Monday Personal Notes - Oscar Edition
2 comments- Greg had some friends over for Jesse's birthday on Friday. Here's a little video clip from the night.
- I have been practicing my juggling a lot. I can only do three balls and am still learning four.
- Good pro-juggling quote from some article in Nature magazine:
- USPS will increase prices in May? Based on size, not a tiny $.01 increase. Just a rumor I heard.
- My friend Megan is going to India next week. Kudos to her for finally making it happen! I am very jealous. She starts her journey in New Delhi and then goes to Dharamsala.
- Good ambient song I recently heard on SomaFM's Groove Salad... Statis State (High On Transistors) - Omicron
- Current TV rocks. It is my favorite channel on television.
- Shoutout to Peter Cooper in the UK!
"Mastering the skill (of juggling) increases the amount of gray matter in areas of the brain that process and store visual information, proving what was not thought possible -- that new stimuli can alter the brain's structure. A comparison of brain-imaging scans of non-jugglers and other volunteers before they learned to juggle and three months later, revealed an increase in gray matter in certain areas of the newly trained jugglers' brains."
User Fees for Private Jets
Update 2-27-2007 - If you have two minutes, please email this template to your Members of Congress and ask them not to impose a fee every time an airplane flies. The process is easy and the cause is worthy.
There is a lot of legislative talk in the business aviation community right now about so-called User Fees. I frequently see phrases like this in our industry magazines:
"If you use a general aviation aircraft for a business purpose, you are under attack!"
The airlines want to impose more than $2 billion in user fees to run things like the air traffic control system.
Their logic is that while one huge commercial jet may carry 200 passengers, it represents only one small dot on the air traffic control radar. A business jet carrying four people takes up as much space in the air traffic control system as a huge commercial jet.
You may have seen this image showing the number of private jets leaving the Super Bowl in 2007.
Not many people know it, but that graphic was created by the Air Transport Association (airlines lobby) to smear the business aviation community.
Word Template for OM96178 Labels
Here is a Microsoft Word template that I made for OM96178 labels from OfficeMax. These have three (3) sets of five (5) multi-color tabs. You should remove the light gray border from the table before printing.
These are also called insertable index dividers. This is a follow-up to my wildly popular OM99023 template hack.
Random Personal Notes - Bluegrass Edition
- I made very tasty salmon patties for dinner tonight (aka salmon croquettes). Ingredients: 1 can of Alaskan salmon, 3 egg whites, and 16 ground Wheat Thins.
- I went to two bluegrass concerts this weekend.
- I am starting to see a pattern. The bluegrass musicians tend to pull songs from a repertoire which includes Cajun fiddle, a few Civil War-time ballads, and then the obligatory gospel. Gospel is a great closer.
- In case you were wondering... My most recent purchase at Wal-Mart included three oranges, three bananas, cottage cheese, and skim milk.
- Someone told me this cool Southern myth-- "If the snow stays on the ground for three days, then we'll get it again."
- Via this article comes this quote within a quote:
Steve Murphy, CEO of publishing company Rodale, says, "A line in a William Blake poem inspired me to think differently about my day: 'Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.' This has made a huge difference in my life. Now, I take out a yellow pad every morning and write my thoughts for the day, which allows me to be much more strategic and proactive than reactive."
- Jakob Lodwick invented Vimeo, but Zach Klein saved it. Just putting that out there. Vote for Vimeo in SXSW people's choice.
- I wrote down to download the song Simple by Violet Archers. It's pretty mellow.
- Allan Bacon says to download some Christopher Jak music, like Old Scars, Bound, and Seamless.
- Speaking of Allan, here are two body building terms... Anabolic = growth, Catabolic = breakdown.
That is all I got! Oh, and I am not joking about the hawks (reference this vidblog). Last week I saw at least one every day. Birds in general are way up - lots of cardinals, blue jays, and robins have been out in our front lawn.
Waffle House grill cook cheat sheet
This is an exclusive Americana photograph of a Waffle House grill cook's cheat sheet.
The photographs indicate the way in which a cook marks his orders. These secret plate markers allow a Waffle House cook to simultaneously prepare multiple customer orders at once.
Let me give you an example. If I were to order three scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and hash browns, the waitress would face the grill and yell out loud - "Mark: Triple scrambled dry wheat plate."
The cook would then quickly take a large dinner plate, turn it sideways, and place a tub of jelly upside down at the six o'clock position.
The six o'clock position indicates scrambled eggs, and the jelly upside down means wheat toast. I am not sure how to mark "dry" for the toast, or how to indicate hash browns versus grits.
This chart explains why I often get a packet of mayonnaise with my grilled chicken plate.