I give them props

Is it wrong to envy Microsoft... BECAUSE they have cool Mac equipment? Now honestly, the MBU has always done great work. Everyone who has used both knows that Word for Mac is better than word for Windows. But our team finally got a new intel mini this week for reproducing bugs, and they've got 64 of 'em :P

Music for the moment is Snow Patrol - Final Straw. Like many of you I downloaded the song "Run" off iTunes when it was free. Like some of you, I then lied when a girl said she liked the band and said I was totally into them, then went to buy the album that evening. Girl is gone, but the music still rocks :)

Creative day

Today was a good day. First, a friend of mine ran out of gas last night so she stayed at my apartment to figure out the car problem later. In the morning, we walked to the gas station and asked for a gas can so we could take it back and start her car. The gas can was, in a word, stupid. The spout leaked when you tried to pour it and we got more on the ground than in her car. But after constructing a rudimentary funnel by cutting off the top part of a plastic bottle at an angle it made a perfect extension to the spout. In hindsight, the formulation of the idea never had it's usual progression. I was clueless thinking about how I could syphon the gas with some rubber tubing and suddenly I had the great idea of constructing a funnel. It reminded me of the movie "Bishop's Wife" where Cary Grant told the little girl that angles put good ideas in people's heads.

The second bit of creativity probably had nothing to do with angels. I made a pizza tonight with red onion, KC bbq sauce, spicy red sauce, Pecans and a little bit of fresh rosemary I'm growing on my deck. It was quite delicious, though more rosemary and less bbq would have been a better balance of flavors.

The album for today is: Creative Kings - Riot on an Empty street. It's very chill; It makes me want to buy a record player so I can listen to it in front of a fire with friends. There, in the flickering light, I sip herbal tea and contemplate what they think about time travel, salvation, and memories. We have nothing but fond memories, lively debate, and completely original hypotheses that verge on absurd, but contain enough truth to merit discussion. Furthermore, we have no apprehension that this blissful moment will slip from our grasp because this night will last halfway to eternity; the other half being the rosy dawn, when we prepare a fine breakfast and retreat to an isolated meadow to waste the day watching clouds pass. What I'm trying to say here is, I recommend this album.

I didn't know if you wanted to
But I came to pick you up
You didn't even hesitate
And now you and me are on our way
I think I've bought everything we need
Don't look back, don't think of the
All the places we should've been
It's a good thing that you came along with me

LOL

Internet jargon: LOL meaning "Lots of Laughs" or "Laugh Out Loud" is the same as saying, "I acknowledge that you have made a joke but I found it utterly boring to the point of offense. If you continue speaking to me I will rip out my ears and eat them. Furthermore, I will close the chat window or browser page which delivered the articulation of your offensive buffoonery and discontinue further textual exchanges with you. I am sure that this intervention of communication will be more insulting than the bit about me eating my ears off."

Also, I've been thinking about posting my current favorite music, because I have pretty good taste in music (I think.) This post is brought to you by Travis - Last Train. It's a good song, by a good band. Mix in moderation with a lonely evening for best results.

01:02:03 4/5/06!

Good morning everyone, I'm posting this (near enough) to a special time. It's one o'two and three seconds on the fifth of April in 2006! I still think we should represent dates as 05/04/06 or even 06/04/05 because then we're either going least significant to least significant, or reverse, but whatever. Happy consecutive times!

Working world

For those of you in the working world... I hope you've experienced the exhilaration that accompanies using your education in your work. It's a fantastic thing. Today I used Parametric Equations, which I remember learning about in highschool pre-calculus, and used a lot in College but I never thought I'd remember or use the concepts in the real world. It inspires me to go back to my books and see what else I can apply to my work!

Taxes

I Just did my taxes, and I thought that since the internet is nothing but a huge popularity contest, I should say I found freetaxusa.com to be a relatively painless process. Federal filing is free, state filing is $10 which is as good as you're going to find anywhere. I'm not sure if it supports the more complicated deductions like home businesses, but I was able to get tax credit on tuition I paid last semester and all the regular charitable donation stuff you'd expect is supported. The best part is that I finished in 45 minutes (including two W2s and figuring out what I paid for tuition) and sent it electronically and I should get my refund in about a week :) On the topic of taxes, here's a fun fact: I have more taken out of my paycheck for state/federal taxes, medicare, etc. per hour than I made per hour a year ago. w00t California!

Recipe for dinner

Tonight I was cooking dinner, and the spirit of Jessie was flowing through me so I decided to go nuts and make up a sauce for the leftover spaghetti noodles I had in the fridge. It turned out quite well, so I thought I'd share.


I buy my chicken ice-frosted in a bag because it's so much easier to cook with than those styrofoam chickenbreasts which (in my mind) leak salmonella juices everywhere. So when I cook dinner, my modus operandi is to skillet one frozen chickenbreast and when it's thawed, add some chopped up onions. I typically add some other stuff and serve with rice or spaghetti but tonight I looked in my fridge and saw my unused bottle of honeymustard that looked so tastey in the store. I put about 3 table spoons of that in a measuring cup with equal amount of water and about a teaspoon of basalmic vinegar. I stirred it up and it looked thin so I added some corn starch and threw it on the cooking chicken. I tasted some of the sauce with a spoon and it was good, but just didn't have the kick I wanted. So I added some ground mustard I had (it's spicy, usually used with a drop or two of water to make a wasabi-like paste) and some red cayenne pepper. I let that cook for a minute so the corn starch could thicken and put that on my noodles. The honey compliments the chicken, and the mustard compliments the onions.


Cooking is fun if you have the right spices and random ingredients!


Serves one, prep time 30 minutes.
1 chicken breast
1/4 onion chopped
some olive oil for cooking chicken and onions
3 tablespoons mustard
3 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon basalmic vinegar
1/2 teaspoon ground mustard
cayenne pepper
salt

Learning by doing

There are three types of learners. Those who learn by hearing - auditory, those who learn by seeing - visual, and those who learn by doing - kinesthetic. I think a recent trend in education has focused on kinesthetic, because most people are best suited for it. I myself am much quicker to pick up concepts when I write a line of code than when I hear or read about it. But today, sitting on the toilet I had a revelation. I learn by doing because my whole life has been hands on. The trend toward kinesthetic learning is perpetuated by the trend toward kinesthetic learning. And now, as I enter the "Real" world I recognize the fact that I need learning skills that I don't have. I need to be able to sit down, read a paragraph and apply it to the world around me or listen to a two hour description of a solution and be able to apply that to the current problem. I haven't been taught how to listen to lectures, I've been taught how to take notes. I do a sample problem and score pretty well on a test, but what about those problems where there are no samples? The worst part is, future teachers of america learned by doing, so they will inevitably teach... by doing.

Political Thoughts

Despite a lingering hesitation of making this a "political blog", I'm going to take the plunge. I've decided to write about my politics for a couple reasons:

• I have a glimmer of hope that someone cares what I believe politically


• It's a blog, therefore I've got a duty to the "powers that be" to mention it


• I have a comment feature now


• It's not November


• It's Saturday night in a city I don't know well and I'm waiting for the water to boil for tea. My first political belief is that nothing worth discussing politically is worth discussing unless you have absolutely nothing better to do.

I'm going to post the page separate from this post, so it doesn't muck up the alignment on my webpage and so I can go back and modify it whenever my opinions change (yes, I'm a flip-flopper.)

With that, let's begin

When I drove to California, I had lots of time to think. One of the ideas I came up with related directly to driving. While I driving down the road in my U-Haul, I realized I see a whole different class of cars when I can't go that fast as when I'm speeding along in my regular car. I see much less slow cars, and much more fast cars. This led me to think about life in general... When you're traveling along in life, you tend to meet up with people going either much faster than you or much slower. These encounters are short lived and generally ill fated, because you aren't moving at the same pace as the cars around you. This is a lesson for a lot of the girls in my life *coughsharonhannahaliceheatherlizcough*. They are all expecting to establish meaningful relationships while they're speeding along, finishing school, going to grad school and pursueing a professional career. They need to realize that the people they meet are moving much slower than them, and they can't lower their standards just so a slow moving vehicle can keep up. Is life doomed to passing cars left and right until the police pull you over? No, I think we all find our correct road eventually. Some people exit to the residental life and mosey along at a slow pace and others find themselves on the Autobon. Either way, you end up with people going the same pace as you, and when you look around they never pass you or drag behind. It's just a matter of time before you finally find the group of people you can keep pace with, and those are the ones you should create meaningful relationships with.

Happiness

Good trip, but it's good to be home. When talking to Jessie today, we came to the decision that happiness is not a tank to be filled, it's a binary output based on the sum of all inputs. What that means is, we could be happier together right now, but being apart doesn't mean we're automatically 70% happy like turning in an assignment late with further deductions based on how much you suck at life. It also doesn't mean that time will cause happiness to leak away or slowly build up over time like rain in a bucket. It's something so unnatural in nature to be able to reverse so quickly. It's good to realize that although any one thing might crush your day, moments later you might experience the most beautiful thing in the world if you only keep your eyes open to see it. I'm pretty sure that covers it, but I may have to write more in order to explain it fully.

Anyway, I don't have the links working right if you're seeing this on www.galateadesign.net. If you want to post a comment, click here to do so.