Childhood obesity

Several months ago I started seeing and hearing numerous ads about childhood obesity. It kind of surprised me that there was a huge campaign to fight it that just appeared when this problem has been known for years. It sickens me to see overweight children. People blame computers and video games for many of the problems. While I'm not going to disagree with that, I think the problem lies in the habits parents teach their children. I use a computer 10+ hours a day for work and other things; however, I make it a point to go for a run 4-5 times a week and carve out that time in my schedule. In addition, I watch what I eat. I was never raised to drink soda all the time or have chips everyday for lunch. Society can be partially blamed for this, but maybe parental influence can also play a factor in preventing this. I don't have children, so I don't know how hard this is, but it would appear (from an outsider's point of view) that good and bad habits start in the home.

I hope that the new initiatives against childhood obesity work as this problem is getting worse and is not only disgusting, it will cost our country a significant amount of lives (and quality of life for those who have it) and will be quite costly monetarily to treat the health problems associated with this.

DocumentWallet Released

Today I released DocumentWallet, a product similar in concept to my ReceiptWallet program. The two programs share much of the same code, but I felt that they needed to be separate applications. The market for this type of program is quite crowded and I own a few of the "competition", but didn't find any one of them to meet my needs. I hope that others feel the same way. I think I've done some clever sales tactics by offering it for 50% off for ReceiptWallet customers. I also decided not to penalize people that buy one and then want to buy the other. Some vendors give you a great deal for a bundle, but if you don't buy it then, tough luck. I now choose to run my business in a way that my customers want to come back. Having an easy to use product should make it easier to sell than some of my past products. I hope it sells well.

Upper body pain - huh?

Today after my run (training has begun for my 2nd marathon), I started to feel pain in my upper body. This doesn't happen after a run so I started thinking, what could cause this? Then I remembered I started playing my Nintendo Wii 2 days ago. While I haven't played with it much, the swinging action is doing a number on me. I thought I was in decent shape, but it's making me work in a way I didn't expect. Thanks Nintendo!

A solution to an annoying ScanSnap issue

I've now had my Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-511E0XM for less than a day now and one thing that I found quite annoying is that if I wanted to scan between scanning to ReceiptWallet and to another application, say preview, I had to go into the ScanSnap Manager preferences (sorry, settings), and change the app. The app has a dock menu, so it wouldn't have been rocket science to let me switch between apps from the menu. So, with a point in the right direction from a colleague, I present ScanHelper. ScanHelper is a small application that places a menu in the menubar that lets you select which application should be used for scanning. Simply tell the ScanSnap Manager to use ScanHelper and then ScanHelper routes the scans to the selected application. You can now easily select a destination right from the menubar. I'm releasing this as free software, but if you like it, please buy my ReceiptWallet application. You can download ScanHelper here.