so stop making fun of my eating habits...

http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/new-eating-disorders-are-they-real

I can't help it if I'm a super taster, genetically superior to normal tasters...

"What is Adult Selective Eating? Like kids, adult picky eaters limit themselves to an extremely narrow range of foods. Unlike those who suffer from anorexia nervosa or bulimia, adult picky eaters are seemingly not worried about calorie counts or body image. But so far, researchers don’t know if adult picky eaters just haven’t outgrown childhood patterns or if their eating habits are a new twist on obsessive compulsive disorder. Some may be “supertasters,” with an abnormally acute sense of taste that turns them off certain foods. Many appear to have had unpleasant childhood associations with food."

So, fuck broccoli!

why I need a raise

So here I am in Hartford, CT, working with a client. I thought it was a nice city but my client told me it's dangerous. I agree with him after my GPS took me through a bunch of crack neighborhoods to get home. In fact, he told me not to drive down Albany St. under any circumstances, and where do you think the GPS told me to turn...I drove down the street, it was like scary Baltimore areas near the performing arts center.

So, I'm supposed to be teaching an advanced programming class, but half the students have never seen the tool I'm teaching on. Most people use it for at least 6 months before taking the advanced class. There is a secretary in the class who wants to be a programmer. I'm trying to support her but...for fuck's sake. No smoking is allowed anywhere on the customer site, which is huge, including outside, because it's a company in healthcare. I had to walk a half mile to smoke at lunch. By the time I got out of there at 6 today I had the shakes from no nicotine.

I'm also supposed to be sharing a client in the evening (what, me have a life when I could be working) with another consultant who is a lying sack of shit. I meet with him before customer meetings to decide who will do what and the agenda for the meeting. Then he goes off the rails and proposes crazy stuff to the customer. Today I got an irate call from the customer's secretary because I missed an 11 am conference call meeting that the other consultant set up but failed to attend. A few points on that:

1. the fuck nut consultant did not invite me to the meeting so I didn't know about it
2. the fuck nut consultant knows I'm working during the day somewhere else
3. the fuck nut consultant told my customer's secretary "I know I set up the meeting but Franki was supposed to handle it" so I would get the blame for him missing the meeting

Like, should I rip his balls off? I would, if I thought he had any.

Anyway, I get to do this all again tomorrow.

I need a raise.

all the bird houses

In case anyone actually cares, here are all the bird houses. My mom painted two - the one with the flowers and the one with the blue roof. I had to put them in my garage because it was raining and the waterproof coating I put on them wasn't dry.

rotation

So, I kept looking at Jesse's painting of the ice ax on Thursday night (http://blonstar40.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-painting.html). It didn't look right because the ax was on its side. So, I rotated the picture. I wonder if changing the direction of a picture pisses the artist off. I like the way it looks though.

bird houses

Today I finished painting the bird houses that I bought with my mom after my surgery.

 Lessons learned: it's more fun to paint them when my mom is here (tomorrow I'll post the ones we painted together). I called her while I was painting them and she said she wished we had done them together. The birds probably wish that too...

This is supposed to be a bird house for birds tripping on acid. I've never tripped on acid, but if I ever did, I would want to do it in a lavender and pink house.

This was supposed to be sort of a chinese bird house, for birds migrating from there. I was talking to my sister on the phone when I painted it. That's why I took the time to make shingles on it.

This was supposed to be sort of a Moroccan style bird house. I know, makes you wonder if craft stores should sell paints and unfinished bird houses to just anyone.

This was supposed to be a bird beach house. I can already hear my brother Steve making fun of it. Shut up Steve. Pretend it's a coal powered bird house.

new paintings

Just bought two paintings from Jesse Crock (www.jessecrockart.com).

 

I know, I need to re-install software to clean up my crackberry pictures...

BTW, I was cranking in the gym this week. Today I climbed a 10+ that I thought would be too hard and it was not easy, but not challenging either.

welcome to corporate hell

So, this is how my week has been going...

I finally heard back from the help desk TWO WEEKS after I submitted my trouble ticket because my laptop hit the deck. They sent me a bunch of links to "do it yourself to fix your problems" web sites. Of course, all the links were broken. Which doesn't matter because the problem is fixed...

I'm supposed to be learning new software that I can't install on my laptop because it requires Windows Server 2003. I spent all day yesterday downloading a VMWare image that may or may not have the tool I need installed on it - the tech notes were vague. I did have a log on to a demo server, but for some reason the server isn't working. I've sent three emails trying to get the problem fixed but, of course, have had no response...

I decided I would watch some recorded demos of the software since I can't actually play with it. The demos were recorded using software that requires a license to install it so you can watch the demos. The software is not on the list of free software my company provides. So I have to apply for approval to buy the software which I may or may not get. In the meantime, I can't watch the demos.

So I decided to do some prep work for an engagement I'm doing next week. I of course did not get approval to make travel arrangements until yesterday because who ever in my company had failed to contact the customer to make sure the statement of work was signed. So I ended up with a crap flight that cost a lot of money.

I have to teach a client how to build diagrams like the ones they were shown in the sales demo. The sales guy who did the demo sent me a ppt with the diagrams in it, but they were so minuscule I can't read what's on the diagrams. Then he sent me a file with the diagrams in it that I can't open because it was created using a different version of a database than I have on my laptop (and I can't get his version because it costs money). So finally I asked him to send me an XML version of the diagrams. Of course, no response...

And Monday some knuckle head fellow consultant arranged a 5 PM - 7 PM meeting with a client that is supposed to be my client. Aforementioned consultant apparently wants to keep the client for himself. I was supposed to do the call but the other consultant wouldn't stop talking long enough for me to get a word in edgewise even though we had a call before the call and had exchanged emails outlining how the call was going to go. The consultant brought up a bunch of stupid ideas for the client, so I'm actually glad I'm not working that account. The best part was when, 1 1/2 hours into the call, the consultant finally asked me to do a demo that I was supposed to do 15 minutes into the call. Five minutes before he asked me to do the demo my power went out. In the 6 years I've lived here the power has never gone out. So I couldn't do the demo. Ech.

Really, this is my life. Really.

extreme painting

view from the top of the ladder

I painted my skylight this weekend. It's 20 feet off the ground and I had a pretty shaky ladder. But the skylight looks great!

prickly pink

I've been in kind of a funk lately. So Sunday I decided to go buy some new cacti. Here are pictures of all of my cacti. I only came up with a name for one of the new ones...after my dead cat Prickly Pete, but the cactus is Prickly Pink.

Check out my Christmas cactus...thought it was supposed to only bloom at Christmas...maybe I should stop watering my plants with coffee.

These are all new cacti. Prickly Pink is to the right.

The cactus to the far left is new, replacing an old cactus that got a fungus and died.

just like triceratops

So, for those of you who haven't heard, it turns out triceratops isn't a real dinosaur. It's a teenage version of the torosaurus.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/04/14/135351303/the-triceratops-panic-why-does-science-keep-changing-its-mind?ps=cprs

I bring this up because it puts into context something that happened to me yesterday.

I got a panicked phone call from a friend of mine, we'll call her A. A had just found out through facebook that a couple we knew, that have been together since they were 13, broke up. Fucking facebook.

The news saddened me because the male participant in the now defunct relationship is a guy I have always idolized. I know it's stupid to do that to people, but he was one of those guys you couldn't help but idolize. He is handsome, funny, athletic, and intelligent. The couple had been through a lot and it was hard to believe, after everything, that they were breaking up.

It's hard to piece together what happened, but one thing was strange. The guy had a bunch of pictures of himself with another woman on his facebook page (note I am NOT on facebook because I think it's stupid, I logged on with A's account). The pictures were taken by the paparazzi. It appears he might have been involved with someone else while he was married and then got busted by a tabloid.

I don't know. I guess the guys who don't have affairs are non-existent or have a low level of testosterone. This guy just didn't seem like the type to do something like that. I always thought he would have more respect and trustworthiness to pull shit like that. He never seemed to be the kind of guy who would break a promise.

Sad days...first the dinosaurs aren't what we believe...now people are changing too...it's like nothing is what it appears to be...

And, oddly, I think I saw my ex from Maryland yesterday. Similar truck to what he used to drive, same ugly blue cloudveil shirt, gym sticker and gear stickers matched what he used to have on his truck back in the day...it was strange. I had just been to the UPS store to drop off my shit laptop (my new one arrived yesterday morning). I was waiting to turn onto Colorado when I noticed the gym sticker on the car in front of me. Then I tried to speed up to see who was driving but the person seemed to be speeding up and changing lanes to avoid me. The person tried to make a right turn right after I sped up behind him, and then cut over 4 lanes and made a left turn into a little fast food place.

I couldn't really see the driver. Probably it wasn't him. I'll be pissed if it was him because that means not only did the asspipe move to MY state but he's also in my neighborhood (the whole reason I moved from the east coast was so I would never have to see him again). But it could have been a coincidence about the truck and the shirt and the stickers. And, maybe that guy is writing on his blog right now how some psycho wearing a black baseball cap with a black car was following him for a quarter of a mile.

I am often mistaken for an undercover cop. Ha.

the secret of the universe...revealed here!

Still blaming paint fumes for my crazy dreams...I painted my kitchen yesterday....

Last night I had a dream that I was working in this building that looked like a school, except that it was an office. Everyone was running around like crazy but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be working on. In fact, my job there was so boring that I realized as I was walking down the hall that I had forgotten to go to work the day before.

I ended up walking into this women's lounge. There was a huge bathtub and two women were sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding a book that looked like the gutenberg bible with all these intricate drawings. They screamed when they saw me, and then an older, professor looking man with spectacles came out of a broom closet and said "oh god no!" I was like "what?" And he said "I can't tell you, it's classified". I was like "dude, I have a clearance."

So then he was like "great, you can help us with our project". I asked what the project was. He said "we've built the largest telescope in the world, and it's in the attic of this building". I was like really, how cool. He said "we are writing the story of the universe in this book (the gutenberg bible looking book) after we find the stories in the stars". So I said "it turns out I'm a writer too".

Everyone got excited and said they would take me to the telescope. I was excited too, though I pointed out they had put the secret entrance in the women's lounge, so it would look suspicious for men to go in there. The secret entrance was like a dumb waiter in the wall, but when I stepped into the dumb waiter it flipped around (like the handle of a mailbox) and dumped me into a tunnel, where I was vacuumed up into the attic.

The attic was a super technical operations center, and the telescope was huge and beautiful. I was really excited to use it. The professor guy said "Okay, when you look through the eye piece, you will see all the secrets of the universe, and then you will write them in this book".

I looked through the eye piece and saw....

Five white dots. Five fucking white dots. It was like the big dipper, but not even close to being as cool.

Everyone in the room started saying "isn't it so amazing?" I suddenly felt really depressed because I thought maybe I just couldn't see the secrets, or these people were so crazy they thought 5 dots were the universe.

Then I woke up.

hero orca

I found Patric's video interesting because last night I had a dream about sharks.

In the dream I was with my friend Brassy (JoJo) and we were driving through this beautiful gorge to get to my vacation home (which only exists in my dream, of course). I was telling Brassy how relaxing it would be at the home and how everything would be perfect there (Brassy and I have been having some bad attitude times lately).

There was a river running through the gorge, but it was like the ocean, and it was full of sharks, dolphins, and orcas. We stopped the car and watched them jumping out of the water. I was very happy.

But then this busload of teenage kids pulled up. All the kids got into the water with these hideous inflatable toys. I was so pissed because they were ruining the view. Then a bunch of the boys started picking up the sharks and punching them, or holding them out of the water so they couldn't breathe.

I started getting upset so Brassy yelled at the kids, but they were making fun of him. I said to Brassy "our beautiful vacation is ruined". But then a huge orca came out of the water. It's head filled the entire gorge. All the kids started screaming. I was like "good, the monster will eat everyone and then we can relax".

Then I woke up.

Note that my house has been filled with paint fumes for the past two days. No idea what this dream means...

cool vid of a redneck getting a lesson about the pointy end of a shark

I just watched this hilarious video from my friend Patric's shark blog:

http://sharkdivers.blogspot.com/2011/03/sunburnt-redneck-and-sharks-bad-combo.html

Ouch, quit it.

Safety first, indeed.

It's not that I'm bored today, watching internet videos. I'm stuck in my office because I have painters here painting my ceiling...

ever wonder about your energy efficiency?

I got this from my brother, and decided to post it because I found it interesting, and I want at least a few of my postings to be intellectually interesting...

From Steve:

I’m glad to see that I’m writing your blog now.

 

Maybe we can jazz it up a little bit, the RSS feed was a good first step.  This means I can monitor your/my blog now.  We should talk more about energy issues.  Here’s an interesting email I wrote to a Virginia business woman.  She was wondering about the cost and consumption of electricity compared to natural gas for residential homes in the Richmond area.  She found my information though our Virginia Energy Patterns and Trends project (VEPT).  Several links are Virginia specific, but the information can be generalized to any location. 

 

VEPT is currently an inactive project and data for 2011 is not available.  Assuming that residential efficiency hasn’t changed dramatically, there will be little difference in the information from 2007 to current.  I would direct you to these two tables:

 

http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/electric/showtable.asp?headerid=2

http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/naturalgas/disposition_eia.asp

 

These show total consumption of electricity and natural gas for the state.  We do not have access to more detailed, like county specific data.  This isn’t data like “gas used for heating air” or “electricity used for heating water.”  Consumers don’t report these values to anyone, and most wouldn’t know the percent of their electricity bill that goes to the end use.  DOE attempted to provide guidance with reports such as this one:

 

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html

 

Virginia has taken a similar approach and published the energy saver’s handbook also the Virginia Energy Plan. You can get this from DMME or from here: http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/energyover/index.asp

 

The comparison you are asking about is difficult to do without making a large number of assumptions.  If the house is built to identical code standards with equally efficient

appliances there will be negligible difference in energy (i.e. capacity for work) consumption.  This energy will be delivered in the form of natural gas or electricity meaning that the price paid difference will simply be the per unit energy cost of the fuel.  The major factors are the insulation factor (this includes windows and insulation), HVAC efficiency, water heater efficiency and appliance efficiency.  The usage, of course, is also important, but not relevant to your question.

 

Unfortunately, this means that one cannot make a definitive statement about the benefits of one fuel source over another.  I find resources like WellHome (http://www.wellhome.com) and Energy Savers (http://www.energysavers.gov/) to have good articles that are targeted for the general consumer.  They have several nice graphics like:

http://www.wellhome.com/blog/2010/03/whi23-energy-of-appliances-infographic/

 

GE has an excellent tool to describe appliance efficiency here: http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/appliances/

 

There are several companies in the commonwealth that specialize in doing energy audits of houses.  See: http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/energy_audits/index.cfm/mytopic=11160

 

This sort of audit on specific houses will let you do an apple to apple comparison.  A company that does energy audits in your area should be able to offer generalizations based on their experiences.

helpless desk

Considering I'm a consultant for a huge IT company, it does not seem unreasonable that I would expect the help desk to provide help for my laptop.

What the hell was I thinking...

I submitted a trouble ticket on Friday (I tried to CALL the help desk, but after being transferred to four different numbers, none of which was the right number, I gave up - stupid me, calling the number listed on the IT help desk web page) because a virus shut down my firewall. Seems like a CRITICAL problem, right????

Wrong. I never heard back on my ticket. So yesterday I did some research (not on the help desk web page - it was full of useless information and broken links) and fixed the problem myself. Today I got a bitchy email from the help desk saying my ticket was going to be closed due to inactivity.

What the fuck?????? They don't respond back to my ticket, which allows them to close it because no activity has been done on it? I fired off an email back to the help desk saying the reason there was no activity on the ticket was because they never responded back to it. So then the help desk called me to show I guess that they were doing SOMETHING. And what they did was transfer my help ticket to another organization because they want me to re-image my laptop. Though, having researched doing that last week, I found out that you have to download a bunch of software for re-imaging (they don't send out CDs anymore because that would be helpful) and the files for download are either missing or have errors. One guy had his hard drive wiped clean and then couldn't re-install Windows XP on it, nor could he access the help desk web page as he was being told to do because he couldn't install anything on it. He put a crazy message on the help desk blog about his problems (from someone else's laptop).

Poor thing. I wonder if he's in a padded white room salivating on himself and singing christmas carols.

I'm glad I work at a company full of unhelpful fuckers. Meanwhile my laptop is operating at half mast. Not like I have real work to do...assholes.

a slight correction

From my brother Steve (meant to post this on Friday but my computer crashed):

I did notice an error in my email.  I removed a sentence that made things more complicated, and inadvertently used the word combinations, instead of permutations.  It should be obvious which one is which, but you can flip a coin when you fix it.

 

http://betterexplained.com/articles/easy-permutations-and-combinations/

my mathy family

I knew that sooner or later, after I posted my little caesar's story, someone in my family would weigh in. I swear I have the mathy-est family in the world. From Steve (sorry if this embarrasses you, I didn't see any legal restrictions on reprinting your email). I've bolded my favorite parts:

"I read your article “pizza facts and factorials“.  Your article may be factual in its recollection of events but the actual way this calculation is done is wrong.  Simple factorials will tell you all possible combinations, allowing for repeated selections.  You should treat the problem as a combination problem.  This is very common problem in computer applications and does not require the services of a mathematician, a undergraduate college student will suffice.  In fact, a Wikipedia article or an article from Microsoft is sufficient to explain both the problem and how to do the calculations.

  Some time ago, the historical Blacksburg pub, the Cellar was redoing their menu.  They wondered exactly how many combinations of calzone they offered. Much drunken intellectual debate, that closely resembles your article,  ensued.  Because of Tammie, they asked me do the calculation for them.  My report to them is below, including a simple spreadsheet that will do the calculation for them in case they add or remove toppings.  To this day their menu states, “Try one of our 6,144 calzones” on the cover.

So what’s the answer for Little Caesar’s?  It’s 44,552 per pie or 89,104 for both, assuming they have 23 potential toppings (probably a bad assumption). "

Hahahahahaha...I knew I could get at least one more person obsessed with the little caesar's problem. 

 In closing, I can't believe those assholes didn't take the time to hire someone to provide a mathematically correct answer. And if anyone wants a copy of my brother's spreadsheet, too bad. Only I am allowed to have it.

pizza facts and factorials

After all these years, I don't know why I'm still obsessing about this...

Back in the early nineties there was a little caesar's commercial on tv (I found it on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmlRAstCCro). In the commercial there's a pizza special - 2 pizzas, 5 toppings each. The little boy in the commercial says "wow, the possibilities are endless". The dad says "what do you mean, 5 + 5 are 10". And the little boy says "actually, it's 1,480,576 possibilities".

So, for fun, I decided to try to calculate the number. I decided it would be a factorial:


n•(n - 1)•(n - 2)•(n - 3)....•1

For 5:
5•4•3•2•1 = 120

Not even close.

So I wrote the number and the problem on the white board in my office to work on when I needed a break. That proved to be a disaster since I was working with a bunch of mathematicians. Everyone became obsessed with the problem and we would spend hours arguing about it.

One of the mathematicians said that, since you could get all the same toppings on one pizza, the problem was 30! (5 toppings + 5 of the same topping * 5 - though this was debated as being wrong). That answer:

30! Factorial -    265,252,859,812,191,058,636,308,480,000,000

We then began calling little caesars pizza places to find out how many toppings they had to select from. The average was 10 so we did 10! -  3,628,800.

After more arguing, calculating, and one guy writing a computer program, we gave up on finding the answer. So I went to the library (this was back before companies were on the internet - wow, that makes me feel old) and looked up the address for little caesar's corporate headquarters. I sent a letter to the president asking how the number used in the commercial was calculated. I suggested in my letter that they must have hired someone to calculate the number, rather than making something up, because it wouldn't have been that expensive to hire a mathematician. And I also had a rambling paragraph about the sorry state of math in the US.


In response I received a form letter, and $30 worth of coupons for free little caesar's pizzas. I gave the coupons away and have, to this day, never eaten little caesar's pizza because I was so pissed about the commercial. 


Last year I finally took the commercial number off the back of my calculator, where I had taped it in case I had a sudden insight into where it might have come from.

snake face

I had another weird dream last night. In the dream I was in a doctor's office because I had cancer. The doctor was pushing me around in a wheel chair and he said that since I had to have surgery for the cancer I should also consider getting plastic surgery. I was like "I don't think I need plastic surgery" and the doctor said "but we can make you look unique!"

Then I saw a wheel chair coming in the other direction. There was a small woman, and she had cloth where her nose had been removed. Her entire face was covered with white beads sewn into her skin, and he eyelids had black beads. The doctor said "this woman had her nose cut off and her face beaded so she could look like a snake". She did look like a snake, sort of. And I got scared as her chair was getting closer to mine. When she was about 10 feet away from me she took a huge leap out of her chair and I realized she was jumping on top of me and that she was going to kill me.

Then I woke up

Publish Post

lights

On Saturday I finally, after four years of procrastination, bought new track lighting for my house. I hate shopping, especially for boring things, like lights.

I had done some research and had an idea of what I wanted. I went to lamps plus and was immediately engulfed in the mob that was shopping there. I was like are you fucking kidding me? Why would so many people be shopping for lights on a beautiful Saturday afternoon (I had to because it was the only day I could go). There were literally lights, fans, and water fountains every where, all blinking and blowing and bubbling at the same time. On top of that, there were three families with small children running and screaming all over the place (seriously people, please - don't take your kids in public if you can't control them - like what possible reason is there to bring kids to a light store? - shop online or leave them at home - just because your kids torture you with their bad behavior is no reason to expose the innocent public to your bad parenting).

I did what I usually do in those situations. I stayed on the perimeter of the store, near the windows, and decided I would walk around the perimeter of the store and leave. As I was heading into the first perimeter turn an older guy sitting in a chair in the corner of the store said to me "Hi". I said hi back and smiled. Then he said "you knocked me down, you owe me $500,000". I was like what the fuck, so I ignored him and kept walking. So he said, louder this time "You KNOCKED ME DOWN. You owe me $500,000!" Tres embarrassing. Why do the crazies always target me? I later saw him with a younger woman carrying the biggest floor lamp ever out of the store.

As I was about to leave a sales guy came over to me and asked if I needed help. Um, duh! I explained my idea for replacing all my track lighting, showed him pictures, and then he passed me off to another sales woman. She kept me waiting for 10 minutes while some annoying fuck asked her the same damn questions over and over again:

"does this lamp come in red?"
"no, it only comes in silver or gold"
"can I order it in red?"
"no, it only comes in those two colors"
"okay, so I guess I have to figure out what color I want...(pause) does it come in red?"

I could have screamed. But, then another sales woman came over. For the third time I explained my project. She did a great job helping me pick out light fixtures and fans for my room and my dad's room. But, it was still BORING. And took TWO hours. I don't ever want to have to do anything to my track lights again after this project is done.

Tomorrow the electrician is coming to give me an estimate. I can't wait until my new lights are up!!!!!