Workout myths beginning to get pushed out of the mainstream

Example here.

I hear this shit from time to time: do more crunches and you’ll get a six-pack. Um, no: I already have one, hidden under a layer of fat.

Short, high-intensity cardio isn’t as effective at fat-burning as staying “in the zone”, which is I guess why sprinters are so porky.

Women should stick to cardio to prevent bulking up: which assumes that the simple act of picking up heavy things and setting them down again, over and over, is all it takes to put on muscle mass.

Quit being such a pussy

Valleywag quotes some VC blogger:

I am afraid to upgrade to Leopard because it might brick my MacBook.

WAAAAAH, drop a hundred bucks on a FireWire drive and Super Duper, or $150 for same + a local geek to back up your shit. A VC can’t get together the scratch to hire a local geek to manage his shit, a process taking (no lie) no more than an hour?Same advice applies to Windows and Linux and every goddamn thing else: BACK UP YOUR FUCKING DATA BEFORE DOING SHIT. Apple had to install a fucking backup program as part of the operating system to convince people this is a good idea, and it still hasn’t gotten onto the radar screen of the thickies yet.

Also we’re still running our business on Tiger, is there something absolutely mission critical about Leopard, or just a case of e-penis envy?

I have a brand new iPhone sitting right next to me on my desk that I can’t figure out how to unlock and jailbreak now that it comes preloaded with 1.1.2 firmware.

WAAAAAH I can’t figure out how to do unsupported hacks on my phone; and apparently I can’t go to Google, type in “1.1.2 jailbreak” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”, cause that totally doesn’t take you to a TUAW post covering all the details.

But anyway, if you can’t use an iPhone without cracking it open and gluing in unsupported pieces of kit, go buy a Treo or a Blackberry. That’s like saying, “I bought a Honda FIT and now I can’t tow my horse trailer”. Well NO SHIT, it does what it says RIGHT THERE ON THE TIN.

Here’s all you need to fix your problems.

Wishlist for BBEdit 9 (or whatever the next version is)

These days I can’t seem to settle on an editor I love. For a long time, I loved BBEdit. Then TextMate came along and did all the things BBEdit didn’t seem interested in doing. I then started doing more and more complicated things with dynamic languages, and spent a while adrift in IDE land. Lately I’m back in BBEdit land, just to see what’s going on, and I’m finding myself in the same place I was when I stopped using it.

It’s unlikely the next BBEdit will materialize any time soon; unless they’re baking a new version, BBEdit will pretty much continue to itself for the foreseeable future (after all they only shipped 8.7 in August of this year, and it was a pretty big upgrade). Maybe something at Macworld, although Macworld no longer seems like a totally awesome time to update things.

I have a strange editor fetish, if it wasn’t clear by now.

But anyway, here’s my list.

I’ve never figured out how people do this

I subscribe to the Loudoun County alerts thingee, and from time to time I see things like this:

Weapons Violation: A 32-year-old Ashburn man told authorities he unintentionally discharged a firearm in his residence.

I will never, as long as I live, understand how anyone ever unintentionally discharges a firearm.

To wit: even if you store a firearm in a loaded, cocked-and-locked state, friggin trigger discipline, have you heard of it?

And this goes for the dummies who fire off a round “cleaning” it. Assuming they’re telling the truth, it’s 2 steps AT MOST to render 99.9% of all firearms safe. Here, I’ll go ahead and prevent you from ever accidentally shooting the family pet with this simple guide.

Ruminations on Travel, part one of a series

It occurred to me that all the changes made to the air travel process - all of them, 100% - are entirely reactive (I don’t fly all that often). The TSA has not, to the best of my knowledge, made a single change to the air travel process in a preemptive manner. Not once has it done anything to make air travel safer, except in the sense that you may now no longer attempt to do things on planes that have already been tried and in most cases, didn’t work (eg the War On Liquid).

Essentially what we created was a faux police force whose job is to wait for something horrible to happen, then ensure that it might not happen again. It apparently has no mandate to prevent anything, which is I guess why we invaded Iraq.

But the best part is that no one - no one at all - gives a shit. If anyone did give a shit, the TSA and its army of bored, underinformed luggage checkers, would be required to work for a living. (There was a time when Republicans would not stand for this shit, before they all became petulant cowards who masturbate to the thought of a giant bureaucracy complete with cradle-to-grave care)

The only people that do give a shit don’t matter, because they will be instantly (if not violently) shouted down as terrorist supporters. You are not allowed to stand up and demand this atrocity be fixed.

Say Hello to Roscoe

Roscoe.

Home again.

Mexico is composed entirely of:

• tequila y cerveza
• Iguanas, geckos, grackles
• tourism
• poverty

Pics (almost 200!) and narrative forthcoming. Tomorrow, Roscoe.