May, 2, 2001 archives
today's trick: homemade pasta. i don't know anything about making pasta from scratch. i don't recall my mom ever doing it, either. today's lesson learned: make sure the well you make in the flour to crack the eggs into is large enough to hold all of the eggs.
i haven't cooked it yet. the water is boiling now.
needless to say, this $130 pasta machine probably would have made things easier. a real drying rack would probably be good, too. (that's a wine rack doing double-duty up there.)
and coupled with that "minnesotan shame" i mentioned before, don't forget the occasional shame of being an american. (via mefi.)
here's a quite well-written story about a programmer's experience at a silly dotcom/software company. the lesson that i (and apparently the author of this piece) learned is: don't work too hard.
(and on a slight tangent, i'm beginning to not see any value to a company going public. it just seems to create an absurd pressure for growth.)
suv vs. minivan. how about a car? "aspirational vehicles"? gimme a break. (15 miles per gallon? someone needs to double the price of consumer gas immediately.)
i've moved on to my third shelf of cds in my cd-ripping quest. 85 artists, 168 albums, 2242 songs, 8.5 gigs.
this includes the brand-new album from marillion, anoraknaphobia. i've only listened to it once, so it is early to render a verdict, but nothing really grabbed me on that first listen, except for a few bits of songs here and there (particular some of the bass lines). because i pre-ordered the album (along with 12,000 others -- providing the funding for the band to record it), i got the special packaging and bonus disc. (but i didn't order early enough to get listed in the credits.)
i have a feeling we'll be reading about this for the next couple of weeks. (let me be clear -- the microsoft guys are obviously just spreading their usual fud. but the amount of coverage that will pass before my eyes on this will be mind-numbing.)
in a very odd coincidence, dave's mom sent him oatmeal chocolate chip cookies on his birthday, and i baked the same thing yesterday.
(and, on a semi-dave-related note, i can't help but think that in regards to open source, microsoft is being a shrieking man.)
i'm doing a lot of pondering today about what the hell it is that i want to be doing with my life. more specifically, how to do something different in a system that favors bland conformity. i get the sinking feeling that the best approach is going to be the usual "less than completely satisfying day job" and "starved for attention side project that i really care about". i need to find a way to have those two fuel off each other. (of course, the real ideal would be for the two to be one, but i find that exceedingly unlikely.)