Back in May I attended an event where the speaking guest was Louis Zamperini. A native of Torrance, California, he was an Olympic runner in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was greeted by Adolph Hitler when he placed. It wasn’t long after World War Two would be in full swing and Zamperini volunteered and became a B-24 bombardier.

In 1943 his aircraft crashed and he spent the remainder of the war as a Japanese POW. Barely surviving treatment by the infamous “The Bird,” he would later meet Billy Graham, forgive the Japanese, and spend his life inspiring others to live Christianly.

Back to the event… Louis spoke to the crowd and handful of young ROTC about his experiences in the War. Albeit, a bit hard of hearing at the age of 90, his mind is sharp and he can still tell a good story. His book, Devil at My Heels, has gotten the attention of Laura Hillenbrand (of Seabiscuit fame) with rumors of seeing the silver screen.

Check out the gallery for stills of Zamperini working the crowd.

I’m a big fan of Monster. The green can gives a nice boost without the jitters from a double-shot of espresso and I expect the other additives help out in the energy department. The big question I have is the caffeine content. How much does a 16 ounce can have compared to a typical cup of coffee?

As usual, a Google search revealed tons of hits and most of them were craptacular. In most cases they stated “yes, Monster has caffeine” and fail to mention how much. Telling me how many calories it has is pointless - it’s printed on the can.

Eventually I found Energy Fiend which reveals Monster’s caffeine content and compares it to a large number of other beverages. Clicking through on any beverage, Monster included, gives further details. In another nice twist of oft-missing accuracy on the ‘net, data sources are cited and linked.

In a move to further aid the caffeine inquisitive you can research foods, sugar content, and calculate your daily buzz intake. Got a death wish? Find out how much of your favorite drink you can handle before it kills you. For me, 70 cans of Monster back-to-back will do it.

So how much caffeine does the typical 16 ounce can of Monster contain? Based on 8 ounce servings, the green machine runs 20 mg less than coffee: 80 mg vs 100 mg. Take that Joe!

Taken at the Santa Ana Zoo in Orange County, Calif. That red just pops right out, doesn’t it?

It’s seldom I shutdown or reboot my MacBook Pro unless I’m installing an OS X update. I usually put the Mac to sleep and crack the lid open when I reach my next destination.

A few days ago OmniOutliner kept locking up on me. I’d open a document and it would freeze. Open OO directly and it would freeze. Force Quit was all I could do.

As any diligent Mac user might do, I deleted the preference file in Application Support. I moved my documents in the rare event one was corrupt and OO was trying to open it by default. Still no joy.

A support request was sent to Omni Technologies and I got a nice response in return with some advanced debugging options. Then it hit me… Why not reboot? I dismissed the idea because it’s “so Windows” but I tried it anyway. OmniOutliner came back to life, documents and all.

If I were running Windows, a reboot would have been the first thing I’d have done. With the Mac it didn’t even dawn on me because it’s so seldom I have trouble. Another reminder that with Mac there is more time spent Geting Things Done rather than perform system maintenance.

Apple’s tech support article describes it the best. FCP cannot playback an MP3 file in real-time due to the compression. As a newbie this seems strange since the DV codec requires decompression as well but I guess the assumption is that MP3 files aren’t appropriate for video projects so they didn’t optimize it for RT.

Since I’m working on something “straight-to-YouTube” I really don’t care that my soundtrack is of the highest quality but rendering audio is no fun either. Rather than re-rip the music from CD media I’m converting the MP3 to AIFF as described in the tech article using QuickTime Pro. The result was surprising: a 6.9 MB file in MP3 format was 133 MB in AIFF format.

On a whim I created a batch job in Compressor 3 and the same file took mere seconds to convert and was half the size: 61 MB. I expect to be using QT Player less and less.