Random Wednesday Dog Blogging

"Oh, God. She has her camera out again. Remind me why it was that I wanted her to visit?"

"Wait! Does she have something in her hand? Does she? Does she? Is it hamburger?"

"No."

Haute Canine Cuisine

On Wednesday, when I went into the office after working at home while I was sick(er), I found that LA had left a container of cookies in my mailbox. I saw that they were even branded with a Gizmo label, which was terribly cute. I tried one and thought they tasted pretty awful, actually, but speculated that my taste buds hadn't fully recovered yet or perhaps it was because they were made from pumpkin. I thought I would take them home to see if my parents liked them.

Last night, I offered them to my mom and she exclaimed, "They're for dogs!"

"What?! No, they aren't."

Maybe I should have asked for Rosetta Stone for French instead of Spanish?

Today, LA, between bouts of hysterical laughter, explained that she gave most of the containers to our co-workers in person and told them they were dog biscuits. It doesn't pay to be out sick, apparently. The good thing is that I'm not squeamish about such things and I've sampled dog biscuits before. If it's good enough for my dog, then it's surely good enough for me, right?

I'm In Love Again

It's not unusual for me to come home from a party and feel as if I'm in love. I usually return feeling that way about a dog or perhaps some sort of gadget. Dogs are the most common, because I really like dogs and they are even friendlier than gadgets.

This time, thanks to the Why Bee, the object of my affection is Cambozola. Like the name suggests, it's kind of like a combination of Camembert or Brie and Gorgonzola. I believe it may be habit forming, if not addictive.

I'm afraid I'm just going to have to go somewhere and introduce myself to a new dog, because I have a feeling that will be a lot healthier.

Downtown Dining

We went to the Flying Fish tonight and sat next to the window. My parents and I were thoroughly entertained by Donald, a corgie, who was vacuuming French fries from underneath all the outdoor seating. I got to meet him as I leaving and he was very sweet.

I then immediately ran into my builder for the first time in almost three years and got to tell him that I still love my house.

They had fried soft shell crabs as the special tonight and they were very good. The tartar sauce was not necessary.

The NCCA tournament is underway. I'm going to make an attempt not to even look at the bracket that I entered into the library pool, because I always enjoy it a lot more when I base my cheering on how I like each team rather than my predictions. I did, however, break my tradition and not pick any upsets for the first round. So far so good.

Smitten State Fan

Tuesday, I had lunch with NP at the Refectory. I had delicious chicken and dumplings, sans dumplings. I guess they got away. That was perfectly ok with me, though, because I got extra rice.

That evening, I celebrated JA's birthday with him and our friends (JJ, HB, JM, DS, AP, AY, and GMc) at Tyler's, at the American Tobacco Campus. I discovered that Tyler's has excellent (extremely tart) lemonade. We shared wings, calamari, pickle chips, nachos and French fries.Tyler As expected, we had a great time.

The next day, I was back at the tobacco campus for my weekly meeting at OIT and had lunch at the Mellow Mushroom with AE and M. For some strange reason, I hadn't noticed that they sold pizza by the slice before. Spinach, tomatoes and feta was a nice combination.

Thursday, LA brought Gizmo Monkeybear Batrabbit over so all of the dog lovers within CIT could meet him. He's AT's dachsund pekingese mix puppy. He's adorable and his tongue is out of control.

Friday, AN, SM and I went to the Visualization Forum, which was an interesting program, given by David Kidd, from the National Evolutionary Synethesis Center, on Visualizing Evolution. He focused primarily on 3D phylogenetic trees, which were cool. Later in the afternoon, AN, NC and I took a field trip down to the Duke Computer Store and checked out the latest tablet PCs. They had the new Lenovo X60 with the touch screen that allows you to either use your finger or a stylus. More exciting to me were the Sony Vaio UX series tablet PCs. They are about the size of a paperback novel, have 1GB of memory, a 1.33Ghz processor, WAN, Cingular cellular access and a 40 GB harddrive. It has a slide-out keyboard, which looks somewhat easier to use than a Treo keyboard, but would have similar issues. I was certainly smitten. It's so portable and is really impressive considering that it's so small, but its computing power is almost as good as the machine I'm using now. That said, one would probably have to have an additional monitor and keyboard to make it practical for everyday use. It's possible that it might be a good Treo replacement, which would mean also carrying a real phone that actually works well as a phone (a novel idea). I don't think I'm going to get one, but on Amazon I saw a strong recommendation for a portable bluetooth keyboard, Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard for PDA, which would work with a tablet PC, a PDA, or with my Treo 650. I decided to order one and give it a try. I take a lot of minutes at meetings and I don't like hauling a heavy laptop around, so I'm betting it will be extremely useful.

That night I met AE at Nosh and we shared another SRB pizza with chicken.

We take basketball very seriously in this area and it's very obvious. We had cable installed in a conference room just for the ACC tournament. So, anytime you want to see what's going on, you can look through the room's windows and check it out on the projection system. Library HR had a bracket contest and I got everything wrong except for UNC's wins. That was amusingly pathetic. I, however, am temporarily a rabid State fan, because I think it's exciting that they are doing well, despite their having knocked Duke out of the tournament. I would love to see them beat UNC tomorrow.

Today I went over to CL and JL's house for an ACC tournament party. We watched the two semi-final games while eating wings, brie and crab dip. It was nice getting to meet KC and CC's baby son and the rest of their family. I experienced another example of good intentions not going so well. I brought over a four-pack of random cold sodas and on the drive over, they decided to leap out of the cartoon, out of the basket I keep on my backseat, and hide between the back seat and the side of the van. One of the bottles actually opened! It was the blueberry one, of course.

Snow Sans Snacks

I have some catching up to do. I'll attempt to stick to the more interesting bits, but I'm not promising anything.

Early last week, I saw V is for Vendetta. I thought it was an excellent movie, because it was both entertaining and thought provoking.

Early that week, I also had lunch at the Refectory with NP. This is still noteworthy because I actually finished my equally sized portion of Sopa du Pollo well before he did. It's my favorite dish there. It's basically a "Mexican chicken casserole".


Last weekend, KS and DB visited. DB was so adorable, especially when carrying around my stuffed animals. It was really a treat to have them over for the weekend. Saturday night, we went to Chai's with AE, DS, JH and AHB. I had chicken pad thai and I believe KS did, too. (Sorry, RP, I'm just not certain!) Afterwards, we went to Shade Tree and were joined by JH's friends, L and S. I had a nice cup of cafe mocha and KS had a sundae, which looked very good. Sunday morning, my parents came over and we made crepe style pancakes, which we served with maple syrup and strawberries. I thought DB was very good while we ate.

Sometime this week, I saw Everything is Illuminated, which I thought was another really interesting movie. One of the characters sounds very similar to Borat, which makes it funnier than was probably originally intended. It also took me a while to not think of Elijah Wood's character as Frodo and there's one line in the movie that is extremely appropriate for that context.

I had lunch with NP again on Tuesday and got to hear all about his wearing a kilt and eating haggis at a recent party. We had chicken and shrimp gumbo, which was good.

Thursday was supposed to be the day of our department retreat, where we were supposed to give presentations of research topics that we'd been working on in groups. My group was investigating the future of Learning Management Systems. Unfortunately, we had a winter storm warning and I elected to work on ordinary work from home. All the schools were closed, it was snowing when I had planned to leave home and I didn't want to drive there and get stuck. Well, like many of these things, it fizzled and would likely have been perfectly fine if I'd gone. They did apparently have over 300 accidents in Orange County, but the roads at least looked ok. I was disappointed that I missed it, but probably saved myself from a few extra thousand calories in sandwiches, popsicles and candy that way.

Friday, I went to the weekly Visualization Forum and listened to a talk by Michael Young, from NC State, on "Leveraging narrative concepts in the automatic construction of interactive experiences". He talked about some of the algorithms used for programming dynamic interactive video games. It was pretty interesting. The spinach lasagna was good, too.

Friday night, at guitar practice, I felt as if I actually was making some progress with shifting to and from the B Minor chord on Wild Horses. Afterwards, JJ, JA, EB, MP, HB and I went to El Corral. I had Vegetarian F, which was two spinach quesadillas. That was good. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of ordering a fried banana. I momentarily forgot that their idea of frying something was to add corn flakes. That is actually a nice effect when it's Mexican Fried Ice Cream, but bananas need to be cooked thoroughly before I like them. I need stick to the ones at Kim Son, which are wonderful.

This evening, I met AE, EG, JB and LB at Chai's for dinner. It was nice to see LB for the first time, because she's very cute. It was also good to see EG, since I hadn't seen her in over five months. I ordered what was effectively sesame chicken. It was a lot of sweet fried chicken with rice and no vegetables. AE and I went to Shade Tree afterwards and talked for quite a while. Check out that link, because now they actually have a demo of how they do some of their neat latte art.

Shoes and Socks

I received my order from baumhouse.com last week! That was every bit as exciting as I'd hoped. It's so hard to find shoes that fit me properly that getting seven new pairs was really amazing. Finally I have Bostons that I can wear in the rain. So far, the screaming bright red ones have received the most attention.

Duke's campus Subway has quit selling the chicken parmesan sub. I don't know why, since they make both fried chicken and meatball subs. It's annoying.

It was incredibly hot at work last week, because of what I believe was routine maintenance. Everything was back to normal yesterday. We've been extremely busy at work with the start of the semester, too.

On Friday, a bunch of folks at the office went to Cosmic Cantina for lunch. HC brought me back a vegetarian burrito. I hadn't had one of those in years and it was just as wonderful as I'd remembered.

At guitar practice that night, we worked primarily on Puff the Magic Dragon. It's such a fun song to play. The highlight of the evening was when Darwin the Beagle decided to climb on top of me while I was playing. My fingering accuracy deteriorates somewhat in such situations.
We went to Baba Ghannouj, at Erwin Square, for dinner. It's hard to beat a healthy falafel sandwich for dinner, which was under $6.

Saturday night, AE, JH, DS and HS came over. We played Khet and Pentago. HS seemed to have a great time and it was such fun having him over. He's so much better behaved than FIFO.
We all met LA at the Flying Fish for dinner. It was really crowded, too. LA and I tried what was supposed to be pomegranate sorbet, but it seemed to be gelato. The flavor wasn't readily identifiable. This is a good thing. I shouldn't eat dessert after a eating a large plate of oysters anyway. Overall, I had a truly excellent time that evening.

On Sunday, after an afternoon of trying to catch up on some work, my parents and I drove in the pouring rain to ACME Food & Beverage Co. They have lobster pot pie on the menu again. That's one of my favorite dishes there and they haven't had it in several years. I need to remember at a convenient time that I have leftovers in the fridge. For dessert we shared two pieces of coconut cream pie with lime curd whipped cream. That was very unusual, because the pie wasn't sweetened. That meant that the strongest flavor was the lime cream. It was quite good, but definitely surprising.

Yesterday, I had lunch with NP at the Refectory. It was nice to have Refectory food again, because I was really starting to miss it. I enjoyed a large bowl of dal. We had a lively conversation about toe socks and iPod random song algorithms.

Today I had lunch with LA at Twinnie's. We primarily discussed dog behavior and bats. This evening, my dad and I went to the Durham FM Association meeting at the Mayflower. The program, by Woody Woodard, KA3VSA, was about publicity and ham radio.

Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship with Fudge

Yesterday, before the gustatory festivities, my parents and I watched Casablanca. None of us had ever seen it. I thought it was a very good movie, although it was hard for me to follow where the characters were supposed to be from at first, because I'm not used to black and white films and the fake accents weren't terribly strong. It's kind of interesting watching a movie you've heard half the dialog and the music before, but you didn't know the plot. Again, I've probably only seen half a dozen black and white films in my life, but I thought the use of contrast and light made it a beautiful film.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that I'd used a particularly cool web application for creating a mock-up of the user interface of a Blackboard building block (module) that I'm going to be writing. The drawing application is called Gliffy. It was very simple, easy to use and I ended up with exactly the sort of drawing I wanted. I've never used Visio, but this may be a good substitute if you don't feel like dealing with the licensing or installation of a traditional desktop application. Thanks to CV for suggesting this!

On a whim, I made fudge for the first time today. I used the recipe on the inside of the Baker's Chocolate box and it was extremely easy. I'm pleased with how it turned out. I actually only used 15/16 of the chocolate, because I ended up losing one of the chocolate squares in the pile of paper wrappers.

I went over to my parents' house to visit FIFO and eat my mom's homemade pizza. If you aren't impressed with dogs, then perhaps you will be after seeing this:

Random Television

Tonight I'm watching American Idol. Most of the contestants seem pretty good. I didn't always agree with the judges, though. Big surprise.

I watched the Daily Show episode that mocked Bush's NBC interview. Actually, they didn't exactly have to mock it. In many instances, they just played parts of it and that was enough for a comedy routine.

Now I'm watching the Westminster Dog Show again. I really can't imagine owning a really hairy dog. I've never even had long hair, so dealing with huge amounts of long pet hair is unfathomable. Right now, I'm watching the Hound Group, so it's chock full of adorable dogs.

I should be reading some documents for work.

In the Dog House

Tonight, I was watching the Westminster Dog Show on tv. It's fun watching all the different breeds. One thing that's weird is they said that the Jack Russel Terrier is now referred to as the Parson Russel Terrier. I think changing the name of a dog breed is weird. I guess if you can spend lots of time changing the name of plants, why not change the names of dog breeds? I thought one of the other particularly cute dogs was the white Bull Terrier. The Fox Terrier was simply elegant, with a half dark brown and half white face. I'm looking forward to the Sporting Group, tomorrow, so I can see the best Weimaraner in show.

Electrical, Erroneous and Election Plans

I wasn't able to contribute more text to my blog last night, because I was working on the electrical plan for my house. When I visited University Lights over Christmas vacation, I decided to change a few of the lights to recessed "cans" and I needed to indicate where those would go on the plans. I also needed to mark up the other changes, such as location of the ceiling fan in the great room, add the sconces on either side of the mirror in the master bathroom and mark where phone/television jacks should go. I met with my builder, Kent, and the electrician after work today to discuss all these things. Some of these decisions are difficult. For example, placing the chandelier is critical, because it determines where my dining room table will go. Going over everything with them was great, although it was very cold and I nearly turned blue. I also got to meet Kent's dog, Nash. He's an adorable 8 month old Jack Russell Terrier.

I thought I would be meeting my friend, RR, (decided to use two initials, since some of my friends didn't decide to distribute their first initials evenly over the alphabet) for dinner, but I was actually confused as to which day her flight would be arriving. Fortunately, I called her and got it straightened out, so I was able to eat at home. I was starving!

Michael Moore endorsed Wesley Clark on Wednesday. That is excellent news. Both Dean and Clark seem like excellent candidates, but I wonder if Clark might have a better chance, if he were to win the nomination.