Door to door, going from my apartment to my grandmother’s house takes about 24 hours, give or take a few hours depending on waiting (for public transit, standby seats, etc.).
According to this thread on MetaFilter, a brain holds just over a terabyte of information.
Using university Internet (hooray!), which is supposedly 100mbps, the time it would take to send the contents of my brain to Japan (or anywhere, I guess? I don’t know how that works) is about 26 hours (link).
That’s kinda crazy.
As individuals, my HS friends are great people. As a Google Groups mailing list (the name of which is so incredibly embarrassing that it is worth mentioning but not worth divulging), my HS friends are collectively pretty awful at email.
GMail (and most other email providers/clients) can sort emails into threads, presumably based on an email’s subject line and maybe some of the metadata involved in a recipient’s reply (??? here’s a link to the first hit for “How does GMail threading work” on Google Search). Unfortunately, GMail et al. (henceforth, just GMail) doesn’t seem to know that every once in a while, or every day in the case of my HS friends, someone will send a completely unrelated “reply” to an email thread, which inevitably spawns more and more unrelated replies and tangents. Although it makes for semi-interesting phrase-association analysis, more importantly it makes for really cluttered email threads. And then what’s the point of email threads?
Simply:
GMail might not be smart enough to detect irrelevant replies, but someone who is reading the email might be, in which case a Not Relevant button would be super awesome. All it would do is take the text of the offending reply and then just move it to the body of a new email. The subject of the email could be a truncated version of the first sentence or something. Both the subject and the content of the email could be edited before being sent out to the same recipients of the original email, with credit/blame to the original sender/offender somewhere, too.
More stuff:
Anyway, it seems like the Not Relevant button would only work if people were more cognizant of proper email threading conventions and etiquette. But then I guess we wouldn’t need a Not Relevant button at all. Bleh.
In general, I was pretty disappointed with Google Images’ impression of me.
Food:
Now that I think about it, the phrase “after my heart” can be considered pretty self centered. Who ever said that anyone was trying to please anybody but themselves?
I was on the D train today and I saw a very young girl make space on her own seat for another young boy, so that he could sit with his family. She then showed him her DS and let him watch as she played it.
When I mentioned this to Aaron he commented on the ingenuousness of children. Kids can be pretty annoying sometimes but there is definitely something to be said about how purely kind they can be.
I just want to make note of the fact that I thought of this phrase. Someone else might have thought of it before me (though the Internet does not seem to have any record of it), but I did think of it on my own.
Possible usages:
Teddy Have you heard of X band?
Yoko Of course, TGIF
Yoko TGIF a way to clear the pre-loaded color swatches in Photoshop; it was such a pain to delete each one individually.
Also here’s my Threadless submission. You can vote for a week from today. You know, if you want to wear the slogan.
Look, it says “mother” in kanji on the pie! I’m so awesome zzz
It recently came to my attention that I’m not the best at getting my mise en place when cooking (in the form of a poorly-planned fried rice—I thought it was still good, though I did forget the eggs entirely. Oops). And since I had a pretty elaborate menu planned for Mother’s Day, I figured I’d motivate myself to get my ish together by promising myself a blog post with pretty (???) photos afterward. So here you go.
Butternut squash spread (recipe at the end): roasted butternut squash (squash, kosher salt, black pepper, cayenne, paprika, evoo); cucumbers, thinly sliced and sprinkled with salt (later squeezed of moisture); onion, minced; hard-boiled eggs, yolks separated and whites minced.
Lemon chicken pasta (part 1): lemon pepper, black pepper, kosher salt; chicken breast, pounded thinner.
Sooort of loosely based off this recipe from Simply Recipes. Inspired by, more like.
Lemon chicken pasta (part 2): spaghetti; Argentinian reggianito,
grated; basil, shredded; heavy cream; lemons (later zested and
juiced); evoo and unsalted butter.
Based on this from Smitten Kitchen.
Tomato and corn pie: lemon juice; flour, baking soda, kosher salt; corn, coarsely chopped; tomatos, peeled pitted and chopped; cheddar, chopped; scallions, minced; butter, chopped and chilled; mayonnaise; milk.
Based on this,
also from Smitten.
And coffee, the most key of ingredients without which I would likely not have survived. Hooray for coffee!
And the boyfriend made the salad. Thanks boyfriend!
Um so I’ve never written a recipe before, and I feel like this (and most recipes) are open to changes. I mean, when I first had it at my mom’s place courtesy of one of her work friends, it used acorn squash, not butternut … and it was more like a potato salad-type food, not a spread … and she used a microwave, not an oven (a microwave! I didn’t know I could do that). So. You know, do whatever. God this is why I should not write recipes.
Read for some KIND OF ARBITRARY DIRECTIONS? Let’s go!
You need:
* Butternut squash seeds, like most gourd-type squash seeds, are awesome roasted. Get rid of the stringy stuff, sprinkle some salt and pepper and evoo and roast in a lined baking sheet in the toaster oven at 350ºF (or thereabouts) until they start popping. SNACKS!!!
My friend Teddy shared with me a recent experience in which he and his two future roommates were trying to decide how to divide up the rent
in their new apartment. The three bedrooms were different sizes, one big and two small (and I guess in a perfect environment everything else is the same, though it isn’t, but we’re going to ignore that for now), so it would not make sense for everyone to pay the same amount of money, but then how would they divide the cost?
One of his friends — who may or may not have been an econ student, I don’t remember — suggested that the fairest way to decide was to mutually agree on the costs of occupying each room such that all three of the roommates were ambivalent about which room they get. The differences in room pricing, along with the room size or location or any other aspect that would make a room more/less desirable, are no longer an issue because the three all agree that the value of the rooms are now equal.
Teddy also mentioned that if they had used square footage to determine the pricing instead, even with the common areas factored in the occupant of the largest bedroom would be paying more than he would have in the “ambivalence” scenario.
Don’t know if it works since they haven’t yet moved in, but I’m sure it takes a bit of the stress that inevitably occurs when living with roommates and having to reconcile the most minute of differences.
This afternoon I saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi with Aaron, and it was a great film. Lots of porn-like shots of sushi. That came out wrong (that did too). Anyway.
Before the film started Aaron noticed that Michael Cera was sitting in the row behind us. Celebrity! Kind of cool, kind of awesome. But what struck me was that, from watching movies he’s been in, I had these expectations of how Michael Cera should look and act … and here he was, exactly how I imagined him to be. Elbow against the seatback, talking to the person next to him while eating popcorn and everything. I was shocked.
I expect things to be a certain way, and at the same time I expect things to be not exactly the way I expect them. Sounds weird, but that’s normal, right?
So I ask you, Internet: is there a word for this feeling? The feeling of surprise you experience when you find that something meets your expectations to a tee? I couldn’t think of a word and neither could Aaron. Right now we’re just calling it cera. Aaron is inclined to pronounce it [sə'ɹɑ] like Georges Seurat the pointillist painter—vaguely European, like Schadenfreude and ennui (which are also feelings that can’t quite be expressed in one English word)—but I’m just sticking with ['seɹə].
Ancient philosophers and medieval alchemists believed that, in addition to the obvious four elements making up the universe (earth, air, fire, and water), there was a fifth essence that permeated all creation and lent nature its highest power. This theory never really had anything going for it in the way of supporting evidence, but before it went the way of disco, it did give us our word “quintessence” — “fifth essence,” get it? It also gave us the awesome French sci-fi epic The Fifth Element, but that’s beside the point.
— Brainiac by Ken Jennings
