Posted by me on Saturday, the 16th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 12:19 AM, local time.
So, I purchased a small, cheap jackknife today that could theoretically be kept in a pocket. My other jackknives are nice, but a bit too large for casual around carrying. Now, this whole thing is scarcely worth mentioning, except that I found it a bit odd that in order to open all the many levels of packaging around the new jackknife, I found myself needing a jackknife.
This brings to the forefront the problem of too much packaging on today’s products. Seriously people, I don’t want to wade through four shells of hard plastic, and several cardboard backings and frontings, to get to the thing I just bought. Surely so much packaging must increase the price of the item, but here I am, willing to pay an extra dollar for an item that is without excessive packaging. You’d think they’d jump on the opportunity to sell me less for more.
(On a side note, it is possible that the additional packaging is desirable to the store owners. It is a convenient place to put bar codes and price tags and hanging-holes, and increases the physical size of items that might have otherwise fit in a pocket and been difficult to distinguish as unpurchased merchandise. It also makes it clear to consumers that the product in question has not been tampered with and is essentially the exact item that was sent from the manufacturer, and thus hopefully increasing the probability of sale. All these considerations aside, I still hate all that extra packaging.)
Tags: economics, jackknife, packaging
From "That which must be stomped upon"
Posted by me on Thursday, the 14th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 12:09 AM, local time.
So, as I rush to make cookies at this late hour for tomorrow’s food day at work, I have paused to contemplate Christmas Cookies for a bit. Please bear with me.
So, I feel bad for the Blue and Yellow food colors in my set of food colorings, because the only time I use food coloring is for Christmas Cookie frosting, and I find myself tending towards having only Red, Green, and White frostings for these cookies. I noticed this because the amount of Red and Green food coloring left in their respective bottles is much much less than the amount of Blue and Yellow. This year, I have decided to let Blue and Yellow in on the fun, and have made White, Blue, and Green Christmas Cookie frosting batches. (The Green being composed of Blue and Yellow food coloring, of course. Keep with me, people! Also, no one wants to see or eat Yellow frosting. Seriously.)
Frosting aside. Wait. Why? Each year as I make Christmas Cookies (including years ago, when I would help my mother by saving some of the dough from the horrors of the oven…), I have a hard time deciding which is better: the Cookie dough, or the Frosting. Both are most excellent. Of course, this is followed by the difficult and uncomfortable decision of which is worse for my health… But, usually these decisions don’t take all that long before simply being discarded altogether, and I eat both in quasi-equal portion as the full and complete Christmas Cookie (“…And, with their powers combined…”).
Ah, never mind. Everybody knows I like cookies. And you should, too!
Tags: baking, christmas cookies, cookies, flour, food coloring, frosting
From "That which must be said"
Posted by me on Tuesday, the 5th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 8:20 PM, local time.
So, I don’t remember who first sent me the link to an article about BookMooch, but it was a while ago and my memory isn’t all that great. Anyway, I thought I would write a bit about it here so others can learn about it as well. As a disclaimer, I have not started using BookMooch, and I am not sure if I ever will, but that’s just me and I know a lot of other people don’t get as attached to books as badly as I do. On the other hand, I do have some duplicate copies (same editions, don’t worry) of books that I might be able to put up on BookMooch to get rid of.
But anyway, that was a horrible introductory paragraph for this piece on BookMooch. BookMooch is a community site where everybody is trying to get books that they want, and trying to get rid of books that they no longer want. Its all free, except that if you send a book to someone else, you have to pay postage fees. So really the site gets no money what-so-ever from you, it just finds you people to send books to, and finds people who you can contact to get books from, as well as providing an easy way to do that contacting. Of course you can read more about it on their site, but the idea is pretty simple.
Here is an example to illustrate (names unchanged, to protect no one):
Let’s say Darcy is done reading some books that she owns. She will probably never read them again, Andy doesn’t want to read them, I’ve already read them, and Adam is too snooty to read them. Well, she simple lists the books on BookMooch as available. Kyle, in Hawaii, is searching around on BookMooch for the next book to read, and finds one of the books Darcy listed and says, “Hey, look, that might be interesting.” So he asks Darcy to send him that book. She puts it in a lovely little mailing box from the post office, pays cheap book rate shipping charges and sends it over to Kyle. Everybody is happy: Kyle has a new book to read, and Darcy got rid of a book she no longer wanted.
There is a point system involved, where the more books you list and then actually send to people, the more points you get. And in order to get a book sent to you, you have to consume a point. So I don’t really know how well the point economy balances out in the end, but its a relatively new site, so they may make adjustments to the point system until it works out to keep people from accumulating all the books (like me) and to try and give a reasonable amount of trust that if you request a book they are going to actually send it to you. But, even if they don’t you don’t really lose much on the deal (though if you are the only person in the system actually sending books, the postage could build up… but I would recommend not sending any more books if people don’t send you the ones you had asked for).
Anyway, its an interesting little community and I think you all should go and try it out. And let me know how it goes. Maybe I can use it to my advantage somehow…
Tags: bookmooch, books, darcy, kyle, websites
From "That which must be mocked"
Posted by me on Tuesday, the 5th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 1:00 PM, local time.
Based on the last few quotes of the day on my google homepage, I have determined that they are deliberately mocking me and my habits. Here is today’s quote:
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser. – Robertson Davies
I mean, seriously, that’s just not nice. I’ve never made disparaging remarks about google, and so shouldn’t have to expect them to make such remarks about me.
On another book related note, I have finally managed to pick up the book club book, Time Enough For Love by Heinlein, again and started reading it. Our first meeting for the book is this Friday, and I have about 200 pages short of where I need to be for it. But, progress was finally made. And, the little short sub-story was very entertaining. It was subtitled as “The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail.” It was fantastic. The motivations of this guy seem very familiar… I have heard laziness being called the Engineer’s Disease, and I am no longer ashamed that it is so!
Anyway, my opinion of the book is improving. It has points where it is a bit of tedious crazy Heinlein-ness, but by and large it appears to be shaping up as the kind of book where some old cantankerous fellow is interviewed by a much younger man for insights into life and living in general. One must deal with the old fellow’s occasional oddities and eccentricities, as well as his antiquated notions and not-quite politically correct ideas, but there are a lot of fun, interesting, and useful stories to hear from him.
But, I am not very far in the book, so who knows if it will stay that way for very long.
Tags: book club, books, engineer's disease, google, heinlein, quotes, the man who was too lazy to fail, time enough for love
From "That which must be mocked"
Posted by me on Monday, the 4th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 10:17 PM, local time.
So I found this quote on my google homepage today. Its accuracy is remarkable, yet somehow depressing. Oh well.
Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them. – Arnold Lobel
On another book related note, yesterday, when I foolishly went to the bookstore, I purchased a couple more books, which is unremarkable in and of itself. However, one of these books was a small collection of poems by Tim Burton (whom you might recall from such movies as The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride). I thought, well, I like his movies, they are touchingly surreal; surely his poetry will be similar. And so I brought it home.
It was definitely surreal. But rather than being touching, most of it was just disturbing. The art was very familiar as Burton’s, the poems were all short doggerel at best, but the topics were downright grotesque. I am slightly disturbed. Note, Kyle, if you are reading this, this is definitely a book that you would enjoy. Everyone else reading this, I would recommend perusing a bit so you are fully aware of Mr. Burton’s psychotic tendencies, but only do so on an empty stomach and only if you are of healthy constitution in general.
On a completely unrelated note, yes, it has been months since I last updated this. Yes, I plan to continue to update it on the same loose schedule. And yes, if anyone still bothers to come here and read these things when updates do happen, I do appreciate each and every one of them.
Tags: books, google, kyle, quotes
From "That which must be mocked"
Posted by me on Sunday, the 10th day of September, anno domini 2006 at 11:30 PM, local time.
So, I had a close call with my laptop today. I was done using it for a while, and so I set it down on the endtable (rather hard, I must admit) and wham! Out go all the lights and the dang thing shuts down completely. Instantly. Not even a little light indicating that the power cord was plugged in. It rattled a bit when I shook it… It refused to turn back on.
Later, I still couldn’t get it to turn on so I completely disassembled it to see if anything was mechanically wrong or had broken off or something. Didn’t find anything odd, though there was certainly plenty of dust. I did break one of the three fans’ power/sense connector off the motherboard on accident during all of this though. Anyway, since I couldn’t find anything, I put it all back together and what-do-ya-know, it powered back on ok and seems to be fine now… I still don’t trust it really, but I don’t really want to buy a new laptop right now. Then I wouldn’t be able to buy the stuff for my new fileserver! So, I think I’ll just pretend everything’s fine, buy my fileserver stuff and then act all shocked when my laptop finally bites the dust.
Sounds like a plan.
Tags: fileserver, laptop
From "That which must be mocked"
Posted by me on Sunday, the 10th day of September, anno domini 2006 at 11:00 PM, local time.
So, in my extreme laziness, I have finally made my rack server use the gmail account I gave him a while back. He reads the email account every once in a while and will post blog entries based on the emails I send it. Its handy, since its just too much work to go into the blog webware and type in there. I guess I just want gmail to be my interface to everything. And while I was at it, my server also can interpret a couple other commands for data entry and the like. At first I had a whole big authentication scheme, but it got to be a pain in the ass. Now it just makes sure the email is of the correct format and from the correct email address. It’s not foolproof, but it’ll do.
The other handy thing about it is that it can post at a specific time in the future (or immediately, of course). That way, I can keep my posts near round number posting times, which is always a plus…
Tags: blogging, gmail, laziness, round numbers
From "That which must be mocked"
Posted by me on Thursday, the 20th day of July, anno domini 2006 at 10:46 PM, local time.
So I needed to create a spreadsheet today. For what, really isn’t all that important (doing some figuring with some loans and such). But, I use Linux here at home, so don’t have Excel sitting around. And I never liked OpenOffice much (I don’t want to get into it). Gnumeric just annoys me. And I haven’t used sc in quite some time so I would have had to re-learn it all again. But I wanted to get this figured out quick!
I had heard about Google’s Spreadsheet stuff but had not used it or seen much about it actually. So, I thought I would try it out. Turns out its pretty good. Hardest bit to get used to is not right clicking for copying and pasting and what not. Right clicking gets you the context menu for the browser. To copy and paste and insert and delete columns/rows/cells/etc., you click on some buttons on the top of the page. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, its just a little weird right now. Also, there aren’t as many formatting options for how to format each cell’s numbers as I’m used to. For most tasks, I’m sure it will be fine.
Another problem I’ve noticed is that there isn’t an easy way to get from the Google Desktop to the Spreadsheets area. Would be a bit nicer if you could get to Spreadsheets directly from the Google Homepage.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I think it will be quite nice to use the sharing stuff for the spreadsheets, too. A given spreadsheet can be made visible to select other Google users, either just for viewing or for editing as well.
So, after all that rambling: The Google Spreadsheets AJAX application appears to be quite nice for simple usage as well as portability and sharing. But there are definitely some things that could be improved upon.
Tags: ajax, google, linux, spreadsheets
From "That which should be praised"
Posted by me on Thursday, the 20th day of July, anno domini 2006 at 10:09 PM, local time.
So, as many people may know, I like pickled eggs. Back home, you could find a jar of pickled eggs pretty much at any bar you wanted to go to. Up at school, maybe a third had pickled eggs around. But here, there is not a single bar to be found that sells them! What kind of crap city is this? So, I had no choice: I had to make my own pickled eggs.
So I brew up a batch of vinegar salt water solution with a variety of spices and such to add some flavor and let some hard boiled eggs sit it in for several weeks. Now, I’m not quite brave enough yet to let the whole solution sit out, so it has to work its pickling magic in the refrigerator for now. Which is fine. I don’t think it hurts the flavor any. I’ve been testing an egg or two every now and again, and they are getting to be rather tasty. I really should hard boil some more eggs and refill the jar. I think I’ll let the brine stay as is for a while. Its in vinegar, for goodness sake, so it’s not like it will go bad!
Anyway, I just thought I would let people know: Pickled Eggs are great! And its really quite easy to make your own. If there is enough interest I could post the exact ingredients I combined for my brine, but really, its a secret (and it’s not that hard to come up with something good on your own, anyway).
Tags: bars, pickled eggs
From "That which must be mocked, That which must be said"
Posted by me on Tuesday, the 6th day of June, anno domini 2006 at 10:28 PM, local time.
So, my script to filter things is complete, I think, and works pretty well. I think :) As I use bits and pieces of it, I shall find out.
Anyway, as I mentioned a while ago, I didn’t think the Unbound Bible was quite up to par but there was another one with better concordance with the Strong Numbers. Well I found it: http://www.bju.edu/bible/bible.php works great for that sort of thing. Only KJV, but that’s really to be expected with the use of Strong Numbers.
Tags: bible, filters, scripts, strong numbers
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
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