Monday, October 31, 2005
Sunday, October 30, 2005
It has not been rolled out to all of the Burger Kings yet, but they are upgrading their coffee and calling it "BK Joe". They will offer the regular regular and decaf, but they also have something called "Turbo" which is extra caffeine or double caffeine. I have not been able to find out exactly what the specs are yet.
They will not brew their coffee a pot at a time anymore. Your cup of coffee gets brewed as it is being dispensed much like the Senseo or Home Cafe coffee systems you can buy for your home. As a matter of fact, the company that makes the coffee for the Senseo machines, Douwe Egberts, is the same company that makes the machines for the new Burger King coffee.
This is the model that Burger King is deploying to all of their restaurants in the next month or so:
The Burger King machines have three buttons on the front panel (about where it says "Since 1753" in this picture) that say turbo, regular, and decaf. You push one of those buttons and then pull the black handle to dispense your coffee.
The Douwe Egbert website says that this machine takes two different blends of coffee, meaning a place for the regular beans and a place for the decaf beans. So that tells me that the turbo coffee isn't some kind of specially grown extra caffeine coffee, or that they chemically add caffeine to the beans. I think it just means that the system brews it a little stronger than the regular coffee. Either a longer slower brew time or by dispensing a little more coffee into the filter basket.
We have been drinking the turbo for the last few hours while I have been working and it is pretty good. Every cup is hot, fresh and consistent. There is nothing I hate more than a cup of coffee that came from a pot that has been on the burner for 40 minutes and has a burned taste. Don't be scared off by the turbo name. It is not some kind of drink-on-a-dare kind of coffee.
This is what Douwe Egbert's web site says about the brewer:
It seems every time I have ordered coffee at Burger King in the past it has been left on the burner too long, so this should really help there coffee sales.
They will not brew their coffee a pot at a time anymore. Your cup of coffee gets brewed as it is being dispensed much like the Senseo or Home Cafe coffee systems you can buy for your home. As a matter of fact, the company that makes the coffee for the Senseo machines, Douwe Egberts, is the same company that makes the machines for the new Burger King coffee.
This is the model that Burger King is deploying to all of their restaurants in the next month or so:
The Burger King machines have three buttons on the front panel (about where it says "Since 1753" in this picture) that say turbo, regular, and decaf. You push one of those buttons and then pull the black handle to dispense your coffee.
The Douwe Egbert website says that this machine takes two different blends of coffee, meaning a place for the regular beans and a place for the decaf beans. So that tells me that the turbo coffee isn't some kind of specially grown extra caffeine coffee, or that they chemically add caffeine to the beans. I think it just means that the system brews it a little stronger than the regular coffee. Either a longer slower brew time or by dispensing a little more coffee into the filter basket.
We have been drinking the turbo for the last few hours while I have been working and it is pretty good. Every cup is hot, fresh and consistent. There is nothing I hate more than a cup of coffee that came from a pot that has been on the burner for 40 minutes and has a burned taste. Don't be scared off by the turbo name. It is not some kind of drink-on-a-dare kind of coffee.
This is what Douwe Egbert's web site says about the brewer:
Brewing up to 1,700 cups per hour, our C-300 brewer is the ideal option for front or back-of-the-house use in food service operations requiring large volumes of freshly brewed coffee during peak hours. The C-300 holds two coffee packs, enabling you to offer two different blends.This coffee is not going to compete with Starbucks, but it is definitely an improvement in what fast food coffee typically tastes like.
It seems every time I have ordered coffee at Burger King in the past it has been left on the burner too long, so this should really help there coffee sales.
We are both sitting in Burger King and just finished a light breakfast. Sheri is reading the paper and drinking a cup of their new Turbo coffee. I am doing some freelance work on my laptop. I am using my light socket power adapter that I wrote about last weekend and so far no one has told me to stop it.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
When I go to Starbucks I either get two shots of espresso on ice or a small decaf triple Americano (three shots of espresso in a small cup topped off with hot water). When I get the Americano I usually end up going back for a second cup.
This morning we decided to wake up by reading the paper at Starbucks and I thought I would try a different order to avoid the need to go back up a second time and maybe save a little money. I ordered an Americano with four shots of espresso in a medium cup. Unfortunately the ratio between hot water and espresso didn't work out; too weak. As a matter of fact it was so unsatisfying that I had to go back up and order my usual small decaf triple Americano. Oh well.
After an hour or so there we went to Wal-Mart to pick up some pictures I sent via the Internet last week. We also picked up a few toiletries.
We stopped at the Wonder Bread thrift shop to get some low carb hot dog buns but they didn't have any.
Then we went to Menard's to get some wood pellets for the fireplace and masking tape. We also picked up a couple jars of Fisher's dry roasted peanuts.
We came home and I had a grilled a couple hot dogs and just used some of my low carb bread instead of a bun. I also ate an avocado because we have a few that will go bad soon.
After sitting around and watching TV for just a little bit we both went outside for some yard work. While Sheri cut the grass I cut down a lot of the perennial plants in the front and back yard. I also pulled up all of the tomato plants. There are a bunch of green tomatoes I pulled off the vines that I think I will fry up.
When Sheri was done cutting the grass I drained the oil from the lawnmower while it was hot and runny and put fresh oil back in.
We showered up and then watched THX 1138. It is George Lucas' first film and has received a lot of acclaim, but we didn't care for it.
It was short and it is only 8:30 PM now, so we are going to watch Me and You and Everyone We Know. Sheri has already seen it in the theater with Emily, but she thought I would like it too, so she put it on our Blockbuster queue.
Don't forget to set your clocks back an hour.
This morning we decided to wake up by reading the paper at Starbucks and I thought I would try a different order to avoid the need to go back up a second time and maybe save a little money. I ordered an Americano with four shots of espresso in a medium cup. Unfortunately the ratio between hot water and espresso didn't work out; too weak. As a matter of fact it was so unsatisfying that I had to go back up and order my usual small decaf triple Americano. Oh well.
After an hour or so there we went to Wal-Mart to pick up some pictures I sent via the Internet last week. We also picked up a few toiletries.
We stopped at the Wonder Bread thrift shop to get some low carb hot dog buns but they didn't have any.
Then we went to Menard's to get some wood pellets for the fireplace and masking tape. We also picked up a couple jars of Fisher's dry roasted peanuts.
We came home and I had a grilled a couple hot dogs and just used some of my low carb bread instead of a bun. I also ate an avocado because we have a few that will go bad soon.
After sitting around and watching TV for just a little bit we both went outside for some yard work. While Sheri cut the grass I cut down a lot of the perennial plants in the front and back yard. I also pulled up all of the tomato plants. There are a bunch of green tomatoes I pulled off the vines that I think I will fry up.
When Sheri was done cutting the grass I drained the oil from the lawnmower while it was hot and runny and put fresh oil back in.
We showered up and then watched THX 1138. It is George Lucas' first film and has received a lot of acclaim, but we didn't care for it.
It was short and it is only 8:30 PM now, so we are going to watch Me and You and Everyone We Know. Sheri has already seen it in the theater with Emily, but she thought I would like it too, so she put it on our Blockbuster queue.
Don't forget to set your clocks back an hour.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Google now hosts video files for free on Google Video. We are talking about shooting some video this weekend and posting it, and if it goes well we might start posting videos more regularly.
As a test please let me know if you can see this video from Google. I don't want to go to the effort of doing it if friends and family can't see the video.
As a test please let me know if you can see this video from Google. I don't want to go to the effort of doing it if friends and family can't see the video.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
We have already decided what we are going to cook for New Years Eve this year: sauerkraut balls. I think I am going to use this recipe from the Hey Hey Bar & Grill which is in Columbus' German Village.
On the train ride back to Chicago I read a neat article in Smithsonian Magazine about bananas.
The banana you are all familiar with seeing the grocery store is called a Cavendish, and there are a number of diseases that are threatening its existence. The article talked about all of the research going on to breed a replacement that is similar to the Cavendish and disease-resistant.
The article talked about how bananas are the fourth most important food crop in the world behind rice, soybeans, and corn.
It also mentioned that there are something like 2,000 different varieties of bananas in the world and how unfortunate it is that Americans are only familiar with the boring Cavendish.
They described some of the tastes of different bananas and it they really sounded delicious. They next time we were grocery shopping I saw a display of red bananas. They were about half the length of a Cavendish but about the girth. I didn’t know if they were dessert bananas (that is what they call a sweet banana like the Cavendish) or ones like plantains that are used more like a potato, but I wanted to expand my banana horizons so I bought a small bunch.
DELICIOUS!
I think I have converted Sheri to red bananas exclusively now. Similar to the Cavendish, but a little bit sweeter and creamier and smoother with maybe a slight hint of vanilla and raspberry. They are not the kind of sweet that you get when a Cavendish starts to turn dark and turn to sugar.
They are a little more expensive than Cavendish bananas. I think they have been in the $0.65 to $0.75 per pound range, whereas the Cavendish's have been below $0.40 per pound lately.
I am glad I read the article and was spurred to try the red bananas, but now I really want to try some of the other delicious ones the rest of the world is eating.
The banana you are all familiar with seeing the grocery store is called a Cavendish, and there are a number of diseases that are threatening its existence. The article talked about all of the research going on to breed a replacement that is similar to the Cavendish and disease-resistant.
The article talked about how bananas are the fourth most important food crop in the world behind rice, soybeans, and corn.
It also mentioned that there are something like 2,000 different varieties of bananas in the world and how unfortunate it is that Americans are only familiar with the boring Cavendish.
They described some of the tastes of different bananas and it they really sounded delicious. They next time we were grocery shopping I saw a display of red bananas. They were about half the length of a Cavendish but about the girth. I didn’t know if they were dessert bananas (that is what they call a sweet banana like the Cavendish) or ones like plantains that are used more like a potato, but I wanted to expand my banana horizons so I bought a small bunch.
DELICIOUS!
I think I have converted Sheri to red bananas exclusively now. Similar to the Cavendish, but a little bit sweeter and creamier and smoother with maybe a slight hint of vanilla and raspberry. They are not the kind of sweet that you get when a Cavendish starts to turn dark and turn to sugar.
They are a little more expensive than Cavendish bananas. I think they have been in the $0.65 to $0.75 per pound range, whereas the Cavendish's have been below $0.40 per pound lately.
I am glad I read the article and was spurred to try the red bananas, but now I really want to try some of the other delicious ones the rest of the world is eating.
Monday, October 24, 2005
If you want to watch TV in 180 weeks from now (only 42 months) you will need one of the following:
1. A TV that has an HD digital tuner.
2. Purchase a digital-to-analog converter box for about $50.
3. Subscribe to cable TV.
No exceptions.
1. A TV that has an HD digital tuner.
2. Purchase a digital-to-analog converter box for about $50.
3. Subscribe to cable TV.
No exceptions.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
A couple years ago we bought a new gas grill. We made sure to buy one that came with a propane tank because the tank we already had could not be refilled because of the new law that makes it illegal to fill propane tanks that do not have an overfill protection device (OPD). We kept the old tank as a back-up, which was about half filled, in case we ran out of gas in the middle of cooking a meal.
When we refilled our main tank at Ace Hardware this summer, which cost us $22 with tax, I asked if they do anything with the old tanks that do not have OPD's installed. The guy said they charge $5 to recycle them so I figured I would just keep the old half-filled one around as a back-up.
Yesterday as I was walking into Wal-Mart I passed their Blue Rhino propane cylinder exchange station out front. Two things occurred to me:
1.Their price for a cylinder of propane was only $14.24, not $22.
2. Could I bring in my old cylinder and and walk away with an OPD-equipped cylinder filled with gas for $14.24?
I looked on their propane exchange web page and YES, they explicitly state that I can bring in my old non-OPD cylinder and exchange it for a new compliant cylinder! No extra charge for the upgrade.
I will definitely do that with my old cylinder, but I have always felt uneasy about doing that on a regular basis. I felt like I was giving them a good cylinder that I took care of and knew its history and getting a cylinder that could have been mishandled or damaged in someway. But I guess if the difference is $8 for a fill-up I might have to get comfortable with the exchange program.
When we refilled our main tank at Ace Hardware this summer, which cost us $22 with tax, I asked if they do anything with the old tanks that do not have OPD's installed. The guy said they charge $5 to recycle them so I figured I would just keep the old half-filled one around as a back-up.
Yesterday as I was walking into Wal-Mart I passed their Blue Rhino propane cylinder exchange station out front. Two things occurred to me:
1.Their price for a cylinder of propane was only $14.24, not $22.
2. Could I bring in my old cylinder and and walk away with an OPD-equipped cylinder filled with gas for $14.24?
I looked on their propane exchange web page and YES, they explicitly state that I can bring in my old non-OPD cylinder and exchange it for a new compliant cylinder! No extra charge for the upgrade.
I will definitely do that with my old cylinder, but I have always felt uneasy about doing that on a regular basis. I felt like I was giving them a good cylinder that I took care of and knew its history and getting a cylinder that could have been mishandled or damaged in someway. But I guess if the difference is $8 for a fill-up I might have to get comfortable with the exchange program.
Louis Armstrong's nickname Satchmo is short for Satchelmouth because of the way his cheeks puff up when he played.
When I drive to and from work I like to keep a little digital voice recorder with me to make little notes to myself about things I hear on the radio or see during my drive. I brought my voice recorder with me this morning to Burger King to catch up on things I have been meaning to research, and Satchmo was one of them. I didn't even know that Satchmo was Louie Armstrong let alone what the etymology was.
When I drive to and from work I like to keep a little digital voice recorder with me to make little notes to myself about things I hear on the radio or see during my drive. I brought my voice recorder with me this morning to Burger King to catch up on things I have been meaning to research, and Satchmo was one of them. I didn't even know that Satchmo was Louie Armstrong let alone what the etymology was.
I am on my own again today (Sunday) while Sheri and Addy take the train into the city for the day. Addy has a couple zones of jet lag to deal with so Sheri is going to let her wake up on her own and then go into the city.
I woke up before both of them so I thought I would go out someplace to read the paper. In the back of my head I vaguely recalled seeing a Wi-Fi sign in our nearby Burger King, but maybe I was thinking of something else. Oh well, if they do great. If not I have the Sunday paper to spend a couple hours with.
As I walk into the restaurant I am scanning all of the walls and windows for "Wi-Fi Here!" signs. Nothing. While I am waiting for my order I am looking around for signs. Nothing. As I am carrying my tray to a table I see one poster tucked in the corner of the restaurant that says "Free Wireless Hot Spot". Yeah! But the sign is facing inside the restaurant, not outside to the rest of the world, and it is obscured by two ceiling-height partitions. You can only see the sign if you stand in very specific parts of the dining room. So it either means a) they don't really want too many people to know they have Wi-Fi, or b) who ever was in charge of promoting this store's Wi-Fi wasn't thinking too much or doesn't think it is an important selling point. Whatever, I am thrilled. It is much closer than our normal Panera Wi-Fi hangout. (A 1.5 mile drive versus a 4.5 mile drive.)
Another nice thing is that this Burger King does not get much traffic so it's like I have my own personal office, and my favorite both has a nice east-facing view, so I don't get much glare, and it has ceiling-high partitions on both sides so it is like a private office. Right now I am the only person in here at 9:30 AM, and they have some acceptable background pop music playing. The next time I stop in I will bring the camera and take a picture of the hidden Wi-Fi sign and my favorite booth to show you.
The one thing that I don't like is I don't see any electrical outlets to keep my laptop going. All of the booths have a light fixture about three feet above the table. I could buy one of those outlet adapters and just unscrew the light bulb and screw in the adapter while I am here. I am way back in the corner out of sight of the counter and hidden by a partition. I think that will work. I am going to swing by the hardware store on the way home and keep the adapter in my laptop bag. Yeah!
I had a bacon, egg, cheese, biscuit breakfast sandwich and a large soda. They also have a sign up announcing they are serving chili again. It is not as good as Wendy's, but pretty good, and sometimes I actually feel like eating Burger King's chili rather than Wendy's. I was upset when I ordered it this summer and they didn't have it. Maybe it is a seasonal thing for Burger King. A small chili, a plain hamburger, and a soda is not a bad meal for me.
I was looking for a cover for our outside air conditioning unit yesterday at Menard's and Wal-Mart but they didn't have one big enough for ours. It is 48" wide and the biggest cover I could find was 36" wide. Maybe I will stop by Ace Hardware after I leave Burger King and see what they have while I pick up the light socket electric outlet adapter.
I turned on the heat yesterday to take a little bit of the edge off for California Addy (even though San Francisco gets pretty cool at night I think) but now I am glad I did it for me. When I woke up this morning it was 34ยบ outside! Maybe I will put up the storm door today and close all of the storm windows today.
I woke up before both of them so I thought I would go out someplace to read the paper. In the back of my head I vaguely recalled seeing a Wi-Fi sign in our nearby Burger King, but maybe I was thinking of something else. Oh well, if they do great. If not I have the Sunday paper to spend a couple hours with.
As I walk into the restaurant I am scanning all of the walls and windows for "Wi-Fi Here!" signs. Nothing. While I am waiting for my order I am looking around for signs. Nothing. As I am carrying my tray to a table I see one poster tucked in the corner of the restaurant that says "Free Wireless Hot Spot". Yeah! But the sign is facing inside the restaurant, not outside to the rest of the world, and it is obscured by two ceiling-height partitions. You can only see the sign if you stand in very specific parts of the dining room. So it either means a) they don't really want too many people to know they have Wi-Fi, or b) who ever was in charge of promoting this store's Wi-Fi wasn't thinking too much or doesn't think it is an important selling point. Whatever, I am thrilled. It is much closer than our normal Panera Wi-Fi hangout. (A 1.5 mile drive versus a 4.5 mile drive.)
Another nice thing is that this Burger King does not get much traffic so it's like I have my own personal office, and my favorite both has a nice east-facing view, so I don't get much glare, and it has ceiling-high partitions on both sides so it is like a private office. Right now I am the only person in here at 9:30 AM, and they have some acceptable background pop music playing. The next time I stop in I will bring the camera and take a picture of the hidden Wi-Fi sign and my favorite booth to show you.
The one thing that I don't like is I don't see any electrical outlets to keep my laptop going. All of the booths have a light fixture about three feet above the table. I could buy one of those outlet adapters and just unscrew the light bulb and screw in the adapter while I am here. I am way back in the corner out of sight of the counter and hidden by a partition. I think that will work. I am going to swing by the hardware store on the way home and keep the adapter in my laptop bag. Yeah!
I had a bacon, egg, cheese, biscuit breakfast sandwich and a large soda. They also have a sign up announcing they are serving chili again. It is not as good as Wendy's, but pretty good, and sometimes I actually feel like eating Burger King's chili rather than Wendy's. I was upset when I ordered it this summer and they didn't have it. Maybe it is a seasonal thing for Burger King. A small chili, a plain hamburger, and a soda is not a bad meal for me.
I was looking for a cover for our outside air conditioning unit yesterday at Menard's and Wal-Mart but they didn't have one big enough for ours. It is 48" wide and the biggest cover I could find was 36" wide. Maybe I will stop by Ace Hardware after I leave Burger King and see what they have while I pick up the light socket electric outlet adapter.
I turned on the heat yesterday to take a little bit of the edge off for California Addy (even though San Francisco gets pretty cool at night I think) but now I am glad I did it for me. When I woke up this morning it was 34ยบ outside! Maybe I will put up the storm door today and close all of the storm windows today.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
We were so wowed by the color of the leaves on this tree we passed on the way to breakfast that we had to stop on the way back home for a picture. However the picture does not capture even a little bit of how amazing the color felt in person. It was almost like it was giving off a light of its own. You can click on the picture for a full size version which conveys a little bit more of its beauty, but still not what it was like in person. That is me under the tree.
I had a good day at work yesterday because I got to work on some stuff that was slightly different than normal. After work I applied lawn fertilizer as soon as I got home. I wanted to just apply a normal feeding, but when I went to buy the fertilizer at Home Depot on Thursday all they had was winterizer with weed control. I didn't want to put that on until the middle of December, but I also didn't want to go driving around yesterday for fertilizer because I was already running late. I guess I will just try to find a straight fertilizer by December.
I washed up and then put together a cookie tray of loaded nachos for our dinner. Onto an aluminum foil lined tray I layered:
· Low carb/high fiber/high protein tortilla chips from Trader Joe's
· Shredded extra sharp cheddar
I put that into a 350° oven for about seven minutes until the cheese was bubbly.
From a small sauce pan that was heating on the stove I spooned over the chips:
· Almost fat free Hormel turkey chili with beans (very good)
Then I sprinkled over all of that:
· One bunch of sliced green onions
· One diced tomato
· One diced avocado (from Chile and very sweet and flavorful)
· I scooped a few tablespoons of fat free sour cream into a sandwich baggy, poked a hole in one of the corners and piped sour cream over the whole tray.
We sat on the couch together and ate that while we watched the movie Batman Begins. Great movie. It is slightly confusing about what is going on in the beginning, but it all works itself out. Just stick with it. Good action. Good story. Good special effects. Really cool car.
After the movie Sheri felt like a donut. I didn't because I was still full from the nachos, but I have been meaning to go to Meijer to see if they have the B-29 airplane model I want to build. Sheri said a cookie from Meijer would also do the trick so at 9:30 PM we saddled up and went to the store.
They didn't have the model I wanted. I was tempted to get a fighter jet they had in the same 1:48 scale as the B-29, but the modern jets just are not as much fun to build because they are too streamlined and not enough little detail things to clue on. I might go to a couple stores today and see if I can find it. I am going to tape old maps from work to the table we bought for the front room and use that to build my model. That will be perfect. The maps will protect the table from paint and glue spills, and it will be better than taking up the kitchen table for a week or two. (I don't think Sheri would go for that anyway.)
When we were checking out I realized I was thirsty, and Meijer has a fountain drink dispenser near the checkout. I knew it was going to keep me awake, but it was Friday night and I could sleep in the next day, and I really wanted it, so I got a large Diet Coke. It really hit the spot.
We got home and got ready for bed. We watched TV in bed for a bit and I surfed the web from the laptop. After a while Sheri got tired and turned the TV off, but I was wide awake from my large soda. At 2 AM I was still awake and thinking of taking the laptop downstairs to the couch and watching TV, but decided to just turn the light out and listen to the radio with my earplug and try to go to sleep.
The friend we visited in San Francisco in early May is flying out here this afternoon (just Addy, not Jeff) for a girls weekend with Sheri, so we thought we would go out for breakfast this morning before she got here. I am typing this in Einstein Bros. Bagels while Sheri works a sudoku puzzle. She had a toasted raisin bagel with cream cheese and I had their Santa Fe breakfast sandwich. That is a little omelet, a piece of sausage, pepper jack cheese, and salsa on a bagel (I picked their everything bagel). All of the ingredients were good, but sandwiches on bagels, especially ones with that much stuff, are difficult to eat. I had to get a fork and eat it piecemeal because the insides kept slipping out. I won't get that again. Maybe with just the egg and cheese might be easier to eat, but the egg could still get squeezed out when I bite into the very firm bagel.
Which brings me to my report on OpenOffice.org. I installed it while I was grilling the London broil Thursday night. It installed flawlessly. No weird stuff. The download file is only 77 Mb. Someone with dial-up could download that without too much pain. So far I love it! The spreadsheet feels almost exactly like the Excel that I have gotten used to over the last 16 years (I had Excel on my Macintosh SE in 1989!) and it is hands-down better than the crummy spreadsheet program that comes bundled with MS Works.
The word processor is serviceable so far. I am not using it for anything more than a text editor and spelling checker so I can't really say if it is any better or worse than Word. For what I am using it for right now it feels exactly the same as the word processor that comes with MS Works. I have also been using MS Word for 16 years and I can get it to do some pretty amazing things. Looking over all of the menus it seems to have everything, but I don't know if I will be able to make it sing like Word until I actually get into a complicated document. That might not happen because my need for that kind of stuff happens more at work where I have Word installed.
I also have not tried opening documents created in Word and Excel so I can't comment yet on the compatibility.
So bottom line, if you already have MS Office installed on your PC you will probably just want to keep using that, but if you are using the bundled programs that came with your PC, you definitely want to download OpenOffice.org. If you are about to buy a new PC and are trying to decide whether to click the option to include MS Office I would also say save your money and just use OpenOffice.org.
There is a database included but I have not played with that yet. I have some pretty involved MS Access databases I have developed for work, and because of the Visual Basic components I wrote for them I don't know how compatible it would be, but if you just needed some basic database utility on the desktop I think it would be perfect. I will write more about this in the future as well as the drawing program, the math equation editor, and the MS PowerPoint replacement.
Sheri will be heading to the airport in a few hours to pick up Addy. My plans roughly are:
Watch the Ohio State vs. Indiana football game
Watch the first game of the World Series that starts at 6:30 PM CDT.
Cut down some of the perennial plants in the yard to get ready for winter.
Look for a B-29 model
Sweep out the garage
Check the air pressure in my tires
I washed up and then put together a cookie tray of loaded nachos for our dinner. Onto an aluminum foil lined tray I layered:
· Low carb/high fiber/high protein tortilla chips from Trader Joe's
· Shredded extra sharp cheddar
I put that into a 350° oven for about seven minutes until the cheese was bubbly.
From a small sauce pan that was heating on the stove I spooned over the chips:
· Almost fat free Hormel turkey chili with beans (very good)
Then I sprinkled over all of that:
· One bunch of sliced green onions
· One diced tomato
· One diced avocado (from Chile and very sweet and flavorful)
· I scooped a few tablespoons of fat free sour cream into a sandwich baggy, poked a hole in one of the corners and piped sour cream over the whole tray.
We sat on the couch together and ate that while we watched the movie Batman Begins. Great movie. It is slightly confusing about what is going on in the beginning, but it all works itself out. Just stick with it. Good action. Good story. Good special effects. Really cool car.
After the movie Sheri felt like a donut. I didn't because I was still full from the nachos, but I have been meaning to go to Meijer to see if they have the B-29 airplane model I want to build. Sheri said a cookie from Meijer would also do the trick so at 9:30 PM we saddled up and went to the store.
They didn't have the model I wanted. I was tempted to get a fighter jet they had in the same 1:48 scale as the B-29, but the modern jets just are not as much fun to build because they are too streamlined and not enough little detail things to clue on. I might go to a couple stores today and see if I can find it. I am going to tape old maps from work to the table we bought for the front room and use that to build my model. That will be perfect. The maps will protect the table from paint and glue spills, and it will be better than taking up the kitchen table for a week or two. (I don't think Sheri would go for that anyway.)
When we were checking out I realized I was thirsty, and Meijer has a fountain drink dispenser near the checkout. I knew it was going to keep me awake, but it was Friday night and I could sleep in the next day, and I really wanted it, so I got a large Diet Coke. It really hit the spot.
We got home and got ready for bed. We watched TV in bed for a bit and I surfed the web from the laptop. After a while Sheri got tired and turned the TV off, but I was wide awake from my large soda. At 2 AM I was still awake and thinking of taking the laptop downstairs to the couch and watching TV, but decided to just turn the light out and listen to the radio with my earplug and try to go to sleep.
The friend we visited in San Francisco in early May is flying out here this afternoon (just Addy, not Jeff) for a girls weekend with Sheri, so we thought we would go out for breakfast this morning before she got here. I am typing this in Einstein Bros. Bagels while Sheri works a sudoku puzzle. She had a toasted raisin bagel with cream cheese and I had their Santa Fe breakfast sandwich. That is a little omelet, a piece of sausage, pepper jack cheese, and salsa on a bagel (I picked their everything bagel). All of the ingredients were good, but sandwiches on bagels, especially ones with that much stuff, are difficult to eat. I had to get a fork and eat it piecemeal because the insides kept slipping out. I won't get that again. Maybe with just the egg and cheese might be easier to eat, but the egg could still get squeezed out when I bite into the very firm bagel.
Which brings me to my report on OpenOffice.org. I installed it while I was grilling the London broil Thursday night. It installed flawlessly. No weird stuff. The download file is only 77 Mb. Someone with dial-up could download that without too much pain. So far I love it! The spreadsheet feels almost exactly like the Excel that I have gotten used to over the last 16 years (I had Excel on my Macintosh SE in 1989!) and it is hands-down better than the crummy spreadsheet program that comes bundled with MS Works.
The word processor is serviceable so far. I am not using it for anything more than a text editor and spelling checker so I can't really say if it is any better or worse than Word. For what I am using it for right now it feels exactly the same as the word processor that comes with MS Works. I have also been using MS Word for 16 years and I can get it to do some pretty amazing things. Looking over all of the menus it seems to have everything, but I don't know if I will be able to make it sing like Word until I actually get into a complicated document. That might not happen because my need for that kind of stuff happens more at work where I have Word installed.
I also have not tried opening documents created in Word and Excel so I can't comment yet on the compatibility.
So bottom line, if you already have MS Office installed on your PC you will probably just want to keep using that, but if you are using the bundled programs that came with your PC, you definitely want to download OpenOffice.org. If you are about to buy a new PC and are trying to decide whether to click the option to include MS Office I would also say save your money and just use OpenOffice.org.
There is a database included but I have not played with that yet. I have some pretty involved MS Access databases I have developed for work, and because of the Visual Basic components I wrote for them I don't know how compatible it would be, but if you just needed some basic database utility on the desktop I think it would be perfect. I will write more about this in the future as well as the drawing program, the math equation editor, and the MS PowerPoint replacement.
Sheri will be heading to the airport in a few hours to pick up Addy. My plans roughly are:
Watch the Ohio State vs. Indiana football game
Watch the first game of the World Series that starts at 6:30 PM CDT.
Cut down some of the perennial plants in the yard to get ready for winter.
Look for a B-29 model
Sweep out the garage
Check the air pressure in my tires
Friday, October 21, 2005
A company called Brinker International owns all six of these restaurants:
Chili's
Corner Bakery Cafรฉ
On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina
Maggiano's Little Italy
Romano's Macaroni Grill
Rockfish Seafood Grill
Chili's
Corner Bakery Cafรฉ
On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina
Maggiano's Little Italy
Romano's Macaroni Grill
Rockfish Seafood Grill
Gravina Island, Alaska is the island that is scheduled to get a $0.94 billion bridge thanks to the transportation bill that George Bush signed in August.
It will be almost as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge.
Less than 50 people live on the island, and there are no stores, no restaurants and no paved roads. The ferry currently runs between every 7 to 30 minutes depending on time of day and the trip takes only five minutes. The fare is $4 for adults and $2 for children.
If the government paid for 1,000 rides a day the $0.94 billion would last for almost 650 years! If each of the 50 residents of the island took four trips per day (still probably a huge over estimate) the $0.94 billion would last over 3,200 years!!!
When I graduated from college I was a staunch Republican because I thought the Democrats just liked to throw money around to get elected and the Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. It looks like things have totally reversed.
It was difficult for me to change my allegiance too because being a Republican was somewhat of my identity. The Republicans represented intelligence, basing decisions on facts and not emotions, valuing higher education. Now they demonize Democrats as elitists with their fancy college degrees, and depend on getting people's emotions elevated by making false comparisons with misleading information.
It will be almost as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge.
Less than 50 people live on the island, and there are no stores, no restaurants and no paved roads. The ferry currently runs between every 7 to 30 minutes depending on time of day and the trip takes only five minutes. The fare is $4 for adults and $2 for children.
If the government paid for 1,000 rides a day the $0.94 billion would last for almost 650 years! If each of the 50 residents of the island took four trips per day (still probably a huge over estimate) the $0.94 billion would last over 3,200 years!!!
When I graduated from college I was a staunch Republican because I thought the Democrats just liked to throw money around to get elected and the Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. It looks like things have totally reversed.
It was difficult for me to change my allegiance too because being a Republican was somewhat of my identity. The Republicans represented intelligence, basing decisions on facts and not emotions, valuing higher education. Now they demonize Democrats as elitists with their fancy college degrees, and depend on getting people's emotions elevated by making false comparisons with misleading information.
I have talked here before about why you should care about the dew point rather than relative humidity (as a rule of thumb, a dew point less than 65° is comfortable). Today in a similar vain I am going to talk about sunrise and sunset versus civil twilight.
The times that the weather forecasters give on TV for sunrise and sunset are useless for most people watching them. Why? Most people incorrectly think sunrise and sunset is respectively when it becomes light and when it becomes dark, while actually these terms have very technical definitions.
While civil twilight also has a very technical definition, it is of much more value to the average person:
I want to apply lawn fertilizer tonight after work and I wanted to see how much time I have. Sunset in my location is 6:02 PM, but civil twilight doesn't end until 6:30 PM.
If you want to find out this information for your location just go to this page that is run by the US Naval Observatory and under the first section select your state and type in your city and click the "Get Data" button.
The times that the weather forecasters give on TV for sunrise and sunset are useless for most people watching them. Why? Most people incorrectly think sunrise and sunset is respectively when it becomes light and when it becomes dark, while actually these terms have very technical definitions.
Sunrise and sunset refer to the times when the upper edge of the disk of the Sun is on the horizon, considered unobstructed relative to the location of interest. Atmospheric conditions are assumed to be average, and the location is in a level region on the Earth's surface.This doesn't tell you when it will be "dark" so you will know how long you have to finish your yard work or how to plan a picnic. For this you need to know about civil twilight.
While civil twilight also has a very technical definition, it is of much more value to the average person:
Civil twilight is defined to begin in the morning, and to end in the evening when the center of the Sun is geometrically 6 degrees below the horizon. This is the limit at which twilight illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; at the beginning of morning civil twilight, or end of evening civil twilight, the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under good atmospheric conditions in the absence of moonlight or other illumination. In the morning before the beginning of civil twilight and in the evening after the end of civil twilight, artificial illumination is normally required to carry on ordinary outdoor activities. Complete darkness, however, ends sometime prior to the beginning of morning civil twilight and begins sometime after the end of evening civil twilight.Simply, it is when there is still enough sunlight outside to do stuff without turning on the lights.
I want to apply lawn fertilizer tonight after work and I wanted to see how much time I have. Sunset in my location is 6:02 PM, but civil twilight doesn't end until 6:30 PM.
If you want to find out this information for your location just go to this page that is run by the US Naval Observatory and under the first section select your state and type in your city and click the "Get Data" button.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
I am reading through the on-line documentation for OpenOffice.org and the spreadsheet even has a pivot table function like in Excel! It is called DataPilot. I can't wait to get my hands on it now.
From the screens shots and instructions I have read looked at so far it looks and feels almost exactly like MS Office. I should be able to open up and application and starting working right away.
From the screens shots and instructions I have read looked at so far it looks and feels almost exactly like MS Office. I should be able to open up and application and starting working right away.
Many many years ago I walked into a French bakery that had just opened up and was getting lots of good press. I was just out of college so money was a little tight so I scanned the menu board and the cheapest thing was a baguette. When it was my turn to order I asked for one "bag you et". The lady gave me a snotty look, pronounced it correctly with a questioning inflection. I sheepishly said yes.
I was in a similar situation last weekend. We were in a bakery and their challah rolls looked really good. I ordered one but didn't know how to pronounce it. I opted to pronounce the "ch" like "chalk". I just looked it up and I was wrong. The two acceptable pronunciations are either "hall uh" or "call uh". At least I didn't get a snotty look this time.
I was in a similar situation last weekend. We were in a bakery and their challah rolls looked really good. I ordered one but didn't know how to pronounce it. I opted to pronounce the "ch" like "chalk". I just looked it up and I was wrong. The two acceptable pronunciations are either "hall uh" or "call uh". At least I didn't get a snotty look this time.
In response to my post about OpenOffice.org someone sent me an e-mail mentioning GIMP which is the free version of Adobe's Photoshop. From the screen shots of the program I think it looks like a pretty full-featured program. I think I will give that a try too since we have been into digital photography lately.
On our oldest computer we paid $200 or $300 for the full version of MS Office Pro ourselves.
On the PC we got last year we got a full copy of MS Office through Sheri's employer for only $20.
The $500 laptop we got in June is intended to be almost exclusively just a web browsing PC and did not buy MS Office. A lot of PC's, like this one, come preinstalled with MS Works. For the light word processing or quickie spreadsheet I might want to do when I am in a coffee shop and away from a primary PC MS Works is just fine.
Today they announced the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. This is a free Office suite that has been primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Novell, Red Hat, Debian, and Intel. Individual programmers around the world have helped with the development in their spare time similar to the way Mozilla's Firefox browser has been programmed.
OpenOffice is already the required office format for internal archives of the State of Massachusetts!
Some of the reviews I have read said the word processing and spreadsheet are almost exactly like MS Word and MS Excel, and in some places even better.
I think tonight I am going to download and install OpenOffice on the laptop and run it through its paces.
On the PC we got last year we got a full copy of MS Office through Sheri's employer for only $20.
The $500 laptop we got in June is intended to be almost exclusively just a web browsing PC and did not buy MS Office. A lot of PC's, like this one, come preinstalled with MS Works. For the light word processing or quickie spreadsheet I might want to do when I am in a coffee shop and away from a primary PC MS Works is just fine.
Today they announced the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. This is a free Office suite that has been primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Novell, Red Hat, Debian, and Intel. Individual programmers around the world have helped with the development in their spare time similar to the way Mozilla's Firefox browser has been programmed.
OpenOffice is already the required office format for internal archives of the State of Massachusetts!
Some of the reviews I have read said the word processing and spreadsheet are almost exactly like MS Word and MS Excel, and in some places even better.
I think tonight I am going to download and install OpenOffice on the laptop and run it through its paces.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
This is really cool! There is a water hole in Africa that flows until mid November. During the wet season it attracts an amazing amount of wildlife: giraffes, hyenas, boars, zebras, antelopes, monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, etc. National Geographic set up a live camcorder and is streaming it to the Internet 24 hours a day. There are always animals at the hole. They even have a night vision camera set up to see who comes then.
This is a map of exactly where the watering hole is.
This is a map of exactly where the watering hole is.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
This web site maps out the coordinates of news stories from Google News in real time! Just click on the link and let it sit there for a minute, and then news stories will start to pop up and zoom to the spot on the globe where it is being reported from.
You will also see little colored circles all over the map. These are older new stores. You can click on them and the text of the story will pop up. Red circles are for world news; yellow for US news, etc.
You will also see little colored circles all over the map. These are older new stores. You can click on them and the text of the story will pop up. Red circles are for world news; yellow for US news, etc.
This AP story was in the USA Today about peak oil and a couple paragraphs stood out to me:
"The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s," says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University professor emeritus of geosciences. "The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death."
He's not kidding: Production of pesticides and fertilizers needed to sustain crop yields rely on large quantities of chemicals derived from petroleum. And Stanford University's Amos Nur says China and the United States could "slide into a military conflict" over oil.
Monday, October 17, 2005
After about 10 years of the Internet being in the mainstream of technology I think most people of heard of an IP address and know what one looks like.
An IP address is four groups numbers where each group can range from 0 to 255. The lowest IP address is 0:0:0:0 and the highest is 255:255:255:255.
This means there can be 4,294,967,296 (4.3 billion) unique IP address.
(256 x 256 x 256 x 256 = 4,294,967,296)
This might seem like a lot, but at the rate we are adding new devices and networks we will run out of IP addresses in two to eight years.
To solve this problem a new IP address format has been created called IP version 6 (or IPv6). The current IP address format is actually known as IPv4.
IPv6 looks like eight groups of four digits or letters ranging from 0 to F. This number and letter numbering scheme is known as hexadecimal because there are 16 different characters to use instead of just ten available in the decimal system.
Therefore the lowest IPv6 is
0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000
and the highest IPv6 address is:
FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF
Now for the amazing part: How many more IP addresses does that give us? Well each four character hexadecimal group has 65,536 possible combinations.
(16 x 16 x 16 x 16 = 65,536)
Combine these eight groups together and you get 340 undecillion possible addresses!
That looks like this:
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 = see above)
How big is this number? It is so big that you could assign 430,000,000,000,000,000,000 IP addresses to each square inch of the Earth!
Practically this means everything in your life can have its own unique IP address. Every house, car, cell phone, wristwatch, coffee maker, TV, radio, MP3 player, PC can have their own address. Anything that has anyway to communicate on a network will be able to be uniquely identified. This will make possible some really neat stuff that I cannot even imagine yet.
An IP address is four groups numbers where each group can range from 0 to 255. The lowest IP address is 0:0:0:0 and the highest is 255:255:255:255.
This means there can be 4,294,967,296 (4.3 billion) unique IP address.
(256 x 256 x 256 x 256 = 4,294,967,296)
This might seem like a lot, but at the rate we are adding new devices and networks we will run out of IP addresses in two to eight years.
To solve this problem a new IP address format has been created called IP version 6 (or IPv6). The current IP address format is actually known as IPv4.
IPv6 looks like eight groups of four digits or letters ranging from 0 to F. This number and letter numbering scheme is known as hexadecimal because there are 16 different characters to use instead of just ten available in the decimal system.
Therefore the lowest IPv6 is
0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000
and the highest IPv6 address is:
FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF
Now for the amazing part: How many more IP addresses does that give us? Well each four character hexadecimal group has 65,536 possible combinations.
(16 x 16 x 16 x 16 = 65,536)
Combine these eight groups together and you get 340 undecillion possible addresses!
That looks like this:
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 = see above)
How big is this number? It is so big that you could assign 430,000,000,000,000,000,000 IP addresses to each square inch of the Earth!
Practically this means everything in your life can have its own unique IP address. Every house, car, cell phone, wristwatch, coffee maker, TV, radio, MP3 player, PC can have their own address. Anything that has anyway to communicate on a network will be able to be uniquely identified. This will make possible some really neat stuff that I cannot even imagine yet.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
I have not put together a model since probably grade school and I have been thinking about putting one together lately. I was looking through the Revell-Monogram site and I think I would like to try the B-29 Superfortress.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Last night I made a pretty good pot of vegetable soup. This morning we both had a bowl for breakfast and then went to Starbucks for coffee and to read the paper. There was a lot of foot traffic in and out of the store which means lots of good people watching.
After an hour or so we decide to walk around the area for a little bit. It is cooking season again so I wanted to go to William Sonoma and Sur La Table. We also stopped at Einstein Bros. Bagels for a snack. When one opened in Columbus we tried it but were not impressed, but what I realized today was that we were comparing it to Block's Bagels which is kind of like comparing a Chevy to a Mercedes. It was also a long time ago and they have had plenty of time to improve. Anyway, I was fairly impressed with the bagels we tried and the coffee. It is no Block's, but it is pretty good. One good indication is that they serve their cream cheese and lox bagel with red onion, tomato, and capers.
Then we drove to Brookfield to walk around a store called Past-Time Hobbies that carries the full line of Corgi die-cast models. I didn't buy anything but it was fun.
On the way to the model store we made a detour into a huge Harley Davidson boutique. I have been meaning to stop in to look for a full grain (not top grain) leather jacket. We were in a Harley store a few years ago and there was a leather jacket that felt like it was made out of belting leather. It weighed a ton, and it was so stiff it could stand up stood up on its own when I set it on the floor. I didn't find any jackets with the leather like I was looking for, and they all had too much flashy Harley Davidson stuff embroidered on.
On the way back home we stopped in a Wild Oats Market for a little snack. We got a little 5-ounce tray of pre-diced 2 year old sharp cheddar cheese and a Gala apple. Sheri loves fruit and cheese together lately.
We came home and I spent maybe 45 minutes working on bills, mail, and the check register, and then we went downstairs to have some soup for dinner.
Then we watched Beautiful Boxer. It is a true story about a transvestite kick boxer in Thailand. It sounds weird and farfetched, but it is a really good story. Rent it.
After an hour or so we decide to walk around the area for a little bit. It is cooking season again so I wanted to go to William Sonoma and Sur La Table. We also stopped at Einstein Bros. Bagels for a snack. When one opened in Columbus we tried it but were not impressed, but what I realized today was that we were comparing it to Block's Bagels which is kind of like comparing a Chevy to a Mercedes. It was also a long time ago and they have had plenty of time to improve. Anyway, I was fairly impressed with the bagels we tried and the coffee. It is no Block's, but it is pretty good. One good indication is that they serve their cream cheese and lox bagel with red onion, tomato, and capers.
Then we drove to Brookfield to walk around a store called Past-Time Hobbies that carries the full line of Corgi die-cast models. I didn't buy anything but it was fun.
On the way to the model store we made a detour into a huge Harley Davidson boutique. I have been meaning to stop in to look for a full grain (not top grain) leather jacket. We were in a Harley store a few years ago and there was a leather jacket that felt like it was made out of belting leather. It weighed a ton, and it was so stiff it could stand up stood up on its own when I set it on the floor. I didn't find any jackets with the leather like I was looking for, and they all had too much flashy Harley Davidson stuff embroidered on.
On the way back home we stopped in a Wild Oats Market for a little snack. We got a little 5-ounce tray of pre-diced 2 year old sharp cheddar cheese and a Gala apple. Sheri loves fruit and cheese together lately.
We came home and I spent maybe 45 minutes working on bills, mail, and the check register, and then we went downstairs to have some soup for dinner.
Then we watched Beautiful Boxer. It is a true story about a transvestite kick boxer in Thailand. It sounds weird and farfetched, but it is a really good story. Rent it.
Friday, October 14, 2005
When I was in Toledo last weekend I bought a really cool shirt at Dillard's. It is a white button down shirt with an intricate blue paisley design.
Anyway, a woman I met at work today for the first time commented within five minutes of meeting her about how much she really liked my shirt. I love it when that happens.
Anyway, a woman I met at work today for the first time commented within five minutes of meeting her about how much she really liked my shirt. I love it when that happens.
There is a kind of spam you may have noticed on my blog. Web robots comb the web looking for comment buttons on blogs, and when they find them they leave a comment with a link to web site.
Lately I have been getting these fairly regularly. Because of this I have turned on a feature that will help stop this. If you want to post a comment to my blog it will work just like it did before except you will see a picture of a nonsense word. All you have to do is type this word into the space below it. It is a picture of a word so the spammers cannot simply write a program that would copy that word and paste it into the space. It takes a person to actually do it.
It will look something like this:
So you would just type "todmcz" in the space below the word picture (without the quotation marks) before you click the OK button to post your comment.
Lately I have been getting these fairly regularly. Because of this I have turned on a feature that will help stop this. If you want to post a comment to my blog it will work just like it did before except you will see a picture of a nonsense word. All you have to do is type this word into the space below it. It is a picture of a word so the spammers cannot simply write a program that would copy that word and paste it into the space. It takes a person to actually do it.
It will look something like this:
So you would just type "todmcz" in the space below the word picture (without the quotation marks) before you click the OK button to post your comment.
We watched The Life and Death of Peter Sellers last night and it was very good. Rent it. I don't know how to describe him. Confused? Anyway, it is a very interesting character study.
As a side note, the actress that played Sophia Loren, Sonia Aquino, is a total hottie.
As a side note, the actress that played Sophia Loren, Sonia Aquino, is a total hottie.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Amtrak's board of directors has approved the first steps of the plan from the Bush administration to break up Amtrak.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
I just got back from visiting a new dentist and I think I have seen the future of dentistry.
Instead of using the traditional high-speed rubber cup and paste method for cleaning, and a flossing afterwards, all he used was a new device called a Prophy-Jet.
Think of it as a power-washer for your mouth. A slurry of water and flavored baking soda is accelerated out of the tip by a strong jet of air. The baking soda is used as an abrasive to remove plaque and stains. My teeth are actually a little bit whiter now! It does such a great job of getting between teeth he does not do the normal flossing either.
He would do maybe a section of about three teeth and then the assistant would use a suction tube to slurp out the salty baking soda slurry that accumulated in my mouth, and then he would do the next few teeth.
It was also by far the fastest 6-month cleaning I have ever had. They did all of this in about ten minutes:
1. Four bitewing x-rays
2. Probed my gums and teeth with a traditional pick
3. Used an ultrasonic scaler for just a minute or so to loosen things up a bit
4. Used the ProphyJet for maybe five minutes
No picking or scraping that seems to last forever and makes your toes curl up. My teeth also feel extremely smooth now.
Instead of using the traditional high-speed rubber cup and paste method for cleaning, and a flossing afterwards, all he used was a new device called a Prophy-Jet.
Think of it as a power-washer for your mouth. A slurry of water and flavored baking soda is accelerated out of the tip by a strong jet of air. The baking soda is used as an abrasive to remove plaque and stains. My teeth are actually a little bit whiter now! It does such a great job of getting between teeth he does not do the normal flossing either.He would do maybe a section of about three teeth and then the assistant would use a suction tube to slurp out the salty baking soda slurry that accumulated in my mouth, and then he would do the next few teeth.
It was also by far the fastest 6-month cleaning I have ever had. They did all of this in about ten minutes:
1. Four bitewing x-rays
2. Probed my gums and teeth with a traditional pick
3. Used an ultrasonic scaler for just a minute or so to loosen things up a bit
4. Used the ProphyJet for maybe five minutes
No picking or scraping that seems to last forever and makes your toes curl up. My teeth also feel extremely smooth now.
I came across a few quotes in some stories I was reading today that were insightful, funny, or just good writing.
- 1964 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy in a story about Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling
[As long as you are not bluffing…] a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action.
- Two quotes from a story about the disappointment with the new Motorola ROKR iPod cell phone.
…a hot gadget has to pretend to meet a need while actually fulfilling a want.
…the ROKR is more soccer mom than supermodel.
- From a story about the inflation economists are predicting.
Ford and General Motors may be struggling to keep their heads above water, but they're doing it by standing on the shoulders of their submerged auto-parts suppliers.
- 1964 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy in a story about Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling
[As long as you are not bluffing…] a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action.
- Two quotes from a story about the disappointment with the new Motorola ROKR iPod cell phone.
…a hot gadget has to pretend to meet a need while actually fulfilling a want.
…the ROKR is more soccer mom than supermodel.
- From a story about the inflation economists are predicting.
Ford and General Motors may be struggling to keep their heads above water, but they're doing it by standing on the shoulders of their submerged auto-parts suppliers.
If you recall a few weeks ago I wrote about a cost splitting program our city has to plant trees in the parkway in front of people's houses. We signed up to get an autumn blaze maple. Our cost: $125.
Last month we staked out the location where we wanted the tree to go. They scheduled an underground utility location person to come out and make sure it was safe to plant there. All thumbs up.
We have been anxiously waiting and waiting to come home and see a new tree. This morning as I was going downstairs for breakfast I heard a big truck outside. I looked and it was a large dump truck with over 50 balled trees on a very big trailer. I watched for a minute or two to see what they were going to do. One guy had a spade but wasn't digging yet. The other two guys were mulling around. They were not going to dig a hole with a spade, so I figured they were going to cut away a circle of sod and drop a tree off, and then a hydraulic tree spade would show up later to make a hole and drop the tree in.
The truck was blocking the driveway so I went about making my breakfast and pouring an iced tea for the road. I thought by the time I was done cleaning up after myself and ready to go they might me done, and if not I would just ask them nicely to move their truck ahead 30 feet.
I went to the front window to see how they were doing before I opened the garage. The truck was gone, the tree was planted, and a nice layer of mulch was around the base! Those guys can handle a shovel.
Last month we staked out the location where we wanted the tree to go. They scheduled an underground utility location person to come out and make sure it was safe to plant there. All thumbs up.
We have been anxiously waiting and waiting to come home and see a new tree. This morning as I was going downstairs for breakfast I heard a big truck outside. I looked and it was a large dump truck with over 50 balled trees on a very big trailer. I watched for a minute or two to see what they were going to do. One guy had a spade but wasn't digging yet. The other two guys were mulling around. They were not going to dig a hole with a spade, so I figured they were going to cut away a circle of sod and drop a tree off, and then a hydraulic tree spade would show up later to make a hole and drop the tree in.
The truck was blocking the driveway so I went about making my breakfast and pouring an iced tea for the road. I thought by the time I was done cleaning up after myself and ready to go they might me done, and if not I would just ask them nicely to move their truck ahead 30 feet.
I went to the front window to see how they were doing before I opened the garage. The truck was gone, the tree was planted, and a nice layer of mulch was around the base! Those guys can handle a shovel.
Monday, October 10, 2005
We just got back from an extended weekend in Toledo visiting my family, with the visit centering around our second annual Lake Erie perch fishing trip. For this trip we also tried using Amtrak to Toledo for the first time.
Wednesday morning I went into work for half a day. When I got home we put the luggage in the car and drove to our local train station to take the Metra downtown to Union Station. I was a little nervous about leaving our car in the parking lot for five nights with an orange Amtrak parking card in our windshield advertising that it would be there for an extended period, but it turned out OK.
We had dinner at Union Station (I had two hot dogs from Gold Coast and Sheri had a burrito from Burrito Beach), and we picked up a couple bottles of soda for the train ride.
The train left right on time a few minutes past 5:30 PM. Sheri rented a couple of DVD's before we left for the train ride. We started up the laptop and started watching Primer almost as soon as we got into our seats. It was nice and really made the time pass quickly. We have a little Y adapter for the headphones so we can both hear without disturbing anyone else. The lady sitting behind us talked on her cell phone for almost the entire length of the movie which took away from the movie a little bit though.
It is a four hour train ride and it was scheduled to get in around 10:30 PM Toledo time, but because of a lot of freight traffic we were about an hour and a half late. We would have watched another movie but we drained the battery and we didn't have an outlet near our seats.
I had my handheld GPS with me and I called Mom and Dad periodically, who was waiting at the train station for us, with periodic location updates. Mom would rely this information to the station master who was glad to have the information because they don't have any kind of real-time train status information. He would make announcements over the station PA and update his sign board. That was kind of cool.
I did not get to bed until around 1 AM. Dad, my brother-in-law Tim, and myself had reservations on a charter boat for Thursday morning at 8 AM in Port Clinton, OH, so we had to get up around 5 AM. I was a little tired with only a few hours of sleep, but once I got going I was OK.
On the way to the boat we passed the Davis-Bessie nuclear power plant while it was still dark out. I thought the big looming silhouette of the cooling tower and the steam was neat and a little eerie.
The weather forecast the entire two weeks before the fishing trip said 3 to 5 foot waves and rain. When we got there the lake was flat calm and not a cloud in the sky.
This picture was taken from our boat while we were waiting to get under way. The boat pictured is the Sassy Sal and is the one we took last year.
We got underway right at 8 AM. As the sun came up the day got even prettier.
Out of the three of us Tim caught the first fish of the day (not of the boat). A nice tasty yellow perch.
Dad caught the most unusual fish of the day. We think it was a gobi; an invasive species to Lake Erie.
If the boat wasn't catching anything after 45 minutes or so the captain would for us to pull in our lines and we would transit to a different location. We did that three or four times. These are some pictures of us and the boat during these moves.
This is our boat after the day of fishing. That's the first mate on board cleaning up.
There were about 15 of us on board. We caught 3.4 pounds of whole fish wish came out to 1.2 pounds of fillets.
Here is a better shot of the Davis-Bessie cooling tower on the way back home.
Tim konked out within 10 minutes of getting in the car and slept hard until we were about 10 from home.
;-)
Crossing the Toledo high level bridge.
When we got back to Mom and Dad's Tim got in his car and went home while I took a quick shower and changed into some clean clothes. Then Mom, Dad, Sheri and myself drove over to Tim and Lisa's to eat our catch. Since we only had 1.2 pounds of perch the girls stopped at the store while we were driving back to Toledo and picked up four pounds of tilapia. We fried it all up in a deep fryer on the patio. Very tasty.
Friday Tim and Lisa had to work, so Mom, Dad, and Sheri and I were on our own. We had fun just being casual around Toledo. We spent an hour of so at Panera talking, reading, showing Dad Google Earth on the laptop, and eating lunch. Then we went to Anderson's and spent an hour or so there. Sheri needed and iced coffee so we stopped at Beaners for a bit, and then we got dropped off at Lisa's office and we went with her to pick up my nephew Shawn from daycare. We spied on interacting with the other kids for a bit before we let him know we were there. That was cute.
We met up with Mom and Dad again and we took Shawn to the mall to walk around and have dinner. Shawn spent the night with us at M & D's. Shawn took a very strong liking to Sheri and wanted to sleep in her bed that night.
Saturday we went to Tim Horton's for a donut and a cup of their excellent coffee. We don't have any Tim's in Chicago and missed them from when we lived in Columbus. It was great. I think I had a dumb grin on my face as I finished my coffee.
We swung by Kroger's to pick up some ingredients for a pot of vegetable soup we were going to make for Sunday. We went home and I helped Mom dice up a turnip, rutabaga, and cabbage for the soup, and then we drove to Tim and Lisa's for the evening.
Tim let me drive his tractor around the yard a few times!
Lisa wanted to take Shawn to his first pumpkin patch and there was a really good one just a couple miles north of their house. The prices were great. We took a pretty long hay ride that only cost $1.50.
They also had lots of farm animals to pet. That is where I met the friendly cow that I posted pictures of previously.
Went back to Tim and Lisa's, and then Tim and I went to Best Buy so he could buy a new wireless router and a USB wireless adapter. I hooked up and configured the router while Tim cooked hamburgers for dinner. Then we watched the Buckeyes lose to Penn State.
Sunday Lisa brought Shawn over to M & D's and we went to the Grand Rapids Apple Butter Festival. That is a great place for people watching, but there was a lot of walking and it wore all of us out.
By the time we got home and Lisa and Shawn said their goodbyes and left we were all too tired to do too much. It was after 1 PM and we had not had anything to eat besides some popcorn and half of a tamale, so we went to Tony Packo's for some Hungarian hot dogs. Yum! Then we went to Meijer to get some snacks and magazines for the train ride back the next day.
We went home, packed, showered, and ate some of the great vegetable soup we made the day before, and then settled in to watch Desperate Housewives.
This morning (Monday) M & D drove us to the train station. We stopped at Tim Horton's again for a coffee and a donut. We expected the train to be maybe be 30 - 45 minutes late getting in. It was waiting for us when we got there 15 minutes before it was due to leave. We got on and our car was very full. We didn't get seats together at first, but when they turned the lights on around 7 AM I asked the military guy next to me if he would trade seats with Sheri.
We got back to Chicago Union Station exactly when it was scheduled to at 9:30 AM. We had a light snack while we waited for the next Metra train back home at 10:30 AM.
We got home and Sheri unpacked and started some laundry. We rested a little bit in bed, and then decided to go to Panera for some lunch and so I could type this post.
We don't know if we will watch TV tonight or watch the other DVD that Sheri rented, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.
Wednesday morning I went into work for half a day. When I got home we put the luggage in the car and drove to our local train station to take the Metra downtown to Union Station. I was a little nervous about leaving our car in the parking lot for five nights with an orange Amtrak parking card in our windshield advertising that it would be there for an extended period, but it turned out OK.
We had dinner at Union Station (I had two hot dogs from Gold Coast and Sheri had a burrito from Burrito Beach), and we picked up a couple bottles of soda for the train ride.
The train left right on time a few minutes past 5:30 PM. Sheri rented a couple of DVD's before we left for the train ride. We started up the laptop and started watching Primer almost as soon as we got into our seats. It was nice and really made the time pass quickly. We have a little Y adapter for the headphones so we can both hear without disturbing anyone else. The lady sitting behind us talked on her cell phone for almost the entire length of the movie which took away from the movie a little bit though.
It is a four hour train ride and it was scheduled to get in around 10:30 PM Toledo time, but because of a lot of freight traffic we were about an hour and a half late. We would have watched another movie but we drained the battery and we didn't have an outlet near our seats.
I had my handheld GPS with me and I called Mom and Dad periodically, who was waiting at the train station for us, with periodic location updates. Mom would rely this information to the station master who was glad to have the information because they don't have any kind of real-time train status information. He would make announcements over the station PA and update his sign board. That was kind of cool.
I did not get to bed until around 1 AM. Dad, my brother-in-law Tim, and myself had reservations on a charter boat for Thursday morning at 8 AM in Port Clinton, OH, so we had to get up around 5 AM. I was a little tired with only a few hours of sleep, but once I got going I was OK.
On the way to the boat we passed the Davis-Bessie nuclear power plant while it was still dark out. I thought the big looming silhouette of the cooling tower and the steam was neat and a little eerie.
The weather forecast the entire two weeks before the fishing trip said 3 to 5 foot waves and rain. When we got there the lake was flat calm and not a cloud in the sky.
This picture was taken from our boat while we were waiting to get under way. The boat pictured is the Sassy Sal and is the one we took last year.
We got underway right at 8 AM. As the sun came up the day got even prettier.
Out of the three of us Tim caught the first fish of the day (not of the boat). A nice tasty yellow perch.
Dad caught the most unusual fish of the day. We think it was a gobi; an invasive species to Lake Erie.
If the boat wasn't catching anything after 45 minutes or so the captain would for us to pull in our lines and we would transit to a different location. We did that three or four times. These are some pictures of us and the boat during these moves.
This is our boat after the day of fishing. That's the first mate on board cleaning up.
There were about 15 of us on board. We caught 3.4 pounds of whole fish wish came out to 1.2 pounds of fillets.
Here is a better shot of the Davis-Bessie cooling tower on the way back home.
Tim konked out within 10 minutes of getting in the car and slept hard until we were about 10 from home.
;-)
Crossing the Toledo high level bridge.
When we got back to Mom and Dad's Tim got in his car and went home while I took a quick shower and changed into some clean clothes. Then Mom, Dad, Sheri and myself drove over to Tim and Lisa's to eat our catch. Since we only had 1.2 pounds of perch the girls stopped at the store while we were driving back to Toledo and picked up four pounds of tilapia. We fried it all up in a deep fryer on the patio. Very tasty.
Friday Tim and Lisa had to work, so Mom, Dad, and Sheri and I were on our own. We had fun just being casual around Toledo. We spent an hour of so at Panera talking, reading, showing Dad Google Earth on the laptop, and eating lunch. Then we went to Anderson's and spent an hour or so there. Sheri needed and iced coffee so we stopped at Beaners for a bit, and then we got dropped off at Lisa's office and we went with her to pick up my nephew Shawn from daycare. We spied on interacting with the other kids for a bit before we let him know we were there. That was cute.
We met up with Mom and Dad again and we took Shawn to the mall to walk around and have dinner. Shawn spent the night with us at M & D's. Shawn took a very strong liking to Sheri and wanted to sleep in her bed that night.
Saturday we went to Tim Horton's for a donut and a cup of their excellent coffee. We don't have any Tim's in Chicago and missed them from when we lived in Columbus. It was great. I think I had a dumb grin on my face as I finished my coffee.
We swung by Kroger's to pick up some ingredients for a pot of vegetable soup we were going to make for Sunday. We went home and I helped Mom dice up a turnip, rutabaga, and cabbage for the soup, and then we drove to Tim and Lisa's for the evening.
Tim let me drive his tractor around the yard a few times!
Lisa wanted to take Shawn to his first pumpkin patch and there was a really good one just a couple miles north of their house. The prices were great. We took a pretty long hay ride that only cost $1.50.
They also had lots of farm animals to pet. That is where I met the friendly cow that I posted pictures of previously.
Went back to Tim and Lisa's, and then Tim and I went to Best Buy so he could buy a new wireless router and a USB wireless adapter. I hooked up and configured the router while Tim cooked hamburgers for dinner. Then we watched the Buckeyes lose to Penn State.
Sunday Lisa brought Shawn over to M & D's and we went to the Grand Rapids Apple Butter Festival. That is a great place for people watching, but there was a lot of walking and it wore all of us out.
By the time we got home and Lisa and Shawn said their goodbyes and left we were all too tired to do too much. It was after 1 PM and we had not had anything to eat besides some popcorn and half of a tamale, so we went to Tony Packo's for some Hungarian hot dogs. Yum! Then we went to Meijer to get some snacks and magazines for the train ride back the next day.
We went home, packed, showered, and ate some of the great vegetable soup we made the day before, and then settled in to watch Desperate Housewives.
This morning (Monday) M & D drove us to the train station. We stopped at Tim Horton's again for a coffee and a donut. We expected the train to be maybe be 30 - 45 minutes late getting in. It was waiting for us when we got there 15 minutes before it was due to leave. We got on and our car was very full. We didn't get seats together at first, but when they turned the lights on around 7 AM I asked the military guy next to me if he would trade seats with Sheri.
We got back to Chicago Union Station exactly when it was scheduled to at 9:30 AM. We had a light snack while we waited for the next Metra train back home at 10:30 AM.
We got home and Sheri unpacked and started some laundry. We rested a little bit in bed, and then decided to go to Panera for some lunch and so I could type this post.
We don't know if we will watch TV tonight or watch the other DVD that Sheri rented, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.
