I’m trying to eat better. It’s hard — there are a lot of temptations. It’s mostly common sense, though. Eat 6 times a day so you don’t get too hungry, try to eat mostly nuts, beans, green veggies, low fat dairy, oatmeal, lean meats, olive oil, whole grains and berries. I’m also trying to up my protein intake.

I only eat food in bar form. When you concentrate food, you unleash its awesome power, I’m told. That’s why I’m compressing 5 pounds of spaghetti into one handy mouth-sized bar. — Homer Simpson

I’ve been on the lookout for a decent protein bar to supplement when I’m on the go or need something quick. The problem is that it’s really unbelievable how many of these so called health bars are filled with garbage like high fructose corn syrup among other things. After looking for a while I finally found something decent — Eleve8 Me! Protein Bars. Each bar has 18 grams of protein and the ingredient list is small and easy to understand: whey protein isolate, organic raisins, organic whole bananas, natural sliced almonds, dates, apples. If you wanted to pick on them it would be that they are high in sugar. Also, they taste so good that it’s hard to just eat one.

Categories: Food, Health
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As anyone who has bought anything or even used Amazon knows, they have an active product announcement program. This is where they notify you of new products via email. Sometimes these are extremely popular items with mass appeal (e.g. Harry Potter) but more frequently they use your history to find items that you would probably be interested in. In my experience, this works very well. I can’t say for sure whether I have bought anything based on their emails but I’m usually interested in the product and will browse to find out more information.

With that said, I was really surprised to receive the following from Amazon.ca: “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Sergio Leone by Christopher Frayling have also purchased Moments Like This by Donna Hill.”

At this point I’m confused. The cover doesn’t look like something I would usually be interested in. At the bottom of the email it indicates that the book is from the Subjects -> Romance category. Now I know I’m not interested. At all.

Then a funny thing happened. No, I didn’t buy the book! But I did start wondering how this could happen.

• Are flocks of huge Sergio Leone fans really buying this book? If so, why? Leone films barely have any female characters let alone actual romance.
• Maybe one person who bought Sergio Leone actually bought the book? It could have been a gift?!
• Could it be a bug with Amazon’s software?

I’m secretly hoping that it is the third option — the other two options are too damaging to my world view.

Categories: Misc, Movies, Tech
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Call me a fool, then!

The reason for the fool quote is that I am actually quoted on The Motley Fool about one of my favorite stocks, Gildan Activewear. The article can be found here. In that article, I’m tuzowilson, by the way. Not a big quote, but still a quote.

Categories: Finance
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I was perusing some JavaScript the other day and saw a strange notation that I had never seen before:

$("report")

"What is this?", I thought. It looks like Perl or PHP -- have I missed some big piece of JavaScript or is this some new feature? In a word: No.

It turns out that this is actually a function contained in the Prototype JavaScript Framework. The definition of the function is along the lines of:

Functionally, this is nothing special: pass in a name and get back the object. Or pass in an array and get back an array of objects. The really cool thing is the simple elegance of this method and how it cleans up your code.

This is so simple, that it seems obvious! This saves on programmer typing, saves on page size and makes the code more readable.

In a word: beautiful.

Categories: IT, Tech
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Anyone have any regrets about concerts or shows or bands they wish they had seen?

I'm talking about shows you could have gone to but for some reason didn't make it. I don't have many but one that sticks out is Sinead O'Connor in Toronto at RPM in 1988. That was before she killed her career, announced she was a lesbian, retracted her lesbianism, became a priest, retired, and then became a reggae loving Rastafarian. Roughly in that order.

Sure, she's touring again, but at the time Sinead had just released her first album, The Lion and The Cobra, and was far from well known -- it was the perfect time to see a future superstar (at least until SNL) before she exploded into the mainstream with I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got.

"Howling like a banshee that makes Siouxie seem tame in comparison" - Now Magazine

I vividly remember seeing an interview with her on Much Music in early December 1987 (maybe the 7th) where she premiered her first video, Troy. The first thing you noticed was the hair -- or lack thereof. This was 1987 so we are still firmly in the big hair period, poodle epoch so the image was quite striking (even shocking?). They cued the video and it was also like nothing I had ever seen or heard before: I was immediately hooked. After the video, the entire studio (of off camera Much Music employees) burst into spontaneous applause which is something I have never seen after playing a video.

Categories: Music
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Stop the presses! Bell actually did something right. It seems that ExpressVu PVRs now have a 9 day guide! This replaces the measly 2 day guide we had to live. This really enhances the usability of the PVR -- good job, Bell.

Now maybe they should look at the billing system.

Categories: Tech
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Well, Wednesday last week I watched a new show called Anchorwoman. The next day it was canceled by Fox.

I thought the show itself was ok to good. The reason I watched was I remembered seeing a Fox promo and thought it was worth a look and there is virtually nothing on TV this week.

That said, I came into the show with no knowledge or expectations about the show. I think the premise of the show (in the mode of Legally Blonde) was good but I think the turn off is the "reality/comedy hybrid" of it. As a reality show, it is so obviously semi-scripted and edited in order to make an entertaining story and characters that it is overly manipulative.

I think if you take the idea as an actual scripted comedy series then there is much more potential there. Keep the reality aspect to it -- ala The Office or Arrested Development or even a Christopher Guest mockumentary -- but pushed further and there are a variety of topics to mine. There are the obvious ones: fish out water, "bimbo makes good/screws up", office politics that are fairly common. Then you there are a bunch of other topics that could be funny and provide some satire or insight: the nature of local news, hypocrisy in the news room (and TV in general), show business behind the scenes, nature of reality TV itself.

A satire of network TV on Fox; who am I kidding?

Categories: TV
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AFI. What do they know?

Well, probably more than me. But I was inspired by their omni-present lists to start thinking about my own list of great films. Like everyone, I disagree with those lists but I recognize that it's more of a marketing thing so I don't get my knickers in a knot (I always wanted to say that!).

The biggest decision is what criteria to use to construct the list. Since it's my list I will use my own criteria. The criteria is simple, I would consider these to be my favorite movies. And the simple test I used to determine if the film should be on the list is: if I see the movie on TV, would I watch it. Every time. If it was on the next day would I watch it again?

Here are the first 34 in no particular order:

Almost Famous
Apollo 13
Die Hard
Gladiator
High Noon
My Cousin Vinny
Once Upon a Time in the West
Speed
Star Wars
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Hunt For Red October
The Matrix
The Natural
The Princess Bride
The Shawshank Redemption
The Usual Suspects
Titanic
For A Few Dollars More
Tin Cup
Bull Durham
The Fugitive
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Naked Gun
La Femme Nikita
Run Lola Run
Rocky
To Sir With Love
12 Angry Men
Aliens
Rob Roy
Conan The Barbarian
This is Spinal Tap
Airplane!
The African Queen

And number one with a bullet: Casablanca.

Categories: Movies
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I've taken up trying to develop a stock system. The main tool I've been using is AmiBroker, a technical analysis tool. It also lets you run back tests etc.

The results can be seen at StockPickr:

http://www.stockpickr.com/members/port/tuzopickr

So, far the performance has been very good -- although the US markets have been doing very nicely during the same time.

Not to be a shill, but AmiBroker is a really nice product and very programmer friendly. It has it's own scripting language, let's you call out to code from the scripting language, has a COM interface so you're programs can manipulate the program and has an SDK for developing c++ plugins.

Categories: Finance, Tech
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I was trying to integrate my solution which contains a web project with Visual Source Safe and was getting the message: "Unable to read the project file. The system can not find the file specified."

I found a good article on how to fix this at: http://www.inventua.com/blogs.content?EntryID=3

Unfortunately, this didn't fix my problem.

I had a variety of issues with VSS asp.net integration. What I specifically wanted to do was:

1) Have my web project be under the same directory structure as my solution (not in c:\inetpub\wwwroot)
2) Have the web location be different from the actual web project name. e.g. the web project name is Com.TestApp.UI.Web but I actually want the location to be http://localhost/TestApp and not http://localhost/Com.TestApp.UI.Web . It is possible to deploy the project to any URL but I wanted everything to be consistent in every environment.

I've read a lot of articles which helped but no one article could solve my exact issues. This is the procedure that I had to work through to get the Visual Studio/VSS integration working.

Assumptions

1) Assume solution is [my solution]
2) Assume web project is [my web project]
3) Assume virtual root name is [my virtual root] -- this may be the same as [my web project]
4) Assume user logged on is [user]

If the project has been already attempted to be loaded, we should clean up first:

Clean Up

1) Delete the VSWebCache directory C:\documents and settings\[user]\VSWebCache\[my virtual root] if it exists
2) Delete the virtual root [my virtual root] from IIS
3) delete the solution directory where [my solution] is currently located. If any files are locked perform an IISRESET and also close VSS Explorer if applicable

Configuration

1) Open up VSS Explorer. Get latest version (recursive, build tree)
2) Set permissions on the [my solution] directory. Add IIS_WPG with the following permissions: Read, Read & Execute, and List Folder Contents
3) Open [my solution]
4) The set project location dialog will open. Hit cancel.
5) Accept any other dialogs that may come up.
6) Delete the project file from the [my web project] directory.
7) Open IIS Admin and create a new virtual directory [my virtual root] that points to the directory that contains [my web project]. Accept all the defaults. Open the [my virtual root] properties page and set the Execute Permissions to Scripts Only. I did not add an application name.
8 ) Now, back in Visual Studio, open the solution from source control. (File->Source Control->Open From Source Control). Browse to the solution folder in VSS. Click overwrite when prompted.
9) The set project location dialog will open again (as in step 4). This time point to [my virtual root] and click OK.
10) As a bonus delete the directory that was created by visual studio
during step 4. This will probably be in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\[my virtual root]. It's ok to delete this because the virtual root
actually points some where else now.

Categories: .Net
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