tommyl’s posterous

We finally saw Avatar earlier today, and it was worth it in 3D at an iMax theater. The movie was certainly ambitious and ground breaking from an infotech view. But like The Great Train Robbery and The Jazz Singer, I think it will seem pretty primitive in contrast to stuff that comes afterward.  And afterward is coming pretty quickly.  The showing today included previews for a Shrek and Alice in Wonderland movies in 3D and iMax. 

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Say you're browsing the web and you uncover a scientific or technical topic you want to know more about. Not just something like the iPad, but something really technical like the impact of genetically modified Eucalyptus trees. Well, you could delve into the academic research on the topic, if that's available. But even if you find it, it may be densely written prose with unfamiliar terms and hard to grasp concepts. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like much fun.

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A few years ago Windows XP crashed on me one too many times, taking some valuable content with it, as I remember. Well, I switched to the Mac and haven't really looked back since. But when the Redmond Borg started showing commercials for Windows 7, I did see one thing that intrigued me. I don't remember exactly what they call it, but it's the feature that lets you put two windows side by side just by dragging them to the edge of the screen.

"Hm, that might be useful," I remember saying, then forgetting about the whole thing. Today I'm experimenting around with my workflow and thought the feature might just be useful. Of course, I'm not gonna revert to Windoze. But I did remember seeing a reference to a Mac version of the feature, so I looked it up and downloaded a copy. I'm using it right now.

The software's called Cinch and it's put out by Irradiated Software.

What's cool about Cinch is how it lets me easily get two windows side by side just by dragging them. I'm a big drag and dropper, so you can see the advantage this arrangement provides. It's especially helpful for moving or copying stuff between two folders.
But beyond housekeeping functions, Cinch is useful for writing blog posts like this one, or composing comments, tweets, whatever. I usually think of post ideas when reading stuff in Safari: RSS feeds, tweet, Facebook updates, and the like. What Cinch lets me do is continue looking at or reading the content in the browser while I compose something in the other window. And it's easy to drag in content if I want to include it as a quote in the post I'm composing.

I haven't tried it yet with images, but I'd bet that's easy, too.

So it's with some reluctance that I endorse an idea from the Windows world. But thank goodness someone translated it something useful on the Mac.
A belated and slight hat tip to Borg HQ in Redmond.

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Yesterday former baseball player Mark McQuire came clean about using steroids. No surprise, but it brought forth links to stories about steroid use, including this one Esquire first published in April 2008. I read it and put a link to it on Twitter.

So this morning I'm at the gym struggling through leg day when I mentioned it to a trainer. Only thing is, I'd misquoted the author as having improved his dumb bell bench press 30 pounds in one day while taking the drugs. I thought he'd said he pressed 190 pounds dumb bells, and I took that to mean in each hand. Well, that turned out to be my mistake: that was really the total for both dumbells. Turns out you'd have to be world class strong to do that.

Anyhow, that got me thinking about how the Esquire editors had fact checked the article. I sent the trainer a link to the article in hopes of more review.

What I got back from that review made me take notice and got me riled up about the state of fact checking in the stories we read.

Okay so his dumb bell presses went up by 15 lbs each. To be honest that’s not that spectacular, considering the amount of protein he’s consuming. We’ve worked with many people who have made those types of gains with a really controlled diet. As for the amount of weight, I train several guys who do more weight and are drug free. His ‘before’ bench press is 15 lbs more than mine. And for the protein - he said there is 13 grams of protein in a can of tuna? No, it’s 32.5 g in a can of tuna. He said he consumed 337 g protein a day (that’s 2,359g per week). He said he went through 4 tubs of muscle milk a week which is 1920 g – sooo, that means he’s practically met his protein intake with just powder. That doesn’t even begin to touch the 20 cans of tuna a day and egg whites, etc… . My guess is it’s another attempt at scaring people and like I said before, people blow holes in it and then think it’s all a lie.

My reaction now is Esquire should be ashamed of itself for not fact checking the story before printing it. WTF's happened to the idea of editing before you publish? Even the NY Times has laid off many of its copy editors and you can spot typos now. Seems to me magazines like Esquire have traded accuracy for literary gems like: "The first week of the cycle, my nipples start to itch."

Oh, the humanity

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