Shawn Lankton Online

This was a guest post for my uncle’s site, Harmony Earth. You can find it in the “Success Stories” section. Enjoy!

I’ve been eating a mostly plant-based diet for the past few years. When I first got started, I faced personal and social barriers. However, by taking a few conscious steps, I was able to break them down and really improve my eating habits! Knowing the truth about nutrition, understanding the benefits of a plant-based diet, and committing to a change are all important, but actually revamping my lifestyle was a daunting task. Here are 6 tricks that I used.

• Think Long-term
• Add Some Extra Steps
• Keep the Good Stuff Nearby
• Surround Yourself
• Embrace Frugality
• Get Accountable

By thinking long-term about rewards and taking steps to preempt myself from falling into old eating habits I was able to leap feet-first into a new way of eating that has improved my life immeasurably.    Click to continue →

I recently figured out how to keep a necktie in place. I get really irritated when they don’t cover the buttons on my shirt. In the past, I’ve tried several tricks, but last month I had to dress up a lot, so I did some research and found the best way (in my opinion).    Click to continue →

Most things I do on the computer, I do within emacs. I use it for email, writing programs, compiling programs, running programs, typeseting papers, running shell commands, etc.

So how did I make this post from within emacs? Google led me to this post detailing how to set up weblogger. Here’s the quick and dirty setup:

bash$ cd ~/.emacs.d/
bash$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:
/sources/emacsweblogs \co -d weblogger weblogger/lisp

Put this in your .emacs and execute it (highlight and C-x C-e):
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/weblogger")
(require 'weblogger)

You’re now ready to start a session: M-x weblogger-setup-weblog. It will prompt you for your XML-RPC server/path. For example, I log into http://www.shawnlankton.com/wp-admin to post, so my XML-RPC path is http://www.shawnlankton.com/xmlrpc.xml.

One final touch is to turn off auto-fill when in weblogger-mode because carriage returns get interpreted literally as <br>. A quick fix:
(add-hook 'weblogger-entry-mode-hook
'(lambda () (auto-fill-mode nil)))

I listen to NPR’s Science Friday podcast every week. Last Friday, there was a great interview wit author Michael Pollan. In it he talks about his new book, “In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto.” Pollan says that he can really sum up the whole book in 7 words.

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

As a mostly-vegan who is appalled with the amount of junk that people eat, I couldn’t agree more! I also like his description of processed-packaged-supermarket-stuff as “edible food-like substances.” I think his message is 100% correct, and very important. Most of the stuff Americans eat is not food. By eating better stuff Americans could be a lot healthier and happier!

While I may sound fanatical about it, Pollan does a great job of getting these points across in a calm, informative way. He even talks about the history of food science and how we got in this predicament. Check The Science Friday Website for a link to the audio of the interview.

Listen to the Interview

I got an iPod shuffle several months ago, and coupled with my cord-free headphones, I am a very satisfied customer. The only problem was that with the iPod mounted securely to your left ear, its hard to see which button is which. This means that sometimes when you want to turn down the volume, you accidentally skip the track and a host of similar transposition of intent problems.

Well, I have found the solution. I needed to give the buttons some kind of tactile indicator. In this case of the shuffle, there is just one doughnut-shaped button. This button smoothly transitions from one function to the next, so you have to add something in order to know that you’re finger is over the appropriate function before you press. I turned to an old friend… superglue.

I put a dollop of superglue over each function. When the glue dried, it left a nice little bump that is feel-able, but doesn’t interfere with operation at all. If you do this to an iPod or other device, be sure to use gel superglue. If you don’t I imagine you’d be in for trouble. Also, keep in mind that it takes the glue several hours to dry when its in blob form I made the mistake of touching the “volume up” dollop too soon. The result is actually nicer though. Now there’s no bump over “volume up,” so I can tell the orientation.

For some time now, I’ve had the dream of growing my own food. Once you start down the natural/healthy path, having your own organic garden is something like the penultimate experience. For Christmas my mom gave me a bag of dirt and two planters. Most people might think they did something wrong if their mother got them dirt for Christmas, but not me… I knew that my mom know just what I wanted! I was going to build a container garden.

In addition to the pots and dirt, Mom let me take 3 baby collard green plants. When I got back to Atlanta, I tucked them into their planter and got some basil, cilantro, and oregano plants for the other one. I’m now an urban gardener with a small but well loved collection of vegetables and herbs. I’m already making plans to get more planters and more plants! (This might get out of hand)

In my struggle to do more, be better, and kick ass I try a menagerie of techniques, experiments, etc. Most recently, I’ve developed a set of mantra that seem to give me that extra push to get things done, and done well. I keep these three phrases in mind all day and let them spur me to action.

DELIVER

The idea that you should always deliver on what you say you will is a strong one. I want to be known as “someone who delivers.” This keeps my head in the game long-term thinking about not just actions right now, but how they will translate to tangibles later on. Deliver at work, Deliver in relationships, Deliver financially. DELIVER.

More Action!

This one comes from my friend Naomi. In this crazy world, it’s all too common to work or play to the exclusion of sleeping. When things start to drag, when my pen slumps and my eyelids get heavy, I think to myself, “More Action!” Its a great way to get going, and keep moving fast. “More Action!” at the gym. “More Action!” when programming. “More Action!” when you want just 5 more minutes before you get out of bed… “More Action!!”

Push It.

Here’s one from my buddy Jon. We tease Jon because, “he pushes it.” However, pushing it is a valuable quality. Whenever I want to quit, take a break, slow down for just a sec’ because its more comfortable… I think “push it.” This means working for 10 extra minutes when I’m stuck on a problem, or running for one extra mile when my lungs and legs burn, or knocking one more thing off of my to-do list before going to bed. I hope working just outside my comfort zone will make me stronger. Push it.

These three are short and simple enough to keep with me mentally all day long. If it were just about that though, I’m sure I’d forget eventually. Hence, I put up sticky-notes with these mantra. I put them on my monitor at work, my microwave at home, my dashboard, my laptop, you name it. Seeing them all the time reminds me to do More Action so I can continue to Push It and eventually DELIVER.

When we were children, we were taught how to spell words. (Personally, I was never fantastic at this.) I see the value of spelling, and look scornfully on documents wrought with spelling errors. You may say, “Lucky for us, we live in the land of spell-checkers, and we don’t have to worry about that.” Ah yes. And this brings me to my point.

Spell-checking is a valuable tool. I couldn’t possibly write without it. This post is a commentary not on spell checking, but on its cousin, auto-correct. Auto-correct is the tool that changes “teh” to “the” and “freindly” to “friendly.” I used to think that this was a fantastic utility. These days I have a different take.

Auto-correct takes away the punishment for misspelling and mistyping words. As a result, you being the clever person you are, adapt and start to exhibit more careless behaviors. After years of training myself in this way, I realized that I could barely type an intelligible sentence when left to my own devices. I was constantly on backspace, and messed up certain words habitually.

As an experiment, about six months ago, I decided to go on an auto-correct hiatus. I disabled it in all programs. Furthermore, I made a promise to myself not to right-click misspelled words to get the correct spelling. Now, if I type a word wrong, I fix it. If I don’t know how to spell a word, I look it up. The results are fantastic.

My typing accuracy has improved dramatically, and I am learning to spell again! Words that I noticed I never *ever* spelled right such as “available” (I always did “avaliable” and auto-correct fixed it) have come back into the fold. Maybe its not necessary. Maybe I’m just a purist. But I like that I can type again.

For a about a week now I’ve been on a mission to remove two words from my vocabulary: “cool” and “sucks.” I think these words are completely non-descriptive and their inclusion in the vernacular promotes imprecise speech and a general under-utilization of this beautiful menagerie of words we call the English Language.

I find these two words offensive, but they are a habitual part of my everyday speech. As such, I require a constant reminder to stay focused and choose appropriate, descriptive alternatives when expressing myself. To give myself this focus I decided to use a variation of a technique employed by author Tim Ferris (whose book should be arriving at my door any day now).

This technique involves wearing a bracelet. Its purpose is to remind you not to do whatever it is you wish to stop. When you slip up, you change which wrist the bracelet is on. My goal is to make it one full month without “cool”-ing or “suck”-ing. So far I’ve only been able to go a few days at a time, but its getting easier and easier. I’ll post a follow-up when I finally succeed!

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama has come to Atlanta. He will be serving as a visiting professor at Emory University over the coming days. To celebrate his arrival in Atlanta, the weekend was filled with seminars and talks (one of which my Mom came up for!). However, I didn’t get to see him until yesterday when he gave a public address from Centennial Olympic Park.

Before his Holiness came on, a contingent of monks from the Drepung Monastery took the stage to perform some of their traditional chanting. Check out this video:

Click To Play

After this, the Dalai Lama took the stage. This man is wonderfully compassionate, and it shows through in his gentle mannerisms, and warm smiles. He is a captivating and engaging speaker despite English not being his first language. He spoke for about twenty minutes on topics mostly related to compassion and kind-hearted-ness and how these tools can result in peace and happiness for their practitioners. It was an inspiring talk, and I left feeling exhilarated and unusually happy.

I also took some videos of his Holiness’s talk, but the audio needs some work. Keep checking back as I hope to put some of these videos online soon.