Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Though it hasn’t worked that well so far, I’m trying to watch what I eat. And like the engineer I am, this means looking at a lot of data on the nutritional value of food. And I’ve discovered that calories are incredibly clever and will sneak into you however they can.

Since I live in Seattle, my friends and I go out and get coffee quite often. I’m not a coffee drinker (I know, I’m weird), so I end up getting hot chocolate or Chai. I know that both of these are not healthful, but I didn’t know how bad until I looked it up. A grande hot chocolate with whipped cream totals to 440 calories and 23 grams of fat. That’s a lot of calories! In fact, it’s the same as McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger (440 calories and 23 grams of fat)!

So next time I’m considering what to get at Starbucks, I’ll ask myself “do you feel like a double cheeseburger?” Hopefully, that will be enough to convince me to get a nice cup of simple decaf tea.

My watch stopped. Or more accurately, the battery needs replacement. On June 30th, the battery wasn’t strong enough to update the date display and then 2 weeks ago, the time hands stopped. I kept wearing the watch out of habit for a day or two (which is weird) and finally stopped wearing it.

Yes, I know. I should just get a new battery, but I haven’t gotten around to it. In the meantime, I learned that I really don’t need the watch as much as I thought. Unfortunately, it’s not because of some new enlightened state, where I transcended the bonds of our temporal existence or some mumbo-jumbo.

No, it’s because there’s a clock everywhere. There’s one on my computer at my desk, one in my car, one in every room at work and most of the rooms in my apartment. Plus there’s one on my cell phone. And one on my Blackberry. And probably in places I haven’t even noticed.

It makes me wonder, what other ridiculous redundancies do we have in our every day lives?

One thing I really like about the status feature in Facebook is that it forces you to write in third person. In college, I had way too much fun writing AOL away messages in the style of bad Roman mythology with myself as the mythical hero. No really, I referred to myself as “our hero”. :-)

For example, from Dec 11, 1999:

Our hero, upon returning from the Nickerson hermitage, is shocked that the wise had absolutely nothing of value to say to him, though his kids were cute and funny. Our hero, after devouring his cold veggie sandwich, attempted to land himself a mole in the Beezer empire. However his contact was less than brilliant and let our hero muttering nonsense about the b-school and the lack of a good educational system in democratic nations. So our hero decides to quit procrastinating and attempt to use his special powers to find the secret bio decoder ring. Will our hero find the ring to slay the Elgin and Pakrasi tag team in Monday Morning Madness? Are will he choose to seek refuge in his EE Design Project? Stay tuned…

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), I only saved a handful of these writings. The rest are nothing more than lost bits and bytes in the vast universe of electrons.

And in case you’re wondering:

• Jackson Nickerson was the professor of Management 100 class that I was the TA for. I think I was referring to a dinner we had with him and his family.
• Cold veggie sandwiches were one of my staples in college (there wasn’t that much vegetarian dorm food).
• Beezer is my friend Bryce, who for literary purposes was one of my many antagonists.
• The reference to educational systems in democratic nations was likely some research I was doing for my column in the student paper. I wrote about geopolitics. I’m sure some of the old columns are floating around the web, which is unfortunate since I was a really bad writer back then. (Yes, even worse than now.)
• The decoder ring is a reference to an ongoing joke since high school, about how you need a decoder ring (like the ones in cereal boxes) to understand difficult topics.
• I don’t remember much about Monday Morning Madness, except that it was significant.
• Elgin and Pakrasi were the team of professors that taught our biology course (Bio 297, I think)
• EE Design Project is a reference to the really complicated EE projects we had. They were great for procrastinating on other school work.

Anyway, this got me thinking about cool plug-ins and apps for Facebook that I should build, but I’m sleepy so I’ll have to discuss them some other time.

Given my huge backlog of books that I read but haven’t written about yet, it’s seems weird to write about a book I haven’t even gotten a hold of. But, it’s not everyday that Book 7 of Harry Potter is about to be released.

Despite my usual complaints about the Harry Potter series, I’m excited about the book coming out this Friday. In case you forgot, my complaints about the books are:

• Repetitive Filler Subplots - Slytherins are rude. Snape picks on Harry. Harry feels bad for himself. Hermione knows all the answers. And so many more.
• Unchanging characters - Neville is clumsy. Malfoy is mean. Yeah, yeah, we get it.
• Simple themes - Good is good. Evil is bad. Love and friendship are good. Hey, let’s add some depth here.
• Boring, straight-forward prose and tone - I’d love to see some clever humor or some intellectual subtlety here.

With the media frenzy, there are high expectations for this book. Plus, since this book has to actually resolve the story, we can’t have a bunch of filler subplots. Also, the characters will presumably have to change since they are involved in some extraordinary circumstances. And the prose, tone, and simple themes? My guess is that this will stay the same.

I decided to set very low expectations so that I will be happy with the book. With that spirit in mind, here are my predictions for the 7th book:

• Book 7 will be in the “Choose your own adventure” format.
• Voldemort is discovered to be the Dumbledore in disguise.
• Hermione is really Ron (this is explained by the use of Time-Turners)
• Harry wakes up at the end and we learn that it was all a strange dream. Harry resolves to stop eating gas station taquitos before bed.

Hopefully a mob of Potter fans won’t come after me for writing this. :-)

As social networking online goes, LinkedIn just isn’t cutting it for me. It’s too sterile and all I get out of it are the occasional job opportunities. These are neat, but I already have a good job.

So I decided I’d go where all the fun is: I finally got on Facebook. As of now, I have 2 friends, so it’s not too exciting. But with Facebook’s development API, I suppose the sky is the limit.

I wonder what silly Facebook app that I can write and sell for millions. :-)

When we learned about Crissy’s dad, I sent a quick email to my teams at work saying that I would be out for a family emergency. As I was a bit distracted when writing it, I was accidentally very cryptic to the nature of the emergency. My search freshness team (who are always on top of the latest Internet buzz) decided that my absence had something to do with the latest celebrity gossip.

So upon my return to work, I found a recent copy of Us Weekly declaring that Nicole Ritchie is pregnant and a congratulatory bottle of champagne. :-)

Perhaps the allusion in the title is a bit of an overstatement, but 2007 has been a relatively bad year for us. Especially when you compare it to 2006, which involved a great set of weddings and parties, nice trip to Hawaii and my awesome new job.

Earlier this year, we had Jill’s coma, where we dodged a huge bullet. The doctors told us that she probably wouldn’t come out of it, but she did and is fine now. A few weeks ago, my grandmother passed away. And just this week, we learned that Crissy’s dad has cancer.

Fortunately, we caught it pretty early. The doctors are hopeful that with 8 weeks of intense radiation and chemotherapy, we can cure it. Chemo and radiation is really rough, but I suppose it’s better than the alternative.

2008 can’t come soon enough. :-)

Also, in case you were wondering why I hadn’t written anything in a while, you now know. :-P