Tag: Experiment

  • So…Cold-fX is BS

    “The study actually showed the placebo to be more effective at relieving (some) cold symptoms than Cold-fX.”

    In something surely nobody could have seen coming, it looks like there’s a non-zero chance anybody who purchased Cold-fX as a cold or flu remedy could be able to join a class-action suit in order to get some of the money they spent that didn’t work as well as a sugar pill in treating seasonal respiratory viruses.

    Yikes.

    > Lawyer in Cold-fX lawsuit to fight for for class-action status, which could trigger mass refund

  • 6 Months of Weight Loss (January 27)

    6 Months of Weight Loss (January 27)

    This week, unless something goes horribly wrong, I will formally hit the goal weight that I set back at the end of June. This doesn’t technically count as ‘making something’, but it definitely took a lot of work.

    Anyhow, writing about it and posting about it and talking about it all the time has been incredibly helpful. I don’t know if 210 lbs is where I’ll end up, but when I was 250 lbs just 6 months ago, it certainly seemed impossible.

    At this exact moment, I weigh 210.63 lbs, which is satisfying all on its own. When I started (although BMI is a horribly outdated measurement tool, I was about 15 pounds into ‘obese’ (about a 32 in BMI, 30 being obese). At the moment, I’m at exactly 27 (25 or less being considered ‘normal weight’). If you know anything about BMI, you’ll know it’s horribly outdated, but I have been using an online tool that attempts to make the calculation a little bit more useful for the modern world. By that metric, I’m almost exactly at the high end of healthy weight, and I’m happy already, because I feel so much better than I did.

    I don’t know what the next 6 months will hold, when I can ride my bike again, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens now that food doesn’t have such a strong hold on me.

  • How to make slow and steady progress

    How to make slow and steady progress

    People ask me from time to time these days: “Rob, do you think you will regret keeping people updated on your weight from week to week?”. To those people, I say “Maybe…but if it stops changing in a healthy direction, I’ll probably just stop talking about it.” For the time being though, my not so diet is going really well! Last weekend hit a small speedbump, but it seems to be back on track now.

    More importantly, riding my bike to work every day has made me FEEL a lot better!

    In addition to biking to and from work, I also did a 30 km bike ride on Saturday, followed by eating WAY too much on Sunday. Being active on a regular basis and not eating more than I need to has been extremely beneficial when it comes to feeling and looking better!

    Check out the shows we put up on UnwindMedia.com this week below:

    On this episode, we chatted with Mrigank Shail. He’s a doctor fresh out of med school who’s been all over the world studying and trying to better the world…
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    On this week’s show, we talk data plans, smartening your old appliances, and the next steps for Uber. Stay tuned for the after-show (1:35:00 or so), where…
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  • Milestones! Gains! Losses!

    Milestones! Gains! Losses!

    That’s a lot of views (I’m just one man)!

    It’s been far too long since I last wrote something on here, and given that a whole heck of a lot has happened in the last month! First up, around the time of the writing of this post, my blog is going to pass another base 10 milestone, racking up a total of 50000 views! This isn’t a big milestone, but I still consider myself as just getting started, so I’m pretty pleased with it.

    As well, in a follow up to my piece about weight loss/overall health, I’m pleased to announce that although my wedding and three-week vacation caused me to gain back a significant amount of the weight I had lost, as of today I will get back to a new all-time** low weight (**least I’ve weighed in over 2 years). I have been working really hard, and I wouldn’t have been able to get to where I am now without my bike, my Soylent, and the willpower to not go nuts eating snack foods. I’ve also effectively eliminated traditional meals from my diet, relying on snacking and smaller portions throughout the day, which has also been nice for me.

    During your wedding/honeymoon, you may experience mysterious weight gain paired with a complete loss of data.

    Finally, I went almost a month without recording a single podcast, but I’ve been back at work on them now (Ottawhat did have an episode every week while I was on my honeymoon though, so you’ll have to go and catch up on those). Last week on Ottawhat, we interviewed my beautiful new wife, Julia, and Mike and I have been getting into some great conversations on Future Chat. On Ottawhat this week, we talked to the owner and manager (2 people) of a local 1-screen cinema, the Mayfair. It was a really great conversation and you should go and check out their podcast too! Links to the episodes can be found below:

    This week on the show, we met with Josh and Mel from the Mayfair Theatre. These diehard movie buffs told us all about the origins of the theatre, why they…
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    On this week’s show, we agree non-Celiac gluten sensitivity probably isn’t a real thing, electric, self-driving cars will be all over our roads soon, and…
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  • East Meets West Returns Triumphantly, And Other Such Things

    East Meets West Returns Triumphantly, And Other Such Things

    On UnwindMedia.com this week, I finally managed to convince Nick to sit down with me for another East Meets West! Thank goodness beer exists to help make that happen! We also had great episodes of Future Chat and Ottawhat? as you’d expect, and those were no slouches either. I should note that in Future Chat, we spontaneously decided to do a moment of silence, which worked surprisingly well until Nick burst out laughing 5 seconds after.

    I spent a lot of time on this blog talking about Soylent, the food product that is literally just a powder you mix with water. I really like it except for the sweetener taste, but I won’t discuss that in any more detail now, you can find out exactly what I think so far here.

    Today on East Meets West, Nick and Rob discuss the NHL draft, polling for the fall’s federal election, the mass exodus of cabinet ministers and what that…
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    In this episode, we chatted with Jacques Breau. Jacques is a woodworker and a vinyl collector, and you can find him all over Ottawa this summer on his tru…
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    This week, the latest Falcon 9 launch is unsuccessful, Rob talks all about his week on Soylent, and we revisit mobile phone corner. We also try a moment o…
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  • Reflections On Soylent So Far

    Reflections On Soylent So Far

    I’m going to keep this fairly short, but after 5 days having Soylent for at least one meal, here are my thoughts:

    • I don’t like the taste of sucralose, and it is the main taste of the current formulation. If there was a non-sweetenered version, I would find that much tastier. I would also love to chew gum these days if it wasn’t sweetened with terrible sucralose, aspartame or acesulfame potassium. The artificial sweetener just kills it for me.
    • I need a better way to mix it completely without resorting to a blender. At the moment, I end up with an imperfect mix (gets stuck to the sides and bottom of the container) just by shaking it up.
    • Food when you’re out or with people is a social thing. You can’t just have Soylent when you’re out with friends having a meal, or at a party. That is definitely a limiting factor for me.
    Soylent is not actually this social a drink.
    If I wanted to just replace all my meals with this (non-sweetened), I think I could do it, if I lived in a bubble. But there are so many circumstances where either I want to eat something, or I’m going somewhere that it’s expected I consume food, that incorporating Soylent into my diet 100% would be really difficult.
    Soylent works best when you’re hungry, have it on you, and you’re going to eat alone. I haven’t tried prepping it in advance to just drink when I get hungry, but I’ll have to try that at some point. I still have almost 60% of the powder left, I think it will last me another week or two. The sucralose taste I think it’s what’s putting me off, because it doesn’t taste bad at all to me, so I think if I could try it without sucralose I could see myself doing it long-term much more easily.
  • Adventures in Podcasting with SoundCloud (Volume I)

    Adventures in Podcasting with SoundCloud (Volume I)

    .code {
    text-align: left;
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    I’ve been podcasting and building my website for a couple of years now, and I thought it would be useful to some people if I talked about some of the things I’ve gone through in getting my site up and running that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the Internet. This one is all about podcasting efficiently with SoundCloud.

    Now, I’m not a professional programmer by ANY stretch, but I like getting my feet wet with little bits of code from time to time. I also podcast a few times a week, and sometimes I’m lucky enough that these hobbies overlap! I recently moved my podcasts to SoundCloud, and they have a really nice web player (check out unwindmedia.com/feedback for a prime example). But I wanted to simplify my life and use one link for the RSS feed and for the web player embed.

    Luckily, they use a unique ID number for each upload to SoundCloud, it’s just a matter of finding it. It is a 9-digit number smack in the middle of the enclosure URL that SoundCloud uses for RSS, something like this:

    http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/204094299-channelname-episodename.mp3

    With a bit of Regex and replace magic (/.*/(d+)-.*/, “$1”) and some simple jQuery, I can extract that number, plunk it into the embed URL (see this page), and stick that into your container div.

    Once you have that embed URL, you just have to put in all the embed options you want for your widget, and you’re good to go!

    As SoundCloud opens up their platform to make it easier for podcasters, I hope this helps you simplify your life. I personally used this code on my Blogger site (unwindmedia.com) so I can have an audio player on my site that uses the enclosure link for the podcast episode, but in SoundCloud’s native player. It’s working incredibly well and I’m moving all my shows to this template in the coming weeks.

    The code I used is below, and you can see it in action online at unwindmedia.com! If you have any questions please ask and I’ll give you all the details you could ever want!

    EDIT (May 8): I made the code a lot simpler and got rid of redundant divs. Hopefully this is even simpler now.

    Pictured: Fun for Rob

    <div class=’”sound-container-” + “POST-ID”‘/>

     <script>
        $(document).ready(function() {

            var idVal = ‘POST-ID’;

            var idTrack = ‘ENCLOSURE-URL’;

            var encl = idTrack.replace(/.*/(d+)-.*/, “$1”);

            var open = “<iframe frameborder=’no’ height=’160′ scrolling=’no’ src=’https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/”;

            var close = “&color=1C4E94&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_artwork=false’ width=’100%’/>”;

            $(‘.sound-container-‘ + idVal).append(open + encl + close);

        });
    </script>

  • How To Get Noticed Online

    How To Get Noticed Online

    For those of you wondering, this is how I see myself.

    I’ve conducted experiments before, but the one I’m going to embark on for the next week will potentially be the most difficult I’ve ever challenged myself with. If you followed me online in December 2014, you’ll recall the Instagram Experiment I embarked upon in the last episode of +Attrell Update (at least the last so far). Basically, I wanted to try Instagram, because I had had an account for several years but had never used it. The experiment was what I would consider a success because I still post photos and video there, and I enjoy the tools Instagram provides to edit and share photos to Twitter and Facebook.

    So, onto this new experiment I will be undertaking starting with the next 7 days. I am somebody who consumes a LOT of media. Podcasts, video, music, television, movies, books, blogs, long-reads, op-ed’s, reviews, etc. There is a lot of stuff on the internet and I take in quite a bit of it.

    For the most part, this media is a one-way street. I slurp it up like a vacuum but rarely contribute to the conversation about it unless it is VERY compelling or I think I can make a particularly witty joke or comment. For the next week, I am going to do my very best to leave some kind of comment, observation or thought on every single thing I read. EVERY. Single. thing.

    I have a feeling this will help me get to know people on the Internet, help me better understand subject matter and actually contribute to the Internet as one of its citizens, and it might help me reach people with my thoughts and ideas that otherwise might not get to them, and vice versa.

    Some simple rules I will try to follow:

    1. I don’t HAVE to leave a comment if the content is offensive or overly negative. I will use my own discretion here.
    2. This will mainly apply to blogs, videos, podcast episodes, things with a home on the internet where you can leave a comment or discuss the media.
    3. I will do my very best to use the original source to comment on the material. For instance, if I read a story on a web page, I will leave a comment on the page directly, or on Twitter (like if I found the link there or on other social media).
    I don’t know that this will be easy, but I’m sure I will find it rewarding. I encourage you to try a less comprehensive version of this, I know that about 99% of people on the Internet soar around 10 feet above what they see, never talking about it or sharing it or liking it no matter how much they enjoyed the content.
    Wish me luck!