This whole week, I’ve been skipping lunch. It has nothing to do with losing weight or anything, but the office is quite a few blocks from even the closest restaurant. Normally I appreciate the excercise and fresh air, but the weather has been so nasty and muggy (and/or rainy) making the walk extremely unpleasant. I can’t bring myself to leave the air conditioned office, and by the time I start to get really hungry it’s usually after 3:00 PM (since I typically eat lunch at 1:00 or 2:00 anyway). By that point, I don’t feel like going to get food because it’s almost time to go home, and there is no point wasting the money to eat out.
So lately I’ve been eating when I get home, and I usually have a plate of cheese, bread, and fruit, because I am too lazy to actually prepare anything. Plus, Bunky often doesn’t get home until 9:00-10:00 at night, so I don’t want to have a big meal and then not be hungry for dinner. Hopefully the weather will cool down soon, because this diet totally sucks. I am foreseeing something similar happening when it gets really cold and snowy, though.
We’re excited to announce that Street View is now available in San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. Like the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego features high-resolution imagery.
Looks like Ender might be able to get an advance walkthrough of the San Diego area, courtesy of Google. Hopefully Street View can keep him from living in some slum his first year!
I liked where they went with the Sandbox Wordpress Theme Competition, and the winners list has been published. I had been eagerly awaiting the results, to see what people came up with.
The list has a lot of attractive, but clean/simple designs. The nice thing is that because everyone used the same base template (and only modified the CSS), all the entries are stable. This is a nice departure from past theme contests where the top themes would be good, but most of the rest would be terrible and unusable. In this contest, even the less popular themes look viable.
I was reading a silly article about the 5 stages of online dating, and it was mildly amusing. Like a comedic parable, it contained such pickup gems as this:
I was able to pick out what I considered to be the most attractive elements of all their profiles. I then combined these traits together to form one uber-profile.
Name: SensitiveListeningLawyer42
However, for the most part it was a fluffy article that mostly got an internal polite chuckle from me. However, scrolling through the comments on the Digg post I had come from revealed some truly outstanding advice about practicing on cashiers.
Eventually, you go from not having any friends, to being on a first name basis with a dozen female cashiers, from the supermarket to the dollar store.
I was wondering if that would actually work, but later comments seemed to confirm success.
Us cashiers get bored, talking to us is a good idea. I work nights and there isn’t always a whole lot to do so when people talk to you its actually a lot of fun.
Too bad you gotta wait in line to talk to them!
After consulting the suggestions in the last report, I went on another trial run. I was unable to find any unflavored Feta cheese, so I grabbed some Manchego instead. I totally forgot about looking for goat cheeses or Roquefort, so that will have to wait until another time.
During this taste test, I had a much bigger arsenal of foods to pair with the cheese, and perhaps the combinations helped make the entire experience a great success. I had some crips sliced apples, cranberry juice, and crusty fresh bread with this platter. I noticed that Cheshire cheese from last time went especially well with the apples, but most of the cheeses this time tasted best paired with bread.
- Manchego: I had a young Manchego, and it was surprisingly mild and soft. I really liked the taste, and it could be eaten alone. The taste was mild and not very salty; also the consistency was a bit creamier than I would have expected. This was a very nice cheese, and the first sheep’s milk cheese I tasted. I think the use of sheep’s milk really imparted a pleasant taste to the cheese.
- Parmigiano-Reggiano: OMFG this cheese is so expensive, but on the other hand, it’s close to being worth it. This is easily my favorite cheese now, and the taste is so complex. The tasting experience had various stages of deliciousness, although it is a bit hard to explain. It doesn’t start too sharp or salty, and there is a very agreeable aftertaste. It also melted nicely in my mouth, in spite of its grainy texture. The one bad thing about this cheese (aside from the cost) is that it is really difficult to cut into nice slices.
- Camembert: It was very similar to the creamy Brie in texture, but the earthy taste was a little different. The Camembert had a fairly delicate taste, and was salty. I paired it with the crusty bread this time (instead of crackers) and it tasted a lot better. I’m not sure if this is because the bread was so good, or if it was because the slightly different taste was enough to affect the cheese, but I enjoyed it a lot more than the Brie.
General | Kabitzin 08/09/2007 | 
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