The Sound of Music

So today at lunch I ventured outside (which is rare for me, I live in the basement usually most of the day whilst I code) and took a bike ride to try to get a bit of a tan for next week’s outdoor adventures in Texas. I saw a doe. Unless is was a gay buck, but I digress. How cool is it to see wildlife? I was close to the Cherry Creek Reservoir, so it wasn’t as if the doe was in my front yard.

I asked the doe to please stay where she was at because I found her appealing and attractive. She looked at me and said, “you’re not my type,” and then ran away. I get this reaction from lots of folks so I wasn’t too worried. However, a female counterpart of the humanish species was walking down the street and threw a glass bottle in front of me! She was young, and her parents should probably be jailed for letting her out unsupervised at that age, but she threw it down on the road in front of me. Fortunately it did not break, but I was ready to call the cops and have her hauled to Juvinile Detention for assault and bottlery.

Anyway, I was pleased to see the doe and hope that I see more wildlife on my lunch adventures in the future.

Wake Up!

I stayed up late last night working on getting the StatTraq 1.b update out. This morning around 6:15 Abby woke up and came in and made huge amounts of noise trying to get me to wake up. She even managed to whack me in the face with a book several times.

Eventually I woke up and was rewarded by needing ot go to the store. However, God, in His infinite wisdom did reward me: King Soopers was running a special on Cliff bars at 50 cents each. I bought a box.

Then, I got online this morning and was told to ‘Wake Up!’ by a co-worker in Texas. There’s a theme here 🙂

Pardon My French

The title of this post accurately reflects my knowledge of most languages actually, not just French. I could say pardon my Spanish, Russian, Yiddish or any other language. I’m bound by the silly English languish. However, I’ve managed in the last 5 or so years to learn various programming languages at least well enough to get things done in them. Why is it that programming languages are simpler than spoken languages to learn? Often because they’ve got similar syntax or a similar approach to things.

Right now I’m learning C++, a language written in what seems like the dark ages after having used Java, but I’m catching on and I think that its going to prove useful. Its a lot faster than older versions of Java and it can be written rather efficiently as well since many function names are terse and remove all vowels. Of course without vowels you have to play a guessing game about what things like the following mean:

atoi
memcmp // oops, they left a vowel in that one
strcmp
strcpy

However, there’s a secret decoder ring that came with one of my books so I was able to figure those out 😉

If You’re Happy and You Know it: Stomp

This weekend I’m going to go see Stomp. I haven’t seen them since the 90’s but I’m quite looking forward to it. I believe we’ll be passing Abby off onto someone else because it will be too loud for her, but I’m very excited. Saturday may lead to another day of working on ‘home things’ but Sunday night is going to be intense! I was blown away by the quality of the percussion rhythms and the diversity as well since to most folks drums have about 6 different beats in the music they listen to. Being a drummer in Jr. High and High School I just loved it and I bought the DVD for my collection – I pull it out every once in a while to enjoy the fun.

Have you seen Stomp, and if so, what did you think?

This is Your Itch Speaking

So whilst camping I was skinually harrased by Mosquitos. They bit me a few times though fortunately the DEET helped scare them away. However, my right calf (no, I don’t have cows) has a bite that just makes me want to “Beat It” like Michael Jackson and a law suit. Actually, I want to beat it until I can’t feel it any longer, but you get the idea.

There are things to stop the itch but my favorite method is the cheap method: time. I’ll wait it out. The mosquito is probably dead by now anyway – I win!


By the way, in case you didnt’ know it there is an acronym element or tag surrounding the DEET acronym above (and that last one, too). In case you didn’t know what those do, it allows you to hover your mouse over the acronym and a tooltip will be displayed that shows the fantastic expansion of said acronym. Unless its an acronym I’m going to make fun of, in which case it will reflect something else… it should be pretty obvious normally that its not the real meaning. DEET however is not your typical acronym and maybe its an abbreviation… actually it doesn’t feel like either, but you can pick what you want to call it.

Off’ing My Wife

Camping was lots of fun except for the part friday night where Abby threw up in the tent. Oh, and the outhouse stench was low on the ‘fun’ list. I would also rank the mosquitos as an annoyance [thus the ‘Off’ bug repelent play-on-words for the title]. But that is the short list of negatives.

I got some incredible photos that I’ll post once I get home. The cell phone reception was incredible up in the mountains and we actually kept in touch with various parties using them. Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

Poor Italian Girl Totally Gets Blown Off

So there’s a commercial on TV for some sort of low carb pasta that comes on with this mother and daughter going into a store. The store looks so expensive that I would probably have to take out a small loan or donate some organs to afford to shop at… once. In the background the commercial has some Italian opera music. I don’t know what the guy is singing about so I often join in with an English translation that I can only assume reflects the intents of the original lyrics in my native tongue.

However, the middle of the commercial shows this girl lifting up one of the pristine boxes of noodles that the competition sells. Since the mother is health conscious and wants the rest of her Italian family to live the Adkin’s lifestyle she shakes her head, ‘no,’ and holds up a box of [marketed brand name here] noodles. Then, they show the woman lifting a noodle on the end of a fork into her mouth. The camera changes angles and she actually ‘chews’ a noodle. Or so it seems. Actually showing anyone masticating like that is not sexy, therefore they show this part from a great distance (which shows that this family has some serious cash since their kitchen can handle a distant shot panning around the room).

Then, to further insult us they show a family of four: a man, the woman, the girl, and a boy all sitting at the table eating some sort of pasta dish. However, these must be droid children because the fact that the sauce is so sparse on the noodles makes it look like they’re just eating a plate of these low-carb noodles with bits of tomato for decoration. No United States of America born child actually eats noodles plain, they drench them in so much sauce that the noodles become a medium for the sauce. In most homes it probably looks like a Tomato based soup with noodles in it.

I still insist that the opera words go something like this:
A woman and her daughter
Love to buy noodles
The daughter is skinny
The Mom is anorexic
[it should be noted that the words don’t rhyme because this is a direct translation, word for word].

The mom is on Adkin’s
Please put it back kid
I’m the boss
Don’t mess with me

She looks so sultry
Eating the noodles
Look how her fork glimmers
In her sexy hand
[Those Italians know sex sells]

The family is eating
Smile or a beating [that rhyme was not intentional]
We’re so stereotypical
It makes you want to throw up

Coffee Ice Cream Review

So last weekend we made Coffee Ice Cream using Craig Kaes’ fantastic Espresso and real live (dead) Vanilla Beans. It was quite tasty with the exception that it had maybe 2 table spoons too much sugar so the richness of the coffee was lost just a little bit. I would have eaten it all myself but I think that would have resulted in several things:

  • Obesity on my part
  • Diabetes for me
  • Death for me as the others would have certainly mauled me to a point where I would have died

I would recommend getting espresso as the coffee flavoring and refrigerating all of the pieces for the 6 hours like we did. We also froze the ‘soft serve’ ice cream out of the ‘maker’ longer to solidify it more. We had to leave before the ice cream was really firm, but it was quite tasty. I imagine that if the Kaes still have any it tastes good, too. I would also imagine that they don’t have any more 🙂