Blessed by the Potato

At the recommendation of some people at work I picked up some just peanuts peanut butter today. It’s interesting. For starters, it tastes exactly like it sounds: like liquid peanuts (the oil and sugar in regular peanut butter make it taste different… like peanut butter). The consistency is also really different: it’s really really sloppy, even more runny than jam. It’s more like the melted peanut butter you’re used to seeing on your english muffin or poptart. The oil also seperates out so you’ve got to stir it before spreading. I’m told that will all thicken up after it cools in the fridge though (which is where it’s to be kept due to the lack of preservatives). I’m going to try it a few more times (particularly in a batch of cookies) before rendering final judgement, but I think I’m going to stick to my old fashioned peanut butter.

However, no matter which way you mix it, you can’t beat peanut butter on english muffins with chocolate milk as a before bed snack! (Though I suppose that counts as cheating on my diet. D’oh!)

The folks at work are trying to squeeze more people into my room for the upcoming conference in Cancun.

Public speaking, tropical sun, and close contact with other human beings — the three things I became a scientist to avoid in the first place!

What’s scarier than playing Doom 3 in the dark with the surround sound turned up? Playing Doom 3 in the dark with the surround sound turned up and having your cat jump on your lap out of nowhere.

Yep, so after depriving myself of a number of games until my thesis was done, I finally submitted my thesis. Someone at work immediately loaned me Doom 3, so I’ve been playing it for just over an hour now, and it is freaky. It’s surprisingly resource-intensive (I thought I’d be playing at close to max resolution with my Radeon 9800, instead I’m at 800×600 for a good frame rate, though I think it could chug through 1024×768). Some of the scares are classic haunted house stuff (like having a crane drop a bunch of steel beams beside you), and I’ve read a number of criticisms about that, but it’s still scary. It works.

The “no duct tape on Mars” phenomenon is really annoying, so after getting past a half-dozen imps, I got a mod that lets you use the flashlight with the shotgun and machine gun. It was just an annoying mechanism before where you had to choose between your flashlight and your gun, especially given how feeble the flashlight is (can’t space marines come up with something brighter than my sister’s fisher price flashlight?). Having monsters appear out of thin air to kill you is shocking, yes, but it’s also slightly annoying — I go to all the trouble of clearing out a corner and backing into it, just to have a zombie spawn behind me (and he didn’t bust through the wall either, since it’s still solid after I kill him). I know teleporting monsters becomes a big part of the plot later on in the game, but I really didn’t think it would start so soon.

Nothing I’m saying is new of course, since the game is nearly 2 years old. It is really scary though, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to continue playing it, I just don’t have the nerves anymore. I nearly shit myself when I was in the air ducts and the cat jumped on me…

You have to learn to stop caring about saving paper when you’re writing a thesis. When you’re proof-reading a 117-page document, it’s nice to do it on paper rather than the screen, and double-spaced at that (if only because the final version must be double-spaced, and changing the spacing sometimes screws up embedded images or other things).

But tonight has just been ridiculous. I’ve burned 3 copies already: 1 came out with weird line spacing errors (so that some lines actually overlapped each other, and the whole thing had the wrong number of total pages). The next copy ran out of toner around page 15. It got into the 100’s before I stopped it and changed the cartridge (fortunately I knew that would happen to me tonight of all nights). With the new cartridge, I tried printing a few test pages (not sure if it would come out streaky at first or what). By entering page 6-10 in the print pages dialog, I ended up getting page vi through 10 (which, thanks to my introductory section going up to x ended up giving me about 16 pages). Those pages came out crooked, too — a very slight misalignment of the stack of paper I fed in that was somehow horribly magnified by the paper feeder. So, giving up on trying to print selected pages with the box in the dialog (since it seems to somehow use both the actual page number in the document, X/117, as well as the header number, i-x, 1-108), I just sent a whole new copy to print… and it just came out with no headers or footers. So now I have to think of whether I can salvage those hundred-some pages by feeding them through again to print the page numbers on the top (and nothing else), and I don’t think I can. In addition to the pain of setting up a document with just page numbers, I’d have to worry about aligning the pages, possibly changing their order… so another copy comes off the presses.

In addition to all this, I have the usual waste of paper associated with a properly formatted thesis: some sections (i.e.: figures) have to be vertically centred on the page, while the rest is aligned to the top like a normal document. Unfortunately, Word doesn’t play very nice about trying to set up seperate sections with different alignments, so we do it the old-fashioned way: after the whole thing has printed, we change the document to be vertically centred, and reprint the 20-odd pages that need it, and replace them in the copy.

As I burn through paper, I find that every pack of paper I bought has a slightly different brightness and opacity (the brightness is usually listed on the pack of paper, the opacity is not, though one would expect 20 lb paper of similar brightness (between 88 and 96) to have similar opacities…

So, it took a few hours and about 400 wasted sheets of paper, but I finally have my 4 hard copies (1 on bond paper) ready to take in to school tomorrow, where hopefully they will be approved without hassle so I can graduate and get them bound.

As I said in the comments of my last post, I passed my master’s defense with relative ease. Now I just have a few corrections to make to my thesis and I’ll be done completely, and can move on to my PhD.

That also means that it’s time to start my diet/exercise program in earnest. I’m not off to a very good start — I only went for a 10 minute walk today, and had a large pizza for dinner. I don’t feel too bad though, since it’s still celebratory, and since they were very late with it (they hadn’t even started by the time I got there to pick it up) they knocked the price down to $8 and gave me cheddar cheese without me even asking (I actually didn’t mind the wait — I wasn’t in a hurry and used the time to extend my walk with a lap around the block). Bonus!

The celebration weekend for the MSc was all right — we had some last-minute drop-outs for health reasons (Shubh’s mom and Dimple’s reluctance), and a good chunk of the party left first thing Sunday and missed some good eats and cards. The whole thing made me feel kind of old though — the latest I stayed up was 2:01 am, and that was a pretty sad sight at that point. Must be the coke withdrawl (I think I only had 6 the whole weekend).

More good news than my own was shared though — Reggie announced his engagement and showed off what 4 month’s salary will get you these days (yes, for a diamond it was pretty big and sparkly, but I still have trouble believing that that much money goes into finger ornamentation that doesn’t even tell time or shoot laser beams). Plus, Joce brought her latest boy toy/legitimately serious boyfriend to show off (though I don’t think he was entirely comfortable stranded in the wilderness with a bunch of old men who might die and stink up the joint before the ambulance could arrive should any sort of fatty-food related coronaries occur).

When I got home, I found a letter from my landlord saying they were going to come in today to change the toilets and showerheads to new water saving ones. I won’t be sad to see the toilets go (which are the original ’62 fixtures) since they don’t work any better than devilish no-flow ones do… but that showerhead is a classic. It doesn’t have a ton of settings, and it doesn’t need them. It has one setting that just simply gets the job done. My shower here has the best water pressure of any shower I’ve ever used. My parents used to have a similar no-nonsense showerhead, but replaced it some years ago for a detachable one with a hose, and showering at home hasn’t been the same since. It has a ton of settings, which can basically be summed up as “useless spray, wide useless spray, narrow useless spray, wide gentle dribble, single stream dribble, single stream high powered massage, and three stream pressurized shower” — of which, only really the last one is of much use for getting shampoo out of your hair, though the effective rinse area is pretty small.

Anyhow, I didn’t sleep at all last night because I hate the thought of someone coming into my apartment while I slumber, so I got up at 9 and waited for them on the couch… and fell asleep and snoozed right through until almost 2. Around 4, they dropped off another letter saying they won’t be here until tomorrow (Tuesday, so today as I post this). I’ve got a bunch of stuff that requires going in to the hospital tomorrow, so I’ll have to let them do it without me here (which is a shame — I was going to try to save my showerhead).

My allergies have been pretty bad this year. That’s the problem with Wayfare: not only does she have crazy, ridiculously over-sensitive allergies, but she also spreads them to everyone around her. It sounds nuts, and I didn’t believe her when she said she gave her strawberry allergy to her best friend in high school… except I used to only have fall allergies (ragweed), which are mostly itchy eyes… but I’ve been pretty damned sneezy the last two springs, too. Plus I gained a mouse allergy (but that can also happen just from working with them as much as I have).

I think that’s about it for tonight.