Tag: reflections

I think my greatest talent might be reading and writing emails. I’m not the best I’ve ever seen but when I’m in a zone, I think I can hold my own against some of the better emailers out there.

I think it would be great to show this off in a talent show some time. With my mutt session being projected, I could start out with 1000 emails that are a mix of spam, list mail, irrelevant stuff and highly relevant email and I could sort through these quickly replying to important emails where necessary.

If I had seen someone do this when I was young, I would have been very impressed.

Through exploration prompted by my last blog entry, you may now know that like everything else today, Beano has a website.

Like many other websites, Beano has added a few features to keep folks coming back. I can happily tell you that Beano didn’t settle for some silly Beano-oriented flash game (yikes) but instead decided to build a comprehensive database of foods whose potential for methane production in the human digestive tract are so intense that you’d have to be crazy to eat them without Beano.

At least, that seem to be the idea. Its called Beano Cuisino and it’s absolutely brilliant.

They’ve got all the classics, like baked bean burritos. They’ve also got more adventurous offerings like sweet and sour lentils with egg noodles. You can polish it all off with a chocolate lentil cake

I think that a desire to increase gas production is the only reason anyone would ever eat a chocolate lentil cake.

My younger brothers will love these recipes.

My favorite vegetable is asparagus which is good because it’s very healthy. The only thing I would change about asparagus is the way that it makes the urine of the people who eat it stink. Curious about the phenomena, I found an article on Occurrence of S-methyl thioesters in urines of humans after they have eaten asparagus that had been published in an issue of Science in 1975. Its author said:

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was used to determine the odor-causing agent (or agents) present in the urines of humans after they have eaten asparagus. S-Methyl thioacrylate and S-methyl 3-(methylthio)thiopropionate were identified from methylene chloride extracts of such urines and appear to be the odor-causing compounds. Methanethiol, the previously reported odor-causing agent, was not detected in these methylene chloride extracts.

It certainly sounds like S-Methyl thioacrylate and S-methyl 3-(methylthio)thiopropionate are the culprits. I think the next step important step is to produce a sort of asparagus-urine-stink prophylactic. Kind of like Beano.

Every time that people organize to sign keys around Jeff Waugh he tries to ridicule the keysigning phenomenon by likening the process to intravenous heroin use. He will say something like, "I’d love to sign keys guys but I don’t have my needle, and I can’t find a good vein, and I’d have to go back to my room to get my Bunsen burner."

I think this characterization is grossly misinformed.

Few heroin addicts would ever bother to use a Bunsen burner.

Last night, I took a risk and gave myself a haircut. I also bought a hat.

Many people might think that they could easy infer a causal relationship from this information but they would be wrong. My haircut is great and the fact that the hat hides it is merely part of the price I pay to stay warm.

With it’s Latin roots (ferrum meaning iron and everything), I understand why in Catalan (and Spanish), a hardware store is called a ferreteria:

What I don’t understand is what you call a store that sells ferrets.

My friend is applying to Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. He is very interested in the program but not as wild about the "tele" bit; Just how far away do the people he’s trying to communicate with need to be? Would across the room work? I suggested that perhaps if his communication were "far out" (in the 1960’s sense of the word), that might qualify as "tele".

I also suggested that a fun way to begin his interview might be to say, "I’m interested in your program but I live in New York City and it seems kind of silly for me to telecommute." The faculty doing the interview would either thing he as very clever — or wouldn’t.

I was pretty confident that Mika and I had the cutest toilet bowl cleaner (see Figure 1).

I’m sad to say that after a visit to Jordi Mallach’s bathroom in Valencia last week, I am reconsidering this (see Figure 2).

Figure 1 My cute toilet bowl cleaner.

Figure 2 Jordi’s cuter toilet bowl cleaner.

I’ve heard folks on mailing lists argue (only partially in jest) that multiple punctuation points, and in particular multiple exclamation points, are a sure sign of a brain damage.

Recently I’ve been wondering what to make of folks who use the interrobang (‽) and other Unicode characters that combine multiple pieces of punctuation into a single glyph (like ⁉, ⁈, and of course ‼). Do these count as one punctuation point or a single new hybrid mark? What does using ending a sentence with such a mark say about the author⁇

I saw a live eel dealer this morning at Valencia’s Market Central (sorry, no pictures). The shop front was simply a pile of hundreds of writhing eels.

It was like a snake pit out of Indian Jones, except yummier.

I once had a job clearing land in the forest to build homes. For one job, we were clearing land for a Tibetan Buddhist women.

On the land where the house was to go, the owner had built a small hand-hewn hut for "sweats" and meditations — her little sweat house.

After a day of work, one of the other workers looked around and asked, puzzled, where the sweat house had gone. With a little bit of examination we realized that we had managed to hit it, squarely, with a large tree we had felled. It was completely pulverized.

Very diplomatically, my boss informed the owner that from now on, her life would be "no sweat."

I frequently run into congestion problems in two places: networks and noses. In the nasal sense of the word, it usually has to do with a build up of pressure and/or an infection in my sinus(es):

With that in mind, take a look at Michael Vogt’s wireless card pictured below:

He said the card preforms poorly. I can suggest a couple good sprays…

When I was younger I went through a punk rock phase. I never really grokked punk music but I liked the punk aesthetic and clothing.

My parents gave us a small allowance to purchase clothing — but it could only be spent on clothing. If I remember correctly, my parents and I once had a small argument when I asked for my clothing allowance to go shopping in the chain, stud, and rivet sections of the hardware store.

A few days ago, I wrote about my kissing competition moment of glory. I think that this is the sort of information that might make me more successful in my love life if it were widely known.

The problem is that if I go around telling people that I’ve won a kissing competition, I would seem sleazy and vain. The fact that I was bragging would hurt opinions of me more than it helped for any of the people that I am interested in kissing.

I think my real friends should find and employ subtle techniques to mention my victory to people that I might enjoy kissing before I meet them.

I was in Italy for much of the last two years but I was always in and out and usually stayed for between a couple weeks and a couple months. It was usually long enough that I didn’t want to eat out every day but not long enough that I wanted to invest in a lot of "core ingredients" for cooking.

As a result, I was frustrated that I couldn’t find olive oil in bottles less than one liter. In the US, it is usually difficult to find bottles larger than half a liter so I couldn’t imagine why there was nothing smaller than what was, for me, extra, extra large.

I asked Enrico Zini (who is from Bologna) if you could find smaller bottles of olive oil in Italy. He paused and then asked in return, "why would anyone want less than 1 liter of olive oil."

I guess that was my answer.