Back in March, I was dismayed to learn that Continental Airlines was discontinuing the gluten-free menu options on all their flights. This was particularly disconcerting to me since I usually fly with them on my frequent trips to Panamá;. Long international flights are killer when you're going hungry, and not all the airports in between there and here are GF-friendly at all, either.

My response was not to panic, but to focus my ire into writing a persuasive letter to the airline's CEO. Apparently, it had some effect, as just yesterday I received a response from Continental's customer service, which included the following:

I understand you had some concerns about Gluten-free meals.

We discontinued serving Gluten-free meals March 15, 2010; however, in response to customer feedback, we decided to start serving them again, effective May 1, 2010.

Continental's website confirms that GF meals are now available again. Now, I am not suggesting that my letter alone changed their minds; rather, I'm certain it was the fact that they received many such letters from other frequent-flyers with Celiac disease like me. But what if I hadn't sent my letter, assuming that everyone else would? I'm rather glad I did!

Tableau Software is well-known for making quality data visualizations—interactive charts, graphs, and plots—easy to do and use. You're probably seen some of their work at major news outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post websites.

So recently when I discovered they have a free "Public" version of the Tableau software, I was eager to try it out. Of course, there are limitations to this version, including limited data inputs and no advanced data manipulation features—but I don't need and probably wouldn't know how to do any of them anyway. But it's fun to experiment and see that even a non-visual person like me can make the charts look solid and function well.

Below you should see my handiwork, munged from an Excel worksheet which Tableau provided for their Interactive "Chart" Contest, co-sponsored by <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/"<ReadWriteWeb.com. I chose to use the dataset revolving around government spending, with the idea that it could help me explore what presidents and political parties actually value, rather than what their words in campaing promises and platforms&mdash;by letting the presidents put their money where their mouths are, so to speak.

If you explore the data, you will clearly see how the George W. Bush administration spent an incredible, almost uncountable amount of money (and this from the Republican party who value "small government"!). But it's not entirely out of line&mdash;the spending was, after all, in line with the growth of the U.S. economy (as measured by the GDP) and the trend of past administration's spending. Upon further inspection, you may note that current President Obama is in a tough spot: with only one year behind him, his spending is outpacing his predecessors by far, presumably due to the active wars in the Middle East and the near collapse of the U.S. banking system, both of which Obama inherited from the younger Bush. Moreover, his first year in office is the first time in decades that the United States' GDP has fallen instead of risen&mdash;bad news when spending is up!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy exploring the data and the interactive features my "viz" grants you. And if you are left thirsting for more, maybe you should try out the Tableau Public for yourself.

Recently I finally came to the realization that I have celiac disease/gluten intolerance. I am not alone; up to 0.75% of Americans may also have it, although it frequently goes undiagnosed for years. And this way my case too... This comes at (what I hope is) the end to a long history of constant discomfort and pain, frustrating visits with doctors and specialists, days lost from work and weekends in bed, and more. Those of you who have known me well anytime in the past dozen years or so can probably recall some of the downsides of my poor health. And for much of that time Ainsley has been telling me, "it's not right for someone so young and healthy as you to be so sick all the time!" Indeed.

So this weekend I went 100% gluten-free. Yeah, that's my new GF&mdash;not "girlfriend", but "gluten-free". My Sweetie &amp; I spent a good part of Saturday afternoon sweeping the kitchen of all the foodstuffs with hidden (and unhidden) glutens, inspired by a great article at Karina's Kitchen that Ainsley found online. (Isn't she great? :)

Ainsley had already done some GF shopping on Saturday, but I went ahead again tonight. Lots of fresh fruit, veggies, meat, eggs, etc.&mdash;all good stuff... but still I kind of wanted to cry (but being the Manly Man that I am, of course I did not). To complicate things, I am trying to go entirely milk-free for the first couple months, after which I will see if I can reintroduce it; this meant that I had to find viable replacements for the few milkful items I still use, notably coffee creamer and butter. This is an affront to my Swedish heritage&mdash;not only am I giving up all the marvelous breads and cookies, but butter! &lt;sigh/&gt; I still shudder at the thought of the new fakey margarine that is newly lurking in my fridge.

Of course, there are some great benefits I expect out of this effort. First and foremost, of course, is that I expect to feel so much better. Not only will I not be destroying my digestion by "pouring Draino down my gut" (in the words of a new friend), but I will be eating unprocessed, fresh, "real" food all the time. I'll probably lose a few pounds, then gain some muscle as I can get back to regular exercise. And hopefully there will be some financial benefits too, as I no longer have the luxury of eating out willy-nilly when I don't feel like packing a lunch for work. And I'll get to spend more time at home cooking and eating with my Sweetie.

Anyway, that's that I guess. Two days down, and many more to go. Stay tuned for more updates on the transition (yes, reader, I intend to post here more often ;). Now I'm off to munch some fresh cherries and cook up some BBQ pulled chicken for tomorrow's lunch. To your health!

For some reason, Micro$oft is giving away free one-year subscriptions to "TechNet Plus Consumer Services Professional Pilot", which includes all the usual TechNet Plus benefits including eval software and support tickets.

Click the link appropriate to your location: US | Canada | UK

Their servers are under high demand at the time of this posting (probably from other people signing up!), so you may have to try a few times to get in.

As most of you readers may already know, I have been working at a financial services company since last September&mdash;yes, just before "The Collapse"&mdash;and thus I have a renewed interest in understanding the investment markets. And now the swings of the market have a more direct impact on all of us than before, when we maybe only needed to find a place to keep our retirement funds. So here are a few things I've been reading lately that I felt were worth passing on to you./p>

If you haven't already heard a reasonable explanation of what cause the U.S. economy's implosion this past autumn (I would call it "fall", but that would be too punny), there are several explanations I would recommend:

• This American Life and NPR teamed up for an excellent bit of radio reporting entitled "The Giant Pool of Money"
• For a more recent (and slightly sensationalist) write-up, check out Wired's article entitled "Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street".

So, in short, it seems that the primary cause of the current financial crisis is that Wall Street figured out how to bundle a bunch of not-so-great mortgage loans into a big investment package and still get them rated 'AAA'-safe, and banks and others bought them up like Cabbage Patch Kids, thinking they were minting easy money.

So where do we go from here? Obviously George W. Bush's tactic of ignoring the problem for 2 years didn't work (and now Obama's administration is saddled with the impossible task of recovery), and along with it the Republican ideal of reducing regulations placed on the market would similarly be a bad idea. But what could help prevent this kind of problem in the future, when Wall Street keeps inventing new convoluted and curious ways to invest faster than the SEC can investigate and rule on them?

Recently I have read two interesting proposals that I would pass on to you:

• An op-ed in today's Times recommends fixing the ratings system.
• Wired Magazine recommends that the SEC require much more public company data be published and tagged with XBRL so any investor can dig into the accounting data to learn the truth.

Both of these sound like reasonable suggestions to me. So what do you think?

The past few days I've been tweaking some VBScripts for Active Directory and file monitoring on Windoze systems, and I've just about had it up to here. VBScript is so painful and inefficient! ( Tell me, what other language has a default error handling option of "On Error Resume Next" that you simply must use to get anything to work?!?)

This always starts and ends the same: At first, it seems like VBScript will be the easiest way to get the info. For example, the web has tons of sample code on how to query AD via VBScript that makes a good starting point. But then I start tweaking and realize that I want to pretty-print the output with simple options like sorting and filtering... and it just keeps getting more complicated, since VBScript doesn't do any of that easily. Now some of the scripts are over 150 lines long now, for doing the simplest things!

In the end, I always wish that I had used a "real" programming language to do them. And I will, eventually, I hope. But at the start it seemed like editing the VBScript would be easier.

In one case, I am writing a Nagios script in Python that will get info about Windows files via WMI, which can be run via winexe from a Linux box&mdash;this will be a major improvement over running Nagios-NT VBScripts. But my own perfectionism and tendency towards feature creep makes this an ever-lengthening process.

In another case&mdash;some simple scripts to list AD members and such&mdash;I just haven't found any good Active Directory modules for Python yet, so the obvious answer was to use the VBScript snippets I already had. (Okay, so maybe I wasn't trying hard enough to find a Pythonic solution, but my Googling did show that there were several competing modules and no one clear winner.) This one I just need to let go.

My writing teacher in college talked about how, at least for him, a poem he was writing was never "finished". I think I'm kind of that way with my small sysadmin scripts&mdash;I continue to compulsively "improve" them long after they have met the need. Sheesh.

One of my favorite SNL skits from a couple years ago is actually good solid financial advice: Don't Buy Stuff You Don't Need.

You'll get pretty much the same advice from the likes of Dave Ramsey, albeit with less tongue-in-cheek humor. (I said less, not none.) I would highly recommend taking one of his Financial Peace University courses if you can find a nearby showing; I know it made a huge difference for Ainsley &amp; me so we're more ready to ride out these economically unstable times.

If you read this blog, you probably are someone who would appreciate the online comic XKCD. Or you're my Mom.

Example: if you think this is funny, then you should probably check out his site every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for more laughs.

And, of course, you should keep reading here too... on the off chance that I say something funny. That includes you, Mom.

Recently I took a fresh-looking notepad off the top of the stack in the office supplies cabinet near my desk. Today as I was using it, I noticed there seemed to be a page out of alignment, sticking out a little bit from one side. I flipped to that page to try to straighten it and found that it was actually a full-page crossword puzzle that someone had completed&mdash;presumably they kept it hidden in the notepad for those boring meetings...?

This weekend a friend and I went to see the movie Doubt in the theater, and I'm so glad I did. While it's not the kind of explosions-and-effects show that is typically better on the big screen, the acting is so captivating that it's worth the extra cash simply to see the actors' faces in such detail. (And y'know, for a script that's mostly about internal action rather than external, the faces are where it's at, as the camera has little else to focus on.)

Permit me to repeat myself: the acting is captivating, riveting, mermerizing... Of course, it's no surprise: everyone knows that Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are among the best, and Amy Adams is clearly a rising star that will shine on for a long time. But put the three of them in a room and POW! BIFF! KAZAAM! (Oh yeah, I should also say that Viola Davis also holds her own, as do the young actors playing the schoolkids. But it's not so much about them now, is it?)

Anyway, it's only the first week of January and I've seen what may be my favorite movie of the year. (I guess it's all downhill from here!)