A Place for my Head

I know I haven't posted lately - truthfully, I often don't find my life interesting enough to share. I guess you'll have to be happy with what meager offerings I can produce.

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I think about weird things. This is probably an understatement. I'm sure that most people have strange things running through their heads, but I am an engineer. We think about the world in a different way than normal people.

Let me give you an example. I was driving toward a traffic light the other day and it was green. My first thought was, "I hope I make it before it turns orange". Then I started thinking of several scenarios. It could turn orange while I had enough time to stop, or while I didn't have enough time to stop. It could turn orange while I could still make it under, or while I couldn't still make it under. And there are overlaps. Let me make a chart (because that's how I think):

That is how my brain works. I think of random stuff like this all the time. Here's another example:

I was eating some cereal one morning and started wondering if was going to go stale because I always have two boxes open and tend to run out of milk for days at a time. Let's call the milkless period a "drought". A drought is wasted open time that just causes open boxes to go stale even more. I always rotate between cereals - one day it's Multi-Grain Cheerios (MGC), the next day it's Sugary Cereal X (like Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, etc). So I always have one box of sugary and one box of MGC open at all times (except when I finish one).

I was trying to figure out the shelf-time of each cereal so I knew which ones were more likely to go bad. So I defined a system where "one box-time" meant "the average length of time it would take me to eat one box of cereal if that was the only one I was eating, excluding droughts". You can see that since I'm always rotating cereals, it takes me about two box-times to finish one box of cereal, more if there's a drought. Furthermore, since I usually have two boxes of sugary and two boxes of MGC in my cabinets (so that there's no shortage when one runs out), each box can spend a maximum of four box-times in my cabinets (two while closed and two while open), plus droughts. However, they're only getting stale when they're open (or at least the process happens more quickly in that case), so the best thing I could do is rotate cereals on a box-level, not on a daily basis. Then I would reduce the open time to one box-time instead of two. It would also eliminate the possibility of having two boxes open during a drought.

From there I kinda lost my train of thought because the only thing I learned was that I would have to rotate on a box-level to decrease staleness, and I don't really want to do that. But you get the idea - I often break down simple problems into overly complex ideas to try and figure things out on a more exact level. It's a blessing and a curse, I think.

Is it Winter Yet?

Quick update - I found some great deals on snowboarding gear so I made some purchases. Everything I bought was about 50% off. Below are the items which now invisibly bear my name.

First is a nice pair of checkered boots. At one point I was trying on one white boot and one black boot to see which fit better, and I told the clerk I wanted one of each - you know, as a fashion statement. He believed me but wanted me to buy both pairs :(

Next is the board and bindings - saved about $200 by getting the board on sale! In case you can't read it, the top says Seek & Destroy:

And the bottom:

And finally, apparently my board came with some sweet stickers:

I'm ready to go!

The Camera Eye

As many of you know (many being like 3 of the 4 people that read this) I have become a little interested in photography lately. I like to carry around a digital camera and snap pictures of random stuff. First it was just a way to document parts of my life for the blog, but then I got more interested and started taking pictures of things I didn't have any intention of ever posting. Eventually I decided I would share some of those things with you. As always, feel free to click on the pictures to see the full-size version.

For some reason one thing that really captures my imagination is clouds, so here are a few of my favorite cloud pictures that I've taken:

Here is the road leading to my parents' house. Years from now this is how I will remember the drive to their house (and yes of course I stopped the car before taking these):

My brother Brian grilling up some delicious food:

Rush in Rock Band (I hadn't yet beaten YYZ when I took this):

My uncle Russ' new old Camaro - it's a '68 that he just finished rebuilding:

My stove - probably some chili or spaghetti brewing:

My grandpa's barns (for you city people, tractors and horses don't just exist on TV):

IS THAT A FLYING SAUCER?!?! Why yes, it is a Frisbee flying straight for my face. I do believe Anderbra is reponsible for this mess:

Kaeden chewing on a bike tire:

Nikki, Kaeden, and someone trying to fish:

I hope you enjoyed my random pictures. Maybe some time in the future I will post more of them. Last but not least, I leave you with a weird juxtaposition. This is one of my favorite pictures I've taken, but it's also one of the few that looks worse when you zoom in because it's a little blurry.

So peaceful.

A Milestone

Due to my lack of access to a real drum kit, I mostly satisfy my drumming fix by using my electronic kit (e-kit) to play Rock Band 2. It's pretty realistic in the sense that I have a full drum set of pads to hit, and I can hit the correct ones to play the game. For example, in 99% of all cases the green note in Rock Band games is either a crash cymbal or a floor tom, so my e-kit has a crash cymbal and a floor tom both mapped to green. It's up to me to hit which one is correct based on how the song sounds (even if I hit the wrong one the game counts it as correct, but it's more satisfying and realistic when I hit the right one). I've mentioned this before but I wanted to say it again anyways.

So as I played through the songs of Rock Band 1, RB2, and DLC (downloadable content) on Expert, the list of songs I couldn't beat got smaller and smaller. I don't want to get your hopes up - I haven't beat them all yet, but today I did hit a milestone. There's a song called Visions which in my opinion is terrible. It's fast growling metal, has very little discernable rhythm, and often times feels like you're just pounding on the drums with no regard to any sort of song structure. This was the hardest song in RB2 on drums because of the above characteristics. I tried it a few times and then for the longest time didn't even play it because I thought it sounded awful. I finally decided to try it again and beat it, the last song in RB2.

(By the way that 53 note streak is hilarious. Most songs I have over 200 note streaks.) I have now officially beaten all Rock Band disc songs on Expert drums. That means that I have finished all of RB1 and 2, and only have DLC to go. The last songs for DLC that I can't beat are:

Prequel to the Sequel (Between the Buried and Me)

More Human than Human (White Zombie)

Jesus Christ Pose (Soundgarden)

Stay Away (Nirvana)

I think on a good day I could beat Stay Away (I've gotten as far as 90% through the song) and maybe More Human than Human (if I can ever learn the weird disco beat). The others, though, are going to be very difficult. Jesus Christ Pose has a pretty constant pattern through the whole song and the farthest I've gotten through it is like 15%. Prequel to the Sequel just has sections that are ridiculously fast that I can't keep up with. Maybe someday...

Is Three-peat Actually a Word?

Quick picture post today - just wanted to congratulate the MCM Ducks on winning the Portland Roller Hockey Championship for the third year in a row. Part of me secretly wished they couldn't do it without me, but I am happy for them regardless. Here are some pictures of their final game.

My photographic skills didn't get much use until the third period. The Young Guns (in red) were down 5-2 at one point, until two goals by Chris Griffin make it 5-4:


Here you can see that they tied it up at 5 shortly before the end of the third period. We're going to overtime!

The fans are tense as the game goes into overtime and the sun begins to set:


Overtime fails to decide the game so it heads to a shootout:


Two shooters go but the goalies do their job. The next Duck takes his turn and barrels toward the Young Guns' goalie. He scores!


Two more shooters are turned away so it comes down to the final shot. Young Guns star Derek Brown needs to score to tie up the game and send it into extra shootout rounds:


But fate was not with the underdogs today. The Ducks skate off with their third championship in as many years.

Adventures in Cooking

So it's been awhile since I've posted, but I decided to get back on the horse. So you get a long post today! It's like reading a post, then going back for seconds. This may not come as much of a surprise to most of you, but I don't cook exotic meals very often. It's not that I'm lazy - I mean I am, but that's not the only reason. Mostly it's because it's only for me - I don't want to put a lot of effort into a meal that is just for me. Also there's the leftover issue - I will put more effort into something that will have leftovers that taste good for a couple of days. It's a simple effort v. reward calculation. But I decided to show all 6 of you or however many people read this the meals that I do make (I don't think that sentence was grammatically correct). So here's the main list:

Chili

Shown above is my famous (at least in my own mind) chili in its bowl form (with optional beer).

Short instructions to making it:

Cook 1 pound of beef and drain. Add 1 can of chili-ready tomatoes and 1 can of italian-style tomatoes (and half a can of beans if you're into that). Add cayenne pepper and A1 sauce liberally. If you want it a little spicier, use the A1 sauce with peppercorn - that is my preferred method but regular A1 works great too. Cook until there's not much liquid left. Enjoy.

Favorite way to eat it:

Crush a few saltines in there to soak up the extra liquid, then take spoonfulls and put them onto whole saltines and eat like nachoes. Absolutely delicious.

Mexican-style chicken and rice

Holy cow, I don't even know how to describe this. When you have got chicken, melted cheese, sauce, colored peppers, and spicy rice in your mouth at the same time, it is hard to imagine anything tasting better. It is a symphony on my tongue.

Instructions:

Cook chicken halfway, put some sauce on, add a layer of cheese, cook the rest of the way, add more cheese. In parallel: cook rice, add taco sauce and a little cayenne pepper while cooking to give it some color and flavor. Add colored peppers (red, orange, or yellow) and enjoy.

Possibly my favorite food to eat, but if you cook the chicken too long or not long enough, it doesn't taste right. On a scale of 1 to difficult-to-make, it gets an "easy to screw up" rating.

Tacos

Pretty standard taco - tortilla, meat, two kinds of cheese (mozarella and colby jack), sauce (ortega medium). I add my standard colored peppers because they taste so good.

Instructions:

Don't be silly, you know how to make tacos. I usually make nachos with the leftover meat the next day, so here is a bonus picture of nachos (again with my standard colored peppers - have I mentioned that they are good with basically any Mexican-style food?):

Hungry Howies' Pizza

Ok I don't make this, but I eat it a lot. They have a special where on Sundays you can get a large pizza for $8, so if it's Sunday and I am feeling lazy (which is often) I tend to get this.

So those are the top foods. Maybe I will show some of the experiments (both the good ones and the bad) I have done in a later post.

Camping and Walking

Well, it's been a little while since the last update. I've been pretty busy. One of the things that kept me busy for a long weekend was camping. It was a ton of fun and I wish I could do it again. The cast of characters (in case you don't see them all in the following pictures) were: My friends Anderbra, Reuben, and James; Reuben's brother Derek, and Derek's friends Brian and Ange. So here is a pictoral recollection of the major events of the weekend (before my camera's battery died). I hope it helps you relax as much as it did for me.

First, a tree along the lakeshore. This was in the city of Ludington and the picture turned out surprisingly well given that the car was going 35ish when I took it (and no, I wasn't driving!).

We drove a little further up the highway and into Ludington State Park. Reuben and Anderbra went to check in, and I took the opportunity to get a picture of the lakeshore. Those sand dunes mean we are definitely in the right place.

We checked in and drove to our parking space. We didn't have a campsite in the main area, so we went to the designated parking lot and started to unload. I believe in this picture Reuben is already regretting the fact that we have to carry all this stuff for a mile and a half.

Speaking of a mile and a half...here's what most of it looked like. We probably saw this particular stretch of sand and gravel path 8 or 10 times over the course of the weekend.

Here is Reuben and Anderbra carrying equipment to the campsite (I was carrying stuff too but I put it down to take pictures). I was half of the cooler team for about a half mile until Reuben complained that I was too short and promoted Anderbra to the job.

Anderbra, Reuben and I were the first to arrive. We made one trip with gear and then walked back to the car. James got there about an hourish later, and the four of us made another trip with more stuff. Here is James chopping firewood at our rustic site (no electricity, one water pump for all 10 sites to share).

A couple of hours later the other guys hadn't arrived yet, and we started to get worried / annoyed. Furthermore, none of us had a good cell signal so we couldn't count on the others calling us when they arrived. Finally, Reuben, James and I decided to walk back to the parking lot to get a cell signal and see what the deal was. I specifically remember Reuben saying "Now that we made the effort to go find them, I'm sure they'll be here already." He turned out to be right. Just as we started up the path, there they were coming to meet us with all of their gear. They had the tent, so we unpacked and set everything up. Here is Derek finishing up the main tent.

We had a nice relaxed night of beer, hot dogs, and s'mores. We even walked to beach and hung out there for a little while. It was only about a quarter mile away so it was no big deal. The next morning we got up and had an amazing breakfast of bacon, eggs, potatoes, and cheese cooked over the campfire. My only regret is that I didn't get a picture of it. After our stomachs settled we walked up the beach to the nearby lighthouse.

My goals of the lighthouse trip were this:

1) Nobody gets hurt or killed

2) My camera survives without falling 100 feet to its doom

3) Get some good pictures

4) Have fun

There was a beautiful view from the top. As you can imagine, I took this picture while holding onto my camera with a vice-like grip.

I got a nice picture of the dunes through a porthole on the way down the lighthouse.

Here is the lighthouse from up close with Anderbra and Ange.

Mmmm hot dogs. We had those for dinner on Saturday night. We also had some beer-battered brats that I sadly don't have a picture of but tasted amazing.

Also on the menu: Beer-battered burgers. Mmmmm.

Saturday night the Wings game was on and some people wanted to go watch it, so we drove into town and found a local bar. We also brought along our camping neighbor Nick, who was a big sports fan. The Wings won 5-0 and I won a t-shirt. It was a good night, except for my nearly empty beer glass that you can see at the bottom of the picture.

I got a nice shot of the evening's fire with James (and I think that's Nick on the right) deep in thought. I believe we made another trip to the lake that night.

Unfortunately at this point my battery died. That's ok though because not much else happened. We packed up and left the next day. Cars 1 & 2 (not Derek's group) stopped at a minigolf course on the way home. I won because of my solid mid-range putting skills (that and the hole with the water puddles that the other guys couldn't stay out of).

It was a good trip. I wish I could go again.