Toothpaste

So, this is a little pet peive of mine: when people just squish a toothpaste tube in the middle. Not only does it make the tube look ugly and scrunched, it also makes it harder to get the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube up.  It even gives instructions on the tube to squeez from the bottom. Yet many people, my sister inculded, insist on clasping the center of the poor tube in their meaty graspers and strangling it as hard as they can. The art of extracting toothpaste is a delicate one- so for heavens sake, ask for help if you are incapable of handling the toothpaste. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Just don't go squishing the life out of my toothpaste!

Cake

Just a few days ago, I made the most wonderfull cake. Looked real delicious. Can't wait to upload the photos, but right now I can't cause I'm on my phone.

Super-Ultra-Secret Meltey Chocolate Fudge

So, today I made my Super-Ultra-Secret Meltey Chocolate Fudge recepie. T'was quite scrumptious. So, I decided that it would be apropriate to share the instructions for this wonderful confection with the internet.

You will need:
(1 cup) Brown sugar, packed
(1/3 cup) Butter
(2 tablespoons) Cocao powder
(3/4 cup) corn syrup
(2 tablespoons ish) molasses
(1 tablespoon) vanila extract
Pinch of salt
Confectioner's sugar

Combine sugar, butter, cocao, corn syrup and molasses in small saucepan and bring to rolling boil. Add vanila and salt. Simer 5 min. Pour into pie dish. Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar. Let cool 45 min.

A virtual journal

Though this blog serves almost no one, I have found that it helps me get my personal thoughts out quite well, and then I can look back on them. Anyways.

Ikea Engineering

     You know, I think that it's really quite fascinating how Ikea develops all of it's furniture to be flat-packaged, transportable, and fairly easily to assemble at home with little to no words, all while at an affordable price. I've done some work with mechanical design in my design class, so I have come to understand exactly how difficult to create an intuitive design. Seriously- all of the holes in an Ikea product are easily distinguishable. Ever wonder why they add pre-drilled holes that you never end up using? It's so that you can easily tell which side is which. Have you ever actually put the wrong screw in a piece of Ikea furniture? I haven't. (except when I don't use the instructions.) Speaking of their pictorial directions, they have a sort of magic. The way you assemble the parts never makes sense when you start, and you ma frequently feel like you know a better way, but after it all comes together, you see the method to the madness.

     It's for these many reasons that I have oodles of respect for the Ikea engineers, those stalwart people who bring me my flat-packed, Swedish magic.

Cake

Is a light confection usualy using eggs as a central ingredient  many cakes are frosted. Cakes can be layered, single, or in small cup-cake format.

Also, yummy.

Crickets

So. Today, my sister and mother where searching some information about crickets for my sisters science fair project, and they found a forum thread similar to a yahoo answers on the subject of how long crickets live.
I'm just going to copy-past the question, and some of my favorite answers.

"OK, for more than a week now there's been a cricket living under my fridge.

And every night, ALL night, it's "creek, creek creek".

Because of its location, I can't reach it (or even find it), and I don't want to spray chemicals (because it's the kitchen).

So can anyone tell me how long (how much LONGER, that is) this thing is likely to live? It's lovely to hear in the evening - such a nice, summery sound - but I also like to sleep sometimes, too!"

"IIRC, the cricket only lives three or four chapters; then Pinocchio squashes it flat. Of course, then you get haunted by cricket ghost as conscience."

"How much eating are you doing underneath your fridge?"

"Can't get to it? Move the fridge. Even the big ones can generally be muscled out pretty easily unless bolted into the cabinets as a built in. If this is really impossible get a vac cleaner with a hose and and one of these skinny suction attachments and see if you can get lucky.

Get some 70% strength isopropyl alochol and put it into a spray bottle and blast into general vicinity of the cricket. Alcohol will evaporate after a few hours and leave no poison reside.

Get a small gecko lizard."

"According to this article at Britannica.com, "adults ordinarily live 6 to 8 weeks." So you could have as many as 7 more weeks of chirping cricket."

"^...they live 6 to 8 weeks in their natural habitat...once they enter into the virtual Heaven of your nice, warm, pesticide-free home, their life expectancy can double or triple."

It speaks for itself.

Oh, nintendo. Oh, my childhood. Oh, navi.

HEY!
LINK!
LISTEN!
WHATCHOUT!
HELLO!

Interface

Oh, blogger. why would you create a new interface.

Skills and Talents

People often think of "skills" and "Talents" as being synonyms. However, I was interested to find if there was a difference, since I have never considered myself especially talented, but I am quite skilled at a variety of things. So here's how I would define a talent and a skill, just off the top of my head:

Talent: A special aptitude of a person to effectuate an action in a way that expresses themselves; a natural, creative ability for a certain action, often one that involves creating something (Eg. music, painting, etc.)

Skill: the ability of a person to effectuate an action with efficiency or precision.

I was surprised how close my definitions came to Merriam-Webster's English dictionary's. Here they are:

Talent: a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude.

Skill:  the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance.

and you can see the clear difference between the two.

So, although I do believe that skills are important, I do not believe that all people are talented. some are merely skilled; and, more often that not, they are the ones who succeed moderately in life. So far. Maybe I will come across further information to change my perspective.

Tightrope walking

might just be as dangerous as it appears. Randomly sifting through the pages of Wikipedia, I found a page about a guy who fell to his death over Niagara falls even though he had crossed it successfully before. Then again, he was reported to be drinking. Let this be a lesson to you, children. Alcohol kills people.

Improvised cooking

Today my mother had to go with my sister to a costume fitting for a play and my father had to stay latter at work. So, he called and asked me to make supper for my two younger siblings. So I asked them what they wanted. They requested pizza, but I lacked the time to make the dough. so instead I took some flour, some milk, some oil and some salt and made a bread-like disk to which I then added cheese. The end result was something more akin to pizza's mediterranean, unleavened origins than it's modern reiterations.

Magic

Today I was just loafing around, seeing as I don't have any school. And, just because, I started to listen to some of my Mario galaxy music. It's lively tempo and upbeat themes awakened something that had gone dormant in my mind; a kind of childish excitement, of dreams, of adventure. I find it fascinating how music can affect one's mood, reawaken memories, and inspire actions. For me, the music made me remember the magic of playing Mario. It helped me shrug off my melancholy mood. but I'm willing to bet that music can work the other way, too.

So maybe we should make all depressed people play Mario.

It snowed!

Finally. It's about halfway through January and this is the first real snowfall we've had since the beginning of December... And, some unseasonably warm weather has been making everything mucky and slippery and gross. >:(

Passwords

Lots of places that require passwords are now asking for a certain level of "security" in each password- Such as having more characters, or adding at least one number and letter. And, yes, I understand their concern: they want to avoid having a thousand different users with the password "Password". Still, I find my originality drops when I'm forced to ad characters- from a complex and hard to guess word, to "123456A" (or something similar, not a password I've ever used) since I want to remember it.

General Ramblings

Do you ever feel like you're making a compromise when you start to work in bigger teams? You give up some of your control, and the project losses some of its personality.Imagine writing a novel in a team of ten people...

Milk has a surprising number of wonderful properties. If you try it, you will find that it is an effective way to remove breath odors, absorb excess sugar from your system, and even slightly reduce the effects of most poisons. All of this is because of the fat carried in milk; the fat cells absorb the thinks like the sugar and dissolve them slowly, instead of letting them permeate into your body. There are also several chemicals that exist in milk because it's been derived from grass: those chemicals, which exist naturally in cellulose (Grass/tree equivalent of glucose/fructose) are not part of our normal diet, but since we humans used to eat cellulose, those chemicals all have specific benefits for our body.

I got a new camera YAY! well, actually, our family got a new camera, but...