part of working for a biology related company is taking part in conversations about life. today at lunch the question came up, what prevents [humans] from living forever?

what we gathered was that the human body’s cells replace themselves every few years. cells can only replicate so many times. you multiply the two together and you get the theoretical lifespan of humans.

the other thing to think about is, every time a cell divides mistakes are made. the copy is not 100% correct. accumulating mistakes is why older people are more susceptible to illness than younger people. it’s why individual lifespan varies so much.

the only ways to prolong life are: reduce the mistakes made in replication, increase the number of times cells can replicate themselves, and reduce the frequency at which cells replace themselves (regenerate). these are the three important variables.

someone suggested that reducing caloric intake would reduce metabolism and tweak the system enough to extend life.

this is an honest to goodness people photo that i took. it’s the closest image i have to a photo of someone i don’t completely know.

it would be both irony and triumph if i was able to do a series of photographs of people in their quiet and alone places. the places they like to be alone in, when they want time away from the world at large. if only..

i’ve been reading diane arbus revelations. it’s affirmed my thought that full frame photos are the most truthful and real.

tom, dad, me. the front steps of the house in peru, indiana.

today we received the final statement and payment from our previous landlord.

from april 14, 2005 through august 10th, living in san francisco has been a wild ride. our landlord threw us for a loop when he decided to sell the property we were renting, 3 months into an 18 month lease. very long story very short, we agreed to move out if he compensated us for our troubles.

as of today, the transaction is complete.

as many people know, i run a server that hosts accounts, email, web pages, etc.

i used to have a user whose address was doug@ and he stopped using the server when he became famous from a documentary movie.

from time to time i watch the server logs and always see attempts to email random email addresses, all are “doug” and three or four random letters… like dougvtr, dougwgg, dougibf,.. you get the idea.

it turns out that there are more than 10,000 attempts a day to send email to these random doug addresses. i thought to check if they’re all coming from a set of mail servers. no such luck. today alone the attempts came from 630 unique hosts.

thankfully, it’s not generating too much load on my machine, as the smtp connections are rejected. but how do you stop so much wasted time/energy/bandwidth?

many people dont know how much crap there is out on the internet. my servers are constantly scanned, spammed, and exploit probed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

before and after.

tonight we made pan-fried potstickers, and beef ala shabu-shabu with soba. served with bishonen sake. yum yum yum!!!

on wednesday we’re making our curry katsu for scott and andy. can’t wait!

today i did a good deed. recently i saw a posting on craigslist for cheap 4×5 film holders. i found two folks on apug.org who were interested. turns out the seller was 5 blocks from me. i walked down and puchased them all. today when i got home from work i shipped them out via UPS. i didn’t ask for shipping charges. if they wanted, i asked them to instead donate the shipping amount to apug.org. helping out feels good.

on sunday, i went on a great drive with boman. when i go for a drive, i run into the most random things. this time we saw wild turkeys that live in a woods. we saw a small russian colony on the coast. we talked to wine maker at a family owned and run winery. we stopped to take a picture of a sign at camp gulala where a feminist camp was taking place.