Articles by Justin

Last week, I had a day off to hang out with my friends. We all wandered into Downtown Tampa at my behest, because I was excited and wanted to try out a new restaurant named Bamboozle Cafe.

Almost all of our meals that are away from home start with a walk or a taxi ride. I figured that it was closer than my mailbox, so we’d walk it, and work up an appetite. When we get downtown, it took us a good minute to find the restaurant, since Google Maps wasn’t quite the benefit we wanted it to be (Google Maps puts the user about a half block past it in a vehicle, forcing the user to circle around for the safest option to come back to the restaurant) .

As we walk in at one in the afternoon, we notice that the place is packed with many diners, and it would be a challenge to get a spot to sit and eat together as three. Waiting in line, we’re asked by one person what we’d like to order and handed a card that we can hand to the crew preparing our meals.

Shortly thereafter, the staff there are putting together boats of pho and beef rolls that remind me of spring rolls — not fried, filled with veggies and a hint of beef. I also picked up the Vietnamese coffee that day, since I was in a caffeinated mood.

Steve and I had both opted for the beef pho, while Chris chose the three beef rolls and the chicken soup.

The pho was served just the right way, with slightly firm rice noodles, flavorful broth, bean sprouts, basil, mint, thin sliced beef, and a serving of hoisin sauce on the side. There was also a lime wedge included, for those who like the bitter taste. I couldn’t help but savor the taste three times, first without anything added. The beef broth carried a light, but rich note when combined with the rice noodles and bean sprouts, making the dish quite enjoyable. 

After several mouthfuls, I moved on to adding the hoisin sauce, which just added a deeper flavor tone that is hard to describe. It was as if it drew the flavor further out of the noodles and broth.

I’m also one of those people who like adding lime to my pho, so I was more than delighted to squeeze my lime wedge over my boat, and re-experience the delicious contents of what was left in my boat.

Steve enjoyed his boat faster than I enjoyed mine. Perhaps it was because I was too busy savoring the flavors erupting in my mouth that I took so long in finishing. Chris enjoyed his chicken soup, and offered me one of his rolls, citing that he couldn’t finish it all (He didn’t, even with only two rolls and the soup — one roll went home with him). The roll was pretty good, as well, but its flavor was much more subtle than I expected it to be.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed in the iced Vietnamese coffee — it was rather bitter, as if it were overbrewed as a hot coffee, then stored to be poured over ice. I don’t know if this is actually how it should have been done or not, since I only have one base to compare it to, and that was a cup at my local Cafe Hey.

Either way, I wouldn’t mind dropping by Bamboozle Cafe again, and indeed, I already have, at least once — I needed a picture of the pho bowl while it had pho in it.

My bento box is becoming my faithful companion these days.

I just get in the kitchen and whip up a tasty meal the night before, or, with my new schedule, in the morning when I get up, since I now work from noon to eleven at night on four days a week. It means I rely less on the vendors, who are almost always gone when I’m ready to go to lunch, and I don’t have to rely on the wheel of death or fast food to fill my belly at five in the evening.

This box is my saviour, in a delicious sense.

Here I am, ten-forty at night, hungry, waiting to leave work, and I hadn’t eaten my food (company had burgers and dogs earlier). I popped open my bentō, heated it up on my break a little earlier, and get to enjoy lemon chicken with roasted salsa, rice with veggies, and creamed corn (which hardly spilled at all during its rough day — just a little in the rice, and a little in the empty slot next to the corn is all it did). 

I think I understand a little about why the Japanese carry bentō boxes now. It’s great to eat food that is prepared with love. I loved cooking food that I knew would go into this box, and I am loving how it fills me up late at night with nutritious, healthy food (except maybe the corn :)).

It’s been a while, world.

In that time, I’ve become the proud owner of a bentō box.
I enjoy spending time the night before, preparing a wonderful box to take with me each day to work. It means that I’m usually eating healthier, since I know what’s going into my bentō, how it’s being seasoned (less salt is great!), and whether it’ll appeal to me when I’m ready to devour its content.

The box itself cost me $16, which seems steep when you look at it from the outside, but, for a multi-compartmented tray with cover that can be heated up in a minute’s time, and can keep everything in place, it’s a great price, especially since I paid no exorbitant shipping cost.

The greatest thing is, with the bentō box, I also got my hands on a rice cooker (shared between friends here). Therefore, I can have real, fresh rice with my meals, especially since I figured out how to use the thing.

I’m also eating my veggies more, as a result, which is yet another perk.

I’m feeling pretty cool about this.

I’ll keep this one short, world.
What if:
We could barter for someone to do our sleeping for us?

It would need some kind of bizarre psychic link of some sort to relay the results of proper sleep from a well-rested body to our body that is staying up later. It would need to have some sort of diminishing return to keep people from having a ’sleep slave’, and therefore never sleeping again.

Perhaps something like this:
One’s ’sleeper’ could sleep six hours for themselves, and a maximum of six hours for ONE person in a given day. This six hours that is slept for someone else will give that person a maximum of four hours of energy if it is their first ’sleeper’ that they received in a 36 hour period, and simply subtract 10% of the resulting energy thereafter. However, because the body will know it’s being shorted on sleep, even if someone were to chain-absorb sleeper energy, it wouldn’t be a rolling 36 hour period. A person would need a minimum of nine hours of real sleep between all these to-go sleepers.

On top of that, the technology would not be available for minors, the elderly, and those deemed to be in bad health, unless some sort of extenuating circumstance shows that they can benefit from it.

Fun things to go with that is:

• Your designated sleeper must have been asleep for at least 2 hours before energy extraction can happen.
• The rule of diminishing returns says that by the time you’re on your 10th sleeper in a single waking period, you might as well not bother.
• The project would need to be priced so that it could be affordable to those who benefit the most from it, which would be the lower working class. Their days are too short to get important things taken care of, sometimes. I’d know.
• Certain failsafes would have to take place to make sure that the sleepers are getting natural sleep, augmented by no more than what their bodies produce.

I know this’ll never happen in my lifetime, but hey, if it does, I want something to mark the day I wanted this.

Now, in the meantime… Sleep.

Wow. So, I forgot to update Gallery 2 a little while back — I thought I had done it, but somehow, I didn’t do it. Seems that my subversion repository for my copy of Gallery 2 is busted.

This was causing Gallery 2 to have explosive memory usage on the server, using as much as 150 MB of memory to execute the main Gallery page, if it even executed it. I got a pair of text messages from Gushi last night, reminding me of said explosive memory usage (again. Sorry, Gushi. :)), so I logged in and had a look. Sure as hell, I’m still using Gallery 2.2, and not the latest version of Gallery. I manually updated Gallery to 2.2.4, remembered to make Gallery 2.2.4 use PHP 5 instead of PHP 4 (Gushi, I’d rather default everyone onto 5, and make them enable 4 if they want it, heh heh heh), and tried again. I no longer seem to have processes that have no end to them to this point, which is good, and quite reminiscent of why everyone should stay on top of their upgrades.

Guess I better get myself back into the routine of updating stuff, right?

I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress, version 2.5.

Right now, I’m liking much of it, since they’ve hammered away at a few things that bothered me about the previous versions. Sure, they’ve added a bit more AJAX to parts of the backend, but this time, it actually serves purposes that make the software greater, instead of making it pretty.

Strangely enough, I turned on the Visual editor for WordPress, and it doesn’t seem to bother me as much NOW as it did years ago. Maybe I’ll leave it on, since it does make a few things a bit more convenient.

Also, the new tag box below my post box is flippin’ sweet. :3

You think I ordered enough? 

I spent more than I thought I was going to spend on this meal, which has a Buffalo Burger (with an egg or two), tons of french fries (since fries come in one size), and some Beer Cheese Soup.

I should tell you about the soup, which was a novel experience. The soup has a bit of a bite to it, but it’s very flavorful, very cheesy, and initially, very hot. (protip!: Don’t spill it.) I’d enjoy it again, but it looks like I really have to go to Square One Burgers with a friend, so I don’t have to box up my food and take it home with me because I got full on a cup of soup and some fries.

I need to get up and go have lunch.

Problem is, figuring out just what the hell I’m going to go have.

I’ve got several options:
One is Jerk Hut, which is Jamaican food. I did say to the gal that I would be back next week to ask about the Cellfire coupons that I saw, but she knew nothing about.
Another option is Cafe Hey, which is the coffee shop a couple of blocks down from me. I like the sandwiches there, and it’d put me right next to Oceanic Supermarket, so I could buy some grapefruits while there.
A third option is Grass Root, which I haven’t been to in a while, but is rather pricey.
My fourth option would be Square One Burgers, which is less pricey than Grass Root, but it takes a little time to get there. The side bonus to it, however, is that I could go to The Fresh Market thereafter, and get some more delicious Orangina.

I still have other, cheaper options like KFC, Taco Bell, Chipotle, or hitting a grocery store up for some meat to cook.

Oi, choices, choices.

I recently bought Rez HD for my XBox 360, which is an XBox Live Arcade game that costs 800 (about US $10).

The game is very heavy on synæsthesia-inducing effects, at least for me; Colors just grow in intensity as the sound grows, with bright lights flashing around when things go pop! on screen. Finishing a couple of areas leaves me feeling wiped out, but in a good way. Not like running a marathon or what have you, but just drained of most types of energy in a pleasant way.

I think Rez is hard to explain without videos, but once you play it, you’ll either get into it and understand, while the controller is thmp-thmp-thmping in your hands, or you just won’t understand it, and pass.

For the oldschool Rez players, your 360 controllers double as trance vibrators; You can have controllers 2, 3, AND 4 just buzzing away on your lap if you’d like.

The best thing about it being on XBox Live Arcade is that you can download a demo of the first level, play it through to the boss at the end, and half-kill the boss before it tells you that to finish this up, you’ll need to pay for it. So, uh, if any of you have a 360, I’d suggest downloading the demo, putting on some headphones or cranking up that 5.1, and enjoy this in widescreen mode. It so, so makes it worth it.

Dang, it feels really nice to have a Saturday off for once, even if WFO screwed up my time off request by giving me the whole day instead of just three hours.

I’ve been in bed all morning, enjoying the lazy time.

Time change still has me a mile off of the ordinary, though.

I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped blogging so much lately.

It’s a mixture of “I don’t really have any interesting things to blog about”, and “I don’t really want to resort to regurgitating the same news articles over and over again.” If I find anything worth posting about, maybe I’ll start posting a little more regularly over here.

Also, while I’m on it, if you’re looking for new music, I’d like to send you a referral to Amie Street. I’m still enjoying what’s happening there. Just poke me, and I’ll take you there.

Well, I haven’t bothered blogging since last year, it seems. There’s a fair bit going on, and I just can’t seem to sit down and post one off to here unless I’m in the mood to do so.

To sort of recap it all, let me start with this: I’ve done a bit of shopping to keep my spirits high.
I bought a few shirts from shirt.woot, including a shirt that’d be perfect for Valentine’s Day with the text, “Be my Dragontine?” on its front. Another shirt is all black, with a snowflake and diamond pattern on the front that looks very crisp. I’ve got to give those guys some serious kudos for their designs, since I’m spending $10 a shirt there (Cheap!) on some days.
I recently picked up a George Foreman grill for myself, since I’m still in the transitional housing program at the Salvation Army. Now, I can actually buy real meat (Gasp!), cook it, and eat it as part of a meal that I’ve prepared for myself.
I bought a couple of bottles from storybottles.com, and have them sitting right here in my cubicle at work. I can’t really decide on how I’m going to fill these. Ideally, I want to use distilled water, with a bit of food coloring, but I don’t want the food coloring to stain the bottle. I assume that with the distilled water lacking minerals, etc., and with the right food coloring, there won’t be any harm done to the insides.

At some point, I should get regular with my blogging again. I just haven’t had the energy to want to bother doing it lately.

For all of you out there who are enjoying the festive holiday, best wishes to you and your family from me.

Merry Christmas.

I’ll come back to normal around New Years, and hopefully be more up to date with things.

I’ve come to a realization that I need to do something new to me to get enjoyment out of my own life. Doing the same thing over and over again leaves me feeling frustrated with myself, and frustrated with the people and things around me.

At some point in the future, I need to go somewhere new, or do something that is exciting in a good way. Maybe I should get on an airplane and go somewhere, just to make myself get over my fear of heights. Maybe if I do that, I’ll even get up and walk around on the plane. They do, after all, recommend walking around on the plane for long flights to help prevent blood clots from forming in your legs. That’d be new for me to do, but it scares me at the same time.

I guess it’s me being bored with Tampa itself…

It’s been a while, humanity.

I kept wanting to blog for a while, but each time I wanted to do it, something would keep me from doing so. Little did I realize that it was a configuration mistake on my part that caused the majority of my issues.

I’ve had a lot to write about, too. I went in for that adenosine thallium stress test. I want to never experience that again. The thallium goes in smoothly, with no issues. It’s the adenosine that’s the bugger. It felt like someone had just turned loose millions of malfunctioning nanobots into my bloodstream, and they were all exploding ten times a second. The pain was so terrible that my chest couldn’t contain it all — I could physically feel the pain backwash into my arms and down into my hands.
As embarrassing as it sounds, I was crying, begging for them to stop it. It was like every single nerve ending had a cheese grater running over it. That was the longest four minutes of my life.

I think I may have a merrier Christmas this year than I did last year — I actually feel fairly happy this month, with all health issues aside. Heh, Santa may even come for me this year, and give me something fun to play with.

Calling it quits for today,
Xee!

I got a call on Monday, asking me to come in to the Doctor’s office. Given that the Doctor and I had already agreed on two weeks from my last appointment, I was justifiably worried that they found something that needs to be taken care of as soon as possible.

I go in, pay my co-pay (which is annoying, and seems like a trap, when you’re just returning for results, makes you think that hmm, there might be more to this visit), and go to see the doctor. He, in his rather downplaying manner, tells me that I have high cholesterol (no surprise here) and high triglycerides. He then mumbles a few things (did I mention that I would prefer a doctor who natively speaks English, instead of English as a second language?) and tells me “That’s all.”

For those of you who know of my legendary patience, you’ll find the next bit surprising.

I ripped that doctor a brand new number two.

I let him know that I hate how I was left wondering if there was something critically wrong that I was asked to come in long before the two weeks was up, and then he just tells me something this simple. At some point, two F-missiles roared out of the launcher; he got mad, and wanted to start yelling at me.

I let him know in no uncertain terms that he’s not going to yell at me. He said he didn’t have to take it, and was going to leave the room. “Fine, then leave. I don’t really care,” was my response to him.

Of note, this doctor also downplayed the Acid Reflux thing last Friday. Everything I know about it, I learned from people who have had Acid Reflux.

… and now, a week later, I come back to finish writing this post. Since then, I’ve been in the hospital. This past Thursday, I went to the hospital in an ambulance, complaining of chest pain. It felt like a web of pain that focuses in the middle of my chest. I still get traces of this pain by just sitting down and doing nothing in particular. Honestly, the doctor I had on Friday tried to do a stress test on me, wanting to get my pulse up to 165 beats per minute, but I failed that test due to my blood pressure skyrocketing to 230 over 115. While it came back down to normal about 10 minutes after I stopped doing the test, it worried the doctor, so he wanted me to make an appointment to have another test done — this time, they want to do an Adenosine Thallium stress test, since I failed on the Bruce protocol (timed treadmill) test.

Honestly, I am pretty worried, since some of my symptoms match up with one of my fears: a pulmonary embolism.

I don’t really feel like posting this, but I need to get back into the once-a-week or better habit of blogging my thoughts. So, I present to you a few tidbits of what’s going on in my life.

• I saw the doctor on Friday, missing a day of work. The doctor states that I have another throat infection, AND that I have Acid Reflux. No connection was noted between the two. I now take a prescription for the stomach acid I have. It makes sense, too — the food they feed us here isn’t all that healthy, as it is laden with calories.
• Speaking of calories, I’m steadily gaining weight. It’s a combination of being stressed out — which leads to me drinking sodas steadily again — and not smoking. I stopped smoking because I can’t find a cigarette that is as satisfying as my old brand of clove cigarettes (Sampoerna). Additionally, I don’t get enough exercise, and I know it.
• Moving on to exercise, I’d like to get some more of it. I really ought to go to the YMCA up the street from here and get a membership there. I should also replace my bicycle, since this one’s needing some repairs that are probably going to be expensive…
• Onto expensive things: I’m falling behind on my budget and plan to get out of here, simply by stopping to eliminate old debts. I’m working on getting rid of my student loan’s debt by just paying on it in lumps. I refuse to deal with this company in the way they ask, because I think they’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Why would I need to tell them the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three people that really know me, just to pay the debt?
• I made a comment via Twitter the other day, mentioning things afflicting me: “Acid reflux, Carpal tunnel, hypertension… What’s next? A thyroid disorder!?” — these are things listed not only in alphabetical order, but also in order of most recent afflicted by, to least recently. A thyroid disorder would be what I expect next, though it’s going to break the chronological order, most likely.
• Oh, and speaking of the thyroid, the Doctor took blood samples Friday, and asked me to come back in two weeks.
• The doctor also wanted to set me up to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, which I think might help with some of the depression I face. There, now it’s in the world’s eye, and I can’t deny it any more.

There… now that this is done, I’m going to go eat breakfast. Yes. At 4 pm.
Ciao, and Chow.

Just a quick post here before I call my taxi today.

I just found out that if I miss the 8 am bus to work, and try to catch the 8:30, I run the risk of really not getting there on time. Since the 8 am route causes me to catch two buses (#6, #37), and would get me there at about 8:45, it’d be fine. However, the 8:30 would require three buses (#6, #15, #37), and it is supposed to put me at the bus stop at 9:23 AM.

Any desync between the three buses could mean I won’t get there on time. The #37 is the one that likes to run at whatever time it feels like, it seems, so I’m just gonna call the taxi in a minute here, and head downstairs.

I must admit that I’ve sort of been avoiding HDTV for a while. It’s not that I didn’t want the high definition displays, but rather that I hadn’t seen any at affordable prices. I didn’t want to spend $1000, $2000, or more just for something I watch for a few hours a week!

I was sorely tempted by HDTV, though, after walking by an HDTV kiosk in a local mall several months back, and glimpsing one out of the corner of my eye. I stopped, turned, and walked up to this display, just marveling at the near-lifelike detail, my eyes opened to just how inferior SDTV (that’s Standard Definition TV) is to the new hardware.

While looking around this week to see what I can window shop for (I have a small list of things I would like to put in an apartment, once I get one), I ran across Second Act’s “Great Deal of the Day“. While the televisions shown on the Great Deal of the Day page are a bit pricey, which means it doesn’t meet my current budget need, the rest of the site has some really good prices and deep cuts on HDTVs.

One thing I noticed is that they do something I already do: They get open boxed, overstocked, closeouts, or refurbished televisions to resell to the public. I actually like refurbs, since they are generally retested by their manufacturer, so that the product meets their standards (and thusly doesn’t embarass the company by failing, I’d dare say).

Part of my head’s stuck in the 80’s and 90’s, so I’m comfortable with spending about $300 on a television that will last several years and isn’t a tiny 13″ box. That’s why I was surprised to see a Toshiba 26″ HDTV for a mere $289.99 plus shipping on their site. It gives me something to consider, and somewhere to watch for decent deals for later.

I’ve come to a conclusion: I need a few more things to read during the week.
On a typical weekday, I can open my newsreader, read everything there, comment on a few interesting things, and then do my job as expected. There’s usually not much in my newsreader, either.

I blame LiveJournal, and the few friends I had there, since they have since “stopped posting”. (For the uninitiated, to “stop posting” on LiveJournal is to set the journal to Friends Only, which basically turns your feed into a hundred bytes of useless mush. You’re still posting, but most web based newsreaders can’t see protected posts, as far as I can tell.)

So yeah, if there’s something that I should be reading, and it has a news feed, let me know, right?

(p.s.: on the weekend, I read on one or the other day, and get done just as fast. I just did that, actually.)

I got around to checking on my Google PageRank today, mostly at the prompting of an entry Deb made today.

Sure enough, Google has dinged me for the second time, knocking my decent five points of PageRank down into the can, leaving me with two points. I’m not entirely certain why I keep taking a ding here, but it’s fairly annoying to have built up the rank naturally, and then watch it plummet.

It might be that there are people still linking to this site as “ESL”, thereby diluting any potential earning of points there. For those who are reading and are just using “ESL” as a link to me… I kindly ask you to stop that, and please update with the (much easier to say) current name of this weblog: Just Like (a) Human.

Either way, I now have to wait until Google decides to reroll my pagerank.

On an aside, I stopped caring about Alexa, since that score just keeps plunging through the basement.

I spend a lot of time sending Tweets of thoughts I’d like to blog, and then when I get to a terminal, I forget to convert those thoughts to a full-fledged entry.

I’ve meant to emphasize what I mean about wanting a No Single Occupant Vehicle day here in Tampa, after seeing an article in the local TBT* about a No Vehicle Day overseas.

I mean to mention my arguably terrible sleeping schedule, where I’m awake for up to 21 hours a day, and limping along with three hours of sleep.

I’ve even meant to kvetch about this one stretch of Martin Luther King Blvd. here, and how I refuse to cycle it unless absolutely necessary, simply because of how wild the traffic is in that stretch, combined with the lack of a sidewalk to stay away from the traffic.

Maybe I’ll make some time to do that, eventually.

Since I started working with these Dell machines, I’ve come to a normal conclusion:
I want to build my own machine.

My biggest reason for wanting to do that is simple: I want the hands-on time with this new hardware that everyone’s using, since I’ve always lagged behind by several years on getting the up to date materials. The problem with that lag is, I’m not sure what’s on the market now, and if it’s any good. There’s a lot of choices, a lot of unsorted information, and a lot to sift through.

While reading my email, I ran across some processor reviews, though. It showed me a lot about some of the information floating on the ‘net, regarding new processors. The great part is, it pulls information from several sources, including popular online shopping sites like NewEgg and Amazon, and puts it right there for me to read.

The greatest part is, this formula is also followed for the motherboard reviews at the same site. I can now use a simple interface, drill down to what I’m looking for, and get the data I want with very little problems whatsoever.

Looks like this one’s getting added to my local bookmarks…

Since I started my Dell training here, I’ve been forced to not use the L-word when referring to portable computers, on penalty of a quarter for slipping.

If we use the L-word (don’t worry, it’s not the L-word that gets men excited over everything, unless they’re geeks who get their kicks on hardware), our instructor has a tendency to say, “The what?”
Many of them fall for it and say, “The l(censored) — Aw, sh–”, doubling their penalty for the day.

We’re required to use words such as “notebook” or “portable” when referring to these devices, and it’s just funny as all get out.

So far, I’ve been caught twice, but there are a few of us who are still in the old school era where you actually could sit these things on your lap and work from them, hence their accidental usage of the former term. But, a number of guys finding themselves at an impromptu sausage roast (heh heh heh) when they do that with the new ones, I can’t blame them for changing the verbage, and making sure we use it, too.

About 20 minutes ago, I logged in so I can update my WordPress install by Subversion. I see this:

[dollar@cake ~/pxnet_html]$ svn up
U wp-includes/version.php
Fetching external item into ‘wp-content/plugins/akismet’
Updated external to revision 19778.
Updated to revision 6166.


Checking WordPress after that, I see that it is indeed WordPress 2.3, and just in time. I finished ironing out a few kinks here (UPDATE YOUR PLUGINS NOW) and there (Look at the new Plugins interface, now with “Update your plugins now” deliciousity) before I took the leap, and now, it’s official, with a nice green sticker on the WordPress.org homepage, 2.3 is here.

I had my first day of Dell training today. I found out that this contract will be on the rather interesting side, too, since we’ll be dealing with small to medium businesses, generally.

I just hate getting up at such an awful hour of the morning (read: 5 AM!), but if it puts the meat in the basket, I really ought not to complain.

Keeping it short and sweet tonight; take care.

I could let the title of this entry be the entire content, but I think I owe you all an explanation. Hopefully, this one’s not against the old NDA I was under (hence the lack of real meat in my work posts).

Basically, the company I work for here, doing tech support for AOL had to lay all of us off, due to… extenuating circumstances. This was something I knew was coming two months ago, and I was prepared and ready. I was planning on using my time off to claim unemployment, and search for a job with similar pay, or even go back to my old job.

On our last week there, I get a phone call just before I could call in with my doctor’s note, telling me that there is an opening available for me with the same company, but doing support for Dell. They tell me it involves a pay raise, which I was pleased as punch to hear, so of course, I went for it.

Therefore, I’ve spent all of THIS week off from work, and will be working next week, by doing over a month of proper training.

I’m glad, too. It means I get to keep benefits, and might be able to make some necessary progress.

Good to the last chop.

I tried eating at Grass Root on Tuesday (and Wednesday, which is where that picture is from). The organic, vegan friendly fare is excellent, as is the atmosphere.

When I took this picture, it shows how much I had that day:
I had the Cucumber Chop (green bowl), which was marvelous — crisp and sweet, with a bit of a tang to it to add in that returning bite, it made me stop at the beginning, so I could enjoy the rest of it at the end. I could almost swear that I tasted celery in this, too… I’ll have to ask.
Along with the Chop, I had the Classic American Burger (yellow-ish plate), which, given this restaurant, has absolutely no meat in it, was unbelievable. I’ve had okay burgers, I’ve had good burgers, but this one was actually several kinds of awesome.

Accompanying the sandwich and salad were two glasses — one for a drink called ‘Mango-Ra’, and the other for a glass of Iced Ginger Green Tea.
The Mango-Ra is interesting, to be sure, given its ingredients: Mango, vanilla extract, strawberries, pineapple juice, lime and agave nectar.
Notice that I didn’t say Sugar? High Fructose Corn Syrup? Turbinado?
The Agave nectar is the sweetener of choice here, and makes the drink quite deliciously sweet. Combined with its thickness, it would serve well as a meal substitute of its own! I had trouble finishing it because I was feeling full.
The tea, however, isn’t to be ignored, with its subtle ginger hints, and a crisp sweetness that is missing from most teas. This too, was excellent.

I’m not a practicing vegetarian, vegan, or raw foodist, but the food here is seriously delicious, and just might make an impact on your health.

Bon Appétit!

How’s this for kicks?

It looks like the iPhone just went through a price drop (ALREADY), and Jobs is being kind in reimbursing HALF of the overpay price (The old price was $200 higher, remember) in the form of a gift certificate.

I’m still in the “WHY would I buy a six hundred dollar phone?” camp here, even though the phone is now only four hundred dollars, but I’m finding this whole thing to be truly funny.

I’m just waiting for the free suppository add-on to come with the iPhone (as well as the phone being usable on a carrier that isn’t AT&T) before I consider buying it, but I’d still be leery of buying it. It’d provide me with no features worth my time.

The other day, I went to log in at SecondLife.com, so I could download the software to my laptop for an experiment (Would I be able to run SL on the laptop I just recently bought? The answer was “Heh, not really.”).
I noticed that I had been gaining L$ (That is, Linden Dollars) at a rather steady rate since I went homeless, and I wasn’t sure how.

I checked carefully, and it seems that somehow, someone signs up with my Referral URL (which has been posted on numerous sites, including here, as part of my signature, among things), and they go for premium accounts. Those premium accounts turn into many L$ for me, and I can turn said L$ into USD$ legally.

I checked on the current conversion, and it seems that I’ll get USD$62 from the L$18100 I have, so I’m feeling pretty perky about that.

If anyone actually reads this regularly, they might have noticed the utter lack of posting for the second half of August. It’s not normal, at least since last year, for me to do that. I decided today to sit down and just blog before work, since it might help.

Right now, I’m depressed about a lot of things. I have that feeling I used to have when I was living with my aunt, trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my bills month to month with her. I decided early this month that I was going to try to clear up my student loan from when I went to a school that doesn’t even deserve a mention, given the way they treated me.

To start paying off the loan, I had to pay an initial lump of $500, according to them, and then pay $50 a month after that. The tradeoff is, as long as I keep paying on time, I get my Title IV eligibility back during the payback period. That makes me eligible for federal grants again, which is wonderful. Problem was, $500 basically eats my savings, since I’ve had extra expenses this month.

I feel… violated, heh.

But, if it means that I can clean up my credit record, then great. I’ll get it done, period.

I finally caved in.

Since I wanted something else to play on my DS, and I came to the realization that we only live once, I decided to buy the R4 card for the Nintendo DS.

I simply wanted a card that had better compatibility than this Datel Games ‘n Music card I got at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Some of the homebrew stuff just does not run on the GnM all that well (DSLinux, for example), and I think it’s because of an artificially imposed bottleneck on the card itself.

So hopefully, I’ll be having some kind of fun with this thing next week.

Right now, I am giving serious thought to continuing my education. I’m tired of being buggered out of potential jobs by not having a piece of paper that says, “Justin is now certified on paper as knowing this”. While I understand their wants, I also have to mention that this just drives me mad, because of the amount of money that I could have been earning, but can’t due to that exact lack of paper.

I spoke with a counselor from University of Phoenix today to see what I can do to enhance my chances.

I just need to find out about this defaulted student loan they say I have, so I can get my Title IV status back.

(I also need to see why WordPress keeps holding my entries instead of posting them…)

I recently caved in and signed up with another one of those social networking sites. This one would be Facebook.

For some reason, when I started using Facebook, toying with its features, and figuring out how to get it to work, I started to understand why people actually USE these social networks. It provides people with a convenient, easy way to reach someone, no matter how much their email address changes, and no matter how far they move. Phone number’s changed? Update your account so your friends will know!

The other networks I’ve tried — The now spam-riddled Orkut, and the utter mess that is MySpace — don’t really relate that kind of ideal to users very well. They just seem to emphasize the wrong parts of a social network, and basically have caved in on themselves. Orkut’s just a dead star, but MySpace is more like a black hole, sucking more and more people in to its nigh-inescapable depths.

When I signed up for Facebook with the sole intent of adding Robert Scoble, I was thinking, “Meh, something else to abandon and never visit again.”
I tried out the system there, searching for old classmates, checking out these Facebook Applications, and other things. I found that it was easy to use, and rather intuitive. I then found Facebook Mobile. Facebook Mobile lets me actually keep up with people via text messages. In fact, I’m keeping up with a former coworker via Facebook now because it’s easy to do — I get a text message letting me know he’s said something, and I can reply immediately to that text message.

Even better is that I can use Facebook Applications to add things to one spot. Since I use Flickr, Last.fm, and Twitter, I can use apps to integrate my data in the same spot, making my Facebook page a hub for activity.

One of these days, I’ll keep up with the lot of you all, with your social networks, and stuff.
Do feel free to find me on Facebook as Justin Hobley. Tell me who you are, and I’ll add you.

[tags]Facebook, Social Networking, MySpace[/tags]

I have to leave for work in six hours. I can’t seem to sleep.

Instead, I’ve Rickrolled, Tayrolled, sought out lulz over the internet, Looked at my Nintendo DS, PLAYED my Nintendo DS, and still can’t get over sleep hill here.

I’m tempted to get up and go eat some spaghetti, since I never did eat my dinner when I came in, opting for a lighter bowl of cereal to try to get by on.

I’d like some barbecue ribs at the moment, though. I miss having mom and dad’s barbecue a lot right now. It’s just not the same going to a chain restaurant, where they ‘barbecue’ ribs and serve ‘em, after being used to putting the meat on the grill, watching it sizzle and burn.

Why do I like the taste of burnt flesh, anyway?
Maybe because it soothes something in me?
I’m an anti-vegetarian’s best friend — gimme a medium rare steak.

I’ve noticed lately that whenever I attempt to blog a photo by phone, the post to this blog here fails. It’s getting annoying, despite everything I’ve tried to make it work.

I’ve tried release versions of WordPress. I’ve tried CVS versions. I am trying SVN versions. None of them get the blog posting on the first try, and that’s just totally annoying!
I’m just not sure who to point the blame at, though, because it might be my fault for mostly using CVS and SVN for WordPress, however, I haven’t tried on a non-SVN blog hosted on this domain.

I just wish I had a better way to make sure I could send an image from my Sprint phone and make sure it posts over to this weblog.

I’m also open for suggestions on how to fix my image blogging issue.

So, the other day, I was sitting around with the guys, playing Xbox360.

They talked me into trying out one of those shooters with them, despite my relatively firm stance about first/third person shooters and consoles (I don’t like them to be together, bob. They should not touch~). It was this game called Gears of War.

When I started playing, I was a bit unsteady with the controls, because I’m used to having omnidirectional aiming in one hand, using the mouse. It took a little to get used to the sticks, since I can’t whip around to kill nearly as fast on the controller AND retain my fine aim that I’m used to.

But, I plowed forward like a trooper, and my first experience on ‘Insane’ settings impressed the guys.

Apparently, I’m good at: Getting to objectives without dying, Tossing the grenades, Conserving ammunition, Finding answers to puzzles that I’ve never seen.

I didn’t have to be picked up by my partner (the only way to get up when facing death in the form of a large red gear plastered in the middle of your screen is to be tagged by your partner. It encourages you to communicate with the partner to get things done) very often, though I did have to help one of the other partners up off the ground a lot.

Jason was pretty good with this, but Zeke is a bit death-prone.
Both of them communicate their part of the plan with me well, and I try to do just as much in return (eg: I told Zeke not to move until I exclaimed that “I am the Light” in one level, because traveling in darkness will almost immediately kill you, instead of letting you face death), but it’s kinda different for me to actually be playing a shooter in a cooperative mode.

Still, I was actually impressed by the game play, and the need for tactics, dodging, wall-crawling, crouching, and overall just staying alive.

It’s like, we’ve come so far since Unreal Tournament, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D.

I’m gonna miss my shield belt, though.

Even though I officially left my constantly paid status in Anarchy Online a while back (I do renew the subscription for a month, every few months, simply because I can’t bear to let go of Araiya so easily), I still like to play online games.

I think I’m strange in my methodology of playing them. I seem to like to go online to usually play in an area by myself. I don’t like to share with anyone else that often, unless the benefit to myself is greater than playing alone (eg: teaming with someone to be able to deal greater damage to greater enemies, to gain extra experience, such as when fighting Hecklers in Anarchy Online’s Elysium region).

I think it’s because online content can change on a whim, and the trade marketing can fluctuate on a heartbeat. There’s almost something new every time I play some games online, and that keeps me playing.

Fallen Sword, for example, is a game I just started playing recently, thanks to a coworker who talked me into it.
I’m getting into it more and more as a substitute for Kingdom of Loathing, since I need to do something after my 200 turns burns off.
While Fallen Sword is fairly simple to play, it has enough of my interest to keep going to see what’s there. I’m finally getting some experience, and earning a few of their bonus currency, called “Fallen Sword Points“.
* Note: Both of the Fallen Sword links will earn me a few of their points if you were to sign up with the game.

I can’t neglect my old favorite, Kingdom of Loathing. I like the constant potshots at various things, and enjoy laughing at the pain of others. The entire game is dirty jokes and poking fun at various things, as well as some genuine humor.

I also like to play Nowhere Else and Beyond, but it’s a little rough on my laptop to play it, or anything else, lately. ;(

As a kid, I’ve had this fascination with languages of the world around me.

I once tried to take basic Spanish and French classes in the same year — I was in third grade. That act alone showed me an appreciation for people who have command of more than one language, because that year showed me how hard it is to learn a language solely by hearing it OR seeing it.

While checking my email accounts (goodness, I have many of them), I stumbled across a link where one can, for Free: Learn English with audio.
Given that English is my native language, I was inclined to toy around with the site, to see just how well it was done.

The home page is essentially bare, save for one Google AdWords box, and the flash object containing the flash cards (no pun intended), which I find to be a very good idea. Nothing says “Learn English” better than a gigantic flash ad for Verizon High Speed FiOS, right?

The Flash box on the page has five labels. Four languages are supported on a path to learn English: Spanish, French, Russian, and Hebrew. There is a standalone label that gives only the English, with no transliterations or translations of words to English, as well as the aforementioned language labels, whose contents come complete with a transliteration of the way the word sounds, as well as the audible enunciation of the words.

For example, I chose French.
For appliances, I see what we call a Stereo in English:
Stereo, sti’(r)io, chaîne stéréo
The first is the English spelling. The second is a transliteration of how we say it in English, and the last is the (familiar) French way of saying the same object. If I clicked on it, I’d hear the “sti’(r)io” as the enunciation.

It’s a pretty healthy way to teach the basics of words, though I admit, I don’t miss conjugating verbs with these cards (simply because I hated conjugating être in my French classes).

I can see how having a free resource to begin learning English as a Second Language from would be so useful.

[tags]ESL, English as a Second Language, Polyglot, Linguistics, Learn English, Contributors[/tags]

Things have been going slower than I expected them to go up here, and it’s mostly my fault.

Lately, I’ve spent far too much money on things that aren’t absolutely necessary, and I’ve had to swallow the temptation to do it yet again, and in a larger amount. Right now, I’m about a month behind on what I wanted to have saved up, because I’ve been taking Voluntary Time Off at work, plus, I’ve been buying my own food for the most part, trying to keep my weight under control (AND FAILING).

It looks like I’ll have to bump my estimate of six months up to around nine months, because I was living in the late 90’s in my head. So far off on pricing, it’s scary as hell, to be truthful.

Ah, well. By that new standard, I’m nearly on schedule again.

As I’m sure it’s been noticed, I don’t blog much lately.

It’s not that I don’t really want to, as much as it is that nothing interesting happens to me. I generally won’t blog if I can’t talk about something that DOES interest me. Given that my life has been one hundred percent dull and boring over the past few weeks, you can pretty much see that this entry alone is taking some kind of effort.

Very little is new in my life. I know that I need to lose weight, since I’m still hovering around the same spot. My insurance from work just kicked in, so I think I’ll see about getting my thyroid checked next week (as soon as I can find a doctor that’s close by), and probably check in with a nutritionist. I’d like to be under the 300 pound mark by the end of the year. Given that it’s only a goal of roughly 20 pounds, I do think I can reach that mark in the six months I am allotting myself.

I may want to consider prescription diet medicines, as well. Since my aunt could take a lot of weight off with her silly pills and no real exercise regime, I could do it too, with a far lower dosage pill, I’d wager. I just know that I weigh way too freakin’ much, and it bothers me.

We’ll see how it goes over the next few months, I guess.

Yesterday, while hanging out with some of my dorm mates who enjoy WWE Wrestling, I heard that Chris Benoit, his wife, and his child were found dead, but with no details.

Being that I had my laptop on me at the time, they all asked me if I can try to get them some more information about what happened. Unfortunately, despite drawing and summoning all of my resources, and even using the Wikipedia booster gave me almost nil, other than confirming that it was not another angle for the show like Vince McMahon’s ‘death’. That was one thing they wanted to know. The information about how it all went down wasn’t available to the public at that time, so unfortunately, they wouldn’t know.

Fast forward to today. I come in to work, and accept a couple of hours of VTO. I check TMZ.com to see if they had any information about Benoit’s death, and was surprised at the article they had published. Lately, at least to me, there’s been a lot of murder-suicide cases, with someone slaughtering the whole family that’s on hand, and then offing themselves so they don’t have to account directly to us as humans for their sins, their crimes, and their transgressions.

This is, perhaps, a bit too disturbing, how people just think like this.

I know what it’s like to want to die, but, I guess I don’t understand why someone feels they must also off family members that are dear to them at the same time. It makes little to no sense whatsoever. I’m just wondering if anyone, be they a star, or maybe sub-par, will ever logically say to themselves, “Oh man, I’m in too deep. Let me talk to someone before I drown myself in this problem.”

I was just wondering, is all.

[tags]Chris Benoit, WWE, Wrestling, Death, Murder, Suicide[/tags]

On Friday, while I was about to get ready to go to work, one of our shelter’s social workers comes into my dorm.

He’s walking down the row, knocking on the walls to see if anyone’s in their room, and if they respond, they are subject to an impromptu search of their posessions, to check for contraband.

I found a delightful amount of humor in part of the list that is considered contraband. Some of the items we are not allowed to have up here are pornography, alcohol, narcotics, weaponry, and (get this) ’adult toys’. In fact, someone was removed from the program earlier in the week, on an unrelated issue, and when they went to clean up what he left, they found several phallic adult toys up here. This, in turn, sparked the dorm by dorm content check to see if they can spot the objects.

There have been many males discharged from the program in the last few weeks, and honestly, I assume they deserved it for whatever reason they were discharged. After all, it was made clear to me that when I came up here, this was a religious organization, so I pretty much assumed that, of course, things like pornography and drugs, or even alcohol would not be allowed up here. I also assumed that for a program that has 42 men living together under the same roof would have no room for weapons.

I am, given my nature, of two minds about the adult toys. Some of them serve a specific purpose, and would be a more viable alternative than intercourse with an unknown person, so I’d side with the owner of the toys. However, I can see where those who follow the Holy Bible strictly would be offended by the presence of these things, and thus I can see where they are coming from as well, and would side with them just as evenly.

I think the rest of my humor about this comes from just how this social worker pronounces the plural form of ’dildo’. I think it sounds like a combination of ’dildo’ and ’Thor’ (link removed to keep you all sane, haha).

I’ll just sit back and wait for the next ’dildor search’.

This is more of a joke, an aside, than anything else, but chew on this:

We seem to make an artificial flavor for nearly anything. Even artificial meat flavoring for people who are transitioning over to a vegetarian / vegan lifestyle from actually eating meat. Artificial flavors compose our lives in their own special way, if you look at it like that.

How do you think people would react if they were offered an antifreeze flavored soda?

It has to be done. After all, we have Brussels Sprouts flavored soda, as well as Turkey and Gravy flavored soda, soooo…

[tags]soda, humor, weird, antifreeze, artificially flavored[/tags]

It’s Monday. I feel supremely lazy, with only one thing to do (which is laundry, two loads) today.

I’d like Chipotle for lunch.
I’m being lazy, and not going to get it.

It’s just one of those days, with the weather see-sawing between sorta-clear, and sorta-rainy.
It’s nice to be lazy and get away with it, sometimes.

Oh, and gushi ? I did mention I would post my laptop specs for you, so:
Dell Latitude CPx H500GT, running on Intel® Pentium III at 500 MHz, ATI RAGE Mobility-M1 AGP2X at 1024 x 768 px, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HD.
Internet access can be done in three ways: Samsung A900m as modem on USB, Xircom Ethernet card + Dialup Modem on Cardbus, and Realtek 802.11g card on Cardbus.

She’s not intended to go fast but she is intended to at least go.

So, when I got paid, I tapped a little into my savings, and burnt off my entertainment budget for the month in a single shot:

I now have an old Dell Latitude CPx laptop at my disposal.

I can finally blog a little more, from more locations, without having to constantly abandon my computer because time’s up. All I’m limited by is where I can connect from at the moment via Ethernet (or by my phone).

This only cost me $200, and can seriously be reused over and over until I manage to break or lose this laptop.

Result: Getting connected often enough to actually download stuff for my personal entertainment, so that I can play offline = Saving money in the long run.

I am seriously happy.

[tags]laptop, internet, tethering, dell[/tags]

So, I’ve been playing NetHack on my USB stick lately, since I’m getting bored with the internet (just a little).

Unfortunately, the computers here at the Salvation Army keep me from visiting the NetHack (I don’t think it likes the word ‘hack’ in the domain name, really) homepage, so I can’t go there and find out if there’s a way to get NH to stop prepending the name of the computer I’m on to the save files. I have to go in and change the name of the save file to get NetHack to realize that I have a valid save that I’d like to continue playing with.

Perhaps one of you reading this would know the answer to my question?

[tags]NetHack, Save Game[/tags]

I’m stuck with a bunch of sports-mongering men here at the Salvation Army, and unfortunately, that means I get to watch lots and lots of sports on television here.

This wouldn’t be bad if I felt they had good taste in sports (extreme snowboarding, just about anything BMX related, skateboarding, etc), but I think their choices in sports are antique, and boring. I mean, why would I want to watch basketball or NASCAR? I’m already dreading when American Football season begins. Hot, sweaty men running back and forth, lobbing an inflated pig’s bladder back and forth? No, thanks.

Please tell me that I haven’t missed snowboarding season SOMEWHERE, and that kids are still doing gnarly tricks on tricked out bikes, among other things.

Just a quick heads-up here, but I’m being joe-jobbed by some slob who’s decided that he’ll take ‘benjaminkhoo’, add a few letters, and just snow his way across the internet using my domain name.

As a result, I’ve been getting more spam, less mail.

Do keep in mind that if I’ve requested email from your website, or am sending, you’ll be able to tell it’s actually me from a rather obvious method I use for mailing.

Not to be confused with lions (Jesus Christ, Get in the Car), the hurricane season has roared into place today.

With that roar comes our second named storm of the year,