Tweetdeck vs. MetroTwit vs. Seesmic

Twitter is one of the most popular web services anywhere, but once you become fairly active on it, I find the web site itself is impossible to use. If you follow lots of people (I follow a little over 300), one single stream of tweets is just too much, and trying to keep track of conversations or random people mentioning you is next to impossible. Luckily there are numerous applications out there designed to make this easier. Most allow you to separate your stream into multiple columns so you can put the people you're following into various groups; for example, I have a group with techie people (Scott Hanselman, Joel Spolsky, Leo Laporte, and the like), another group with people I've "met" online through my interest in pro lacrosse, another one for other sports people (Bruce Arthur, Dave Hodge, Down Goes Brown), and so on. This makes it much easier to keep up. You can also add a column for direct messages or mentions so those are easy to see. This makes having a conversation with someone on Twitter possible, where replies to you from others don't get lost in the deluge of tweets.

I tried three of the most popular such applications: Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter itself), MetroTwit, and Seesmic, and made some notes on each. Note that there are lots of options in both Twitter and these applications that I never use (eg. tweeting from multiple accounts, trending topics, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc.) so I can't comment on those. For each one, advantages/drawbacks are ordered roughly in order of importance to me.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have web versions that allow you to do much the same things as the desktop apps, but through a web interface so there's nothing to install. I didn't investigate these at all.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is the first Twitter application that I used, and I used it for about a year so it's the one I'm most familiar with. It handles multiple Twitter accounts and you can add accounts from Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Google Buzz (why?) as well. I really only used Twitter. I occasionally updated my Facebook status through Tweetdeck, but only when I wanted to set my status to something and tweet it at the same time, which was rare.

Version: 0.38.2

Advantages:

• A global filter hides tweets you don't want to see based on hashtags, other content, user, or application. This makes it easy to ignore useless Foursquare tweets.
  
• The colour scheme is nice – dark background (but not too dark) with white text
  
• There are versions for Windows, Android, and iPhone.
  
• Pops up a little window for images from twitpic, yfrog, lockerz, and others, as well as for youtube videos.
  
• Easy to click on a user or tweet and jump to it in a browser if you want to
  
• I like the little whistling sound it makes for notifications.
  
• You can follow/unfollow people right from the interface and even modify Twitter lists.

Drawbacks:

• Columns are not resizable. This means that you have a maximum of six columns on a 1920x1200 screen if the window is maximized (and you can't see all of the sixth column). Any more than that and you have to start scrolling horizontally. I hate that.
  
• Rearranging columns is silly – you have to click little arrow buttons to move columns right or left one position. You can't just grab the top of the column and drag it to where you want it to be like you would expect. Dragging columns works in both MetroTwit and Seesmic.
  
• To mark a tweet as read, you either click on a tiny little dot on the tweet, select "Mark tweet as seen" from level 3 of a nested menu on the tweet, or click the "Mark all as seen" button at the bottom of the column. Not at all intuitive. I got around this by simply clicking "Clear all" at the bottom once I'd read everything to mark then all as read and remove them from the column entirely – though once you've done that, you will never see those tweets again through Tweetdeck.
  
• If you've marked all the tweets in a column as read but not cleared them, there is no obvious indication that there are new tweets. Unread ones have a little dot next to them, but it's hard to see and not obvious at all. (This is why I clear out the whole thing.)
  
• If you see a reply to someone but want to see the rest of the conversation, you can click on the "in response to" in the tweet (this feature was also not obvious). However, this link shows up on the same line as the username, date and time, and application used (eg. "Twitter for iPhone") so it's not always visible. If you can't see the link, I have found no way to get Tweetdeck to show the conversation.

Drawback specific to the Android version:

• If you haven't updated in a while, you have to scroll through everything to get to the top. You can click on the title bar of a column to automatically scroll, but it still actually scrolls and if you have several days worth of tweets to scroll through, this can take a while. I couldn't find an obvious way to simply jump to the top or mark everything as read.

 

MetroTwit

A couple of weeks ago, I had a problem with Tweetdeck popping up a weird empty "Updating" window that never went away. (It got fixed the next day.) This was not a big deal at all, but I tweeted about it anyway. A friend responded and told me that he had tried MetroTwit and had never gone back, so I decided to give it a try as well. I had a tough time ordering the advantages below since the top six are excellent features.

Version: 0.9.0.0

Advantages:

• Columns are resized as they are added so if you only have a couple, they're wide but if you have lots, they're narrower but still all fit on the screen – no horizontal scrolling. This is fabulous. I have seven columns and can see them all easily. I haven't tried more but I assume if you have too many it will eventually either not let you add more or will be forced to make you scroll.
  
• A big number appears at the top of each column telling you how many unread tweets are in that column, though I've occasionally seen situations where the number is off by one.
  
• Clicking on a tweet marks all tweets below it as read, so you can mark an entire column as read by clicking the top one.
  
• A mark appears in the scroll bar for each column indicating where the most recently read tweet is.
  
• The most recently read tweet has a line and arrow at the top to indicate "you've read up to here". Very nice.
  
• You can have the application's icon change to include a count of unread tweets or replies or messages or whatever. I have it set to replies only so I can glance at the icon on the taskbar to see if I have any unread replies.
  
• If you hover over shortened links you will get a tooltip containing the real URL.
  
• Images from yfrog, twitpic, etc. will pop up in the interface when you click on them. I prefer the way Tweetdeck pops up a window to display images, but this isn't bad.
  
• The link to see the rest of a conversation is always visible and obvious (i.e. it's a link on its own line that says "View conversation").
  
• All three apps will autocomplete usernames when you type a '@' but MetroTwit will also autocomplete #hashtags, choosing from those that you've previously used as well as current trending ones.

 

Drawbacks:

• When you minimize the app, some more tweets come in, and then you restore the window, the columns sometimes show the latest tweet, sometimes they show the most recently read tweet, and sometimes they show some random tweet that may be in between the two, or one that may be days old. It seems random which one happens – consistency would be good. This happens when you close and restart the app as well.
  
• No built-in filters, so no way to get rid of Foursquare tweets. There is a filter from something called proxlet.com, but I haven't tried it yet.
  
• The scroll bar is very narrow and it's hard to grab the scroller thing.
  
• You can follow/unfollow people but I couldn't find a way to modify lists from the application. I generally do that from the twitter.com web page anyway. I only list it here because Tweetdeck can do it.
  
• Not quite as easy as Tweetdeck to click on a user and jump to that user's page in a browser. It's two clicks instead of one.
  
• The dark colour scheme is very dark, and the white one is hard to read. I prefer Tweetdeck's colours.
  
• Twitter only. No support for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
  
• Doesn't handle multiple Twitter accounts. Apparently this is "coming soon" but may only be available in the not-free "Plus" version.
  
• Windows only. No Mac/Linux version, and no mobile versions.
  
• There is an ad (OH NOES! ADVERTIZING!) at the top of one column. It's a different colour than other tweets and you can't get rid of it, but it's not really a huge deal. You can pay for the app ($14.95 Australian which is roughly the same in Canadian or US) to upgrade to "MetroTwit Plus" to make the ads go away.

 

Seesmic

I had nothing but problems with Seesmic. I installed it a few months ago and was less than impressed. I uninstalled it a day later. When I decided to write up this article, I couldn't remember what I didn't like about it, so I re-installed it and tried it for a while. "A while", in this case, turned out to be about an hour. I've given it a few more chances since then but they've always been short and frustrating.

First off, there were authentication issues. I authenticated with Twitter, but when I stopped and restarted the app (required to disable most of the myriad of plug-ins that were automatically installed and enabled (grrrrrr...)), I had to authenticate again. But this time the authentication failed – numerous times. I tried shutting down the app and trying again with no luck. I checked to make sure the Twitter site itself was up, and it seemed fine. After about ten minutes I tried again and everything was fine. Note that I was copy-and-pasting my password from KeePass so it was not a case of simply mistyping the password. This hasn't happened since then, so perhaps it was a one-time thing.

Version: They call it "Seesmic Desktop 2" but the version number was 1.2.0.1891.

Advantages:

• It lists retweets other than my own. If a user I follow retweets a user that I don't follow (i.e. a "real" Twitter retweet, not just adding "RT" in front of the text), I'll see it in Seesmic but I don't think I will in either MetroTwit or Tweetdeck.
  
• You can create a Seesmic account and it will do extra stuff like be able to synchronize your configuration among machines. I did not do this, so I can't comment on that feature.
  
• Windows and Mac versions as well as Android and iPhone.

Drawbacks:

• The columns don't resize.
  
• Each tweet that you haven't read is marked with a little yellow circle, which goes away when you click on the tweet or select "Mark all as read" from the menu at the top of the column. But that's the only way to mark things as read. Not quite as bad as Tweetdeck, but worse than MetroTwit. You can clear out the tweets marked as read (i.e. empty the column), but when you close the application and start it up again, they all come back.
  
• There are two buttons in the bottom left panel with no indication of what they do. One looks like a solid rectangle, the other a series of smaller
  rectangles but when I click on either of them (they seem to be mutually exclusive toggles), there were no obvious changes anywhere. There are no tooltips or text anywhere to indicate what they're for.
  
• There didn't seem to be any way of determining or controlling how often it refreshes the feed. I could find no way of manually causing a refresh either.
  
• At one point I had a Home column (i.e. my entire Twitter feed) plus a Sports column, made from a list I have. Several users in the sports list had unread tweets in the Home column but not in the Sports column. The tweets did show up in the Sports column some time later, but it didn't make sense to me that one column was updated while the other wasn't.
  
• If you right-click on a tweet, there is a large list of things you can do (i.e. reply, retweet, block user, etc.). There is a little menu at the top of each column but if you right-click there, you just get a small and useless Silverlight menu.
  
• Bug – when I tried copy-and-pasting my Facebook password, it seemed to think I was pasting in several hundred or thousand characters, as the password field kept scrolling horizontally for 10-15 seconds. My password is 8 characters long and when I typed it rather than pasted it, it worked.
  
• There were about 10-15 plug-ins automatically installed and enabled. I disabled all but about three of them.

Conclusion

On the desktop, I've moved over to MetroTwit. It has resizable columns, and tells you at a glance how many unread tweets you have in each column without having to clear the column, and changes the application icon to indicate how many replies are unread and makes it brain-dead easy to mark tweets as read. Lots of big plusses. However, I tend to keep my Twitter application open but minimized most of the time, and the scrolling behaviour I described earlier is annoying. Big minus. When I bring up the application (whether starting or de-minimizing), ideally I'd like the columns to automatically scroll, showing new tweets, until the most recently read tweet is visible at the bottom with the unread tweets above it, and then stop scrolling. This way I can instantly see the oldest ones I haven't seen, and then continue to scroll up as I get to the newer ones. Actually I'm not sure what Tweetdeck does in this respect, since I always clear the column (because it's not obvious which tweets I haven't yet read).

I wouldn't touch Seesmic with a 39 ½ foot pole. It seems like beta software that got released too early. Maybe I'll try it again in a year or so to see how it's improved.

I still use Tweetdeck on Android because there is no MetroTwit for Android (or iPhone).

What song has the most "na"s?

The question that everyone has been wondering in the back of their minds for decades has finally been answered. What song has the most "na"s in it?

And the winner is.... Centerfold by the J. Geils Band, which has 221 "na"s, one more than Hey Jude.

No, I did not google this, I actually did my own research, as any good journalist would do. This consisted of listening to each song, typing an 'x' whenever they said "na", then counting up the x's. Why, how did you spend your Thanksgiving?

Facebook changes and rumours

From Twitter:

Scientists: Hey, I think we discovered particles that travel faster than the speed of light. World: OMG new Facebook!

Facebook made some changes to their interface recently, and just like every other time they've done this, a bunch of people lost their minds. There were postings about how to get the old interface back by changing your locale to the UK, and I heard the tired old calls of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There were even petitions demanding that Facebook change it back. These petitions will never work.

It's not that Facebook doesn't care what its users think, it's just that they have so many users that they have to cater to the majority. If you make a petition telling Facebook that you hate the new format and demand that they change it back, and you get thirty five million people to sign it – the entire population of Canada – and print it out and drop it on Mark Zuckerberg's desk, do you know what he'll say? He'll look at the 35 million signatures of people who hate the interface and say "This means that ninety five percent of our users love it! Success!"

Meet the new Facebook, same as the old Facebook

Of course, two days after the change, the postings all stop as people become accustomed to the new interface, realize that everything they've been used to is still there though perhaps in a different place, and that the new interface really isn't so bad after all. Everything is once again fine in the Facebook world until the next time they make a change, at which time people will lose their minds once again – because Facebook has changed away from the interface they complained so bitterly about the last time.

Ever notice that the people that complain the most about the Facebook changes are those who update their status fifteen times a day and are the least likely people to leave Facebook? Facebook knows this, which is another reason they don't worry about the complaints. I'm not making judgements about people who are on Facebook a lot – I am quite active on Facebook myself, as well as Twitter, and I have my own blog fer cryin' out loud, so I'm not about to criticize others for wasting spending a lot of time online.

Regarding the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" – do you really want Facebook to keep the same interface and features forever? That's not the way the software industry works. We software engineers are always looking for ways to make our product better. Sometimes this comes from adding features that have been requested by customers, other times it's stuff we come up with ourselves. (Make a note of that word "customer" – I'll get back to that in a minute.) Facebook engineers are no different – they want to improve the customer experience. Their problem is that many people are using Facebook twenty times a day and become accustomed to how it looks and how to do things. When that changes, people are suddenly uncomfortable with something that they've been comfortable with for a long time. The fact that they have seven hundred million users also guarantees that no matter what change they make, millions of people won't like it, and we all know that people who don't like something are more likely to comment on it than those who do. How many postings did you see talking about the Facebook changes and how great they were?

Does Facebook have privacy problems? Sure they do. I used to know exactly what the defaults were and how all of that worked, but Facebook has added new features and changed things often enough that now I don't know what happens by default. I have found in the past that once you change your security settings to be something different from the default, new features tend to be off or more private by default, while if you have never touched your settings, everything's wide open by default. I don't know if it's still that way and that topic is beyond the scope of this article. I did want to mention it to acknowledge that Facebook is not perfect – for those people who read this article and think I'm some kind of Facebook fanboy who would never say anything negative about them.

You will never pay for it

Another rumour that I've seen a bunch of times is that Facebook is soon going to start charging people to use the site. I can guarantee you that these are rumours are false. Facebook will always be free. You will never need to worry about paying Facebook anything as a customer. Why? Because you're not the customer. Facebook is not in the business of building a social network, they are in the business of selling advertising. They built a social network in order to attract people to their website, and they sell those pageviews to advertisers. You are the product Facebook sells. They make far more money selling advertising than they would charging people to use their web site, since they know that a large percentage of the well over half a billion users they have would not pay for the service. Classmates.com never understood this.

So don't worry about rearranging your finances to have an extra few bucks a month for Facebook, and don't worry about how you are going to keep in touch with your friends in Texas or Scotland or Italy or Japan without Facebook. Will it be around forever? Who knows. But it's the most popular web site in the world right now, I don't see it going away any time soon, and you'll never have to pay for it.

9/11 was an outside job

I watched a YouTube video recently called Loose Change. This is one of the most popular 9/11 conspiracy videos out there. The description of the video on the YouTube page is as follows:

For anyone who still has doubts about 911, weigh out the facts and the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the reality that the events of 911 were one big set-up.

This exposes the lies, disproving every aspect of the bogus 911 commission report put forth by the corrupt government.

Judge for yourselves, but investigate the facts and evidence before jumping to a conclsuion [sic].

The video is about an hour and twenty minutes long. The film is professionally shot and edited, and there are a number of computer animations which are also professionally done – what I mean by that is that it looks good. This is not something done in the basement with a hand-held video camera by some conspiracy theory nut. The film states and attempts to prove that all of the terrible events of September 11, 2001 – the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the airliner crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania – were designed, orchestrated, and then covered up by the American government. It contains descriptions of physical evidence, scientific discussions, and interviews with witnesses, firefighters, airline industry spokespeople, and scientists.

It is also complete and utter horseshit.

There are numerous web sites out there (here, here, here, here, here) that address the claims made in the film in great detail, some of them point-by-point, so I'm not going to do it here. Suffice it to say that the makers of this film get many facts wrong, misinterpret facts and evidence (whether accidentally or intentionally), and use many of the standard logical fallacies including straw men, observational selection, appeals to ignorance, and red herrings.

For me, the most damning evidence that this whole conspiracy theory is wrong is the lack of whistleblowers.  If this were a government plot, the number of people that would have to have been complicit is immense. The people that flew the airliners (who must have been OK with a suicide mission). Pilots that fired the missiles at the Pentagon. Demolitions experts that planned and planted the explosives. Air traffic controllers and other staff at the airport in Cleveland (where United flight 93 landed in this scenario). Communications experts who faked all of the cell phone calls from flight 93. There must have been some firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders that were in on it, so they could hide or destroy evidence of the explosives if any was found in the rubble. Many experts in many different fields to come up with ways that this could all happen but still look like a terrorist plot. The President of the country. Numerous senior members of the armed forces, CIA, and FBI. Who knows how many other members of the Executive Branch as well as advisors and assistants. There would have to be people whose job it is forever to ensure that any evidence found in the future is covered up, and witnesses and others involved in the conspiracy paid off or killed. We're talking about hundreds of people here.

If this was a government plot, the majority of the people I listed above must have known about the plan, or at least part of it, beforehand and agreed with it. None of them had any trouble planting bombs in the iconic twin towers in downtown Manhattan that have hundreds of thousands of people going through them every day. None of them had a problem with firing a missile into the Pentagon. Even if they didn't know about the attacks or agree with them beforehand, they've had plenty of time since then to realize what they were a part of and reflect on their role in this event. But in the ten years since the attacks, not one person has had a change of heart and come forward. Perhaps the American government has had each and every one of them murdered in such a way that their friends and families didn't suspect murder. If that's the case, why hasn't the government just killed the makers of this film for revealing the truth?

The funny part is that the conspiracy theorists describe the most complicated conspiracy ever conceived, which was apparently pulled off to perfection, and at the same time point to many mistakes that the conspirators made and clues that they left behind. So they're saying that the most evil government conspiracy ever was pulled off by a bunch of incompetent boobs.

There was no government conspiracy to kill American citizens on September 11. The attacks were pulled off by a bunch of Islamic extremists who hijacked four airliners. That, my friends, is the 9/11 truth.

Three and one from the Jays game

Quick post about the Blue Jays game I went to with my dad the other day. Three weird things and one complaint – a complaint about complaints.

Weird thing #1: At one point, the Angels had back-to-back doubles, with no outs or stupid baserunning plays in between, and nobody scored. How do you hit a double with a guy on second and not drive him in? Glad you asked. The second double was a popup a mile high to the right side, so the runner on second had to wait to see if it would be caught. The batter, of course, just kept running. When it fell in front of Bautista and behind Lind and Johnson, the runner on second only had time to make it to third but the batter made it to second. Nobody blew the play so it wasn't an error, so the scorer had no choice but to credit the batter with a double. I'm sure it's not unique in the world of baseball, but with your standard double, you can usually assume that all the runners will move up at least two bases, and a baserunner scoring from first on a double is not unusual at all.

Weird thing #2: During Eric Thames' third at-bat, the scoreboard showed that he'd flied out to LF in his first at-bat then flied out to CF in his second at-bat, so my dad and I decided that he should hit it to RF this time. I said "Put it over the right field fence!". Thames hit the very next pitch over the right field fence.

Weird thing #3: "Batting ninth, the designated hitter, David Cooper." The DH hitting 9th? Does someone not understand the concept of the DH? Yes I know: end of the season, the team is out of the playoffs, give the young kids some at-bats, and all that. Still weird.

The complaint about complaints involves Vernon Wells. Each time his name was announced, there were both cheers and boos coming from the crowd. The people booing Wells irritated me. Wells played several seasons for the Jays, and in some of those years he was very good and in the rest he was excellent. After one excellent year he was rewarded with a huge contract. Was he worth it? Probably not. But can you blame him for taking it? If someone said to you "We're going to give you $125 million over the next seven years", are you going to ask for less because you don't deserve that much? Not on your life. So he took it and promptly got injured, hitting 20 home runs only once over the next 3 years. Then he returned to form in 2010, hitting .273 with 31 homers. Are these $15-million-a-year numbers? No but again, his inflated salary is not his fault, it's J.P. Ricciardi's. Wells was traded solely because his contract was so big. He never asked to be traded (Roger Clemens) never said he didn't want to play in Toronto (again, Roger Clemens), didn't sign somewhere else as a free agent (where do I start?) and never admitted to not giving his best during games because he wanted to play somewhere else (Vince Carter). I have even heard the tired old line about "now that he's got the big contract, he doesn't have to play hard." I don't buy that for a second.

Any player playing at the major league level has likely been playing baseball all his life because he loves the game. To get to the highest level in the sport, he'd have to have worked hard and excelled in Little League, high school, college, and several levels of minor leagues where he was making very little money. His hard work and determination paid off, and he made it to the majors where he continued to work hard and excel. And I'm supposed to believe that when he gets a huge contract that ensures that he can continue playing at the highest level, he suddenly doesn't bother trying so hard anymore? The previous 20 years have been solely for the unlikely possibility of the huge payday? No. He's been working his ass off and playing as hard as he can his whole life - he doesn't know any other way to play. That refers to any professional athlete, not just baseball players, and not just Vernon Wells. Well, I guess it doesn't apply to Vince Carter.

Hey Vernon, I was clapping for you.

OK, so that wasn't such a quick post.

Educating the public

This letter to the editor appeared in the Flamborough Review on September 17, 2011:

I was puzzled – but not surprised – to read the comments offered by the provincial candidates regarding education (Review, Sept. 8). The big picture to these players is the bricks and mortar and infrastructure. They really need to pay attention to the people.

Wait, where have we heard that before? I am a parent, and the biggest concern among all parents I talk to is the curriculum.

We are inundated with fundraising for this, awareness for that. The kids come home telling us about all the “activities” they do.

Wait a minute. What happened to the three R’s?

What happened to sitting down and having a deep discussion about something relevant? Has school turned into glorified daycare?

I’m sure there are some teachers who are just fuming right now, but I don’t care. The public system is failing our kids. The adage that they “never leave a child behind” because it may affect his “self esteem” doesn’t wash with me, or many other parents. Who will worry about their self esteem when they can’t fill out a job application?

I don’t agree with technology and keyboards in primary schools. What is wrong with pen and paper? Apparently, spelling tests are too much to bear anymore. Standardized testing is also an issue with many parents. Many teachers I have spoken to say that they are pressured into spending more time in preparing the kids for these tests.

Let’s get back to basics. Our kids need a stable base of readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, not volunteering activity time to promote corporate marketing.

Kevin Inglehart
Lynden

The only phrase missing from this rant was "Back in my day..." My first thought upon reading it was "spoken like a man who hasn't set foot in a school in thirty years." Gail, who has been involved as a volunteer and on the school council at our kids' school for eight years and is currently going through teacher's college, was indeed fuming when she read it. If Mr. Inglehart had done the slightest bit of research before writing this, he might have understood the current goals of the education system and why they're different from those of years ago.

"What happened to the three R's?" – Literacy (which is far more than just reading and writing) and mathematics (which is far more than just arithmetic) have always been the core of the education system and still are, though they are being taught in a different way than in the past. When my parents were kids, and to a lesser extent when I was a kid (I'm currently 42), mathematics in primary school was mostly arithmetic and was almost entirely memorization. Here are the times tables, learn them by rote (i.e. repeating them out loud over and over and over until it's burned into your head). There you go, that's math. Did the students understand what it was they were memorizing? I'm sure some did but many did not. In public school, we had to memorize the times tables up to 12 times 12. To this day, I can instantly tell you that 12 times 12 is 144. If you asked me 12 times 13 it takes me a half-second longer to come up with the answer – but I can come up with the answer. In all modesty, I am one of the ones that understood how the times tables worked (I always did well in math and went on to get a Bachelor of Mathematics degree) but I know that some of my classmates would have been completely lost because 12 times 13 wasn't on the chart we learned memorized. That's not the way math is taught these days. Kids are not just given the answers but are taught how it works so that they can figure out the answers for themselves.

"What happened to sitting down and having a deep discussion about something relevant?" – That depends on the grade level. Just try having a deep discussion about anything with twenty 8-year-olds and see how far you get. That hasn't changed in a hundred years and so has nothing to do with this issue. But I know what kinds of projects Ryan (currently in grade 7) has worked on over the past few years, and they are having deep discussions about relevant issues.

"The public system is failing our kids." – Evidence please. Don't go spouting off a claim like this without backing it up. Show me evidence that children are coming out of public school less prepared for high school or university than they were twenty or forty years ago and I'll start listening.

"Who will worry about their self esteem when they can’t fill out a job application?" – Show me a teacher that allows a student to pass their class with high self esteem but without the basics of reading and writing and I'll show you a teacher who needs to be fired. That's not the way the public education system works, now or in the past. The difference is that now teachers consider a student's self-esteem whereas in the past they did not. Were people in Mr. Inglehart's classes ever singled out and humiliated in front of the class? Let me guess, stuff like that "builds character", right? It doesn't take a genius to realize that humiliating a student or telling him he's stupid because he didn't do well on a test or assignment does nothing to help the student learn. If a child is struggling in school and you tell him he's stupid, after a while he will come to believe it himself. Alternatively, you can give him extra help – both in the curriculum and in believing in himself so that he has the confidence to continue. If a student's self esteem is ignored and he struggles, he is more likely to hate school and leave as soon as possible. How is that good for the student or the community?

"I don't agree with technology and keyboards in primary school. What is wrong with pen and paper?" – Technology is not replacing pen and paper. Both of my kids go through plenty of paper during the school year and they do far more printing and writing than typing. But considering the pervasiveness of computers and technology in our world, how does it make any sense not to start familiarizing our children with it as soon as possible?

"Apparently, spelling tests are too much to bear anymore." – That's because many studies have shown that spelling tests are ineffective. Students learn how to spell the words in the few days before the test, write the test, and then promptly forget them. Teaching them the fundamentals of English grammar and phonics is far more effective in teaching kids how to use language.

"Standardized testing is also an issue with many parents. Many teachers I have spoken to say that they are pressured into spending more time in preparing the kids for these tests." – Then whoever is pressuring the teachers doesn't get it either. The idea is to prepare the children for life – teach them how to think, not how to answer the questions on the test. Once you've done that, they will succeed on any test you give them.

I don't know what "corporate marketing" thing Mr. Inglehart is referring to in his last line, but I assume it has to do with fundraising which he mentioned earlier in the letter. It's a fairly well-known fact that schools are given far less money now than in previous years. As for why that's true, that's a political issue that has nothing to do with the teachers or how they teach. When I was in school, all the materials we used were provided by the school itself. Now, teachers spend their own money to outfit their classrooms. Over the years my kids have read and studied many books that were purchased by (and then borrowed from) their teacher, not the school or the Board of Education. Fundraising is a way to help further equip the schools. Without it, schools wouldn't be able to afford many of the materials necessary, and programs like music and art may need to be cancelled altogether.

Mr. Inglehart needs to realize that society is constantly improving its knowledge of how children learn, and changes must be made to the education system to reflect that knowledge. Yes, sometimes money is a factor in such changes, but not always. Things don't work the same way as they did when he was a kid, but that doesn't make the changes unnecessary.

There are always people who say things like "it was good enough for me when I was a kid", but is that really what you want for the next generation – "good enough"? Don't you want "better"?

Make a teaching fairyland

Nicky was given a toy last week – a 3D puzzle of a Ferrari racing car. The puzzle was made in China, and the people who created the packaging were obviously not English-speakers. Perhaps they had access to Google Translate and decided that translating the Chinese text a word at a time was the best way to go. We had a pretty good time reading the instructions:

Use hand and head --- Training kid's flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes. Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.

Design munificent --- It can be assemblaged detached over and over, and looks like veritable. It needn't any assist tools.

Perfect in workmanship --- Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly. Full of colour printing.

It could certainly be said that it's not fair to make fun of these people because their English, as bad as it is, is better than my Chinese. This is absolutely true – I don't know a word of Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. But I'm not writing Chinese text for a product that will be sold in China. If that was my job, I might try talking to someone who actually speaks Chinese.  If I were to write it myself, I'm sure it would be pretty damned funny to Chinese speakers.

Mini movie reviews

We saw a few movies over the past week or two; here are some mini-reviews of each. Sorry, no haikus.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Pros:

• Special effects were excellent, but that's becoming less of a draw, since lots of movies have effects that are just as good
• Leonard Nimoy saying "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" was cool. A bit of a Star Trek II homage for those of us old enough to get it.
• John Malkovich is always good

Cons:

• The movie was far too long. The robot fight scenes over the last hour or so were long and drawn out and could easily have been cut down. It was amazing that with so much stuff happening on the screen, I was still bored.
• I find it odd that a movie that stems from a toy (I laughed at the "in association with Hasbro" during the credits) has so much violence, bad language, and even sexual content that I won't let my kids watch it.
• There were lots of scenes of robots fighting and transforming all at the same time. I found it overwhelming – I couldn't tell what was happening half the time.
• Several blatantly cheesy 3D effects. If you want to see a movie that gets 3D right, see Avatar.
• I found it hard to tell the bad robots from the good robots, other than Optimus and Bumblebee. And the two little annoying and pointless robots, Comic and Relief.
• The first Transformers movie was entertaining and while the plot wasn't brilliant, it was OK. I don't really remember the second movie. This one was somewhat entertaining at times but the plot was just dumb. Sentinal even says at one point "I created this technology that defies the laws of physics" so they didn't have to explain anything.
• WARNING: spoilers below
• Patrick Dempsey as the bad guy was not believable. At the beginning I could kind of understand it, but once it became obvious that the Decepticons were planning on enslaving the entire human race, why was he still trying to help them? It's not like they said they'd spare him or he had any reason to believe they might.
• Similarly, Sentinal's whole "the only way to save our planet is to join with the Decepticons" thing was not believable either.
• Optimus's execution of Sentinal (shooting him in the back of the head) was out of character.

 

Spy Kids: All The Time In The World

Pros:

• Jessica Alba! Quite possibly the most beautiful actress in Hollywood today. Can she actually act? Who cares?

Cons:

• I fully agree with the "family is the most important thing" theme, but they pushed it too hard and it ended up being corny.
• The time-travel stuff. I know that time travel is (very likely) impossible, but some movies that involve time travel at least try to make some sense of the whole paradox thing. Back to the Future did a great job, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure did some neat stuff with it as well. This one didn't even try, and as a result it made no sense.
• Too many poop jokes. Then again, it's possible that "males in their early 40's" is not the target demographic for this movie.
• The movie was presented in "Aroma-vision". When we got our tickets, we were given a card with 8 scratch-and-sniff circles on it, and when a number showed up on the screen, we were supposed to scratch the corresponding number on the card and be surrounded with the aroma of whatever was happening on the screen. This worked perfectly, assuming the aroma for each of the numbers was supposed to be "cardboard".
• The kids who starred in the original Spy Kids movies haven't had many significant acting roles since. Their performances in this movie help to explain why.

 

Knight And Day

Pros:

• Cameron Diaz in a bikini! She's no Jessica Alba, but still, wow.
• Sure he's a wacko, but I really like Tom Cruise.
• Lots of chemistry between Diaz and Cruise

Cons:

• During the movie, I couldn't help wondering about the movie's budget for Tom Cruise's platform shoes.
• The idea of a battery that never runs out of power is not possible. It sounded like the writers needed some small yet extremely valuable thing for the bad guys to chase after, and precious gems have been done to death, so they picked this without giving it much thought.

 

The Adjustment Bureau

Pros:

• I really enjoyed this movie. The concept was interesting and made you think – sort of Matrix-y that way.
• Matt Damon. I think I've enjoyed every movie I've seen him in.
• In a way, I wanted them to explain more about the Bureau and the Chairman and so on, but I'm sort of glad they didn't. The fact that they didn't is what makes you think.

Cons:

• Can't say I'm a fan of Emily Blunt. She was OK, but she just doesn't do it for me.  I'm not talking looks here, I just didn't connect with her character.

Ten awesome things about Fern Resort

Our family travels with a couple of other families to Fern Resort for a week every August, and we've done this for the past 11 years. We love our week at Fern, not only because the food is great and there's lots to do, but also because we're all so familiar with the place so the kids have a lot more freedom there than they generally do.

Other than the obvious "someone else making meals for you", "you don't need to clean up", "lots of fun things to do" which are true for Fern and many other resorts, here are ten awesome things unique to Fern, in no particular order:

1. Peanut butter pie

A creamy peanut-butter-flavoured pie with a chocolate crust and whipped cream and chocolate syrup on top. Nothing else to say but OM NOM NOM.

2. Mike Stewart

Mike has been the sports director at Fern forever. If you have ever been to Fern, you have met Mike. If you've been a few times, he likely knows your name. He runs tennis, volleyball, basketball, badminton, bocce, shuffleboard, all the trivia games, and more. He is also the MC and one of the performers for the Show Time! show (see below). He's friendly, he's outgoing, he's helpful, he's LOUD, he's always smiling, and he don't take no crap from nobody. He's got a lot of good stories - ask him about the time he bought the Zamboni. Another good one is when a guest and her husband asked him to join them for... well, he may not tell you all of that one.

3. The Bad Boys line, the Irie line, the No Problem line, the Go Get a T-Shirt line, and the O Canada line

You haven't played bingo until you've played bingo called by an frenetic Jamaican dude with big mirrored sunglasses. Crazy D is the bingo king of Fern. Bingo can be a pretty boring game but when Crazy D is calling it, it's always fun. He's got more energy than half the Playvillage and always gets people pumped and excited about N34 and G49.

4. Four-way beach volleyball

This is an absolute must for me every year - Monday at 1:30. Standard beach volleyball except that there are four courts arranged in a square with nets between them in a cross. You can serve and return the ball to any of the other courts. Always a fun game even when there's eleven or twelve people per team, all playing at the same time.

5. Rolls and honey

Putting honey on fresh squishy rolls is definitely a Fern thing. Every year we buy a dozen rolls and some honey to bring home.

6. The kids programs

If this list was in order of importance, this might be #1. Kids from 0 to 17 have programs specifically for them run by counsellors who are fun and friendly and outgoing. For kids 0-6, we have the Playvillage. There's a nursery for babies, an area for toddlers with swings and stuff, a big climbing structure, a ball pit, diggers, a track for motorized jeeps, a couple of trampolines, a water play area, a little amphitheatre for shows, and the "craft caboose", where they make all kinds of crafts. They have snacks, go for walks around the resort, and take a tractor ride called the Honey Bee Express. I have to say it's awfully cute seeing a bunch of 3-6 year olds on the Honey Bee waving to everyone and singing their "mighty mighty Playvillage" song. The best part is that the Playvillage is open from 6-7:30pm, which is (not coincidentally) during dinner, so you can feed your kids from 5:30-6:00, take them to Playvillage, then enjoy a nice relaxing kid-free dinner, knowing that your kids are being cared for and are having fun.

There are also Junior programs (7-9), Youths (10-12), and Teens (13-17). They do lots of sports and other activities, crafts (tie-dye T-shirts are very popular), practice skits or songs for Show Time, and sometimes just hang out and chill. This year the Juniors and Youths began programs during dinner times so parents of kids that are too old for Playvillage can have a quiet kid-free dinner as well.

7. Chocolate monkeys

Invented by Lou, who's been a bartender at Fern for 29 years. Creme de Cacao, Creme de Banane, ice cream, half a banana, and chocolate syrup. Yummy. The kids can get a virgin one that's just as good.

8. The guest video and Show Time

There's a photographer / videographer walking around the resort all day every day. On Thursday night they show a video with lots of pictures and video of volleyball games, water skiing, dancing on the pool deck, kids playing at Playvillage, pedal carts, swimming, rock wall climbing, golf, tennis, and all of the other Fern activities. It's fun to look for people in your group, and of course the kids love looking for pictures of themselves. After the video is Show Time, a lip-sync show hosted by Mike Stewart and performed by the staff including sports, Playvillage, and kitchen people, the odd manager, and even the owner's kids. Some of them are well-choreographed dance numbers while others are comedy songs that have everyone in stitches. Either way, it's a lot of fun and the talent of the staff is evident.

9. Mushball

Baseball with a mushy mini-soccer ball rather than an actual baseball so no gloves are needed. The staff play on one team, the guests on the other, and I've seen guest teams with 40 people. This makes for a long ad-hoc batting order that frequently changes between innings. Despite being vastly outnumbered and intentionally "blowing" plays involving small children ("Oh look, he dropped the ball, Ashley! Run to first, quick!"), the staff wins every week... or so they tell us. The game was a little different this year since they introduced paintball which happens at the same time, so all the teens were out doing that. The guest team this year consisted of about 5 adults and 20-30 kids under 12.

10. The Downings

With most resorts, the owner is an invisible corporation but Fern is a family business. The Downing family have owned and operated Fern for over 100 years, and the current generation running the place consists of Mark Downing and his sister Laura. Mark, Laura, and their respective spouses and daughters are frequently seen around the resort, and a couple of the girls are old enough now to work there. Mark is as friendly a guy as you'll ever meet, and both he and Laura host (and tend bar at) a cocktail party on Thursday nights specifically for alumni (i.e. guests who have been to Fern several times) where the drinks and snacks are free. Mark's father Robert is retired but you still seem him around the resort, driving his golf cart labelled "Robbie's Rocket".

The Healthiest Fast-Food Burger

Recently I did some analysis of the nutritional content of McDonald's burgers compared with those from various other "roadhouse"-type restaurants. I found that a Big Mac and large fries at McDonald's is lower in calories, fat, carbs, and sodium than any of the other restaurants I looked at. Now, let's look at just the fast food restaurants.

Here is the nutritional information that I used:

• McDonald's
• Burger King
• Harvey's
• Wendy's
• A & W

Note to Facebook readers: Facebook sometimes screws up the formatting of tables when it imports my articles. You may want to click the "View Original Post" button at the bottom of the article.

Here are the results:

Burgers

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Big Mac	540	29	10	44	1020
McDonalds	Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese	530	28	13	41	1110
Burger King	Whopper w/ Cheese	760	47	16	49	1320
Harvey's	Original Cheeseburger	460	35	11	39	1130
Wendy's	1/4 pound single	470	22	7	70	870
A & W	Teen burger	500	26	11	41	1220

I don't go to A&W often enough to know which burger to choose (Teen, Mama, Papa, Grandpa), so I chose the Teen Burger because the numbers seemed similar to the others. The BK Whopper was dead last in every category. Harvey's had the least calories but lots of fat and sodium. Wendy's only had 10 more calories than Harvey's, had way less fat and sodium, but way more carbs.

Chicken Sandwich

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	McChicken	470	27	4.5	46	790
McDonalds	Grilled Chicken Classic	390	11	1.5	46	810
Burger King	Tendergrill	370	16	2.5	37	910
Harvey's	Grilled chicken	290	5	1.5	28	810
Wendy's	Ultimate chicken grill	360	7	1.5	42	1090
A & W	Chicken Grill Deluxe	320	9	1.5	37	1040

Harvey's is the best in each category except saturated fat, but all the grilled sandwiches are relatively similar in all categories. The McChicken (which is fried) is last in every category except sodium where it's the best. McChicken has more than five times the fat of the Harvey's grilled sandwich – this should not surprise anyone.

Fries

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Large	560	27	3.5	74	430
Burger King	Large	440	22	4.5	57	1000
Harvey's	Large	410	16	1	61	1190
Wendy's	Large	500	24	4.5	54	610
A & W	Large	520	22	1.5	76	920

McDonald's is last in calories and fat, and up near the top in carbs, but is way ahead in sodium. I found this strange considering the reason I like McD's fries is that they seem especially salty. Harvey's, on the other hand, is first in calories and fat, but last in sodium.

Overall Results

You can "have it your way" at Burger King if "your way" includes more calories, fat, and sodium than anywhere else. There's no clear winner here, but Harvey's and Wendy's are the lowest in most categories. If I had to pick one winner, it'd have to be Wendy's – it's a little higher than Harvey's in calories and carbs, a little lower in fat, but 36% lower in sodium.

Notable stats for the burger and fries combo:

• Lowest calories: Harvey's. Second: Wendy's. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest fat: Wendy's. Second: A&W. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest saturated fat: Wendy's. Second: Harvey's. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest carbs: Harvey's. Second: Burger King. Highest: Wendy's.
• Lowest sodium: Big Mac. Second: Wendy's. Highest: Burger King / Harvey's.

The shocking conclusion: Having a grilled chicken sandwich instead of a burger and skipping the fries results in a healthier meal. But if you simply must have a fast food burger, opting for Wendy's or Harvey's is a little healthier than McDonald's or A & W, and a lot better than Burger King.

Spotlight: Marisa Ingemi

I have no statistics to prove this, but I would guess that there are far fewer women than men seriously interested in professional sports. By "seriously interested", I'm not talking about those who don't mind going to see a game once in a while, and can name some of the teams and superstars of whatever league. My wife could probably pick Sidney Crosby out of a lineup, but wouldn't know Alex Ovechkin from Alex Trebek. No, I'm talking about women who are "real fans". They know all the players and teams. They can look at a trade and give you an informed opinion about it. They can hear about a player being injured and analyze how it might impact the rest of the team. Before you start to compose your email calling me a misogynist, I'm not saying women can't do this, I'm just talking about numbers. There are simply far fewer women than men that are interested in sports to that degree.

So when you hear that the host of the only radio show in the United States dedicated to the sport of lacrosse is female, you may raise an eyebrow. [Correction: One of the only lacrosse radio shows - there is at least one other] When you hear that she also runs the only lacrosse blog of the 300+ blogs in SBNation.com, co-hosts a baseball radio show, covers baseball for two different web sites, and covers hockey for another, you would think she's not only pretty busy, but she knows her sports and is a seasoned sports reporter and writer. But when I tell you that she recently celebrated her 15th birthday, well, you can pick your jaw up from the floor.

Marisa Ingemi is a high school student who lives in the Boston area. Her first interest in sports came in 2007, when she followed her sister's interest in the Boston Red Sox, and jumped on the bandwagon when they won the World Series. She became hooked on baseball, quickly followed by hockey, football, lacrosse, and basketball. Of course, if you're going to be a sports fan, Boston ain't a bad place to be since each of their hockey, baseball, basketball, and football teams have won championships over the last ten years. I live in the Toronto area where other than the Rock, any season your team doesn't completely suck is considered a success.

After the 2008 MLB season, Marisa decided it would be cool to write her own web site, and began writing news for a fake website at home. She soon created a real website, bestbostonsports.com, which only got a few more hits than her fake one, but it got her started. She started following the NLL during the 2010 season and in an attempt to learn even more about the league, she started looking for lacrosse blogs. She couldn't find one that contained as much information as she wanted so she created her own, simply called The Lacrosse Blog. A few months later, the blog was moved to SBNation.com, becoming the first lacrosse blog in that group, and she renamed it In Lax We Trust. Over 1000 stories and 50,000 page views later, it is one of the most popular fan-run lacrosse blogs on the internet. [Full disclosure: I am one of the eleven writers on that site.]

But just one blog wasn't enough for Marisa. She also covers the Pawtucket Red Sox, Portland Sea Dogs, and Lowell Spinners (all minor-league affiliates of the Boston Red Sox) for both bostonsportsthenandnow.com and minorleagueball.com, and the Boston Bruins for Inside Hockey. She began her radio career in March 2011 with the creation of two different weekly internet radio shows: Lax Live and Beantown Breakdown. Beantown Breakdown features Marisa and a few other local bloggers talking about all aspects of pro sports in the Boston area while Lax Live is covers all types of lacrosse. But Lax Live isn't just some fan yakking about lacrosse for 20 minutes; she interviews lacrosse reporters, bloggers, players, and coaches. She's talked to such names as Andrew McKay, Connor Wilson, Teddy Jenner, Graeme Perrow (had to throw that in there), Dave Pym, John Tavares, Lewis Ratcliff, Ryan Benesch, and even NLL Commissioner George Daniel. Very few 15-year-olds even have a career highlight, but Marisa does, and it's pretty cool: her first-ever interview was lacrosse legend Casey Powell after a Blazers game in 2011.

Considering she's only been following the NLL for two years, Marisa is surprisingly knowledgeable. Ask her who the top goalie in the NLL is, and she'll tell you (hint: it won't be Chris Levis). Ask her who won the recent Brodie Merrill-for-Athan Iannucci trade, and she'll tell you who and why (hint: she'll say Edmonton and she's right). She's interviewed some big names in lacrosse and doesn't sound all star-struck (none of this "OMG OMG OMG I'm talking to John Tavares! He's awesome!!!!!1!") and asks real questions that show insight. When she interviewed me for Lax Live radio last season, I mentioned that Toronto were having problems on transition, and she asked me if Toronto regretted trading away Ryan Dilks. I had completely forgotten that Dilks came from Toronto, so I was caught off-guard. I managed to sputter out some kind of answer and hopefully didn't sound too silly. Before the interview, she had given me a list of questions she was going to ask but that wasn't one of them, which tells me that when I mentioned Toronto's transition, she thought about the Dilks trade on the fly. Despite being a touch embarrassed (which I know wasn't her intent), I was impressed.

Marisa's ultimate goal is to get a degree in journalism and then cover the Red Sox and Bruins for ESPN. There are thousands of people out there who share similar goals, and a good chunk of them likely have created blogs to get some experience and hone their craft. But I suspect the number of them who write for four different blogs, do two radio shows, and have press passes for the NHL, NLL, and minor league baseball years before even finishing high school is much lower.

Perhaps this article will be the first of many to cover this up-and-coming sports reporter. Hopefully she remembers me when she's rich and famous.

Is McDonalds healthier than other restaurants?

Eating at McDonald's is far less healthy than eating at other restaurants, right? Of course it is. Everyone knows that. Well, everyone is wrong.

I used the nutrition calculator from the McDonald's Canada website (http://www.mcdonalds.ca/en/index.aspx) and compared the nutritional information of several of their items with those from a few other restaurants. The restaurants were:

• The Keg
• Kelsey's
• Montana's
• Jack Astor's

The reason I chose these restaurants is that they are popular and ubiquitous (in Canada anyway, no idea about anywhere else), and because I have never heard anyone say that they never eat at one of these places because the food is so bad for you. I have heard that about McDonald's (and other fast food places) on numerous occasions, which is the reason for this article. In a future article, I will look at just fast food restaurants (McDonald's, Burger King, Harvey's, Wendy's, etc.) to see how they compare, but for this one it's McDonald's vs. the roadhouses.

I looked at burgers primarily, since that's what I suspect the vast majority of McDonald's customers eat, but I looked at chicken sandwiches and fries as well. For McDonald's, I chose the Big Mac and Quarter Pounder with Cheese (called the Royale with Cheese in Paris!), and for the rest I chose the closest thing to a "standard" burger that I could find (i.e. no bacon or mushrooms or extra stuff). For the chicken sandwich, I tried the most basic one available, again without cheese or bacon or whatever if possible.

Note to Facebook readers: Facebook sometimes screws up the formatting of tables when it imports my articles. You may want to click the "View Original Post" button at the bottom of the article.

Here are the results:

Burgers

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Big Mac	540	29	10	44	1020
McDonalds	Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese	530	28	13	41	1110
The Keg	Classic Burger	1182.2	63.9	20.2	130.5	2982.9
Kelsey's	Classic Burger	690	41	12	47	960
Montana's	Sirloin Burger	770	45	20	46	1230
Jack Astor's	Classic Burger	918	46.5	12	42	865

McDonalds burgers have the fewest calories and by far the least fat. The Big Mac has the least saturated fat and the Quarter Pounder is comparable to Kelsey's and Jack Astor's, though a higher percentage of the fat is saturated. Other than the Keg's monster burger (by far the worst in every category), the carbs and sodium are comparable among all of them.

 

Chicken Sandwich

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	McChicken	470	27	4.5	46	790
McDonalds	Grilled Chicken Classic	390	11	1.5	46	810
The Keg	Chipotle Chicken Sandwich	1565	90.6	11.64	152.3	2925
Kelsey's	Buffalo Chicken Sandwich	720	36	7	60	1450
Montana's	Chipotle Buffalo Chicken Sandwich	590	19	3	59	1640
Jack Astor's	Chicken Club Sandwich	863	53	5.7	67	1422

I couldn't find a standard chicken sandwich at most of these places. It's highly possible that the chipotle / buffalo sauce on some of the sandwiches is to blame for the extra calories and fat, though the McChicken has a tartar-like sauce on it as well. Jack Astor's didn't say anything about the sauce, but the "club" implies that it has bacon, which none of the others have.

As a result of the sandwich differences, the comparisons here may be less meaningful, but the McDonalds sandwiches have the least calories, carbs, and sodium. Other than the Montana's sandwich, they also have the least fat and saturated fat. Once again, The Keg's sandwich is far and away the worst.

Fries

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Large	560	27	3.5	74	430
The Keg	Keg Fries	312.9	10.9	2.7	47	684.2
Kelsey's	Sweet Potato Fries	710	38	4.5	86	630
Montana's	Fries	400	22	2	47	1060
Jack Astor's	Fries (10 oz)	680	40	6	78	1278

Finally a category where the Keg doesn't come in last. McDonalds fries sit smack in the middle in terms of calories, fat, and carbs, though they are surprisingly low in sodium. I couldn't find standard fries on the Kelsey's list.

Overall Results

Though it's one of my favourite restaurants, The Keg comes up as the big loser here. A burger at the Keg is roughly equivalent to two Big Macs in terms of calories and fat, and three Big Macs in terms of carbs and sodium. Notable stats for the burger and fries combo:

• Lowest calories: Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Second: Big Mac.
• Lowest fat: Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Second: Big Mac.
• Lowest saturated fat: Big Mac. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
• Lowest carbs: Montana's Sirloin burger. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
• Lowest sodium: Big Mac. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Now, there will be people who read this who think I'm saying that McDonalds makes the healthiest burger available. To those people I say read it again. I never said anything of the sort. All I said is that the McDonalds burgers are the healthiest of the ones I looked at. This is like saying compared to a Lamborghini and a Ferrari, a $100,000 Corvette is really cheap.

The take-home message from all of this is that portion sizes matter. A Quarter Pounder contains (I'm making an assumption here) a quarter pound of beef, or 4 ounces. A Big Mac has two smaller patties that add up to about the same. Is the Keg Classic Burger more than 4 oz? Almost certainly. But you don't go to McDonalds and order two Big Macs for dinner to make sure you're getting the same amount of food as you'd get at The Keg. At either restaurant, you generally order one burger, one order of fries, and a drink. The drinks are likely to be exactly the same so I ignored those. Also remember the bread you eat while waiting for your meal at the Keg, and the fact that you are more likely to order an appetizer and dessert at the Keg than McDonalds. So the issue is less about how healthy the food is vs. how much of it there is. I have certainly walked out of the Keg feeling completely stuffed after a meal more often than I have at McDonald's.

There is also the possibility that because McDonald's portion sizes are smaller, you are more likely to snack later on after eating at McDonalds than you are at the Keg. This may be true, but if you're comparing the burger-and-fries meals we talked about before, you can eat at McDonald's and then have a 395 calorie snack later on and still be below what your Keg meal would have been. Even if your snack is another Big Mac, you are only 145 calories and 10 grams of fat worse off, and and you're still 15 grams of carbs and 1200 mg of sodium lower than the Keg meal.

While researching this, I was asked if I had seen the documentary film Super Size Me, in which a healthy guy eats every meal at McDonald's for 30 days and ends up gaining a lot of weight and being generally less healthy. I have not seen it, but I know that the filmmaker (don't call him a "scientist", this was hardly a scientific experiment) forced himself to eat every bite of every meal, super-sized whenever the option was offered, and ate an average of 5,000 calories a day. Eating 5,000 calories a day is unhealthy and will cause weight gain regardless of what it is you're eating, or where. A nutritionist did a similar experiment with university students (and made a film himself, called "Portion Size Me") but didn't force them to overeat and after 30 days on fast food, they all lost weight and their cholesterol levels dropped.

You need to take this information for what it is. I am not saying that McDonalds is an overall healthy choice. If you're going out for dinner and are interested in a truly healthy meal, McDonalds is not where you want to go. But if you skip McDonalds because "it's so unhealthy" and get a burger at the Keg instead, you're misleading yourself.

My new gig as a sports writer

No, I'm not leaving the software industry to become an ink-stained wretch, but I will be writing for a bigger audience during the next NLL season. I started writing for the NLL Blog just before last season, and enjoyed being part of that team. Today we are announcing that the NLL Blog staff will be joining In Lax We Trust, one of the most popular lacrosse blogs around. It is run by Marisa Ingemi and features articles on not only the NLL, but the MLL, Canadian summer leagues (MSL, WLA), as well as the new CLax and NALL leagues and some college lacrosse stuff as well. There are now eleven writers for ILWT, myself included.

I will remained focused on the NLL and the Toronto Rock in particular, and I have also decided not to post each lacrosse article here as well. I may post links to the ILWT articles I write, or maybe a weekly digest of my ILWT articles, but for those readers of mine who are not lacrosse fans, fear not. Next winter, you won't get deluged with lacrosse articles like last year, just my regular drivel compelling reading.

Baseball is awesome too

A while ago I wrote an article listing some awesome things about lacrosse. I love baseball too, so here are some things that make baseball awesome. Some of these are about playing, some are about watching, and some are just about the game in general.

The opposing team has the bases loaded and nobody out and you get out of the inning without giving up any runs.

When playing the outfield, that feeling you get after thinking "Oh crap, I'm not going to get to this fly ball" and then realizing that you can.

Watching one of your favourite players hit a walk-off 3-run home run to left field to win the World Series. (Note: may not be awesome to Phillies fans.)

An outfield assist.

Weird scoring plays. The best are the ones that involve a rundown. Combine this with the outfield assist, and you could have a 7-6-5-4-5-4 double play.

Seeing a ball game in a park you've never been to before. Places I've seen baseball games: Skydome Rogers Centre, Exhibition Stadium (RIP), Fenway, (New) Comiskey, Alameda County Coliseum (Oakland), The Kingdome (formerly in Seattle - RIP), plus one spring training game in Fort Myers, Florida.

No lead is safe. If you're down 5-0 with 5 minutes left to play in a hockey game, it's technically possible that you could come back and win, but I doubt it's ever happened in the NHL. In baseball, there's no time limits, so as long as you keep getting on base, you can do it. I've seen the Jays come back and win after being down 10-0. The other night I saw them lose 5-4 after going into the bottom of the 9th up 4-0.

Again when playing the outfield, running in on a short pop fly that nobody thinks you can get to, making the catch, and then doubling a runner off. (This has only happened to me a couple of times but is especially awesome since I don't have a strong throwing arm, so baserunners who test my arm generally win.)

When a pitcher strikes out the last batter of a complete game victory. I love complete games in general, but when the last out is a strikeout, you can tell that the pitcher is still in command after nine innings.

A perfectly executed double steal.

When the ball is hit so sharply to the right fielder that he throws the batter out at first. I'm not sure I've ever seen this in an MLB game, but it's happened a couple of times in games I've played in.

Watching a milestone happen live. Doesn't need to be a huge milestone, but when the PA announcer comes on and tells you that you've just seen the first-ever <something>, that's awesome. My wife was in attendance at Dave Steib's no-hitter in Cleveland, but those kinds of milestones are few and far between. Milestones I have seen live:

• The Blue Jays' first triple play in 1977
• Manny Lee's first major league hit (a single)
• Dave Steib's first one-hitter
• Pat Hentgen's last start as a Blue Jay
• Roger Clemens' first start as a Blue Jay (and his opening day start the next year too)
• Cal Ripken's first game after ending his 17-year streak

Seeing a kid bring his glove to an MLB game. It's the only sport where nobody thinks twice if they see you bring your own equipment to a game you're watching. Nobody brings a hockey stick to an NHL game or their own tennis racquet to Wimbledon. I must say I have seen lacrosse sticks at NLL games, but it's generally young kids bringing little plastic sticks, not adults bringing full-sized ones.

A straight steal of home. You gotta have cojones.

When a batter watches strike three go by and then smiles because he knows it was a great pitch.

Watching the last out of the last game of the World Series. I love watching the players celebrate, even if it's not my team. Though it's better if it is.

Did I miss any?

Tara the Medium

I was perusing a skeptoid.com article recently (see also my review of the Skeptoid podcast), and Google's ad selection algorithm decided that since the article was about the paranormal, I would probably like to see ads for paranormal services. Logical to some extent, since the Google algorithm couldn't easily detect that the article was debunking the particular paranormal event it was discussing. Anyway, one of the ads was for Tara the Medium, which, as it turns out, was not a Queen of England who was not particularly tall or short. Tara is a psychic (at www dot tara dash medium dot com¹) and offered a free psychic reading, and I'm not one to turn down something valuable that I can get for free.

¹ - I'm listing the URL but intentionally not including a link to the site so she gains no pagerank from this article.

Tara is apparently a "special case, even in the occult field". She is a "pure psychic", unlike other types of hybrid psychics I suppose. Her bio page says that she was born on August 8, though no year is given. She also talked about another event, her first "vision", which happened on February 27, but again no year. How does knowing these dates with no years give me any information at all, other than the ability to send her a birthday card? She was trained by an unnamed "Western Spirit Master", and is now so powerful that she can do reading of people she's never met or even seen, as long as she knows their date and time of birth and their email address. I was not aware that my email address was somehow connected to me spiritually, but who am I to argue with the spirits? (Yes, I know the email address is only necessary so she can contact me. But that's not as funny.)

Despite this being a free reading, there are some terms and conditions. Here are some of the more interesting ones. Note that "The Company" refers to "the company selling the offers found on the website www.tara-medium.com".

• "The Company offers no commitment regarding the actual unfolding of the events mentioned on the website or affiliated emails."
• "The texts provided by the www.tara-medium.com website and affiliated contents cannot be regarded as advice provided by recognized regulated professions like legal, medical or psychological advice."
• "If the User is suffering from a specific illness or problem (legal or juridical), he or she should consult a professional suited to that problem as soon as possible."
• "The Company may not be held liable for any breach of contract in case of force majeure, including but not limited to: war, catastrophe, fire hazard, strikes, power failure or breakdown, and more generally any event that would not allow for the proper processing of the orders." – Why not? Surely a pure psychic like Tara can see these things coming.

"The Company" is called Astroway, based in Hong Kong. I did a search on them and found a complaint on complaintsboard.com. (This by itself means nothing – regardless of how great your company is, someone is going to complain.) This guy had dumped in more than £750 (over $1100 Cdn as of mid-July 2011) before deciding that Tara wasn't giving him anything except "a load of false predictions and plausible stories". There was a comment on the posting from someone saying that Tara was running a psychic scam (note that "psychic scam" is redundant). The commenter gave some suggestions on who to complain to, although "the appropriate bodies in you [sic] relevant country" is not very helpful. But his credibility went right out the window when he tried to be more helpful by saying "I found a really good psychic at [some other site]".

I sent in my request for a free reading on Friday evening, June 24th 2011. I received my reading (via an email link to a web page) two days later on June 26th. (I received another email the next day saying that she was surprised that I hadn't looked at it yet, which was strange since I had.) The reading was far longer than I expected, and rather than include the entire thing in this article, I've copied it here and added some comments. As I said the reading is quite long so you may not want to read the whole thing but just skim it for my comments, which are easy to find in blue boxes throughout. Same goes for the subsequent emails she sent me later – more details on those below.

Here are the main points of my reading:

• She spent 13 hours on my reading
• There will be a decisive turning point in my life on July 25, 2011 (give or take a couple of days). This is one month from when I received the reading.
• The three months after this date will be the most important of my life, followed by three more very good months.
• She detects in me "unbounded magnetic power, along with extraordinary strength and exuberance".  
• She says "You radiate your amazing magnetism with so much force that people perceive it even long after you’ve left". [I'm sure that those of you who know me personally are nodding right now.]
• I have "often violent and destructive anger". [Again, those of you who know me personally are nodding. But don't let me catch you nodding, or I'll kick your ass.]
• I have remarkable "energy, vitality, endurance, and resistance".
• I am "too egocentric to be able to love someone absolutely".
• I should "learn to take things easier and not be too aggressive" or it will spark my violent anger.
• My lucky numbers are 1, 9, and 10.
• I have a huge potential for luck and unexpected money, and yet bad luck is unjustly affecting me.
• The sun is my dominant planet (despite it not being a planet at all). It has provided me with numerous lucky occasions but I couldn't take advantage of them because no one was there to help me. [Thankfully, now I have Tara!]
• I have Unlimited Inner Power [note proper capitalization] that I "totally ignore and make no use of at all".
• A person who is envious of me may try to direct harmful unlucky vibrations at me. [This person is obviously unaware of my "violent and destructive anger".]
• I will be getting enough money over the three month period starting July 25 that I will never need to worry about money ever again.
• She can tell me all the decisions I will have to make and what to do, which games to play to maximize my winnings, and what "interesting encounters" I will have, with whom and where, and if they will be favourable or if I should avoid them.
• She has helped many famous people to be more successful, but she's not naming names (for their privacy, you know).
• She's willing to give me "the most complete, detailed and precise astral reading of [my] entire life".
• If I'm not completely satisfied, I can send her an email and she'll refund my money, no questions asked.
• As a free gift, I'll receive a "magic wish-fulfilling pentacle", which "seems to be impregnated with a mysterious secret that contains  powerful astral forces" and "is reputed to trigger the rapid  realization of your secret wishes".

To get my complete astral reading, all I have to do is fill out a questionnaire. Oh, and send some money to cover her costs. The questionnaire contains 14 yes/no questions such as "Do you tend to regret your past?", "Are you sometimes afraid of your future?", and "Do you sometimes doubt your abilities?" These are utterly useless questions since anyone who doesn't answer "yes" is a liar. She asks for "a small contribution of only $CAD99.00 (instead of the usual $CAD178)" though she gives no reason for the discount. I would love to continue down this road and see how accurate my personal DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY is, but sorry dear reader, I'm not paying $99 for it. If anyone would like to send me $99 via Paypal, I will use it to pay for my reading, but otherwise I'm afraid my professional relationship with Tara the Medium is at an end. But if you're thinking of sending me the $99, please, read on first.

Now, someone who believes in psychics is likely to look at their reading and focus on things that are correct, ignoring statements that are wrong, and then manage to convince themselves that the psychic who got two right guesses out of twenty "nailed it", at which point I would point out the error of their ways. As a skeptic, it's likely that I'm doing exactly the opposite: focussing on things that she got wrong and dismissing what she got right as coincidence. Perhaps the truth, as it so often is, is somewhere in the middle. But Tara did say that she "can see the future of someone accurately, 97% of the time", so I would have expected a lot more hits and very few misses. As it happens, there was a bunch of stuff that's true about me but it was all vague enough that it could be said about anyone.

There wasn't one single thing in my reading that made me think "wow, how did she know that?", and certainly nothing compelling enough to warrant spending $99 for another reading.

Tara Follows Up

On July 2nd, six days after receiving the reading, I received another email with a link to a different page, which I have copied here, again with comments. On July 6, another one, copied here. There aren't that many comments in the third one, because it doesn't contain any information that wasn't in the second one, and the second didn't contain much that wasn't in the first. On July 12th, I got yet another email (which she resent again on the 14th), in which she offers me my DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY for only $CAD79.00 instead of $99, though again she doesn't state why she's giving me this discount. To those of you who were considering giving me the $99 via paypal, great news! I just saved you $20! You're welcome.

But wait, there's more! On July 18th (shortly after I was considering posting this article), I got another email. Not only did this one reduce the price again to $69 (another $10 in your pocket, dear reader!) but there was no mention of the July 25th date. This time, she knows the exact amount of money I'm going to win ($9600), and the date is now August 24th. And the cheque will come in a yellow envelope. I'm no psychic, but I could have predicted that as we approached July 25th and I still hadn't paid anything, the date would change.

I'm assuming that she'll give up on me at some point because it will eventually become obvious that I'm not going to partake. Watch my twitter feed and facebook page on July 25th and August 24th to see what kinds of wonderful things happen to me. But if nothing spectacular happens on those days, you gotta know that it's entirely my own fault, for not having given Tara the opportunity to help me. I will also update this article periodically if I continue to get more emails from Tara.

Let's get serious

I've had a good laugh with this whole thing but just underneath the surface, I'm quite angry. I keep referring to Tara as a she, but I doubt anyone named Tara is actually involved here. It's probably a whole staff of writers who have experience with human psychology and how to manipulate people. The thing that makes me angry is how much work went into my "reading" and the subsequent emails. Granted, they are very likely form pages with "insert name here" and "choose random planet" and stuff like that. But nobody is going to put all of that together to make a few hundred bucks off a handful of gullible people, which tells me that they are likely making tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. All they have to do is provide people with meaningless drivel about the astral plane and positive energy and negative vibrations and all of that bullshit, and they will find people who believe it and are willing to part with their money just so they can be told exactly what they want to hear. "You've had bad luck and problems with money (or you wouldn't be on this web site), but it's not your fault – someone else is to blame and if you give me some money, I can prevent them from getting in the way of your rightful happiness." Some people will pay the money, receive the fake readings, and be quite happy. Others will realize that they're being scammed, but by the time they realize that she is not telling them anything actually meaningful, she already has their money.

Dear Tara: You can shove your DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY right up your astral plane.

Update - July 25: Got another email from Tara, and the price was reduced again to $59.

Update - August 3: Got two more. One on my birthday and another on August 1. The price is now $49.

Update - August 5: Another one - this time with a 3-day deadline. Down to $29. The price is low enough now that I'm actually considering paying it just to see what happens next, but I know better.

Update - August 11: Another one, this time with an offer for a "Great Magical Intervention" for only $39.

Update - September 2: Another offer from Tara, this time she's promising $100,000 or more, if I pay $29.95 for a Active Magic Thought ritual. This will likely be the last offer from Tara, since I have finally clicked on the "if you don't want to receive further offers, click here" link.