hour car trips and similar functions. It did work but I then decided it wasn't that useful since most of the time I can just talk on my cell phone. But I was using Pandora while doing my taxes and I noticed that they finally offered Blackberry support. Since it was already 3:00 AM when I finished fighting with TurboTax I figured it was the perfect time to invest some quality time with my gadgets. So I downloaded the Pandora application to the Blackberry. I wasn't about to excercise at this hour! It warned me off the bat that this was a very data intensive application. I pondered the brief description that I had gotten the "unlimited data plan" with my Blackberry when I got it at the Sprint office and thought to myself... glad I don't care about that. On turning it on it blasted some music out of the phone that I thought might wake the kids. So I figured "NOW is the time to test my blue tooth headset as a preliminary act prior to using my phone as a music device while working out on my overpriced elliptical runner in the basement. So I paired the devices and am listening to a crackly "Sweet Surrender" by Sarah M. I walked away from the phone to see how far the blue tooth stuff reached and learned that I wasn't about to get orange juice in my house without the music cutting out. But hey... I got Pandora to work on my Blackberry with a blue tooth set of headphones and I'm going to sleep well tonight (for 2 hours)!

annual turbo tax horror story

2009-04-14T07:44:02Z

So as usual I am attempting to do my taxes online. This year my catch-22 is that I am unable to get rid of a "phantom rental property". For some reason Turbo Tax online is convinced that I have a rental property despite my never having told it so. Maybe they know something I don't. The problem isn't that they do this but that in doing so they generate a form called an E-1 form. This form is error checked prior to filing electronically to the state of massachusetts. It checks to make sure that there is a real address for the property entered. I agree with the logic but that is where things start to get ugly. So in order to enter an address you are supposed to return to the Federal return to enter the property address. Now that is what I tried. But since there is no rental property the answer either yes or no on the Federal return doesn't show said phantom rental property generating the form. So the next option offered by the helpful community is to delete the form itself. Now the fun thing here is that there is a button for deleting forms. It allows me the option to delete an odd named form called a Pg 2 Schedule E. Doing this warns me all sorts of stuff and then after accepting to delete the E-1 pg. 2 thing it proceeds to do absolutely nothing. The form is still there. So I looked online to find I am not the only Mass resident stuck unable to e-file because of the loop condition of having a form that shouldn't exist that can't be deleted that can't be ignored before filing. Entries include the stuff below. So I believe I am stuck and need to kill a tree to mail this sucker through the postal service. It's not the end of the world but annoying since TurboTax cleverly charges you for the whole eFiling before you get to the "validation" screens. Now if my time was not worth anything I might spend a few hundred hours in principle to get my $40 back from them for providing a product that is unusable for the stated task. But for now it is probably easier for me to use the trusty postal service and try again next year to use the wonders of the Internet and computers to do this seemingly computerizable task.

BTW: The final winning piece of advice came from the following gentleman..

"With Turbo Tax Online, you can't delete it, but you can work around it. I went back to Federal and filled in some mumbo jumbo for the information for my non-existent rental property, and then when I was done, I clicked on "revisit" in the rental income section, and then deleted the property. I then filed my Federal. After that, I went back and created a rental property, and just wrote something like:
Property type: I have no rental property. Turbo Tax won't let me delete this form
Address: No rental property
City: None
State: MA
Zip: 00000."

As long as I didn't say I had any income from the property, no rental income form appeared in my state taxes to file, so it looks like MA is just going to see zero income from rental property and no worksheet or form or anything.

"
I have the same problem and i havent filed my federal yet--my federal shows correct info and I am also unable to delete schedule E-1 I don't show a delete form selection anywhere
( Posted 02/16/09 06:04 PM ,Views by community 98 )
Rating (0): Report This:
Problem You Are Reporting:
Abusive Behavior
Inaccurate information
Other (add details below)

Add Details:

fzhu99 commented same problem to delete a form for MA Schedule E-1!!!!!!
Poor software!!!
No answer ????
( Posted 03/16/09 03:24 PM ,Views by community 45 )
Report This:
Problem You Are Reporting:
Abusive Behavior
Inaccurate information
Other (add details below)

Add Details:

Ben78 commented I have the same damn problem
( Posted 03/31/09 08:41 AM ,Views by community 23 )
Report This:
Problem You Are Reporting:
Abusive Behavior
Inaccurate information
Other (add details below)

Add Details:

E30 commented I have the same exact problem! Their software is messed up! And I call turbotax people and they are clue less as to what to do! And I already paid them too!
( Posted 04/05/09 12:40 PM ,Views by community 18 )
Report This:
Problem You Are Reporting:
Abusive Behavior
Inaccurate information
Other (add details below)

Add Details:
Jeremywh commented I'm having the same issue as well. I could delete the E-1 form on my Federal Taxes, but that didn't delete it on my State taxes.
( Posted yesterday 10:18 PM ,Views by community 4 )
"

Where the wild things are movie (spoiler alert)

2009-04-09T10:28:44Z

I finally checked out Hulu after getting in trouble for posting a status update on Facebook about Kal Penn getting offed on House due to pursuit of a political career. Hopefully this is not also a spoler. In doing so it was good to see some shows are free on the Internet although a lot of ones that would be nice were not free. What looked interesting to me was that Where the Wild Things Are has been adapted into a movie. http://www.hulu.com/watch/64652/movie-trailers-where-the-wild-things-are

Passover seder number one was a good experience this year. Zachary wasn't ready to wait through the whole seder. He did use his limited vocabulary to communicate his thoughts on the pace of the seder by repeatedly saying "Awww Done" once he was done eating his pretzels and yogurt. A friend of the family brought their two kids who are the same age as Zach and Madeline. It took the 3 year olds a couple of hours but then they discovered there was a person they could play with to accomplish tasks like dueling with trash can lids.

My dad brought a copy of a graduate student haggadah which added some good humor for us MIT folks. My favorite part was about the hiding of the centrifuge rotors.

I seem to have been abandoning my web site slowly for the lures of the social networks. I put little updates into Facebook for my status and load all my photos onto Flickr. It begs the question of why I need my own web site but there is this lack of a home base on the Internet so maybe I should get back to this site and start blogging again. Zach is sleeping through the night. Madeline is too although she mysteriously appears next to me when I awake each night. As long as I am not overcomitted at work I ought to have some hours to sleep each night and that must mean I am near the level of time to be able to jot down some thoughts.

Mr Potato Head controversy

2009-02-07T00:18:02Z

Lisa Dave and I debated whether there was ever a real vegetable Mr. Potato Head. The issue was put to rest by Wikipedia. Yes some guy was making dolls for his sisters out of vegetables. Also of interest was that Mr. Potato Head was a controversial and rejected idea at first due to the wastefulness of vegetables.

The grape-eyed, carrot-nosed, potato-headed dolls became the principal idea behind the plastic toy which would later be manufactured.
In the beginning, Lerner's toy proved controversial. With the war and food rationing a recent memory for most Americans, the use of fruits and vegetables to make toys was considered irresponsible and wasteful. Toy companies rejected Lerner's creation.

Disneyworld fountain of youth odd fact

2009-02-05T08:07:14Z

I was reading something in Wikipedia about the fountain of youth while looking for some good names for a pharma data warehouse. This fact entertained me since I've always found it funny that a movie was made out of a ride at Disneyworld. It all connects back in the movie though here...

" The 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ends with Captain Jack Sparrow heading off to find the Fountain of Youth, positioned in southern Florida (Disney World, to be exact) according to his map."

From - Wikipedia fountain of youth