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Oct 18 2011
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Al Observes Things

Liveblogging the Western Republican Presidential Debate

OK – so in conclusion, sorry everyone, this has been awful. I’ll go back to what I do best: posting about profound things. For example, people keep having trouble opening the door at work. I’ll figure out why! Is it because they’re pushing instead of pulling? Or are they not turning the door knob enough? We’ll find out! ‘til next time!

9:53 Woot! It’s over! I hope CNN now gets a bunch of people whose opinions don’t really mean anything to bicker over how great/awful Republicans are.

9:50 +5pts to Newt Gingrich for accusing Anderson Cooper of having a debate format that maximizes back-and-forth bickering.

9:44 When’s the evening gown portion of the debate?

9:41 Commercial/protein break!

9:39 –5pts to Rick Santorum. Iran Contra wasn’t a real problem? Come on now. Come on. 4realz.

9:36 +5pts to Ron Paul for using a clever hand gesture to get Anderson Cooper’s attention.

9:34 Question from the audience: “White people are having a hard time in the US. Why do we send foreign aid abroad?”

9:30 Oooh hostage negotiation question. I’d like to hear how they get out of this one!

My summary of what Hermain Cain’s saying:

“I would have a policy of not negotiating with terrorists. Then I’d look on a terrorist by terrorist basis to decide whether to negotiate with them.”

9:27 Bachmann seems to want to search for the WMDs in Iran.

9:23 Long meandering comment by Rick Perry that reveals that he doesn’t know what “repudiate” means.

9:16 SO – I regret that I’m just kinda commenting on the theatrics of the debate instead of adding any real insight to it, but uh… ionno. Is there anything to say? Does anyone really want to hear me making fun of Republicans? I feel like the best thing I could actually do is teach an online economics course. Anyway, commercial’s over. A question from Mike Richards? KRAMER???

9:04 +5pts to me if someone says “gold standard” in their response to how they’d fix housing problems.

9:02 Free market should decide where nuclear waste goes! Because everyone knows that corporations are in the best position to decide where nuclear waste goes.

8:56 –5pts to Rick Perry for blatantly disregarding Anderson Cooper’s control. +5pts to Rick Perry for blatantly disregarding Anderson Cooper’s control.

8:49 +10pts to Bachmann for politely raising her hand to get speaking time!

8:45 +5pts to Anderson for quoting Hermain Cain on the electrified fence.

8:42 +5pts to Mitt Romney for lecturing Rick Perry on the rules.

8:36 This thing seriously goes until 10? I’m running out of arbitrary reasons for giving Rick Santorum points.

8:33 +1pt to Bachmann for yelling “Anderson!” repeatedly trying to get speaking time.

8:31 +5pts to Newt Gingrich for telling everyone to “focus.”

8:27 +5pts to Rick Santorum for “income mobility.” –5pts for criticizing Mitt Romney on Obamacare. Isn’t that the one question that you think he’s had the most time to prep on?

8:21 Why was Mitt Romney allowed to make that long speech? Why isn’t Rick Santorum making a speech? This is biased.

8:16 Rick Perry – “I’ve got a great plan. But I’m not sharing it with you yet, but I’m going to have it, and it’ll be great!”

8:14 People stop having kids when taxes are high. +5pts to Rick Santorum.

8:13 I feel like Herman Cain always sounds like he’s lecturing me when he talks.

8:08 Everyone seems to be writing something while Anderson Cooper is explaining the rules. What can they possibly be writing? Did you not learn the rules ahead of time?

8:06 National Anthem. 5pts to Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney for mouthing the words to it. Or lip synching?

8:03 Oh nice, they’re taking attendance.

8:01 Wow CNN makes the presidential campaigning a year before the actual elections look pretty exciting. I bet they could do wonders for pre-season football!

8:01 Oh yay!

8:00 Oh snap it’s starting. I hope they have a video montage telling me what the West is all about.

7:36 About ‘alf an ‘our ago, Jessi told me to Liveblog tonight’s debate, so I’m going to do it. I’m pretty excited about finding out who’s the best candidate to become the next President of the Western Republican.

Warning: I’ve never liveblogged anything before, and I can’t guarantee that this will be anything more than half-assed. I may get distracted and go play StarCraft midsentence or something. No promises!

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Oct 15 2011
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Al Observes Things

Setting goals with GOAL!

5296_647406879262_108741_37788637_2284760_nAre you trying to get your life in order but not sure how to set proper goals? If so, I hear where you’re coming from! Setting goals is not easy, but fortunately, I’ve put together this little acronym to make setting goals easier for you. Just follow GOAL!

G – Gender-specific

Specificity in your goal reflects how seriously you take them. Having vague goals is an indication that you’re not serious about your goals. Make your goals specific. In fact, make your goals gender-specific. This will help you hone in on what you really want to accomplish. For example:

  1. Meet 5 girls at a bar.
  2. Perform 25 modified (girl) push-ups

O – Original

Do you want to reduce your credit card debt by 25% Yes? Well, so does everyone else, and someone is likely to beat you to it. It’s not enough to just say you want to do something. You have to set out to do something that you’ll be the first to accomplish. Original goals would be more like:

  1. Reduce my debt by exactly pi%
  2. Reduce your carbon footprint. Literally!

A – Attitude

Lethargy is dangerous – especially when setting goals. Make sure you set your goals with attitude, largely by adding punctuation to them. Punctuation can be added almost anywhere in your goal. For example:

  1. Lose 10lbs of weight in a month!
  2. Join! a? book. club;

L – Lower your goals

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re here reading a blog article about setting goals, which means that we’re probably not the overachieving. Let’s not go overboard and set goals that we can’t accomplish. When you think you’ve set the right goal, dial it back by maybe 10%. Some examples of goals that have been dialed back a bit include:

  1. Run a 4.5K
  2. Put more money into your 360.9K retirement plan.

So there you have it. Just try to follow these guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to setting great goals!

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Oct 12 2011
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Al Observes Things

I do it because it’s fun… and it has anti-oxidants

WARNING: Ranty post!

Every notice that often when you ask someone why they have some hobby, they rattle off 5 or so answers that generally have nothing to do with the actual reason why they do things? One day, my sister was telling me about how she wanted to buy some more gems, and I asked her why she liked buying gems so much, and she said “because I like having pretty things.” What a refreshingly honest answer! The following post parses through common answers I hear to “why” to provide what I think are the real answers.

Why do you go to the gym?

Official answer: It reduces health risk factors, helps me better regulate my energy levels during the work day, makes me feel better afterward, and helps me perform better in my co-rec sports league.

Actual answer: It makes me less unappealing to the opposite sex.

Why do you like guns?

Official answer: It helps with hand-eye coordination, builds confidence, and studies show that areas where more people are proficient in guns have lower crime rate as it increases the risk of committing crime for criminals.

Actual answer: It makes a cool BANG noise when I pull the trigger!

Why are you on the Paleo diet?

Official answer: The modern diet is so polluted by refining processes and the all mighty corn industry that the only way to truly be healthful is to eat that cavemen did (plus or minus a few arbitrary decisions and add a workout routine that would make cavemen go “wtf?”)

Actual answer: I haven’t really thought about correlation vs causation, but some people that are in better shape than I am are on this diet, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Why do you pirate music/software?

Official answer: It’s my way of balancing out the unfair distribution of wealth. Big software companies and the recording industry don’t NEED my money, and meanwhile they’re just making record profits (pun intended!)

Actual answer: I’m cheap, fairly confident that I won’t get caught, and morally bankrupt.

Why do you have a StarCraft table in your apartment?

Official answer: So people can come over and play StarCraft, obviously?

Actual answer: So people can come over and play StarCraft. I think once a StarCraft player reveals that they play StarCraft, the big secret’s out, and they’re pretty open about it.

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Oct 06 2011
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Al Observes Things

My StarCraft 2 Playlist

Back where I used to train in Krav Maga, my instructors would blast hard rock while we worked out. It’d be loud music with a good bit of yelling, and this was supposed to motivate us while we did drills like “get choked from behind while the lights are off, your eyes are closed, and you’re disoriented.”

To be honest though, that music never really did it for me. As I’m now a starving student, I no longer formally train in Krav, but I do play StarCraft2, which is roughly the same thing, and what really gets me going is:

1. Colbie Caillat – All of You

220px-ColbieallofyouThough the album “All of You” sounds like the aural manifestation of falling in love when you first listen to it, it’s actually the official training music for the Russian Spetsnaz counter-terrorism unit. They also blast it aloud on speakers before action, striking fear in the heart of Chechens.

In StarCraft2, Colbie Caillat is best suited for those that play Protoss as the rhythms contain queues useful for warpgate rushing.

2. Avril Lavigne – Goodbye Lullaby

220px-Avril_Lavigne_Goodbye_Lullaby_album_coverOne often wonders when listening to Avril Lavigne, “what is this music actually about?” The first track, entitled Black Star, is actually about rogue scientific experiments done in Italy circa the early 90s to clone Silvio Berlusconi. This went on to become the basis of the storyline for Star Trek: The Attack of Evil Reman Picard (or better known as its production title Star Trek: Nemesis).

Goodbye Lullaby is best paired with players playing Terran as the atonal chords destructively interfere with the SC2 soundtrack, leaving only a series of beeps that reminds you when to build SCVs. Though the beeps would also be useful for those playing Protoss, the music actually constructively interferes with the Protoss soundtrack, causing players to oversaturate their mineral lines while under-producing army units.

3. Sara Bareilles – Kaleidoscope Heart

220px-SarabareilleskaleidoscopeheartcoverSeal team six listened to Kaleidoscope Heart when they killed Bin Laden.

The soulfulness of the music counteracts the gross squishy sounds of the Zerg soundtrack.

But mostly the Seal team 6 part.

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Sep 26 2011
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Al Observes Things

Al’s Guide to Regular Expressions

regexRegular expressions always came up for me when I was minoring in Computer Science in school and even still when I was a Program Manager at Microsoft. I always wished I had a “cheat sheet” as a reference, but I never found one that I liked, so I figured I’d write a post that was actually “useful” for a change.

Warning to all you computer-y people: this will probably just be review for you guys, so don’t expect to learn anything new.

Definition: regular expressions –n;

Things people say casually at work that sound pretty normal and don’t get you slapped, generally in the context of software engineers.

Examples:

  1. “Ship it.” – This means that you agree or approve.
  2. “Your bug doesn’t meet the bar” – This means that the priority of something was not high enough to warrant action.
  3. “What’s the high order bit here?” –  You’re asking what the most important concept is.
  4. “I’m not sure that that’s right.” – This is what you say when you flat out disagree with someone and don’t want to hurt their feelings.
  5. “We can certainly consider it, but…” – See both 2 and 4.
  6. “I think we have to look back to our goals” – Your proposal sounds like you pulled it out of your ass.

Examples of expressions that are not regular:

  1. “Let’s go dancing after work.”
  2. “I really enjoyed the smell of the people around me on the bus during my commute.”
  3. “Nah, I can’t play StarCraft. I’ve got a date tonight.”

Next up: Big O-face notation: Surprised smile

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Sep 21 2011
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Al Observes Things

What’s a facebook? And why does everyone keep complaining about it???

If there’s one thing I know that I don’t appreciate in life, it’s change. That’s why I still sport a bedazzled denim jacket from 1987, and I wear burlap underwear, which was the fashion at the time in the 17th century when underwear was first invented.

So imagine my surprise when I find out that people are using something called “Facebook,” complain about it every time there’s a new update, threaten to stop using it, and then forget all about all of the changes and go about their business. I don’t know how people deal with that!

Personally, when I want to share my thoughts with my peers, I prefer to load up Word Perfect 7.1, which I actually converted to PDP8 assembly so I could run it on my mainframe, which is then interfaced with a series of bobbins which weave a tapestry that displays my blog. The tapestry is then distributed to my friends via carrier pigeons on steroids.

And how has this been working for me? I’m not going to lie. It sucks. Every once in a while, the punch card manufacturer that I use arbitrarily decides to change the material with which they create punch cards (wtf is “recycled product”?), and the pigeon handlers (aka “Pigeoners”) threaten to unionize.

Really, I miss the good ol’ days of wooden punch cards, carrier velociraptors, and no underwear.

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Sep 20 2011
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Al Observes Things

A “return” to homework?

Many of you who read my blog may have been out of academia long enough that you don’t remember what homework was like. I’m here to describe it to you, based on my current experiences retaking General Chemistry.

  1. You log onto your class’s website to receive instructions about going to another site.
  2. You create an account on the other site with a completely different set of credentials, and you give them your credit card number so they can do whatever they want with it.
  3. The site tries to upsell you on the eBook. The eBook is the same as the textbook that you spent up to $150, but it’s more… uh… electronic.
  4. You spend a bunch of time learning a crazy language for talking to computers via plaintext <input> fields. For example, H2O is written as “H_2_O.” Superscripts, like in OH+, are written as “OH^+^.” It’s like a cat smiling at you!
  5. If you get a set of problems right, the site tries to encourage you:

ontheball

But it does so sometimes in an awkward way like it didn’t expect you to succeed:

yesyoudidit

And sometimes it just says crazy ass shit:

elvis

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Sep 19 2011
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Al Observes Things

Wrong Subway Line Chicken

MTA_Subway_EastsideEarlier today, the roommate Mike and I were headed back to our apartment from Union Square. To do this, we’re supposed to take the uptown 6 (green line). However, I thought it’d be funny if I proposed that instead we take the N R Q (yellow line), which takes you to either Queens or Brooklyn. That’s when I realized that this was potentially a great game:

“Wrong Subway Line Chicken.”

How to play:

  1. On the way to the subway, one person proposes that everyone take a subway line that does not take you where you want to go.
  2. The first person to back out or insist on taking the right subway line loses.
  3. Bonus points for suggesting a subway line that takes you somewhere really shady.
  4. If the game ends at JFK International Airport, the game can be continued by proposing a flight. Bonus points for international destinations. Canada does not count.

Keys to the game:

  1. Having really low opportunity cost. This game favors people that are unemployed, single, and have nothing better to do than to drag their friends down with them in the name of humor/honor.
  2. Having low relative opportunity cost. Well, okay, having nothing better to do is a general good way to win points, but really, it doesn’t help you if your friends are also unemployed. If this is the situation you’re in, be sure to propose to play this game when you know that your friends are in a rush for some reason.
  3. Being completely oblivious as to where the subways take you. This makes everything feel like an adventure. Jamaica Center? That sounds nice!
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Sep 14 2011
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Dieting

Banquet TV dinners past and present

Can you tell what’s missing here:

Photo_448175F9-5EEF-6A77-EC6E-36058E076FB8

Take your time.

Time’s up. The correct answer is: A SECOND PIECE OF CHICKEN.

The other day, I was at my local “supermarket” looking for “backup meals.” Back up meals are just a source of calories for when you may not have had the chance to cook and just want a quick meal without a lot of hassle. Good back up meals should have a low cost/calorie ratio. Naturally, I go to the TV dinner section thinking that Moore’s Law of Frozen/Preserved Meals should be yielding 10,000 calorie meals for only $1 (way more than when I last ate a TV dinner). What I saw instead were:

  • Stouffers – $6. These are surprisingly tasty and yield a fair number of calories, but it exceeds the “Cheap Chinese Food Barrier.” The “Cheap Chinese Food barrier” is the price of a cheap Chinese food takeout meal. If a frozen meal exceeds that price, I’d prefer to get cheap Chinese food.
  • Smart Ones – $4. These look like a pretty good deal at first until I realized that a box only had 230 calories and 11g of protein! At this point, I might as well have a protein shake for $0.75 (cost of protein powder+ milk)!
  • Banquet Fried Chicken – $1.50. I was pretty excited that these were on sale for 2 for $3, so I bought a whole bunch of them. However, I was really sad that they were missing the SECOND piece of chicken. Back when I was a kid, mother Banquet would prepare me frozen meals with a tiny scoop of potatoes, a tiny scoop of corn, and TWO pieces of chicken. Though it was still probably a pretty good deal for $1.50, it just made me sad. Oh how times have changed!

Oh, and here were a few other acceptable answers that have nothing to do with this post:

  • a spoon (a cha!)
  • most of the stuff you actually want in a meal (micronutrients, fiber, etc)
  • ketchup

Next up: Why does my Kefir have clumps in it?

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Sep 14 2011
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Dieting

The Ramen Kit

I’m pretty excited today because my “Ramen Kit” has arrived in the mail. What’s a “Ramen Kit” you ask? It’s:

Photo_CD3FBED2-4AB7-55B9-3E0B-04C6B203133D

  • A 7” Bowl
  • A couple pairs of chopsticks (textured at the bottom for enhanced grippiness!)
  • A soup spoon (that I don’t really use, but the Ramen Kit would be incomplete without it)
  • ~40 packs of Chinese instant noodles

Often when I tell people about my Ramen kit, I’ll get a either the response of “oh. nice, I guess?” or “hey, for a guy that works out as much as you do, I’m surprised you don’t care more about what you put in your body” (cough cough, Andrew). To those of you that are thinking the latter, I’ve put together the following responses. (They’re kinda mutually exclusive, so imagine that if someone said it to me, I’d pick one of these responses at random.)

  • Hey, that’s a rather bourgeois comment! I’m a starving college student with almost no income (due to my love of beer, whiskey, and high-rise apartments). This is a solid number of calories for a fraction of a dollar!
  • There’s all this nutritional “voodoo” about how bad everything is for you and how one study shows this and another study shows that. Yeah, preservatives probably aren’t great for you, but worrying about it seems to be a second order problem compared to having solid health fundamentals like exercising a lot and making sure you’re getting your macro nutrients (protein, carbs, fats), which I’ll make sure I get across the entire day.
  • Yeah, you’re probably right, but I make up for it by having Tasti-D. Did you know it’s only 70 calories????

So that’s that for today. Next: my thoughts on how Banquet TV dinners have changed over the years.

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