saturday, december 24, 2005
Who doesn’t like raspberries
At my house, we make a birthday cake for Jesus.
: )
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wednesday, december 21, 2005
I didn’t find the right thing
Things found while excavating my little sister’s closet:
- One 20-dollar bill, 20 one-dollar bills, and 65 cents in coins.
- Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, due back to the school library in January 2001.
- An eight-foot-long green snake from IKEA, named Alice.
- A retelling of the three little pigs story that I wrote in sixth grade. It involves the pigs as professional architects, and the wolf is eventually scared off by falling down a stinky chimney.
- The colorful t-shirt from this post.
- An excuse to take pictures with the macro button.
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monday, december 19, 2005
Whole grain Pillsbury
The current edition of Cheerios boxes really emphasizes their alleged whole grain goodness. How many times each side of a standard box says “Whole Grain”:
Top - 3
Bottom - 1
Front - 6
Side - 1
Other side - 1
Back - 24
The total count comes to 36, including three “whole grain” buttons, two large “Whole Grain” logos, the ingredients list, a couple paragraphs on the back that extoll the benefits of “Whole Grain”, and a few disclaimers about how whole grain might not be the cure for everything.
The General Mills Gazette somehow reminds me of The Onion.
I think Cheerios might be allied with the vegetarian industrial complex.
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wednesday, december 14, 2005
A combination of half-written posts
I got a new 15” Powerbook. Yay! The slowness, blurriness, and non-portability of my summer-2001 iMac was getting to me. The new screen is so much brighter; now I’m not sure whether I’ve been adjusting my photos to be too bright. Time to calibrate. Other issues: the battery doesn’t work and they’re sending me a new one. It came with 10.4.2, not 10.4.3. The only extra bundled software I like is OmniGraffle — be prepared for more crazy charts! But the Powerbook is definitely fast, sharp, and portable, and I love it already.
And now for something completely different. This website is a collection of hacked-up old scripts. Instead of writing everything myself, I grab other people’s good work and customize it to death. I like things that don’t use a relational database or web admin interface (right now, Blosxom, UseModWiki, and Photostack) because I like to do everything from my FTP client. A lot of Blosxom users have moved to Wordpress or Movable Type in the past few years, but so what if it’s not being actively developed? I like it! The same goes for UseModWiki and the old version of Photostack that I use. Just so you know.
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thursday, december 01, 2005
Money and other dirty things
A year or so ago in Economics class, my partner and I invested an imaginary $81,000 in the stock market. How is our money doing?
The $16,000 divided among Gap, Hershey, and Nike stayed about the same. We chose them because they seemed solid, but I guess they didn’t have much room for growth. Starbucks went down 40% and Red Robin (a burger chain) went up 10% for a combined loss of $2,400 on an $18,600 investment. So, investing in Starbucks was dumb, but Red Robin did fine — the only non-globalized corporation in the bunch.
But of course, I put most of our money in Google and Apple. They’re important companies and I liked them despite their evil tendencies (this is the stock market, after all). The $37,000 I invested in Google grew to $82,800. That was a lot of money in a single company, but it doubled. The $9,700 I put into Apple made a profit of $4,700.
I could be paying for most of college with the $50,500 total profit — a 40% return.
