Posts tagged with "food"

Sleeping Early, And The New Breakfast

I find myself unable to stay up late nowa­days, the time that writ­ing comes eas­i­est to me. I wake up in the mid­dle of these sum­mer nights and can’t fall back asleep. In the end, I regain lost sleep by tak­ing mid-day naps, a habit I’ll have to break once I find a job. My par­ents would ask me whether I slept well, when I was younger, and being a child at the time, knew noth­ing but excep­tion­al slum­ber. “Of course”, I would tell them, with a con­fused look on my face. To me, naps were always a sign of old age, and per­haps I’m get­ting old­er.

I’ve recent­ly switched from hav­ing bacon with egg on toast in the morn­ings to hav­ing a bacon and egg sand­wich. The dif­fer­ence in prepa­ra­tion lies in the style of eggs. Whereas sun­ny-side up com­pli­ments toast with it’s oh-so-dip­pable run­ni­ness, a pair of over-hard eggs go much bet­ter in any hand held meal.

White Cheddar KD, Game Addiction, Etc.

I had some white ched­dar KD for din­ner tonight. I have to admit that it tastes bet­ter than reg­u­lar KD. It seems to have a “high­er class” cheap taste.

Blizzard has me addict­ed yet again. At least Dina is addict­ed too. And Trolley some­how made the FT beta, which is amaz­ing. I feel like I get to say, “I know a guy who made the beta!” When I tell peo­ple they look at me fun­ny.

I almost com­plet­ed my graph­ics assign­ment. The only thing that’s miss­ing is the object motion along the con­vey­or belt, and some pol­ish­ing of the col­li­sion detec­tion. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get per­fect col­li­sion detec­tion done, but I doubt that I’ll lose too many marks for that. I think I’ll just leave it the way it is, since I should be work­ing on oth­er projects, and I need to pri­or­i­tize.

Mel is hav­ing a birth­day par­ty on Saturday at the Honest Lawyer, and I’m look­ing for­ward to going.

There are a few things I want to with this page, like add a fea­ture that will sep­a­rate archives into dif­fer­ent pages, if it finds more than 100 results from a data­base query. I sup­pose I’ll find the time some­where.

I got my mouse in the mail today. It has stiffer but­tons and a stiffer scroll wheel, but every­thing is more respon­sive. I don’t like the fact that a part of the design isn’t flush with the rest of the mouse, so my pinky will catch on it. I’m not sure if that’s part of the design, or just some­thing that hap­pened to mine. The back thumb but­ton is also a bit too small and sunken when pressed. The pre­ci­sion of the mouse is dead on though, even with extreme­ly fast motions. I can now retire my old mouse. I should have giv­en him a name.

I don’t know how Trolley seems to drink every night. Some weeks I wish that I had noth­ing but alco­hol con­sump­tion, but my con­science always pre­vents me. I guess the idea that it’s cost­ly and not-so-dele­te­ri­ous real­ly pre­vents me from tak­ing shots as dessert. Yet Wheaties just tells me, “drink for fear of being upset do to lack of rea­son to drink. this way, you can drink before you get upset, real­iz­ing there real­ly isnt a need to drink, and you’ll be a peace­ful alco­holist — bet­ter than a ragin one.. hon­est­ly, its for your own good”. I think I’ll heed some of his advice.

Thoughts After A Bad Phonecall

Leave it to a sin­gle phone call to fill me with wor­ry. Now I’m anx­ious about my marks, my mid-terms, my projects, my grad­u­a­tion, my life. Pat gave me a pep-talk yes­ter­day, and it helped. Graduation seems uncom­fort­ably close. I’m dying to know how the sto­ry ends.

Patrick was nice enough to come up to me and start a con­ver­sa­tion the oth­er day. I asked him how his work was going, and he told that he’s real­ly enjoy­ing it. He let me know that the Montage project in becom­ing real­ly big, and they might be look­ing for more work­ers, and that if I send Chau my resumé and let him know that I can work full-time dur­ing the sum­mer, I might be able to get a job in devel­op­ment, instead of infor­mat­ics.

God, my sen­tences are becom­ing more and more struc­tured like some­thing Henry James would have writ­ten, although I’m sure I’m not able to be as descrip­tive, or as bril­liant, since he’s a well renowned author infa­mous for being gar­ru­lous, where­as I’m sim­ply a com­put­er sci­ence stu­dent, only able to write when nec­es­sary.

There seem to be a few Five Alive flavours on the mar­ket, such as “Tropical”, “Citrus”, or “Peach Passion”, but none taste as good as “Berry”. Aaron, Trolley, and I all agree that it tastes like Skittles. The juice from con­cen­trate has a slight­ly vary­ing taste from the one in the bot­tle; I find the lat­ter to be a lit­tle more tart and a lit­tle sweet­er.

I’m get­ting a new Intellimouse Explorer sent to me via snail mail, thanks to Trolley. I called up Microsoft, told them that my mouse but­ton was dou­ble-click­ing when it should have sin­gle-clicked (as instruct­ed by Trolley), and they told me that they would send a new one, free of charge. I don’t even need to send my cur­rent one back. I got my cur­rent one four years ago, and I remem­ber spend­ing $100 on it. The pads of it have been worn out uneven­ly, caus­ing a notice­able wob­ble. The lat­est design of the Intellimouse Explorer has a low­er, sleek­er pro­file, and more eas­i­ly acces­si­ble thumb but­tons. Yay.

After talk­ing with my geol­o­gy pro­fes­sor I feel dumb as fuck. I almost failed my mid-term; my mark was the sec­ond low­est in the class, even with a gen­er­ous grade curve. I think I did con­sid­er­ably well, con­sid­er­ing the fact that I had three mid-terms that day, and the fact that I find my mind to be dead when I have my Tuesday lec­tures after a 7:30am lab. Apparently, I have very lit­tle com­mon sense. Although I know that zinc is the main ingre­di­ent is sun­screen, or that soft-drinks con­tain car­bon, I don’t know that nitro­gen is an impor­tant ele­ment in fer­til­iz­er or that graphite is a pop­u­lar indus­tri­al lubri­cant. The list of what I don’t know goes on and on. I had no fuck­ing clue that bak­ing soda is sodi­um bicar­bon­ate. To my prof, all of this is gen­er­al knowl­edge, so it’s assumed when deal­ing with the course. I was nev­er good at chem­istry, and my pro­gramme of stud­ies isn’t even close to relat­ed. I also took the pre­req­ui­site at the begin­ning of uni­ver­si­ty, which is four years ago. Fuck.

Old School, Frozen Carrots, Etc.

I was exhaust­ed yes­ter­day. I worked almost all day on my graph­ics project, and Aaron came over to work on his Scheme assign­ment. I was able to talk to him for a few hours before start­ing the work. We caught Old School at the Coliseum near his place, but it was still a thir­ty minute walk in one direc­tion. The movie was too pre­dictable, but had some very well done scenes, such as Will Ferrell get­ting shot in the neck with a tranq dart. I thought some parts were almost insult­ing though, like a com­plete­ly gra­tu­itous cam­era shot of Elisha Cuthbert’s ass while she was lay­ing on a bed. It’s not that I don’t find her behind to be a thing of beau­ty, it’s that it feels like the pro­duc­ers are adding shit like that in just to get more peo­ple in the audi­ence. I guess it’s been hap­pen­ing for a while now; ever since Shannon Elizabeth bared her twins in American Pie, teen movies have been becom­ing more and more sleazy. I still enjoyed Old School though, and gen­er­al­ly laughed my ass off.

Watching Old School allowed me to dis­cov­er a decent song called Dust in the Wind by Kansas. I’ve also been down­load­ing a lot of Canadian singer Holly Cole, who has a beau­ti­ful­ly expres­sive, olive oil voice. I enjoy Bagdad Café in par­tic­u­lar. I found two ver­sions of the song, one live and one stu­dio, which are good but with their own unique flaws. I pre­fer the live ver­sion because it has a sim­ple piano and bass, instead of synth sounds in the stu­dio ver­sion, but at one point she becomes obnox­ious­ly loud, as if she was over­sing­ing the notes, the way a trum­pet would sound if the trum­peter was blar­ing. It makes her voice seem almost mas­cu­line, which is a big turn-off. The way she mix­es her vibra­to with her flar­ing is very seduc­tive though. In the stu­dio ver­sion, how­ev­er, she seems to start off one line a lit­tle flat, before push­ing her diaphragm to hit a note with­out going falset­to. It sur­prized me, since stu­dio songs tend to be a lit­tle too per­fect.

I final­ly put up my poster of Dominique Swain. Aaron helped me decide on the linen clos­et door, since the walls in my room are so big they dwarf my mod­est­ly sized poster. I haven’t put it up since sec­ond year because it did­n’t seem to fit into the sim­ple­ness of my room.

I’m not espe­cial­ly hap­py with yes­ter­days entry, but I des­per­ate­ly felt like I had to get some­thing down. It’s a lit­tle too trite for me to be sat­is­fied.

I bought a bag of frozen car­rots and pearl onions to try out the last time I went gro­cery shop­ping, since I’ve been try­ing to eat more veg­eta­bles. I found out today that I real­ly don’t like pearl onions. They taste like what I imag­ine an onion would taste like after being soaked in water overnight. I tried to have the car­rots only, but the bag is sup­posed to be a mélange of the two, and the taste of the onions ends up seep­ing into the taste of the car­rots. I real­ly enjoy hav­ing a bunch of onion slices sautéed before adding in a pork chop or what­not to the fry­ing pan, but pearl onions seem to be a dif­fer­ent breed of onion.

33% Less Salt, Schoolwork, And More Games

I’ve been try­ing the reg­u­lar Maple Leaf bacon recent­ly, instead of the 33% less salt I nor­mal­ly buy. I want­ed to see what I was miss­ing out on, and it turns out that it’s just the salt. The bacon does taste bet­ter (it is salt after all), but that’s about it. I’ll prob­a­bly switch back to my less unhealthy bacon next time I go shop­ping.

I still haven’t been able to accom­plish a sin­gle bit of school­work so far in the week. Aaron, Trolley, and Dougie were all inter­est­ed in my OpenGL assign­ment, so I feel like I’m more inspired to work on it to show them what can be done, maybe make them proud of me. I’d def­i­nite­ly want to cre­ate some­thing that they would find amaz­ing. Almost like quan­tum par­ti­cle observers.

I’ve been get­ting a boon of games late­ly, such as Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1942 plays fair­ly well, with decent bot sup­port, but some­times runs at ter­ri­ble speeds, even on high-end machines. The mul­ti­play­er poten­tial is amaz­ing though. Pat also loaned me his PS2 for the week, so I’ve been try­ing to get through MGS2 as fast as I can. I have to admit that hid­ing in card­board box­es is the best part of the game, which is say­ing a lot, con­sid­er­ing how good a game MGS2 is.