i will never update this

Another fantastic example of designers (and, in this case, educators) taking the time to produce awesome stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nteiqLgZFOU&feature=fvst

One more reason to teach students how to learn and how to think rather than how to do things.

/me counts his blessings

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,3606923.story

News flash: The regular flu kills tons of people every year. WHO not concerned about relatively mild swine flu.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWRyj5cHIQA&

1) Being sick *sucks*. Being sick during crunch time at work *really* sucks, since the work just stacks up while I'm away. I'll end up working late next week for certain. Missed my OT appointment and spent 2 days inexorably bored and sniffly. On the up side, the podcast for Friday is already edited.

2) Sudafed is great for clearing my sinuses, but not so great for clearing my head. Good lord it makes me feel weird.

3) Beer geekery: Pulled a Sierra Nevada clone out of the secondary fermenter on Sunday, under the influence of the previously mentioned drug, and it tasted *awesome*. The residual sweetness that I've noticed in my last 3 batches seems to have been mostly melted away by the super-extra-mega long time it spent in secondary (more than 2 months). It's racked for carbonation. Should come out nicely carbonated in about 3 weeks, and then we'll see if that residual sweetness is still there. Dan and I have lots of theories about why it's there, but no solid leads.

4) Cori and I are going to visit a Brittany breeder this Sunday. It's likely that she has our puppy. We're going to meet dad. Cost? $700. Sounds like a lot until you remember that we were about to pay $2000+ for a portuguese water dog. By all accounts, they are fantastic dogs.

5) I have to recommend this cookbook that my mom got us: Nigella Express. There are lots of cookbooks out there for the "workaday" type, but not a lot of really good ones. This cookbook is awesome for a few reasons:

• Every recipe has a giant full-color photo. Excellent for browsing. No one wants to imagine what food should look like.
• Brief instructions. No recipe extends more than a page. This is good and bad, since the instructions are sometimes a tad vague, but overall it's a bonus.
• Few ingredients. Nearly everything worth making is less than 10 ingredients, and everything that we've loved is, like, 4 or 5. This fits with Michael Palin's mantra: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.
• Awesome food. Nearly everything is truly gourmet. "Only as good as your ingredients..."... meh. This food is awesome even with store brand stuff.
• Fast spins on old classics. Mac and cheese, home made french fries, burgers, a whole section on easy slow cooking... It's a treasure trove of new takes on stuff we mostly buy pre-made in the modern world.
Cori and I have been loving it.

Can we agree that the question "why are donuts so good?" is silly?

Donuts are good because they are fried cake. It's right there in the name. Fried cake. You can't possibly have a more dense set of fantastic food terms crammed more closely together.

Oh, you could try. You could have like "julienned hummous" or "minced cheddar," but it just doesn't work.

Let's break it down. I would assert that the modifier "fried" is better than all other modifier that describe food preparation. "Grilled" might be a close second, but let's face it, "grilled" isn't even really on the same level as "fried." Minced, broiled, baked, aged... nothing really even comes close. I think we can take this one to the bank.

"Cake" is a little harder. There are lots of foods that might be better than cake, as a general rule: Potatoes (fried, of course), sandwiches, steak, candy bars, chocolate, beer, coffee... you get the idea. And some of them, like beer and maybe ice cream, clearly stand above cake in the Hierarchy of Awesome. But I'm having trouble thinking of a food that so readily accepts frying. You can't fry beer. You can fry ice cream, but let's face it, that sucks. You can fry candy bars, but that also sucks. You can fry steak, but... let's not go there.

No, I'm quite sure that among the top 10 or 20 foods or thereabouts, cake is the only one that comes out so deliciously awesome after frying.

Mmm donuts.

I consistently do nothing for the first half of every vacation I have and then berate myself for doing nothing for the first half of the vacation.

Well now it's the second half and I need to study for the GMAT, decide how to incorporate mustlovebeer.com into geek-beer.com, brew again, transfer the current brew to the secondary, go to Ikea to get GORM (aka cheap brew shelving), clean the office, edit and upload dozens of photos from the last couple months, add tons of content to geek-beer.com, get my computer to my sister, plan something for New Year's... and lots more.

In other news, all future posts will be Friends Only. If you're not a friend and would like to be, please comment on this post (or email me).

Dad, I'm looking at you. You'll need a LiveJournal account.

this is... this is amazing.

I would say there is 10 inches of snow on our patio furniture. Seattle has pretty much shut down. The local QFC missed its morning delivery. We're getting national news coverage here. Spokane has record snowfall. The Portland airport canceled dozens of flights yesterday. Airlines are canceling flights at the Seattle airport in record numbers. My dad says Boise is receiving record snowfall, too. The whole Northwest is going into whiteout.

Totally stunning. I think the odds that Cori and I will be going anywhere for Xmas are pretty slim now. But that's okay. Our house is warm and we've got brie and hummus and crackers and each other and friends in the building.

We managed to get the car into the garage today with the help of Mr. Tea and the Chemist, and it then took about 2 hours to get to the store and back (with the help of the Chemist's Radio Flyer wagon).

Seattle doesn't do well with this. Really. We don't have plows for 45th, even, let alone the side streets. We don't have salt or gravel for the city. Alaska Airlines had to cancel flights because they don't have enough de-icer just for their flights. It's kind of crazy.

But we're cuddling, and we opened Solstice presents. And it's not the end of the world, right?

zomg

tom says, "snow!"

ethan says, "ok!" (for once)

they go play in the snow.

they say, "jake!"

jake says, "..."

they say, "jake!"

jake says, "... ok."

they all say, "zomg! snow!"

and good times are had.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/28182873

Former chairman of NASDAQ admits to swindling tens of thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. This is wrong in so many ways...People still think this system works? We're only fining him $5 million? Amazing.