Cranberry/Strawberry Smoothie

• 1 can Ocean Spray whole berry cranberry sauce (Anyone know of a low/no-sugar alternative? We couldn’t find frozen cranberries, and this crap has high fructose corn syrup in it.)
• 1 bag of frozen strawberries
• 3-5 tablespoons nonfat plain yogurt

Blitz in a blender (my low-speed “puree” setting works very well for frozen fruits) until smooth. Makes about 4 1-cup servings at about 270 calories each (ouch! damn HFCS). Very, very tastee, though. The yogurt makes it a little creamy.

If you’ve got frozen cranberries, I’d recommend using 100% cranberry juice as a liquid with maybe a tablespoon or two of sugar.

*nom, nom, nom*

• xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe - Everyone probably already reads xkcd, but I loved this one.
• "DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary" By Erika Moen - This whole comic series is amazing, but this particular comic (especially panel #4) had me rolling. I'd probably be arrested if I had a penis, too.
• An important issue? « I?m just saying? - This author (professor?) and a group of students set up an exhibit exploring white privilege at Seattle Pacific University. I always love discussions of white privilege for the different reactions they bring up. Some white people I've talked to have abso
• HTTP 414: Way Too F#%&ing Long - The Daily WTF - I kind of want to try this…
• Skepchick: Critical Thinking at its Finest - A hilarious series of father's day-appropriate pictures on how to take care of a baby.

In the last month or so, I’ve been struggling to structure my life so that I get things done around work — I get up early, run and do yoga, write some on my novel (tentatively named A Touch of Life) or code, then go to work. In the evenings, I read a bit (from books!), write more, sling more code.

I’m using an app called RescueTime to track how I use my time. I don’t have much of a “time-management” issue — if I want to work, I’m hard to distract at home, and if I don’t want to work, good luck getting me to do so. That said, I often like stats I don’t have to create myself (bye, bye, chemistry), and on evenings I feel like crap, it can remind me that I’ve done a good job of getting shit done.

My current job (soon to just be “the job”) is rather pleasant, as far as jobs go. My initial period as the “clean-up person” — the strongest .NET person on staff, and hence charged with cleaning up the messy projects that were left by the previous developers — is nearing an end.

Thank goodness. Some of that mess was worthy of The Daily WTF…

Since .NET projects tend to come in odd bursts, I’m picking up PHP and the .NET MVC frameworks. Two of my colleagues created a PHP MVC framework/code generator that I’m playing around with.

I’m moderately impressed with the .NET MVC framework on an initial pass, despite the inconsistencies in the documentation for the Preview 3 release. It gives .NET two distinct edges over PHP, now — it’s compiled, and its ORMs (Subsonic and LINQ) decrease development time once you’re familiar with them.

Not that, technically speaking, .NET wasn’t MVC before — it was just the classroom definition of MVC, with the views and controllers on the same level in the hierarchy when code-behinds are used. (A good picture of that is here. By the way, that professor created the MCV pattern.)

Another perk of my new job is health insurance. I spent $130 yesterday filling and refilling a month’s worth of prescriptions. It really is decent health insurance, I promise. It’s just that there supposedly aren’t generics of my asthma meds. I’m going to need to see the doctor about getting a different set of meds, obviously.

If many of my rants weren’t about clients from work, I’d totally post them here. The sorts of characters I deal with… I swear. Folks still wearing wallet chains and designers that have never seen or used an internet shopping cart before…

• migrating email to Gmail - I just moved this domain's email to Google's hosted apps, including their gmail interface. The issue was, of course, that I had years of emails stored from IMAP that I wanted in gmail for searchability. This thread in the DreamHost forums offers two wor
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• YouTube - Where is the center of the Universe? - …How in the world is there no center to the universe?

…I love it.

Now, I have a PDA, you might say. A nice little Sony Clie 610C that’s served my GTD needs well.

It has, but I’ve found myself using it less and less. Evidently, this isn’t uncommon. I have a system that works: I have a reliable way to keep up with information that’s important to me. I capture on paper that I carry in my purse, and transfer to (formerly) Palm Desktop or (now) Tracks when I’m near a computer and ready to process it.

At best, it’s nice to have a calendar at hand. But really, I’m not so famous that I often have back-to-back appointments. Or that I need anything more than a 30-to-60-minute reminder, even via SMS on my cell phone. Again, I have a system that works. Morning reviews of what I need to do, combined with setting those Most Important Tasks”, rarely let an engagement slip through the cracks.

That need for only gentle reminders means that I can move to, say, Google Calendar for my calendaring needs, little though they are. I already have a g-cal for work, and my personal one shares with that one.

But for tasks, the internet is fine. After a few days of using Tracks on a hosted solution, I figured I’d go ahead and get it installed on a subdomain here at irrsinn.net.

Um. Yeah. About that.

About 6 hours later, I have a working install using mysql.

Six hours. Of not getting things done.

Here’s a head’s up: make sure your database user’s password consists of something other than all numbers. The ruby/rails-to-mysql call to “to_s” does something funky with all-num passwords such that you will continually get an “access denied” error on running “rake db:migrate” to set up the database for your site.

Six hours. No one else on the internet is having this problem.

Of course, that’s because people pick better passwords for their DB users that I do for test users, evidently. Changing it to have letters, symbols, &tc. resolved all my issues.

I hope it helps someone else.

Regardless, I really hope Tracks is worth it. It seems like it will be.

My writing here is often inspired by my readings of books, news, or other blogs, and for the past several days, I haven’t been struck by much that really pinged with me, which is why there have just been several link posts.

I’m at the new job, and it’s very nice so far. Because of how late I’m forced to go in in the mornings, I don’t take lunch, and so I’m even less inclined to write here, since my evenings are filled with D & D and financial fun.

I’ll need to use my words, though, lest I lose them…

• Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » Do it again, stupid - I can't stand these DIAS types of games. I've dabbled in Tony Hawk, but only when I can beat levels on the first or second try, or when I can make my character fall in fun ways. Shamus perfectly explains why these games annoy the hell out of me.
• The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey - Page 7 | Cracked.com - Pretty good — and very funny — list of things video games need to be good and/or interesting.
• David Sirota: The Importance of Black Voters, and the Stupidity of Ignoring Them - Politics on The Huffington Post - 'For instance, though much of the African-American community is economically in the "working class," pundits and reporters use economic and other demographic distinctions only to describe white voters, while black voters are just "black voters"'.
• Bad Astronomy Blog » What does a nebula look like up close? - This is a pretty interesting video about — you guessed it, what a nebula would look like up close.
• A Four Year Old Reviews Grand Theft Auto IV « Live Granades - At first, I was like, "Oh, no!" and then I was like, "Tee, hee." I had to crank my volume for this.
• Batman's alignments - I don't like Batman, but I am a D & D lady, and I often chafe at the rigid interpretation some GMs take to the alignment system. I find this sort of thing interesting–how Batman fits all the D & D alignments, presumably over different eras of the comic.
• Art: French Artist Adds Scifi to Beautiful Photos - These are really freaky and really cool. I don't understand how the eyeball one or the face were done, but I'm not very good at graphics manipulation.
• Stimulus payments to go out ahead of schedule - Apr. 24, 2008 - Holla! How 'bout *that*?!

The other two players were never on time after the first week and couldn’t be bothered to notify anyone, much less WO-the-GM (game-master), when they were going to be late or not show up. Each of them had problems with money, to the point where one often didn’t have bus fare.

$1.65.

He could have called for a ride.

WO, the regular player, an myself would sit for an hour or so in WO’s apartment, waiting for one of them to arrive so we would have at least three people to play.

Finally, WO moved the game back an hour, to give those two time to arrive without being late. That was cool with me, because I could go home, shower, and play with the cats before game started. At this point, I was complaining almost every week about my Fridays being taken up with a game we barely got to play. I could be home, relaxing, reading, cleaning, writing, or out socializing.

This week, WO and I each got two emails. One was from regular guy, saying he was dropping game for work-related reasons. That alone really spelled the end of game. The second, just yesterday, was from the fellow without bus fare. His money issues drove him to move to another state, and so, needless to say — although it was kind of him to do so, for once — he wouldn’t be in the game anymore.

Leaving me and the other irregular, money-issues man. Meaning, no game.

WO had a really good idea for a campaign, and his execution was good. We were warned before we started the game, though, that people who like Shadowrun tend to rules-lawyer and nitpick on history, because there’s so much back-story in the books. WO and I are big believers in stretching the book-given world to its limits, which has caused us strife in folks’ D & D games. (”Wait, you really mean that when I’m 5th level, I’m in the top 1% of people’s abilities? 5th level? And no one has heard of magic? Really. Fuck the DMG 2. Who wants to play in a cookie-cutter world? This isn’t going to work for me.”)

Unfortunately, just that sort of thing happened. WO was nitpicked on historical details and rules and had to put up with a player who decided to get revenge by “min-maxing leading to invulnerability”, in WO’s words. It was, in many ways, a very rough game. There was never any party cohesion, and the players grew increasingly annoyed with each other. It wasn’t a game where any of us were inclined to kill each other (out of game) — no insults were thrown around or anything — but it stopped being… fun.

So on what is becoming a Friday of Finales, I say goodbye to this f’ing awful job and that slightly disappointing game.

I want to find the good gamers in Charlotte. The cooperative (rather than competitive) ones who want to create something, instead of destroy something.

I went ahead and finished it last night.

I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed by the book, as it soon began to describe Weiner’s work in far more detail than her personal struggles. It became — to a certain degree — more about “stuff” than “people”, even though her work as a writer, director, and performer of motivational works is very much about people. But we went from a nitty-gritty view of her world and the people around her to a 1000-foot view of her work. Even the occasional mention of her struggles with eating didn’t really return us to the trenches.

As I wrote yesterday, I went into the book without many expectations, but I found I’d built them rapidly within those first 40 pages. I expected a story about the author more so than about her work.

The very end of the book contains bits of guidance toward leading a fuller, more satisfying life, for varying definitions of those words. Weiner repeats advice I’d heard from my own therapist — you can’t live well avoiding your emotions and problems. The only way to get past them is to go through them.

That’s hard. That’s something I still struggle with, in part due to the fact that one of the key people I talk to about my issues — WO — has such a different life history than me. It’s hard to be emotional about an experience when you’re struggling just to relate the basic concepts and to deal with someone else’s shock about the fact that traumatic things happen to real-live people.

We are a culture so desensitized to violence, sex, sexual violence, and general suffering that I’m rather curious as to how someone who regularly takes in television and movies feels reading the first half of this book. For example, can you regularly watch and find entertaining a show like The Biggest Loser and still feel the pain of the people in the book who are also doing such extreme things to their bodies? Do the people on TBL not seem to be “ill” because they have some doctor’s approval to do what they do to their bodies?

• The Psychology of the $1000 Emergency Fund | I've Paid For This Twice Already… - A commenter's word choice really got me: "For people who have never had a comma in their savings account before, getting to that magic number can be a real encouragement to keep saving money." I've never had a comma in my savings account. Excellent read.
• Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » Serious Sam:The Mayhem Shooter - This description/review of Serious Sam is rather accurate. WO and I played SS 2 for an afternoon and loved getting to blow shit up. I enjoy mayhem games that require very little strategy, and WO can't stand anything as old as Doom 2. Good compromise.
• Someday is Now: No, Mar!a, you're a skag - An old blog post I ran across, but hilarious. Brava, Kathy!