Monday, December 24, 2007

Cheese Theory of Human Behaviour

photo from ulterior epicureYou can tell a lot about a person by their cheese preference. That's my theory of the week, so let me explain it.

The basis is very simple really. If you like to do certain things you will likely also do other things. There are probably other preferences a person can have that would also correlate, but I'm failing to find one that is more widespread. Certainly food in general works, or places someone would go, but it all gets too complicated. Cheese is simple, and great.

My system postulates that the level of excitement and interestingness you go for in your cheese will correspond with the rest of your life. As an example, if you only like American cheese you're pretty boring. You also have bad taste in cheese. If you like cheddar, provolone, swiss - you like to get out a bit and maybe you live in the suburbs, but you're not likely to be seen wearing a funny hat outside of your circle of friends. If you'll try any cheese, you may end up running around the desert naked at an event like burning man.

As for the other extremes: if you only eat fancy goat cheese then you have very high taste but can't really hang out with the simpler cheese types. And if you don't eat any cheese than you're too picky and can't make logical decisions, which I think is true for most vegans. Feel free to argue this with me.

So this is my cheese theory as it stands. Are there some arguments for or against it? Do you have a better theory. Is there really any point to figuring out your cheese type?

Here's some "what cheese are you" quiz but it doesn't have many possible results. http://quibblo.com/quiz/2OBTrG/What-kind-of-cheese-are-you

photo from ulterior epicure

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Sunday, December 02, 2007

Soy milk cheaper than whole milk

On a recent shopping trip, to of all places, walmart, I discovered a surprising thing. A half gallon of soy milk was about 2.40 and a half gallon of whole milk was about 2.60. The brand in question was the "Great Value" generic, but still this is a troubling symptom of something. How can a cow cost more to make this tasty beverage than an intensive factory process with soy plant grinding and filtration. Maybe it really should cost more, but of course there is more demand and supply of cow milk to keep the prices down, yet a gallon of cow milk is over $4 in many places. See the USDA for a price chart. What does this all mean? Is it a sign of the apocalypse? I'm not sure, but I'm drinking some chocolate soy milk right now and it's pretty tasty.

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Toshiba A215-7437 and how to get stuff cheap on black friday without the lines

The Toshiba A215-7437 was a recent black friday deal at circuit city. It is $399 after rebates. Of course, these deals are meant to get you in the store. Now there are some interesting things about circuit city, one is that they have a 30 day price matching guarantee, if they or someone else has a sale within 30 days of purchase they'll price match it. Of course in the store they put up signs saying no returns and no price matching on black friday. What I did was go buy the laptop on Wednesday before it went on sale, went back to the store on the afternoon of black friday, and returned and bought it again. I didn't have any lines and got a receipt for a new purchase. The important thing to do here is that you can't open up the box until you've made the purchase successfully at the sale price. Their return policy charges a restocking fee for opened items.

This notebook computer is pretty decent, especially for the price. On the negative the battery life doesn't appear very good, and it lacks infrared and bluetooth. Also, the AMD Athlon X2 64 TK-53 processor is only about as fast as an Athlon XP 2700+ in benchmarks at 32 bits. Although it would be faster with a 64 bit operating system it ships with Vista Home Premium's 32 bit version, and drivers are not readily available in 64 bits. Hopefully they will be available at some point. The 1GB of memory isn't enough for Vista, especially since the memory is shared with the integrated ATI Xpress video.

Still though, this machine is a dual core machine, and while one thing is about as fast as an XP 2700+ it can do two at once. I run boinc and it runs two processes at the same time at that speed. You can also download applications from AMD that show you how your cpu's are doing.

I'm quite happy with this purchase, but it doesn't quite compete with much more expensive intel core 2 duo machines.

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nokia xpressmusic 5300 - Free Applications and Games Available on Nokia Site



I discovered today that there are some pretty cool applications available for nokia phones, and in particular the phone I'm using. If you go to nokia's european site, you can download some free apps. I found "sensor" a bluetooth mobile social networking program, a 3D snakes game, a decent snowboarding game, and a unit conversion tool. When looking on the US nokia site these apps are not to be found. The apps installed using nokia's pc suite program without difficulty. I do have my phone set to think it's a british phone though to get around t-mobile's blocking of java programs from their cheaper internet service, so this might have helped.

Why does Europe get cooler stuff that the US does without additional cost? I'm not sure. I recommend using NSS and setting your phone up this way if the programs don't work for you.

The program I was really looking for was the nokia sensor app. It allows you to see other phones with the application running and thus see if friends are nearby or meet people. It's probably something like the helios buddy beacon. Of course, if nobody else around is able to run the application then it's worthless.

As for a review of this phone, I haven't found the music buttons to be very useful so if I hadn't enabled these extra features and applications (I also have installed msn's search program that can show live traffic and google maps and mail) then this phone would be a complete piece of junk.

As it is I'm rather happy with it, although I can't wait for a google phone.

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