March, 3, 2003 archives

the who and the fao will be issuing a report that encourages people to limit sugar intake to no more than 10 percent of their diet. which isn't to say a low-carbs diet—the report suggests 55-75 percent of daily calorie intake should be carbohydrates. 10-15 percent protein, and 15-30 percent fat (with less than ten percent of that being saturated fats).

i'm not mentioning this to suggest anyone go out and start obsessively counting calories (i certainly don't), because it creates a counter-point to the bloggers shilling for dr pepper. apparently they're hyping sugary cow juice.

unable to simultaneously sit at my desk and think yesterday, i knocked two more movies off my queue. spider-man was about what i expected, which was enjoyable. it was a strong re-telling of the spidey origin story, and was quite faithful to the comic book's mix of heroics and personal turmoil. the royal tenenbaums was a bit of a disappointment, but i just may not have been in the right frame of mind for that sort of comedy. it was all expertly done, it just didn't spark.

i also finished listening to the commentary tracks for season one of the shield, which are great. each episode features a different group of people. shawn ryan, the creator of the series, is on almost all of the commentaries and does a fantastic job of driving the commentary with questions for the others and adding his own observations and recollections. each regular cast member is involved in the commentary for at least two episodes, and other tracks include many of the directors, the writers, and key members of the crew.

looking at my phone bill, i finally decided to ditch caller-id ($6 a month for a service that is basically useless), and find it very frustrating that i'm paying $15 per month more for dsl access than a new customer would. great way to reward loyalty.

(in contrast, i've been a member of netflix since june 2000, and am still getting my four-movies-out-at-once deal for the same price as the current three-movies-out-at-once deal. speaking of netflix, according to this new york times article, you are what you queue. it would be interesting to see a graph of the distribution of queue length for all netflix users.)

this article from the motley fool talks about how consumer spending may be on the wane because of consumer debt saturation. that would be very bad.