Symptoms: Metabolic Syndrome Is Tied to Diet Soda - New York Times via Serious Eats

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

I hate diet soda. Not only does it taste terrible, but it's really bad for you.

I've cut out most of the soda from my diet. And the less I drink, the less I enjoy it. So I guess that's good. But I always drink the regular stuff. I'd rather high-fructose corn syrup than some carcinogenic artificial sweetener.

ShirtADay via HIDE YOUR ARMS

Okay, this is a cool idea. A new t-shirt every day, and the more people who buy it, the cheaper it gets.

But they don't have an RSS feed for the shirts. This is the type of site that RSS was made for. If I wasn't on my way to bed, I would email them right now and demand an RSS feed.

I mean, the nerve. Making me actually, like, check back every day to see what's new. I don't have time for that. Do you think these complaints write themselves?

I upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and it broke the tag cloud that I've been using for my categories. I'm going to have to go find the WordPress API again and figure out why it's broken and how I need to fix it, but it's kind of late, and I'm kind of annoyed because I always upgrade and things break and I always think nothing will go wrong and something always does.

WordPress 2.1 doesn't seem like a big upgrade, but maybe there's some stuff I haven't seen yet. I had the impression that it was awesome, but that's not my experience so far.

Edit: Apparently the plugin that I used for the cloud was just something that some dude wrote, and he hasn't upgraded it for 2.1.  I guess I need to brush up on my PHP skills.

YouTube Finds Step 2 1 In Profit Plan: Will Pay For User Vids - Gizmodo

YouTube rolls out profit sharing plan where they reward uploaders with shares of ad sales based on number of views. The ads will come in the shape of short clips in place of the actual YouTube video, which you presumably have to watch before getting to the meat. The videos may be at most three seconds long, but the details are still being worked out.

The day people have to watch a video ad before they watch the YouTube video is the day that YouTube is no longer relevant.  Unless Google makes it not just illegal but physically impossible to create a free user-content video sharing site, this is doomed to fail.  You can't just take a service that everyone loves, make it less valuable to the audience by adding commercials, and expect people to stick around.  Sure, it might help get more and better content.  But that wasn't really the problem, was it?  Have you ever NOT found what you were looking for on YouTube?  This strikes me as catastrophically stupid.

Boing Boing: Bush no longer "miserable failure": Google tackles googlebombs

Google is changing algorithms so that Googlebombing doesn't work anymore.  That makes me a little sad.

Mystery odor permeates Manhattan

"One thing we are very confident of, it's not dangerous," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.

We don't know what it is, but we know it isn't dangerous. Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg. Sorry to all of you who live in Manhattan. That's got to be rough on you.

"If you were in a gas station, [the odor] would be magnified 1,000 times," NEW JERSEY mayor's spokeswoman Maria Pignataro told CNN.

At least it's not terrorism. Not sure how they're ruling that out without knowing what the smell is, but maybe they have advanced terrorism identification techniques that are too secret to inform the public of their existence.

I went to a party at a friend's house for the New Year.  It was a cool party.  It became uncool, however, through no fault of the hostess, at about 2am.  My wife and I had planned to take a cab to my mom's house, only a few miles away, where the spare room was all set up for us.  We had both been drinking, and had no intention of driving anywhere.

So I went to Google maps and looked for a cab in the area.  First company didn't even answer the phone.  The second one told me there was a two hour wait for a cab.  The third said they had no cabs.

Was this a shock?  Were they unprepared for people to want cabs after parties for New Year's?  I can't imagine demand was much higher than last year.

It worked out okay, as the hostess had a fold-out couch that we could sleep on that wasn't even uncomfortable.  But it was annoying.  You suck, Annapolis cab companies.

'Apocalypto' wins weekend box office - CNN.com

But "Apocalypto" overcame the baggage of Gibson's personal troubles as well as its difficult subject matter, which features a no-name cast in a hyper-violent tale that includes beheadings and images of hearts ripped from people's chests.

This is a DISNEY movie.  What is wrong with the world where once-respected actor who has lost all touch with reality can make a "hyper-violent" movie in a language almost no one speaks, get a deal with the company that makes almost nothing but children's entertainment, and then lead the weekend in ticket sales?  There is absolutely nothing right with this picture.

Where are the people screaming for an NC-17 rating?  Once again, horrific violence is just fine, as long as there's no sex.  Or maybe there is sex, I don't know. Our country is so messed up.

In any event, I don't watch Mel Gibson movies anymore.  Old ones are okay, before he lost it.  But nothing new.

Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares - washingtonpost.com

"Because of declining real estate values, we have holes to fill of our own, and now we're being presented with holes in Metro," said Kauffman, a member of Fairfax County's Board of Supervisors. "It's not like we have a stockpile of green putty to fill the gaps."

Wonderful. I was just talking to my friend and host in NYC yesterday about how much nicer the subway is in New York than Metro is in DC, and how Metro is expensive here.

I love how they want to combat a slower-than-expected increase in Metro riders by a fare increase. It's like the pay phones, facing greatly increased competition from cell phones, doubling the cost of a call in a few years. And what happened there? The pay phone has become nearly obsolete. Not that they had much chance of competing, so maybe it's not a good analogy.

But it's Econ 101 - the way to fix slow growth is not to raise the price. In fact, they might want to consider lowering rates. And the article mentions discounts for SmartTrip riders (SmartTrip is the permanent card that replaces the paper cards, if you ride Metro more than once every six months it's worth the SmartTrip). I had no idea there were discounts for SmartTrips. Maybe they should try publicizing this. You can discount all you want, but if people don't realize it's cheaper, it doesn't do you much good.

With Novel Writing Month (a personal daily best of 5700 words on Friday), preparing to deliver version 3.0 at work, getting the condo ready to sell, and various other life responsibilities, I feel like I'm not complaining enough.  At least, not here.  I'm certain I've done enough complaining about painting, even though my wife does most of the work.

So, I'd like to apologize to my loyal fans.  This week is pretty busy, but next week is looking a little better, and the week after that even better.  I could be wrong, though.  But I'll be back to my normal elevated level of complaining as soon as possible.