Reading

Last week I finished the book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It's a cute story. Tells a little bit about Chinese culture during the cultural revolution.

I'm also about to finish Julie & Julia tonight. I've only got a couple pages left. This is also a light decent read.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I'd like to read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I tried reading it a couple months ago, but I didn't have the amount of processing power (spare brain cycles) to devote to it. It's not a light read, and he plays around with the English language some also. Maybe I'll try it again. I'm not as tired as I was then.

Cooking and Cleaning

I've been using my free time to cook a lot lately.

Yesterday, was a day where I kept myself really busy all day long. I never had a moment of down time and was on my feet most of the day. It helped me sleep really well last night.

Today, I wasn't moving quite as fast. After I had breakfast, I fell asleep on the couch for an hour, and then I got up and have been doing stuff, albeit a little slower.

Yesterday, I made kimchi, yogurt and green curry for dinner. I ate some of the yogurt this morning, and it came out pretty good. I couldn't figure out how to "cook" it though after I added the cultures because our oven doesn't go that low. Instead I put a couple candles in the oven and hoped for the best. It seemed to work ok.

The kimchi was actually a lot of fun to make because I had to pound the crap out of all that vegetable matter. It's currently sitting on my counter fermenting right now and will sit there for a couple more days.

Right now I'm making ranchero sauce. We're having huevos rancheros for dinner tonight. I've always wanted to figure out how to make a decent ranchero sauce. It's not completely done yet, but so far it tastes great! I'm hopeful that I've found my recipe.

In other news I started reading "The Red Planet" by Robert Heinlein last night. It's pretty good and I'm about half way through. I'll need to find a new book soon.

The Geography of Bliss

For the past week or so I've been slowly reading this book where the author tries to quantify why certain cultures and countries appear to be happier than others according to happiness researchers.

The happiest place according to positive psychology researchers is Switzerland followed by Qatar and then Iceland. I haven't gotten to the chapters about the other countries yet.

It's pretty entertaining partly because the author has a partially jaded view on happiness (a self declared negative person) and mostly because he has a hard time trying to quantify the qualities that make these very different cultures happy.

House bound

My honeypot put the toilet into our new bathroom. It's pretty exciting. He also cleaned a ton. This is also pretty exciting.

I just finished reading the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I really like reading the book but it wasn't nearly as great as the other sci fi I've been reading lately. The next one for me is "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Our tomatoes have grown so much. I really didn't think they would grow like this. We've eaten a bunch and it looks like we're going to get a bunch more.

I recently built a new computer for myself. I've been spending lots of time trying to get everything moved over. It's a long process. My new computer is so fast. I can't believe how slow my old one was. It's better that I didn't know. I wasted most of yesterday fighting with apache php5 and mysql. At the end of last night, I had gotten it all to play nice.

Nintendo Love

I've been thinking about Mario Bros and Nintendo for weeks now. Today I finally got a hold of the ROMs and the emulator. My honeypot also found his usb controller, (and it works) so I'm in business! There really is nothing like projecting super mario bros and using an authentic anti ergonomic conroller with surround sound. Nothing.

I suppose it's nostalgia, though I don't remember being an especially happy kid. But boy were the video games fun!

In other news I just finished reading "Snow Crash". This is a great book! I reminds me a bit of the "Da Vinci Code" for all the religious history. I'm now reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
I don't really know - but I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Last, I finally moved my number over to the iPhone. I've been really happy with it and have only crashed it once. I finally bought some protection for it, instead of keep wrapping it up in a wash cloth and stuffing it into a zip lock. And no, I haven't experienced any dropped calls. (Yet - hopefully never.)