“With the extra hours of daylight saved, most people open up a money market fund to maintain daylight liquidity and preserve daylight capital.”

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2004/04/

Today started with going to Powel’s. I love that place! It is like old-school Amazon (before they got electronics and kitchenware and jewelry), only in both internet and physical form. I picked up two books for the first-time home buyer and a Ben Franklin action figure. Now, Ben and Albert can fight in hand-to-hand combat. I completely spaced and did not wander over to the technical book annex to get the tech book I needed. Maybe tomorrow. I then proceeded to meander through downtown, taking no real direct route. My primary goal was to “see what I could see.” My secondary goal was to find some food. My tertiary goal was to make it down to the waterfront. 1 and 3 were completed, but I found a lot of pizzarias (which I was not in the mood for) and lots of chain places (Subway, the food court, and the like). On the way to the waterfront, I wandered past Pioneer Square, where they had some crazy chess festivities going on: a giant tent, several dozen chess games being played, a tournament, products to purchase, and the biggest little chess board I have seen. We are not talking “human-size pieces out in the courtyard” big, but child-size big. The pieces were about thigh-high, and the board reminded me of the big foam square mats for kids consisting of smaller interlocking squares with letters and numbers imprinted on them. I then made my way to the waterfront and pretty darn far up and down it. People were biking, skating, sunbathing, asking for money, selling glass bongs, collecting cans, and all sorts of other stuff. I then proceeded to make it all the way back to my car…without food, but a little hot and sweaty from the sun and the walk. I don’t *think* I stuck as bad as the punks with the mohawks, liberty spikes, leather jackets, and/or B.O…but it was a pretty hot day.

Attention world: every XML-based recipe data format sucks. I have decided to invent my own, like so many before me. It is bare-bones and does not take into account a menu of multiple recipes, nor enumerated type measurements that include “a bushel.” It is primarily geared toward displaying a recipe, and not toward looking through a database for everything that may happen to include less than or equal to 2 tablespoons of rosemary. In related news, the last veggie pot pie kind of sucked. While I was able to successfully and in good faith say “NO, KITTY, MY POT PIE” for the first time in my life, the actual pot pie really sucked. I blame the sweet potatoes. I am going to tweak the recipe a bit. I went to Wild Oats a got a bunch of different veggies that I thought would make a better pot pie. It was only after mentally tweaking the recipe and getting new veggies that I turned a few more pages in the excellent recipe book and discovered a “Shepherd’s veggie Pot Pie” that is basically what I invented, only slightly different. I hope it turns out okay.

I helped Kate disassemble some of her shelving and desk this evening. On the way, I saw a “self-service dog wash.” Because of confusion and miscommunication I sat around for almost two hours (the desk disassembly ended up being much more quick than I expected). Part of that time was alone (except for the cats there). Part was watching an ESPN football X-Box game. Video games have progressed a bit since I last noticed (mostly the Nintendo, but a little bit of old-school Playstation and Dreamcast in there). If the ESPN game had not been the center of attention, I would have not looked too closely and thought it was an actual game going on in the background. The realism was pretty darn good, except for people’s faces. There was even a segment where there was some dispute over whether a pass was caught out-of-bounds. The referees made a call, but then had to review the slow-motion footage, and everyone had to wait a minute while they figured it all out. There were sports casters doing voiceovers, there were fans in the stands, there were cheerleaders. Somewhere out there, someone has the job of calculating the physics of the cheerleaders’ breasts.

If anyone wants a bare-bones, not-too-advanced, barcode image recognition system, I released some Open Source code the other day. It kind of sucks and is only aimed at developers, but worked well enough for the random ARG-related side-project I was playing with. In related news, I am not sure if I announced here: Magic Codes and Mac-Package.

I got the kitties a new toy yesterday: a ball with a jingily bell inside. Ebenezer has been playing with it for, quite literally, two hours straight now. Last night, the only reason he stopped playing with it was that it got lost behind one of the bookcases. Now, I hear silence. I think it got stuck between the fridge and cupboard now. The good thing about these kitties is that they sleep at night. They are not the play-all-through-the-night variety kitties. If they were, they either would not have gotten the toy, or they would have had it hidden every night.

I curse Ben Franklin for daylight savings time.

I had forgotten that Gary Oldman is in True Romance. I had also not realized that Tony Soprano is in it, too. Not *as* Tony Soprano, but as a generic mafioso dude.

I asshat dried pineapples.

Posted in: Code Dear Diary

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