Posts from — August 2007

Idea:

A map of the world, with political boundaries, color-coded by the percentage of Americans that can find that country on an unlabeled map.

Then generate the same map surveying different populations.

Mr. Show is a sketch comedy show from the 90s by David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, whose name I’ve probably misspelled. A lot of the sketches were not that funny, but many of them were excellent. I made a playlist on YouTube with some of my favorites, though there were many I couldn’t find.

Warning: language… wear your headphones if you’re at work.

The timing on this video is perfect:

Pianist Jennifer Lin (14 years old when this was recorded) plays some really challenging pieces. The most interesting part, however, is her improvisation, in which she has someone from the audience select five notes for a theme and then improvises a beautiful piece based upon it.

link

youtube of the whole performance:

youtube of the improvisation part only:

Firefox extension: block facebook apps. Direct link to installer here.

Sorta like adblock, but for apps.

Installed!

(Sorry, Larry)

Career Advice from Scott Adams:
“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”

Worth reading

South Carolina has a 54% high school graduation rate, the lowest in the country. I wish they had talked more about that during the debate in Charleston. All they did was discuss really vague things, such as not liking No Child Left Behind and needing better teachers. Also, the way CNN showed the question was atrocious, but I think they learned that lesson.

54%, though.. that’s scary.

John and I made fettuccine alfredo from scratch on Sunday. It was quite a bit easier than I expected, and came out really good.

The ingredients for the dough were very simple:

(that’s everything)

After the first pass through the machine:

After a few more passes through the machine, we get:

FOOD!

The home-made noodles were far more tender than the dried store-bought ones, and the dish came out really well. We’re looking to some more challenging pasta recipes later.

A bit more about the pasta machine, in case you haven’t used one:
First, it’s not too expensive- I think I paid a little over $30. You aren’t making your own pasta to save money, regardless. There are three slots through which the dough can travel. One is for flattening: it has several thickness levels. You start it at the thickest level, and keep running it through progressively thinner levels until you get to the right level. The other slots are for cutting fettuccine or spaghetti after the correct thickness has been attained. Only one slot operates at a time, since there’s only one crank to attach (and doing something more complicated would be really hard).

I’ll try to continue documenting culinary adventures that may be of interest.