Why the hell haven’t I been doing this all along?

Ever since I started buying books on Amazon years ago at heavily discounted prices from the comfort of my own home I’ve only once bought a book from a retail store and only because the savings weren’t as huge and I really wanted the book right away. You really can’t beat discounts of up to 37%, ordering from the comfort of your own home, free shipping (usually 2 days), and an excellent review system to help you pick your books.

I am a firm believer that most shopping will move online because it’s simply better. I can imagine in the not-so-distant future retail clothing “stores” that don’t carry any stock, where you can go in and try things on or feel the material, but have it shipped directly to your house.

So it is strange that I have never bought contact lenses online, given their high-markup nature. I have always considered it, but I suppose it has simply been habit that I go into an eye exam and at the end I order a set of contacts.

Today I broke that habit. I went with www.clearlycontacts.ca and it took me about 5 minutes to save $100. I started using daily contact lenses a few years ago. When I first started, I paid $130 for 2 90-packs (one for each eye, so 90 pairs) – $65 per box. That was the price I paid for a couple of years since I bought them at the same place back home in Belleville. Last year I ended up buying them in Waterloo where I had an eye exam and I paid $300 for 4 90-packs (180 pairs) – $75 per box.

At clearlycontacts.ca the unit price of the exact same (brand of) contacts was $59.89. They had a 4-box volume discount for $54.89 per box. They normally offer a 10% discount to new customers but I found a coupon for 15% off if you were a new customer and paid with VISA. Shipping was free. The only “catch” was that they threw in a “Handling & Insurance” fee of $10.98.

My grand total today was $197.61 for 4 90-packs – $49.40 per box. It was shipped by FedEx overnight so I should have them in a couple of days.

Seriously, WTF. I’m terribly embarrassed that I only started doing this now. Everyone else should do the same.

I recently stumbled upon an old video that I’ve seen before and thought I’d share it. It’s on “how to eat sushi” and it’s quite entertaining. But first, some thoughts on sushi.

I remember when I was a kid I wasn’t a big fan of sushi. I think it was because my mom only used to make a specific kind of sushi, and not necessarily the kind with raw fish that everyone calls sushi. In any case, as I got older I started thinking to myself “you’re Japanese, idiot, you should love sushi” so I decided I’d start liking sushi. And only in the last year have I regularly gone out to eat sushi with friends, all thanks to the recent popularity of all-you-can-eat sushi in the Waterloo region.

I find it interesting that sushi has become an activity that the younger generation has adopted as a sign of affluence or being the cool thing to do. Don’t get me wrong, sushi is delicious and I love it. But I think our current generation is infatuated with it because it only recently realized that it exists and that it’s delicious. At the same time it’s unfortunate that a lot of people are only exposed to cheap sushi and equate eating sushi to gorging oneself. Sushi is more than just gorging and the experience of eating raw fish. The lack of beautiful presentation, delivery, and culture in eating sushi at these all-you-can-eat sushi places takes away from the experience.

I can’t wait until I go to Japan in May when I’ll be eating real sushi.

Today I started cutting. Cutting is a bodybuiding euphemism for “losing fat”. Or the d-word. But we don’t use that word because it’s a dirty, dirty 4-letter word. I’ve seen Mariano go through 2 complete cuts before. His first one was back in the summer of 2006 and the most recent one last summer. It certainly is a test of willpower but after having done it twice before, he’s been refining his process and thankfully I get to experience the 3rd generation of the formula.

I’m doing a cut for a few reasons. I’ve never had abs. Abs are pretty sick. I want abs. And as they say (and as Mariano often reminds me), “Abs are made in the kitchen.” I’m also doing this for Team Jacked. Mariano will be joining me shortly, in about a week, and we both intend to show some significant improvements in our physique over the next few months. We are building our own “success stories” that we can then use to inspire and motivate others to take their own journeys to the Kingdom of Jacked. Team Jacked is still an idea and I will leave the full explanation for a future post but at its core it’s a service that we’d like to provide to get people jacked.

Luckily I teach CycleFit twice a week and intend to attend another class as well so my physical activity is through the roof when combined with workouts and other random fitness activities. I’m hoping this cut will only take 8-12 weeks and then I will arrive at a place we like to call “The Promised Land” where you’re jacked and eating delicious, healthy meals to maintain.

Last night I also took my first set of progress pictures. They will represent the “before” of the transformation and it is with both great sadness and great happiness that I can say that the before pictures are wonderful. I will be shamefully hiding those pictures until the “after” pictures are taken.

I finally got around to making a portfolio of websites that I’ve worked on.

Here is a pilot for a maybe-someday tv or internet show. It features Ze Frank and I rather enjoyed it.

Go to Vimeo (rather than watching embedded) to watch it in HD.

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

“Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?”  at the 1:56 mark.

The product itself is interesting and may actually be pretty good. But seriously, what were they thinking? The entire Microsoft marketing department is full of fail.

I finished migrating Pleasant Interruption over to WordPress. We begin yet another chapter in the history of Pleasant Interruption which goes back all the way to the beginning of 2005. From Blogger, to b2evolution, to Drupal, and now, finally, to WordPress.

It’s strange, as WordPress never caught my eye back at the end of 2005. Rather, if I recall correctly, I think the main reason why I went with Drupal (and had used b2evolution prior) was that we could have separate “blog” pages(and RSS feeds) for each author but have all the posts aggregate on the main page as well.

Now that I am much more experienced with web programming it seems so trivial to me to simply write a separate template for each author showing only their posts.

In any case, I still love Drupal as a full-blown CMS but the important lesson here is to use the right tool for the right job. And for a blog, nothing comes even close to WordPress. It’s so polished and it isn’t riddled with extra garbage that Drupal comes with. In fact, I love WordPress so much that I’ve migrated a bunch of other sites I manage to WordPress, using it as a basic CMS. I think for all but large community-style websites WordPress totally outshines both Drupal and Joomla(the 2 go-to CMS softwares).

I think what does it for me is the inclusion of a WYSIWYG editor by default. I’ve always loathed Drupal for not having one built in. The main problem with Drupal is that it’s designed by developers, FOR developers. I liken it to Linux whereas WordPress is the Mac. Convention over configuration; as is the (Ruby on) Rails philosophy that I have come to so dearly love. Drupal is powerful, but too powerful for its own good. An end-user of a CMS doesn’t care what the “input format” is. Nor do they care about revisions, or menu links, etc. The language is too techie: “node” and “taxonomy” are two that stick out like a sore thumb.

But WordPress get it. The end user only wants to be able to create and manage content. Leave the technical decisions to the person setting it up and building the theme. But otherwise, all the complicated stuff should be hidden and the user should be presented with a simple, beautiful interface.

So here’s to WordPress, for being so awesome.

This is just a warning to the handful of people that have Pleasant Interruption in their RSS readers that I will be migrating the site over to WordPress sometime tomorrow.

This might break your feeds depending on which reader you use so you may want to check the actual website (pleasantinterruption.com) sometime over the next week to make sure you’re getting the goods.

MacHeist is really well-known in the Mac techie world but not so much when you step just outside of that world. Essentially MacHeist is two things: A form of an alternate reality game (ARG) and a promotion for indie Mac software.

The ARG part involves a series of challenges or “Heists” as they call it that users participate in either alone or as a community – you can complete the challenges yourself but some parts can be insanely difficult, technical, or require obscure knowledge so the community works together by discussing in the forums. Each Heist unlocks some free software (that are normally not free) for the participants and new challenges are revealed. In the end, a steeply discounted software bundle is revealed and a lot of the participants buy it.

Just yesterday MacHeist unveiled a mini-heist as a warm-up to the upcoming MacHeist III. I was poking around thinking of participating but the first puzzle got Mariano’s attention and we were both immediately hooked. We ended up spending four hours solving the 9 puzzles and it was a blast. About 3 of them required fairly technical knowledge and a few required a Mac (to run applications) but all in all it was fairly accessible to non-techies. Of course, you can just cheat and check the forums for answers if you get stuck. We needed a little help on a couple of them but managed most of it.

During the past two MacHeists I sat on the sidelines and only last year did I create an account to sang some freebies without actually working on the challenges. But this year, I’ll be waiting anxiously and jumping in as soon as it begins.