March 2007 - Posts
Saturday, March 31, 2007
i just sent the following to aol:
"I guess I haven't been paying close attention. I just recently noticed that AOL is appending advertising to my outgoing emails - even though I'm a paying customer.
"When did this start ? Make it stop.
"I can understand this practice in the case of non-paying AOL accounts, but this is unacceptable for paying members.
"Thanks for your time, and for helping make my emails less annoying to my friends and family. Every little bit helps."
"Save money on Ketchup and Mustard."
i just thought this (below) was frickin' hilarious ;-) what kind of diet does this guy have ?? geez, that much mustard would last the rest of my life. and i rarely use ketchup. you'd think he was eatin' the stuff straight from the bottle - er, tub - as his vegetable course.
as for the rice, 25 punds isn't that much, really, if it's being used as your primary carb input. but if you're being a _reasonable_ person with a varied diet (_not_ - see above) and you're buying bulk, you'd have large amounts of all kinds of stuff on hand - so where do you put it all ?
the gist is that there's a storage problem with bulk foods, especially the ones that are perishable once the seal is cracked. sounds like a business opportunity to me: bulk-food-friendly containers and refigeration. yeah, let's suck more money out of the penny-wise, pound-poor crowd ;-) "hey, harry, i saved three bucks on my mustard this month! and look at this nifty $3000 refrigerator to put all my cheap food in!".
ok, i confess, i don't know anything about what appliances cost these days ;-)
In a message dated 2007.03.27 12:54:19 Eastern Daylight Time, popovsky@ writes:
So here's my Martha Stewart moment, a new home economics money saving discovery for you. How much do you spend on Ketchup and Mustard? Its probably more than you think and if you have kids a lot more than you notice.
I was at Sams Club last month and realized I needed to buy some Ketchup and Mustard. Laughingly I looked at what they carried even though I knew it'd be way too much to deal with. You know the monster tubs they have setup at the snack bar for hotdogs that have a pump on top? yeah, all they had were those great big wide mouthed 117 oz. plastic monsters. I'm laughing cause their brand name Heinz ketchup was priced UNDER $3 a tub. Food Kitty charges over $2.50 for a 64 oz (or smaller) squeeze bottle, so I got one of each (SUCH A DEAL eh). I got home and discovered that they don't come with the pump, just a big white wide-mouth screw-on top.
So I'm standing at the kitchen sink without a decent funnel, thinking how I'm gonna get this ketchup out of the wide mouth tub jar into my empty squeeze bottles (lucky I didn't throw them away yet). Even if I had a funnel, most would clog before filling a single bottle of ketchup while Carly Simon sings the "anticipation" song from the commercials over and over again. I needed a way to get the ketchup out of the wide mouth vat into the narrow mouth 32 or 64 oz. squeeze bottles. Hmm.
I rummaged up a $2 rubbermaid 32 oz. sports drink bottle with a wide mouth and a lid with a pull to open stream valve on top. The same kind of plastic valve you find on top of dish detergent bottles. So over the sink I filled it with very little mess by pouring ketchup from the vat right into it. I screwed on the cap, and squeezed a stream a ketchup out the top into the empty ketchup bottles. There was no mess! In two minutes I was able to refill a 64 oz and a 32 oz ketchup bottle and still had enough left in the tub for another 32 oz. bottle in the future. I screwed the air tight lid back on the vat and put the half empty tub back on the shelf. A week or two later I emptied the remainder into another 32 oz. bottle and there was no ill effect or bad ketchup in the tub which was not refrigerated after opening. It makes sense considering they leave these tubs out at hot dog stands etc. all day long.
I was able to get almost $8 worth of ketchup for under $3 and ten minutes of my time. Not bad eh? I washed out the rubbermaid sports bottle and filled it with mustard and used it to refill some mustard squeeze bottles. I still have some mustard in its air tight tub (3-4 weeks old now) in the pantry thats still good which I'll refill the big squeeze bottles with soon. Mustard is even more expensive per oz. in the stores than ketchup. My savings there should be even higher, maybe $10 to $12 overall.
It was an experiment, but seeing a retail bottle nearing $3, I just thought that even if I ended up throwing the rest away I'd break even on the first bottles worth. Alternatively you could spend $3 on restaurant style condiment squeeze bottles and spend less time refilling them although you'd probably have to do it more often.
Either way you go this will cut your cost of K & M to one third which helps.
I also buy pickle chips (to put on hamburgers) at Sams or Wal Mart. You get a really big glass jar for about the same $3 cost as a small jar at the grocery store. You think its way more than you need but it goes pretty quickly when you can put 4 pickle chips on a burger. I take one of those small ziplock containers, the kind you get with premium lunchmeat, and fill one with pickles and juice. Then I put the big bottle on a lower shelf in the fridge and use the plastic container first. You get about 3 or 4 containers full out of the bottle without the hassle of having to manhandle a big gallon glass jar every day.
I have not bought any canned goods in those monster sizes. I don't plan to start to either but if you can figure out how to partition out and preserve or use up a 100+ oz. giant can of baked beans let me know. Short of opening a restaurant I don't see how to make those deals practical. Now I did notice that they are carrying more big bulk sacks of rice these days. The last time I went on a super cheap diet, I found I could make a lot of meals out of a 5 lb. bag of Indian wholegrain rice that cost me next to nothing to buy in the regular grocery store. Granted Sams looks to be carrying 25 lb bags (ugh!) but seal up the excess in an 18 gal. rubbermaid tub and you've got your year's worth supply of grain there. In fact those wide mouth ketchup & mustard vats would be real good for keeping a few pounds of grains, cereals and powders in the pantry for immediate access.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
so, y'know, the relations all change in a non-euclidean geometry, so maybe there is a geometry in which those circles do coincide, and i have no idea how this affects the shape or consistency of deserts. ...
... ok, i'll shut up now.
so i get to work early today, shy a few hours sleep. i start drawing diagrams relating to my last post on the manager's whiteboard, in between all the other discussions.
yeah, i tell everyone that it's pi day. i think i'm being humored. and i don't really care.
it occurs to me to go to a local bakery in search of a square pi. i use that as an excuse to get lunch. or was it the other way around ? in any case, there are no squared pi's in sight. oh well. so i get a bailey's irish cream pie instead. ok, so that makes no sense. did you read the part about lost sleep ??
the bakery lady (approaching her 70's?) looks at me strange when i ask for square pi's, and i explain that it's pi day. you'd think a bakery would be up on things like that. well, a geeky bakery, anyway.
the pi was very good, by the way, even if it did soften into pudding a bit.
they didn't teach us about that part in geometry class.
i haven''t been sleeping well lately, i dunno why. the first few days of the ski trip were phenomenal, but since then, well ...
so i woke at 3am today, head spinning with work, life - and pi day. oh, geek, thy name is... ok, i'm no drama queen / king. but still...
anyway, it had to do with squared pi's (π ? cool! use "π"), and the relations between circles and squares with various dimensions.
1: if you center a circle of radius one (area π) on a square of area π, the area of the clipped square corners equals the area of the clipped circle arcs. no, i didn't calculate this area.
2: but are the square / circle intersections the corners of a regular octagon ? no. a regular octagon formed in such a way has a circle of radius (π ^ 1/2) * (3 - 2 ^ 3/2 + 1/4) ^ 1/2 = 1.15... . bummer.
3: ok, so then, how about a circle intersecting a square in such a way that it trisects the sides ? what's that radius ? turns out that's yet another different circle. you work it out. ends up with a radius of approximately 0.95...
really annoying, this stuff. in a perfect universe, these would all be the same circle. close, but no cigar / banana / whatever.
got me thinking about the area of the sectors clipped by the (irregular) octagon in case (1), inside the corners clipped by the circle. i would like to see some slice of π re-emerge from all this. nope, haven't worked this one out yet either.
yeah, nothing particularly "interesting" here, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.
yeah, ok i admit it - i just wanted to use the word "nonetheless" ;-)
... more or less. did my usual ranting thing at work today, but it seems i am more able to channel that passion / frustration into constructive stuff, combined with perhaps a but more balanced treatment of whatever topic is at hand.
yeah, ok, that's a bit optimistic ;-) but, although i did not get a lot of programming per se done, a lot of planning and decisions were made for the final stretch, and i got another batch of knowledge and tools transferred to folks there.
that's the ongoing battle. it's not so much the customers of IT that are the issue (although that is sometimes significant), but IT itself getting in its own way.
so much cool stuff on the web today to build community and increase visibility. and i haven't even really looked for it; it's just stuff i just keep bumping into by accident. for example, ran into someone's sig image in a forum that was doing something cool, rotating through the title of his last few blog posts. turns out to be a feedburner.com thing. here, like this:
that only took a minute or two, i swear. less than 100 seconds.
anyway, it seems my constant harassing does seem to eventually take hold, seeding thoughts, words and actions in others, who in turn do the same, and so on. but it's so slow. dammit.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
so much for unique post titles ;-) no stories here, just a couple notes.
don't ya hate that pushpin ?
stayed at a chalet called "zoo haus". apparently, it was built in 1965 and made a bit of news up there at the time. it's a 3 / 6 sided structure with a central fire pit and cathedral ceiling that extends through the circular three bedroom loft area on the second floor. a small spiral staircase by the front door leads upstairs. hard to tell which opening is the staircase once up there on the circular balcony. not a drunk-friendly place at all ;-) nor is the metal stairway, with about 18 inch wide treads.
decent stereo system, and we found a radio station playing retro classic rock, not old top 40s, so that was pretty cool. although the place seemed like the ideal hippie hangout for the era, it was most likely an upper-income pad.
we dug a trench through the two to three foot snow outside to get to the grill for saturday dinner.
only a short hike from the hill, and very affordable, we will probably stay here again sometime. the only drawback was that the open floorplan and ceilings caused all sound to carry well, meaning that the snorers and early risers (well, one - me) were a small source of annoyance to the others.
although i prefer colder, drier weather, people were glad that temps stayed near 30F all day saturday. it was one of my sister's friends' only third time out. you could see her visibly improve throughout the day.
well, afternoon. this was not a die-hard skiing group, and some other planning was lacking, so there was no friday night or saturday morning skiing. eh, what the heck, it was to be a "social skiing" weekend anyway. i followed the other folks around the green or blue runs most of the time, messing around. i know how to have a good time whatever's on the menu.
the snow was great, no ice at all. we found out later that thursday a blizzard blew through, dropping twelve inches or better. we drove up in the tail end of it on friday. it snowed all day saturday. so everything was fresh and soft.
i headed out saturday night as well, and a couple staying with us came with me. the best, though, is the sunday morning skiing. always is. no one on the hill, sunny weather and no company means that i can go out, ski hard and toast my legs in less than two hours. they have some wonderful looking glades there - i wasn't up to actually skiing trees. but the rest of the area was fine. the usual complaint is the short black runs, which is unavoidable with the limited vertical available in the midwest. but damn, it was great anyway ;-)
only a few pics from my sister. not sure what most people do with a camera. i always think in terms of telling a story, or perhaps capturing some unique view. seems everyone else thinks in terms of portraits. oh well. but here's one of me, ready for the online dating sites. just kidding.
i took a six-day "weekend" - ! it's nice just to sit around on each end of the trip. saw a few movies. ate at a good japanese restaurant. and my favorite mexican place. drank good scotch and beer. got stuffed a couple times, got hungry a couple others.
and best of all, forgot about work. what was it we were doing again ?
i don't even care.