Monday April 11, 2005

Brilliant idea of the day (not approved by Martha Stewart): Instead of dousing baby carrots in a bowl with Marie’s Poppy Seed dressing and letting precious and tasty dressing go to waste (unless you’re going to lick the bowl afterward), just dump all the carrots into the dressing bottle, close the cap, and shake shake shake! Perfectly drenched carrots, every time!

Got a demo unit of Motion Computing’s M1400 tablet PC last week.  It got hacked over the network on the first day, so I’ve spent more time reloading the OS on it than actually using it for anything interesting.  Ironically, this meant that I had an external mouse and keyboard plugged into unit for the first two days of “testing,” which pretty much defeats the point of having a tablet.  And for something that you’re supposed to cradle in your arms, it sure runs hot!  Not so sure it’s supposed to be like that…

Have you ever worked in a restaurant before?  How much of the tip ends up in the waiter’s pocket, and how does he even get any of it when you include it on the credit card payment anyway?  Had an *excellent* pork shank dinner (for lunch) at Mimi’s Cafe with Steph and friends last Saturday.  It was way more excellent after the waiter said it was on the house because I actually had ordered the pork chops and they made me the wrong thing.  In gratefulness, I wanted to leave the waiter (who for all I know had to pay for the mistake out of his own pocket) a larger tip.  But then we decided not to add it to the credit card payment in case it didn’t go directly to him.  But then we stayed at the restaurant to chat with our friends for such a long time that the waiter eventually told us his shift was over and that he was going to have to leave us.  And then he didn’t take the cash tip that we had placed on the table specifically for him!  So who exactly ended up with the tip anyway?

Trying out Blockbuster.com, which offers 3 DVDs at a time, plus 2 in-store rentals a month, plus random free popcorn and soda, for less than the cost of Netflix. Is Blockbuster really that much slower a service, or else why aren’t more people biting? I don’t know a single Blockbuster.com user, except… me.  And the first month is free!  What’s the catch?

Had $0.99 Chicken McNuggets with Steph last Sunday.  They were so-so when lukewarm.  I remember the days of 20-piece boxes of McNuggets for $5.00, which I often consumed all by myself.  Guess I’m a tad less inclined after reading “What’s in the Meat” in Fast Food Nation and watching Morgan Spurlock super-size himself (though Brian and I did order an extra helping of Micky D’s to liven up the viewing).  But I’m still pretty curious about Chick-fil-A, if only I could find one.

Finally added RSS feeds for my phpbb forum at work, and then decided to enable it in my photo gallery too at http://niftyken.stanford.edu/gallery/rss.php (uh, which won’t look like anything if you don’t have an RSS news aggregator like Firefox’s Live Bookmarks).  Hey, I think the Jack Checker should bookmark my photo site instead of this sad little blog that I “nearly never update.”  Cute baby ducks, Cute babies, cute… pore strips!  All this and more at http://niftyken.stanford.edu (updated way more often, and much more visually stimulating).

Speaking of photos, I think my Canon Powershot G2 is dying.  The LCD screen doesn’t light up most of the time unless I position it just the right way.  What will I do without a camera with a swiveling LCD screen?