Monthly Archives: April 2002

Discussion about evolution

M and I were watching something on Discovery about the Neanderthal and there was a commercial for another show about “the Real Eve”. Something like “Was there really a single common ancestor for the whole human race? Find out how she might have lived, etc.”

This led to a discussion about how evolution really happens. Neither M or I have studied it in detail, so perhaps there is something fundamental here we’re not getting. Continue reading

Sunday, boring Sunday

I have accomplished a few things this weekend.

Yesterday: I filed all the papers on my desk into file folders on the letter tray (not filed, but ready to be filed, mostly). I spent some hours last night tagging all my mp3 music with album-cover art.

Today: I cleaned the meat-drying trays and arranged the meat slices to soak in the soy sauce. So we will be able to make jerky today and have it ready tomorrow night.

What I’m avoiding: I haven’t exercised in a while, I really should do so. Also, if I’m going to get serious about running a game, I should start writing some story/setting material for it.

Thursdayfolks has a journal?

I wanted to experiment with the “community” features, so I created a community for Thursdayfolks. Thursdayfolks is a chat list for Miche and I and many of our friends. The new Thursdayfolks community contains some of these folks, but not all, since not all of them have LiveJournal accounts.

Info
Join

I’m not expecting many folks to post there actively, but you can if the mood strikes you. If you post via the web, view the “full” set of options instead of the “simple” options and you should see the option of posting in thursdayfolks instead of your default journal. For the Windows client and others, there should be an option for “Select Active Journal”.

Even if the community posts themselves are not exciting, you might want to browse the Thursdayfolks Friends page to see what the various members are up to.

You’re welcome to join as well, even if you’re not part of the original Thursdayfolks list, especially if you know some of the members already.

Similar interests, and six degrees of separation

Interests

I checked out the list of people who have similar interests to mine and found: 1. le_merle is still at the top of the list and leading the pack by a lot, and 2. there are a lot of other people on the list that I don’t know.

1. le_merle’s score is not that surprising, considering I used his list as a starting point for my own list, so an interest is more likely to be on my list if is was on his, back in September or so. 2. the interests shared with lots of people I don’t know is not surprising, but also not very informative, since they all tend to list a LOT of interests, meaning that there is a lot of overlap when looking at my list, but not very much when looking at theirs (probably that means that I didn’t place very high on their lists.)

Update: After editing my interests and adding some, the max score is now 44 instead of 25, with le_merle still leading the pack.

Anyway I used this tool by sachmet to find how we are linked, and came up with these results…

Week o’ stress

The last few weeks have been stressful due to work, especially last week. I hope it gets better soon. There are some indications that it might get better, but then again, this is Operations, the land of the unexpected.

I have been on some high-blood-pressure medication for about a month now, but it doesn’t seem to have lowered my bp at all. I have to go back to the doctor on Tuesday and he will probably increase my dosage, or switch me to another medication. I will also start taking the Flonase (anti-allergy, I think it is a steroid) because I think the nighttime congestion and snoring are due to allergies. I would also like to go get allergy screening done and perhaps arrange for some shots, if it looks like they would help.

No exercise this week, shame on me. That is something I should work on. I would like to be able to go up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath. It would be cool if M and I could find some kind of exercise we both enjoy, so we could do it together. My favorite exercise is walking, and her favorite is probably weights or some kind of strength training. She is going to get some therapy for her knees, hopefully that will help.

I did the good deed this weekend and built up a usable computer from spare parts, which I will eventually give to my grandparents. We may go over there today, if they call us back. I installed XP but didn’t activate yet, because I want to make sure they didn’t already get a computer when I wasn’t looking.

We had another Altaia game on Friday, which was cool. We got to do some role-playing that was not combat-related. I like a good balance of combat with character interaction, because character interaction lets me actually get in character and get a feel for who this character is. In this case Veldan is a half-orc caster who is really a wanna-be elf; so far I have played him as kind of fruity and not much other flavor mixed in. The character is supposed to be impetuous, but I’m really not impetuous, so it’s tough to work that in (plus, I don’t like grabbing lots of the DM’s attention, that tends to annoy other players).

What else? M and I went to dinner at Mudd’s last weekend, it was quite grand. We got to listen to the harpist for a while, and the food was wonderful. The lady brought us our main course before the soup and salad, so we had the salad after (European style) and took the soup home. The salad was wonderful; it was arrugula, warm goat cheese, prosciutto, and a light, sweet mango dressing, excellent “dessert salad”. We would like to go again soon. I would like it even more if I could find more excellent restaurants nearer to us. It’s kind of tough to find new restaurants because M doesn’t like to experiment much, and I don’t like to go out without her, so we have to rely on reviews from others we trust…

Things I would like to do this week: Organize the desk, Catch up on bills, Exercise at least once, Find the amazon book supposedly at my work somewhere. Maybe next weekend’s project can be to set up the access point and get some of these machines behind a firewall.

Tired

I was up quite late working on a report for work. I am now incredibly tired. For some reason I thought it was Wednesday when I woke up, though it was clearly Thursday when I went to bed at 3:30.

I got a huge coffee mug from 7-11 (20 oz) and everybody kind of chuckles when they see it, like I’m a huge caffeine freak or something. Never mind that I haven’t put coffee in it, it is usually hot chocolate or sometimes tea. I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping at 7-11 for a 79c hot chocolate in the morning, which is like 1.09 in a disposable cup, so I’m saving money and helping the environment.
Speaking of helping the environment