Staticfree Blog

I've a dilemma: I want to have a big party with many people. This means that it will have to be held at a time that's inconvenient for at least one person, at least according to most probabilities. In order to minimize the number of people it's inconvenient for, I'm holding a public vote right here for your editorial entertainment. To use, please make sure to use my comment system, not livejournals and leave a vote for each day (listed below) that is convenient for you. All times are assumed to be evening (18:00-whenever). Please pass this on to anyone who might know me (and therefore be invited to the party).

1. July 5^th
2. July 6^th
3. July 11^th
4. July 12^th
5. July 13^th
6. July 18^th
7. July 19^th
8. July 20^th
9. July 25^th
10. July 26^th
11. July 27^th

You can vote by leaving a comment with either the bullet numbers or the dates, by IMing me, or by throwing a brick through our open window with your vote wrapped around it; I really don't care. Remember: If you don't vote, you can't bitch that you can't make it.

the confused upsidedown pirate goes: "ɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹə"

It's been about 7 years since I've gotten a pair of rollerblades. I specifically "forgot" to bring my old pair from Rochester so that I would have a strong incentive not to ever use them again and instead purchase a new pair. I got a new pair today, as Blades in Harvard Square happen to have an older model in my size (size 13 men's. Quite a rarity that they had them). They're Rollerblade® Aero, black with big wheels. All in all, they're decent skates, though I'm sure a more obsessed 'blader would object to the brand.

The old ones were classics: Rollerblade®-brand blades that were undoubtedly one of the first models made (they have "Patent Pending" printed on their sides). They still roll and are quite sturdy, though could use new wheels, bearings, laces and bolts. Oh, and they're about as comfy as strapping steel-armored gophers to your feet. They, like shoulder pads, are thankfully now mostly-deceased spawns of the mid 90's.

I believe I shall attempt at rollerblading to the T tomorrow, and then from the T to work. With any luck, I can shave a good 15 minutes of walking off. We'll see how unwieldy they end up being.

For some strange reason, I find it incredibly odd that the Blue Line goes out to Revere Beach. Even odder is the fact that I've lived in the Boston area for about a decade and I didn't realize this until just now. It's always been there, about an hour and a half away...and I never noticed.

Rachel and I went to the aformentioned beach last Sunday. We were a bit worried that it'd rain, but luck was with us and the grey clouds gave way to sunshine and a cool breeze. Toss in a trip to the famous Kelly's for dinner, and it was a quite pleasant, unique excursion. I'll definitely have to venture out there more as the summer progresses. Maybe I'll even start to like fish & chips :-)

On an entirely unrelated note, Bluetooth is nifty. My new toy has built-in bluetooth, so I went ahead and got my laptop a little box so they could talk to amongst themselves. I made sure to get one that supported the headset protocol, so (someday) I may be able to wirelessly connect something like this headset to my laptop. It'd be nifty giving it voice commands all day. Now, all I need is to combine that with normal stereo headphones and I'm all set. Or, perhaps, I could just wire my computer straight into my brain: ears can be damaged by abusive concerts, but microphones can be replaced.

If you've gotten this far, you should probably know that my birthday is coming up soon. By soon, I mean by someone else's qualification of the word entirely: July 17. This means I'll have a party sometime then. So far, the date is tentatively Saturday, July 19^th. With any luck, I'll be able to drag as many people from as many recesses of the country as I can to the party, including the old Tigernet crew and maybe even some Rochester crew. I fully intend to literally go through my Palm's address book and look through all my contacts: see who's still alive and around Boston. Leave a comment here if you are interested/not interested, or you can directly contact me about coming. I'll mention more as the time comes around.

I thought I would know
if four walls could hold me.
I wanted to see
if fire would burn me.

-Mogwai - O I Sleep

Last night I hung out with Susannah, which was fun. We played on our laptops: I poking the Interweb and she installing OS X. We also put together a tasty dinner, noted below. I definitely agree with her: OS X's installer is poorly designed. If you want to do anything else but the standard install onto one partition, you have to know substantially more than you'd expect or "call your systems administrator". That's one thing I love about most open source software: they never say "call your systems administrator" as they tend to assume that you are the systems administrator.

Cole once made this recipe for my family, and I had always wanted to try my hand at it. It's very tasty and so simple I wonder why I'm even bothering to consider it a recipe.

Spicy Marinated Tempeh

Ingredients

• 1 package of soy tempeh (I used Lightlife's organic soy tempeh)
• ¾ cup - 1 cup soy sauce
• 2-3 tbsp. minced garlic (to taste)
• 1-2 tbsp. chili powder (to taste)

Procedure

1. Make the marinade (soy sauce, garlic, chili powder) in a deep bowl.
2. Dice the tempeh and place in marinade for 10-15 minutes. Make sure to occasionally spoon some marinade over the tempeh or stir so the tempeh gets throughly flavoured.
3. Saute with a bit of vegetable oil until golden brown
4. Serve over rice [non-exclusive 'or'] vegetables, optionally using any remaining marinade to season
5. Serves 2 people

I should start posting more things I cook here; mainly to inspire myself to cook more often. I really love cooking: it's like compiling for your food! *goes off to poke at fire*

Two things I've [re]learned recently: snuggling/cuddling rules and Cambridge can be pretty wacky, if you know where to look. In addition, the Internet is a great catalyst for people meeting each other; particularly people of like minds.

Consider this: if the Internet makes it easier for an individual to find their peers in the world, then if applied to everyone, everyone will find it easier to find their peers. Through that, people of like mind/interest will more easily find each other and thus what appear to be insanely weird connections will have formed. It's like Google: you end up getting what you want, even if you're not sure what you're looking for.

I'm starting to research Jabber for work. Jabber is very cool. It's not only an IM system, but it's also a really good platform for routing XML messages. It can therefore be used for all sorts of nifty things, including RPC and generic message systems. Now the only thing left to do is write some nifty apps for it. I think i'll implement Geekhaüs's information-age instant-message-sending doorbell with it; that'd be super-keen.

I'm very fond of soda (not "pop", as Midwesterners, southerners, or Canadians might call it. It's "soda" or "carbonated beverage" in my book). I'm particularly fond of Coke®, ginger beer (the stuff that burns as it goes down), root beer, birch beer, and (the focus of this post) grape soda|grape or orange soda. The last two behave in a rather unusual fashion though: unlike the other flavours, their quality of taste is inversely proportionate to the apparent quality of the beverage.

The primary characteristics I look for in a soda are:

1. carbonation
2. sweetness
3. caffeine content
4. flavour

I've found the best beverages are a good balance of the first three, with each drink defined by the fourth trait. Too much of any one trait can ruin a beverage and overpower any of the other traits. It's refreshing, though, to occasionally focus on one characteristic when selecting a beverage: in the case of Mountain Dew (or the tastier Code Red), the focus is on the third trait. The same applies with Red Bull, although other chemicals are used to function in conjunction with the caffeine to enhance the "energy" nature of the beverage.

In the case of orange or grape soda, the best drinks come when the first is fairly medium, the second is maximized, and there's a good selection on the fourth. If a grape soda is not sweet enough, it ends up becoming much too tart. Too much carbonation overpowers the flavour, and too little makes it taste too much like slightly-fermented grape juice.

The problem arises in these two traits: companies that produce more "expensive" beverages try and deviate from the established "fairly sweet with medium carbonation" paradigm that tends to turn out the best. The data are summarized below (with caffeine left out as none had any):

Note: "corp" means "corporate", "store" means the given beverage is a store brand.

• Polar grape (corp): medium carbonation, mild sweetness: too tart, not very good
• Wegman's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a very "hard candy" flavour
• Shaw's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a bit more tart than Wegman's
• Bread & Circus grape(expensive store): mild carbonation, strong sweetness: light grape flavour, much too tart
• Shasta grape (cheap corp): mild/medium carbonation medium/strong sweetness: a good grape flavour, but a bit light on the other two traits

From the data, you can see that the best grape sodas tend to be the "store" or "cheap corp" sodas. One could hypothesize that the cheaper or more generic the grape soda brand, the better overall it becomes. Thus, the actual beverage quality is inversely-proportional to the "cost" or apparent quality of the beverage. This is a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon that is not often found in other beverage categories.

This was tested with orange soda as well, with the results being that cheap store brands were far better than Coke or Pepsi's answer to the orange soda demand. (especially the Minute Maid brand version).

The question arises: why? I postulate that it's a result of the more expensive brands trying to make the drink seem less "candy"-like and more like their more popular beverages. That, unfortunately, is against the nature of these two flavours. Overall, though, it's not that big a deal as the better sodas end up being cheaper and can therefore be bought in much greater bulk: ready for any long coding sessions.