Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Remote Control Your PC... For FREE!

I've tried out GoToMyPC a few times over the years, and I always thought it was very cool, but I never needed it enough to pay $20 per month.

I recently came across a provider of a similar technology called LogMeIn, and this one has a free version! It seems to work just as well as GoToMyPC. Check it out!

Monday, April 06, 2009

Semi Annual

Semiannual, last I heard, mean's every 6 months. There's nothing in the definition that would make it acceptable to mean "once a year, but 6 months after the other one that we refer to as annual". But yet that's exactly what the church uses it to mean in reference to general conference!

Can someone explain how they can get away with this? Do they think their tax exempt status makes them dictionary exempt as well?? I think I was confused by this for about the first 25 years of my life. (Me: "Wait, wasn't the last one the 160th??") I'm still outraged by it. I'm tempted to boycott conference or start a Facebook group demanding that the naming convention be changed.

Aside from that, conference was really good.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Letting Go

I've been carrying the same wallet for about 10 or 15 years that my brother Matthew bought me for Christmas many moons ago. It's gotten so ragged that I have tenants who don't even pay their rent who have offered to buy me a new one. I've put it off for a long time, but tonight I finally broke down and bought a new one.


The little one in the middle came as an added bonus, I guess for when I want to travel light. Here's the open look:


You can't even tell from the pictures how ragged the old one is. But I did get a nice shot of the lint build up:


That 20-10-29 number you see on there? I'm not really sure what that is. Probably the combination to a gym locker at some point...

However, I'm not really sold on this new one. Having those slots for credit cards makes it look like a girl's wallet. And when I put all the cards in it got kind of fat like George Costanza's wallet.


I didn't even put in all the cards I had in the old one -- I had a credit card that I don't use, a Cold Stone gift card with 97 cents on it that I've been carrying around forever, and an old BYU ID.


That white line? Yep, my social security number was printed right on the front. Maybe identity theft didn't exist back in the 90s.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Limits of Exhaustion

I ended up pulling an "all nighter" accidentally last night. It really was an accident -- I went to bed at a normal time, but because I had slept in till noon on Monday I couldn't go to sleep. The reason I slept so late on Monday was that I had been sick on Sunday, and apparently a combination of a generic Day-quil knock off during the day and Nyquil at night make me sleep for 15+ hours.

So anyway, I got up at noon, I went to bed at midnight, and I couldn't sleep. I got up, did some work for a couple hours, and tried again. Still no good. I didn't want to take more Nyquil and risk sleeping for another 15 hours so I got up and started reading a John Grisham book (that I ended up with because my roommate's girlfriend was going to donate it to charity but it got left on our kitchen table instead... but I digress from my perfectly streamlined story...). And then of course I just kept reading until I finished. (I have a little problem with "moderation" sometimes... good thing I don't drink... or play Word Twist on Facebook...)

I don't remember how many all nighters I pulled in college, I know there were quite a few. But I always got to sleep the next day as soon as I could. This time I started getting phone calls around 8 AM, and I thought, "What the Heck? I'll just see how long I last." So I went to work (meaning I commuted to my home office 20 feet away) and acted like it was a normal day.

About 3 in the afternoon it started really hitting me. By about 4 PM (hour 28) I crashed. I got up at 8 PM (and of course had 6 voice mails...can't you people leave me alone while I'm doing SCIENCE?).

So I guess 28 hours is my reasonable limit. (I could have pushed it further if really necessary but I wouldn't have been at all effective.) Which leads me to wonder about this policy of having doctors work 36 hour shifts in hospitals. How safe can that really be? How many patients have been killed or harmed because the doctor hadn't slept and didn't know what he/she was doing?

I think Barak should look into this... but hopefully he'll worry about more important things first -- instituting PLAYOFFS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL!

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Getting Healthy

I don't usually get around to eating all the fruits and vegetables I buy before they go bad. So about a month ago, I started making smoothies to try to use them up. I've been on a smoothie kick ever since. I didn't think it would last very long, because my usual philosophy on food is: "If it takes more than 30 seconds to make, that's too much effort." But for now I'm still going at it.

It's not a good idea to use more than about three ingredients in a smoothie, because then the tastes all merge together and you can't really taste anything specific. But today, just for fun, I thought I'd make the ultimate smoothie, with ALL the ingredients. Here's what I included:
  • 3 bananas
  • 10 strawberries
  • A handful of blueberries
  • 1/2 cup of chunk pineapple
  • An apple
  • 1/2 cup of orange juice
  • A few baby carrots
  • A celery stalk
  • About 2 inches of cucumber
  • A handful of spinach
  • 5 ice cubes
It actually tasted pretty good, even though you couldn't really make out individual tastes. The color was, well... you decide:



Around the same time I started making smoothies, I also started making "health pizzas". I use whole wheat crust, lots of vegetables, some pineapple, turkey pepperoni (70% less fat!), and sometimes actual turkey as a topping. But the most visible difference is the spinach, which is kind of a separate layer between the sauce and the toppings. The spinach doesn't have too much taste after cooking, but it adds to the nutritional value. (Even though all the good stuff gets killed when you cook vegetables...yeah yeah.)

(The pizza in the pictures below did not have the whole wheat crust.)