First I wrote a silly post on twitter about how I have regrets and I used the hashtag “#ihaveregets”

Then I bought the domain name ihaveregets.com

Then I learned the twitter REST API

Then I wrote a little PHP script to pull down any posts written by me with the hashtag “#ihaveregrets” and display them as text

Then using the php5-memcached client I put that behind a 60 second cache in order to not violate the twitter API limits

Then I put it on my new domain, but it didn’t work because Ubuntu Dapper doesn’t support php5-memcached

Then I downloaded an ancient (copyright 2003!) memcached php client from http://phpca.cytherianage.net/memcached/ and adapted my script to use that syntax.

Then it worked!

Then I wrote this note.

Anyhow check out http://ihaveregrets.com/ it’s an awesome site even though so far I only have one regret and I haven’t make the HTML look good yet.

I strongly disagree with this recent NYT Op/Ed about the value of calorie posting requirements.  Based on a study of McDonalds customers, they conclude that people don’t modify their behaviour based on posted calories in those restaurants.  Anyone see the SERIOUS GAPING FLAW in that logic?  (If it helps, I italicized it for you.)

As someone who has recently lost a whole bunch of weight, I can testify to the obvious and basic fact that the most important thing to control your weight is to measure calories consumed and compare that with calories exerted via normal daily activity plus exercise.  Some people call this “energy balance” — but the easiest way think of your body like it’s an engine in a car:  Eating food == filling up at the gas station and exercise == using the car’s engine to drive around.  By controlling the inputs and outputs, you can basically hit any level you want to!

Once you grasp this extremely simple logic, shedding excess points is astonishingly easy.  You count your calories in by adding up what you eat in a day (there are lots of websites that help you do that), and figure out how much you expend in a day (again, lots of tools to figure that out).  If you intake less than you exert, you’ll lose weight — that’s it — no magic, no BS.  If reality doesn’t match your expectation, you’re either miscounting inputs or outputs — you can create a simple and effective feedback loop to manage this by adjusting your average calories in or out per day.

The hardest part thus becomes eating out — in many cases you have no idea what the restaurant put into the food, so you’re unable to see how many calories you are taking in.  If you can’t measure your rate of intake, you can’t make informed decisions to achieve your goals.  Thus, if a goal of public health policy is to give people the tools they need in order to improve their health (and it should be), then requiring chains to post calories makes a bucketload of good sense.  It’s not the full solution, basic education is also required to explain to people what the numbers mean and provide context, but it’s an essential and required step.

Folks, I am really enjoying the new PS3 game “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves”.  I was thinking that it was probably game of the year, but now I’m thinking different.  Maybe it should really be considered *movie* of the year, because this game has as much in common with Hollywood than it does with video gaming.

Unlike many of my favourite games, Uncharted 2  is very linear — it doesn’t pretend to be sandboxy like Grand Theft Auto, and you don’t progress your character and choose your storyline as in an branching RPG like Fallout 3.

Instead it tells a story, and you as the gamer are a participant in that story.  There is usually only one way to deal with any particular situation, and frankly it’s never all that hard.  The strength of the game is that it’s story is superb, and are the voice acting and cinematics.   The cutscenes (which load seamlessly and are never annoying) are funny and compelling storytelling, and add to not subtract from the overall experience.

As you progress through the story, you are put in incredible situations which you have to deal with.  Right from the opening scene it will wow you in this regard.  But they keep on shaking things up, it’s not like Doom or Halo where you do basically the same thing in the basically the same setting over and over again.  In Uncharted 2, while the game mechanics remain the same (climbing, shooting, solving puzzles), the settings and puzzles are varied enough that it feels fresh every time.  Enough that it makes me go wow and giggle with glee every few minutes.

On paper, this game isn’t that much different than it’s predecessor, Uncharted.  What has improved is mostly polish — they tightened up the gameplay and cinematics, and made the puzzles seem much less contrived.  This polish though has pushed Uncharted 2 from being a good game into a truly wonderful entertainment experience.  Watching an Indiana Jones movie is dull in comparison to actually BEING in those circumstances and coping with the challenges in gameplay.

Seriously — this is not the future of games.  It’s the future of movies.

Today I tried to buy the Fallout 3 expansion packs from your PSN store.

Irritation #1: First I looked under “Game Add-Ons”, but instead of showing me expansions for the games I have it showed me add-ons for a bunch of games I don’t have, and not ones I was looking for were not listed. I did find them by scrolling through “new releases” though.

Irritation #2: One I went through the clumsy add-to-cart process for the four items I wanted, I tried to buy them. But instead of paying for things they force you to “add money to wallet”, and then “remove items from wallet”. This is a completely unnecessary step and makes the purchase process more annoying than it should be.

Irritation #3: One I went through their wallet process and tried to actually “add money to wallet”, my credit card was declined as the expiration date had changed. To change the expiration date, I had to go to “account management”. To get to this page, I had to exit the store. Exiting the store means I lost the contents of my cart and had to do it all over again.

Irritation #4: Once I got the correct credit card information into my account, and re-added all of my games, I successfully added the funds to my “wallet” and then immediately removed them again to buy the game. Now I tried to download the games, and it said that I didn’t have enough space to download them! Of course, to free up space I’d have to exit the store, and now that I’ve actually paid for stuff I don’t really want to do that and risk losing everything I paid for. So what I did was download each item in the background one by one and select “download in background”. Then I could exit the store without worrying.

Irritation #5: To clear up the disk space I had to sift through my saved games one by one. I have dozens of saved games for games I no longer want to play, but I have to use their clumsy 3 step process for every single saved game I want to delete. Please let me bundle some together!

Irritation #6: I want a pony. Where’s my frigging pony?

Trader Joe’s is always a pleasant end-to-end consumer experience, which is rare for someone like me who hates shopping.  Instead of having to wade through 20 aisles of different stupid ketchup brands, I can quickly find what I’m looking for and know that it’s of good quality and at a fair price.  No hassling me about filling out some long-ass form to join their club.

And most importantly, complete the whole journey in just a few minutes. It’s fast enough that I don’t have to do a whole week’s shopping at once, I just drop in a few times a week as required.  Whoever designed that process did a kickass job.

I hope you forgive me, but I’ve moved my blog to omgzombies.org