Shovel May 12, 2006
One of the biggest inconveniences of eating is transferring the food to the mouth.  Should a fork be used?  Maybe chopsticks?  Or should you just use the hands? 

Here's a better idea:  Skip the middle man.  Just shovel the food into your mouth, right out of the container.  Why waste time and resources?  Just pour it right into your face. 

I do this on a regular basis.  Sometimes I'm concerned about what other people are thinking when I do this.  "Look at this freak.  He eats like a starved raccoon.  Someone should really say something."  But the other times (most times) (actually, all the time), I do it anyway.  Why should I be restricted by social norms?  Why should I be a product of the system?  As I pour food into my mouth, you should be praising my ingenuity and writing down everything I say.  Obviously I'm on some sort of higher mental plane. 

I adopted a new practice based on this idea:  Eating cereal out of a cup while driving to work.  Who has time to sit around and eat breakfast in the morning?  And why should a spoon or a fork be used to transfer food from one container to another?  Just put it all in a cup and pour it down your throat. #food
Wiretap me May 11, 2006
Sometimes, the federal government listens to my phone calls.  Sometimes they record them.  Sometimes they just make a note of who I called.  This is called wiretapping, and it makes a lot of people mad. 

I, for one, couldn't care less.  If George W. wants to listen to my phone calls, he can go right ahead.  He might be sad to find that my phone calls are quite uneventful.  My life isn't very exciting, and my phone calls reflect this.  But if he wants to listen, I don't mind. 

I don't really see what the big deal is.  Actually, I do see what the big deal is:  The government isn't really supposed to invade my privacy.  It has something to do with one of my constitutional rights.  And if the government gets away with listening to my phone calls, they might take it a step further and listen to my brain waves.  And they might take that a step further and send me to jail for committing a crime before I actually commit a crime.  Hello, Minority Report.  And Tom Cruise.  He's weird. 

But I think the key word in the previous paragraph is "might".  The government might do a lot of things.  They might take away my right to vote.  They might prohibit the consumption of alcohol.  They might shut down the internet.  But they didn't.  They didn't do any of these things yet.  And I doubt they will.  I guess my point is that I'll be concerned with government wiretapping as soon as they do something that annoys me.  I don't care if they listen to my phone calls.  I don't care if they know my social security number (since they gave it to me) and my credit card numbers.  But if they publish my phone calls in a book, I might be mad.  If they write me a letter and tell me to stop pretending to know what I'm talking about, I might be a little peeved.  But until something like this happens, I say this:  "Wiretap me". #politics
Circular Kitchen May 10, 2006
The Circular Kitchen is an 8 foot tall "thing" that rotates 360 degrees, enabling different compartments to be opened and appliances to be used.  It's meant to be an alternative to the traditional kitchen by transforming the normal "dedicated, inflexible room" into a big spinning island.  (via Cynical-C) #technology
Just give up (1) May 10, 2006
School of Rock is one of my top ten favorite movies.  This quote is great: 
Give up, just quit, because in this life, you can't win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end you're just gonna lose, big time, because the world is run by the Man. The Man, oh, you don't know the Man. He's everywhere. In the White House... down the hall... Ms. Mullins, she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock 'n roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV! So don't waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome 'cause the Man is just gonna call you a fat washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!
Sometimes, when people are having trouble with schoolwork or are stressed out at work, I give them this little piece of advice:  Just give up.  It's not worth it.  You're wasting your time.  Think of all the other things you could be doing right now.  Don't even try. 

It's my way of making the world a better place. #psychology
Cruise (1) May 9, 2006
Wendy and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean from May 1 to May 5.  We were on the Majesty of the Seas, a ship operated by Royal Caribbean.  The ship left out of Miami on Monday afternoon.  On Tuesday morning, we arrived at New Providence Island, Bahamas.  This island is home to the city of Nassau.  We spent the morning walking around town and seeing some historic sites and shops.  We were harassed by a barrage of locals trying to sell us things or drive us around town.  After eating lunch back on the ship, we took a ferry to Paradise Island where we spent the afternoon battling the big waves on the beach.  On Wednesday, we went to CocoCay, a private island in the Bahamas owned by (or at least solely inhabited by) Royal Caribbean and its guests.  It was awesome.  Nobody was trying to sell us anything or drive us anywhere.  We did a little snorkeling and walking around.  The water was crystal clear and totally calm.  On Thursday, we arrived at Key West and had to go through customs so that we could be allowed back into the US (the Bahamas are British, I believe).  We walked around the island and saw some major landmarks.  We also visited Ernest Hemingway's house, which is home to 30 or 40 polydactyl cats.  By Friday morning, we were back in Miami and on a plane back home.  I still feel like I'm moving, and it's been a few days. 

From what I've heard (and seen on my honeymoon in Jamaica), most Caribbean islands are pretty poor and have a bunch of people that will try to sell you things as soon as you step foot on their beautiful little islands.  I'm not a fan of this.  In fact, it's really quite annoying.  I understand that people need to do things to make a living.  But I found it interesting that the inhabitants of Key West didn't pick up on this annoying practice.  Sure, Key West isn't quite as poor as other Caribbean islands, but the people still need to work to make a living.  They had the same types of shops selling the same kinds of things.  They had the same modes of transportation in and around the island.  Yet they sat around and waited for people to come up to them.  And obviously they're relatively successful, because they'd be out of business if they weren't.  So my conclusion is that the annoying people on Caribbean islands have no need to be annoying.  If I want to buy a banana leaf picture frame, I'll go into their hut and buy one.  If I want a Prada bag, I'll go into their little shack and buy one.  There's no need to harass me. 

All in all, the cruise was a pretty good way to take a vacation.  It's basically a floating, moving hotel that transports you to different destinations.  They provide all your meals, though alcohol and soda cost extra.  They plan out a bunch of activities (called excursions) to do when you get to a destination.  These all cost money, and some of them weren't worth the cost.  Our only excursion was snorkeling at CocoCay.  Some of the other excursions were things like scuba diving, parasailing, tours, etc.  Instead of doing these things, we did our own thing on each island.  One interesting thing about the cruise is that tipping is highly suggested.  It's done at the end of the cruise by giving your waiter and room attendant an envelope with some money.  I'm not a fan of tipping, but I did it anyway.  The final price came out to be about $150 more than the actual price of the cruise.  Not a very pleasant little surprise, but there's no way around it.  At least we got to spend a few days in the warm, sunny Caribbean. #travel
Picture menu May 7, 2006
I'm a slave to the picture menu.  Whenever I go out to eat, I always begrudgingly order from the picture menu.  Even if I have something specific in mind, I'll always go for something I see in the menu.  I could be thinking about steak all day, but as soon as I see a picture of pasta with seafood, I'm sold.  I always feel like I've been taken advantage of.  They trick me with their fancy pictures and their word-filled menus.  They know I won't read all those words, but that I'll go straight for those mouth-watering displays of goodness.  Some may ask, "Why don't you just not look at the pictures?"  But that's just impossible.  I can't look away.  Like a moth to a flame, I'm uncontrollably led to the pictures. 

On that note, I have a word of advice to restaurants:  Use picture menus.  Instead of just having a few pictures in your menu, have pictures of everything.  Look at fast food places:  They've been doing it for years.  You can sell anything with pictures. #food
Bed Books May 5, 2006
Bed Books are books printed sideways to enable the reader to read while lying on their side in bed.  Even though it sounds like a stupid idea, it's actually kinda cool.  If they would only do this with TVs, life would be complete.  I guess you could pretty easily rest a TV (or a book) on its side, but if someone does it for you, it's a whole new thing.  (via Strange New Products) #technology
Hosted services Apr 30, 2006
The more I think about it, the more I understand the usefulness of hosted services.  For example, Gmail for your domain, picture sharer Flickr, bookmark sharer del.icio.us, video sharer YouTube, and even blogging tool WordPress.  I used to be under the impression that all these things can and should be hosted at one's own website.  It just seemed to make sense:  If you have your own web space, you should put all your stuff in the same place.  You should set up your website and implement a photo gallery.  You should collect and share links.  If you have videos or other multimedia, you should host them too.  If you have access to a mail server, you should implement that.  Why use a bunch of different sites when you have plenty of space on your own site? 

But I'm realizing the error in this way of thinking.  If your site goes down, everything goes down.  If something weird happens to your mail server, you have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.  On the other hand, if you stored your pictures on Flickr, you'd be using their bandwidth, not yours.  If you used del.icio.us to manage your bookmarks, you'd be using their reliable servers, not your own.  If you used YouTube, you'd be sharing videos with their web-based Flash player, not forcing people to download the right program and necessary codecs. 

Although I'm still not a fan of Flickr's maximum storage space and monthly upload rate, and I don't really feel the need for "social" anything, I can appreciate the usefulness of hosted services.  You get to use somebody else's bandwidth and reliability at the cost of customization and localization.  At times, that's a worthwhile compromise. #technology
WordPress the_content (8) Apr 28, 2006
I've never been a big fan of how WordPress treats my post content (the_content).  It automatically puts it within paragraph tags (<p>), and there's no way I can disable that. 

Or is there?  I searched for it and found that other people are unhappy with this function.  This WordPress support topic pointed to a plugin called WP Unformatted, written by WordPress guru Alex King.  The plugin somewhat clumsily disables the auto-formatting when a custom field is added to a post.  That's a lot of work, seeing that you'd have to add that custom field to every single post to make everything look the same.  This guy found the function that applies this auto-formatting (which can also be found in the WP Unformatted plugin if you're a little bit smart):  It's named "wpautop" and it's called in the "default-filters.php" file in the "wp-includes" directory.  His suggestion is to edit the file by commenting out the call to that function. 

I've never been a fan of editing core WordPress files because it adds a lot of confusion when upgrading.  So the other obvious alternative is to make a little plugin or include in some "my-hacks.php" file this little bit of code:  "remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop')".  This does the trick, but it causes a few other problems.  If a post has any type of formatting, such as paragraphs or line breaks, they're all gone.  Disabling that filter simply outputs plain text, though the text still looks like it has formatting [1].  Another weird thing that happens is that the_content has a blank space before the first character of the first word.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but I verified that it happens in more than one theme, which means it's not just a problem caused by my theme. 

A WordPress support page said that the the_content() function simply applies filters to the get_the_content() function, meaning that a user could call "echo get_the_content()", and it would output the stripped-down version of a post's content.  I tried it and found that it works great and doesn't have that blank space at the beginning.  Problem solved!  Except that it creates a whole bunch of new problems, the most important of which being plugins.  Most plugins apply filters to the_content, which means they would have no effect if the_content isn't called.  So I'm back to where I started.  WordPress puts the_content in paragraph tags.  Suck it up. 

[1] The plain text looks like it still has formatting (when viewing the source) because that's how it's stored in MySQL.  It has line breaks and spaces, but HTML doesn't display it like that.  The solution to that problem is to put it in <pre> tags and include word wrap with the "wrap='virtual'" attribute.  You can also apply styling to <pre> tags like this:  <pre wrap="virtual" style="font-family:trebuchet ms; font-size:10pt;"> #technology
Audience Apr 27, 2006
Sometimes I don't write anything on my website for a little while because I get a form of writer's block.  My general idea behind this site is that I'll stop writing when I have nothing more to say.  But I have more to say.  Lots more.  I have an opinion about everything.  Obviously even stupid things.  So where does this writer's block come in?  It happens when I think about who my audience is.  Since I personally know the 4-5 people who regularly read this site, I sometimes feel the need to write things they might agree with or be interested in.  It's not that I'm changing my ideas so they fit in with my "audience".  It's more like I hold back on writing about everything that's on my mind.  This can be a good thing, obviously, because I have some pretty radical beliefs and ideas.  But it can also be a bad thing because I'm not writing what I really want to write.  And it's not all offensive, racist stuff.  Some of it is Christian.  Some of it is uber-technical.  And these are the kinds of things that I think twice about writing because I have my "audience" in mind. 

That's just plain dumb.  This website isn't about my "audience" (I keep using quotes because having an audience makes it sound like I'm important, and I'm not).  It's about me.  If you don't like what I have to say, stop reading.  Or get your own website.  I'm an opinionist, and this site is a collection of my thoughts, feelings, opinions, ideas, beliefs, rants, raves, and anything else I can think of, written about every topic under the sun.  Why should I hold something back because I think it'll bore people?  Why should I filter my ideas so that only the "best and most agreeable" come out? 

I shouldn't, so I won't.  I'm going back to writing for the sake of writing.  Be prepared for some more geeky-ness and mediocrity. #psychology