Via MediaBistro’s mailing list, I heard about this article on Boston.com about fX’s new reality show “Masterplan”. Basically, a guy is filmed 24 hours a day and the viewers get to vote on his life decisions:

Imported from Portugal, where it is known as &l.dquo;Masterplan,” the series will follow an individual — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — who has agreed to turn over his life decisions to the viewers, who vote via phone and the Internet after each episode. FX will begin running seven one-hour episodes in its “Friday Night Fix” programming in October. […]

It reminds me in some ways of an IRL version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. And I suppose I’m most curious about what type of decisions the viewers would get to vote on. In any case, it seems interesting.

I was amused by this recent Salon article about an editor whose friends keep asking her to help edit their personal ads. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose it’s much in the same way that doctors are always getting asked for medical advice or how IT guys are often asked to help with their friends’ PCs.

Editing is subjective. One editor’s treasure is another’s trash. Under the “Five things I can't live without” section I can’t delete intangibles like “laughter” and “the ability to dream” fast enough. Or, under “Things you’ll find in my bedroom,” “bare walls,” “piles of paper” and “free stuff I get from work” says little. “Less Ikea furniture than before,” tells me more (you’re creative and upwardly mobile). […]

I discovered through a thread on the DPReview Forums (about wishful features for the Coolpix 5700) that you can get a thread adapter for Coolpix 5xxx series cameras to allow filter attachments.

It’s just some guy out of Canada that machined (?) some thread adapters on his own. And, they're available for the Coolpix 5000, 5400 and 5700 in several sizes (46mm, 49mm, 52mm, and others).

I wanted to get one, but at first I wasn’t sure which adapter size would be best. Apparently, 52mm adn 58mm are two of the most common sizes for filters, so that narrowed it down. And, I was concerned that a 58mm filter might get in the way of the built-in popup flash, so I went with the 52mm.

I also picked up an Excellent-rated used Tiffen circular polarizer from KEH to go with it. If you’re not familiar with polarizers, they’re most commonly used to enhance blue skies and, as a rule of thumb, autofocus cameras need circular polarizers (as opposed to a linear polarizers).

I setup a Google News Alert for “Atkins” and I discovered this Time magazine article on low carb snacks. I’m not on Atkins, as I find The Zone to be more well-rounded, but I’m still interested in upcoming lower-carb snacks.

Catering to adherents of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, foodmakers are filling out the $40 billion diet industry with alternative versions of their favorite sins, from marshmallows and margarita mix to biscotti and beer. And thanks to increasingly successful formulations of sugar substitutes, many members of this new generation of munchie killers are downright delicious. […]

The second page from the article also lists several low carbs products and how they comapre to their high-carb couterparts. For instance, Michelob Ultra has 2.6g carbs (compared with 13.3g in regular Michelob). But, Michelob Ultra isn't the tastiest of beers, either (it’s at the 0.1 percentile at RateBeer.com).

We celebrated Roger’s birthday at Texas Roadhouse last night. Interestingly enough, the chain is actually based in Indiana and only came to Texas relatively recently.

Since they have their menu right on their site, I checked that out beforehand. Before looking, I already had a fillet in mind, and they had two to offer (6 oz & 8 oz). At first, I wasn’t sure whether I should go for the 6 or 8 oz, but I quickly realized that it’s not every day that I have fillet (8 oz it is!).

And that wasn’t the only decision. Each entree also comes with two sides (cup of chili, baked potato, sweet potato, steak fries, green beans&hellip). So, I had more decisions. But, I quickly narrowed that down since they included house and cesar salads among their sides. And, since I wanted a salad anyway, I could just include my salad as a side and not have to order it separately.

I could have ordered a baked potato as my other side (you can’t go wrong there), but I figured that I’d have plenty of carbs from various birthday goodies. So, I just selected the vegetables as my other side.

The food arrived relatively quickly and it looked great. I wasn’t sure what to expect of the vegetables, but the vegetable side had broccoli, cauliflower and carrots (a reasonable combination). Before tasting anything else, I cut right into the fillet to check its done-ness — it seems that some steakhouses don’t account for meat’s tendancy to continue cooking after it’s removed from heat. But, it was pleasantly pink — a perfect “medium”.

The meat looked good, but how did it taste? Fantastic. It was warm and very tender — I really cherished each bite. Maybe it wasn’t the best fillet I’ve ever had, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with which ones were better.

For birthday merriment, Leia and Ru made some double-chocolate cupcakes earlier in the day. As I understand it, Ru helped mix the batter while Leia baked and iced the cupcakes. They brought them along to Texas Roadhouse for dessert.

As cupcakes go, these were possibly thesecond best from-a-mix cupcakes that I’ve had. I’m also a chocolate fiend and the double-chocolate nature was an added bonus. Leia even adorned them with sprinkles/jimmes.

As it turns out, these cupcakes featured the dot-type sprinkes. The dot-type sprinkle adds a pleasant color to the cupcakes but they can be rather crunchy — somewhat like adding sugar-flavored sand to a cupcake. Don’t get me wrong — I like dot-type sprinkles as much as the next guy — but perhaps the cylindar-type (softer) sprinkles could have been even better.

I’m not one to turn down a steakhouse, but I was a bit skeptical about Texas Roadhouse. After all, could a good steakhouse really come out of Indiana? In the end, it worked out great and I’d go back to Texas Roadhouse anytime.

Zip2it reports that Temptation Island is coming back to Fox on Thursday, August 28th:

As with the previous two editions of the show, four couples who’ve been dating for a while will spend two weeks on a tropical island — in this case, the Caribbean’s Bay Islands. They’ll spend most of the apart from each other and in the company of 14 members of the opposite sex whose goal is to, as the title suggests, tempt them. […]

There’s a degree of schadenfreude in any reality tv show, but perhaps none more in what I like to call Schadenfreude Island. Really, I don’t know why couples agree to go on the show — I can imagine nothing good for their relationship that could come from participating. But, at at least it gives a good laugh for the rest of us :).

Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:

People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.

The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]

I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.

Thanks to bug 56301 being fixed recently, the latest builds of Mozilla now include the spellchecker built right in (it used to be that you’d have to install the spellchecker separately). I’m really pleased about this since it’s not only one less step that I have to go through each day (yeah, I upgrade Mozilla every day), but it also means that the spellchecker’s reliability is now tied to the core Mozilla development (I’ll explain).

When the spellchecker existed as a separate plugin, it had no association with the Mozilla team. So, if the spellchecker stopped working, you’d just be stuck without a spellchecker until the spellchecker guys got around to fixing it (which could sometimes last for months on end). Now that’s it’s integrated with Mozilla, if the spellchecker breaks, the core Mozilla team will work towards fixing it. And, even better, the spellchecker won’t check quoted text anymore either.

I enjoyed this News In Brief from the latest issue of The Onion:

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks
SANDPOINT, ID—Seated on the edge of his bed, Carl Thompson, 38, paused for 20 minutes with one sock on his foot and the other in his hand Tuesday. “Ugh, tired,” said Thompson, who was otherwise silent from 6:30 to 6:50 a.m. During that period, Thompson stared at the wall and teetered perilously close to a reclining position six times.

I can relate to that feeling from when I used to work for Steamatic. Their office is in Fort Worth (about 45 miles from here), and I had to leave at 7:30am each morning just to get there on time. That made for some tired mornings.

I saw The Shawshank Redemption the other day, recorded from TNT on TiVo. I hadn’t seen it before, but I heard it was good and so I set TiVo to record it (and I’m glad I did).

It was actually excellent, and I was surprised to later learn that it was based on a short story written by Stephen King. Had I known that previously, I might have avoided it altogether since I dislike horror flicks (of course, this was more of a drama in any case).

After watching it, I thought for sure that it must have won some Oscars. So, I loaded IMDB to check on its awards only to find that it didn’t get any Oscars. I was puzzled at first but then realized that 1994 was also the year the Forrest Gump came out, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. Yeah, pretty much everything ;).

You’d think that there might be a lot lost between the original R-rated cut and the version of The Shawsharnk Redemption shown on TNT. But, it wasn’t too bad. Reading over the quotes at IMDB, some words were cropped but only the ones you’d expect. And, I also learned that [spoiler] the scene with the warden’s self-inflicted gunshot [/end spoiler] was heavily cut.

All the same, I really enjoyed the movie. But, I’m not sure I’d buy it on DVD — it’s the type of flick that kept me interested because I didn’t know what was coming next. Of course, now that I've seen it once, I know what happens during every scene.

There is one part that confused me. [spoiler] Why did the warden have Tommy shot? (He’s the Gil Bellows character who revealed that Dufresne’s wife was shot by another man.) [/end spoler]