windows hang, android bitches

I hate it when Windows (7)
stops accepting keyboard input & must be rebooted.

but at least i can bitch about it using my android.

Monitoring histamine like blood glucose

OK, I admit it in public: I have Type 2 diabetes. Controlled by diet.

Regularly monitoring my blood sugar with the home tests made  a great difference:

• I learned how much of my mental state - alertness, fatigue, ability to concentrate - is related to blood sugar. Not all, but a lot.
• I learned that what I thought was low blood sugar, hypoglycemia, is more often than not high blood sugar, hyperglycemia.

Regular tracking has helped me keep to my diet and exercise program.

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Since tracking my blood sugar has helped so much, I wonder about tracking another health issue for me: allergies.

Since I have started tracking and logging and journaling more diligently, I have noticed what I call a "pre-allergy" pattern: there are days when I definitely have allergies, sniffling, etc. And days when I am definitely clear of allergies.  But there are also days when I don't feel clear of allergies, but when I don't really have allergy syndromes: instead of my nose being blocked (as it is today), I just feel a little tickle.

The funny thing is that these "pre-allergy" days seem to be the days that I am most likely to be irritable and anxious and have trouble concentrating.  Sure, sniffling all day long can be distracting, but I have started feeling relieved when I wake up sniffling, because that usually means I will have a relatively good day at work. Except for the sniffling.  A full blown allergy attack - constant sniffling, eyes sore, skin itching - is distracting, but a mild one can be worked through.

I call these days of low but present allergy symptoms "pre-allergy" because quite often after a few days of "pre-allergy" I will have more intense allergy symptoms.  Although sometimes it is post-allergy as well.  I imagine that it is the "shoulders" of my allergy intensity curve, at levels just below the levels that trigger full allergy attacks.

I wonder if there is a home blood test to measure allergic intensity, i.e. histamine levels?  I can see that there are lab tests for histamine, http://www.integrativepsychiatry.net/histamine_level_whole_blood.html.  But they are heavyweight - go to a lab.  Not something you can measure 2-3 times a day, as I measue my blood sugar.

--

OK, I admit it further: since I started tracking my blood sugar, I have gotten into Quantified Self / Personal Monitoring.

For manual tracking of ...probably too many things... I use KeepTrack on my Samsung Galaxy Player.

But its best when the tracking is done automatically.  E.g. I splureged on the Withings wifi connected scale, http://www.withings.com/en/bodyscale, that uploads my weight to their website every time I weigh myself. Without me having to intervene.

I had hopes for MapMyHike, http://www.mapmyhike.com/.  It's great when it works.  But (1) the GPS on my Samung device is unreliable, at least where I live, an area with deep ravines and canyons and poor sky exposure, and (2) even tolerating the GPS fragility, the MapMyHike app is much slower than most other aps, and often loses data that it has promised to upload later.

I wish there was an aggregator for these cloud based tracking tools.  I would like to see all of my stuff in one place.

etc, etc.

How to search within an Outlook message (hint: can't search in preview pane)

Quick stupid Outlook question:

How to search within an Outlook message?  So that I can jump quickly to the details for XXX in a long message.

I guess I could use Outlook Web Access, and just use ^F in my browser.  .. Well, I could, if OWA was working.

But there must be some way to do this in Outlook itself.

(I suspect that I have asked this question before, and forgotten the answer. For the life of me, can't see a button or menu item. Yes, I'm trying helpﾅ)

...

Ah.

F4 to search

- but it doesn't work in the preview or reading pane. Must open the message in a window of its own.

Google works better than MS help.  When something as basic as this needs a help page on about.com, it must be a UserInterface bug.

http://email.about.com/od/outlooktips/qt/et102904.htm

How to Search Inside a Message in Outlook

Finding messages is easy, accessible and reasonably fast in Outlook, but finding text inside a message I find more challenging. It can be done, though a few detours are involved.

Double-click the message to open it in its own window.
" You cannot search inside a message shown in the Outlook preview pane.

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Posting this on my blog so that I can find it quickly.