Roseyland

Yeah, so I blogged every day in November and not once in December. I have a number of excuses, but none of them are very good. In order to get back into the swing of things, let me try an easy blog post to update you on all things Roseyland. God bless the bulleted list:

• I put up a Christmas tree for the first time this year. I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It felt like Christmas lasted for the whole month of December rather than just a day or two. Plus, it became a project where I had to make measurements, comparison shop, and then buy accessories. These are the things I truly love.
• I travelled to Florida to visit family for New Year’s. It was fun, but it should have been warmer. I think the state of Florida owes me a refund.
• I’m on a diet. I weighed myself after New Year’s and discovered that I weighed more than I have ever weighed. Go me! My BMI is about 28. Last year it was 24. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at losing weight. I watch my calories, work out, and magically I’m thinner. This time I’m using myfitnesspal.com. This is a website that let’s you track your daily calorie intake and calories burned from exercise. They have a large database of foods and exercises, and even an iPhone app. The website calculates how many calories you should eat to lose a certain amount of weight, and then as you enter food or exercise during the day, it lets you know how many calories you have left. I think the technical term is “Easy-Peasy”. I’m going for a loss of 2 pounds per week. I’ve lost 5 pounds in the first week, that never keeps up though. You can follow my progress by checking out the badge over on the right.
• I’m reading SuperFreakonomics. The book Freakonomics is the closest thing I have to a bible, and SuperFreakonomics is just as good, if not better. Freakonomics is basically an economist analysis of the world. I love these books because they show how many of our preconceived notions are just plain wrong. I think these books should be required reading for anyone who wants to have an opinion. I also recommend anything by Malcolm Gladwell.
• I’m pretty sure that I’m going to Italy in June with my Mom, Aunt, and maybe a cousin or two. After going to London and Paris last summer, I’m afraid that I want to see the whole World, and by the whole World I mean Europe and Australia. My plan is to fly to Rome and stay in a vacation rental apartment. We will have 5 full days in which I would like to see: The Vatican, Ancient Rome, Ostia Antica, Tivoli, and maybe even a day in Florence. I’ve also been learning Italian on livemocha.com.
• I need you to watch Chuck. It’s one of the best shows on TV and if it get’s canceled, I’ll cry. You don’t want that do you? It’s on NBC, Monday night, 7C/8E. You can watch previous episodes on Hulu. I’m also watching Big Love on HBO, which is another one of my favorite shows.
• My Mom and Grandpa had an interesting discussion about healthcare over New Year’s. I stayed out of it, but it did make me think of a couple things. One being that we are all part of a system, and every “personal freedom” you take affects the “personal freedoms” available to others. The other thought I had was about complexity. There are a million different ways you can analyze our heath care issues, but the ultimate problem is that our health care system has grown into a very very complex system. The only way we will get out of this mess is to transition to a significantly less complex system. I can’t say that the current health care reform bill accomplishes this, but it still has my support. Partly because it does fix some significant flaws in our current system (pre-existing conditions, benefit caps), and partly because I think this is the best first step we are going to get at this point. This would be a good topic for a whole blog post, maybe I’ll write one.

That is all. I’ll write a real blog post soon. I promise.

Image Credit : Elizabeth

Well, it looks like I have successfully survived NaBloPoMo 2009. I hope you didn’t enjoy my blog too much, because I don’t think I’ll be posting again for at least a couple weeks. All in all, it wasn’t that bad, and I’m glad I did it, but it was definitely a challenge to make sure I left time for blogging every day. Here is what I learned:

• When I’m in a time crunch, the first thing I cut out is sleep. This is not a terrific strategy.
• If you are looking to buy an artificial Christmas tree, you should do so before Thanksgiving, they seem to be popular this time of year.
• The same goes for those miniature Starbucks cup Christmas tree ornaments.
• The previous two list items have very little to do with NaBloPoMo.
• Onedadslife’s experimental physics skills are somewhat lacking.
• I can blog from my iPhone.
• Epcot needs an India pavilion. Yeah, um, I didn’t get around to blogging about this, but I wanted too.
• The best way to save time blogging is to write shorter post, and lots of times they are better that way.

That’s it. I learned nothing else. I wish I could say that my writing has improved significantly, but it hasn’t. I also wish I could say that my writing speed has increased, and actually, it has a little. Probably the best thing that came out of NaBloPoMo is that now I have a fairly long list of potential blogging topics. If only I could find someone to write post on these topics. I really wish I could think of something profound to say to end this whole NaBloPoMo experiment, but mostly I just want to be done. So I guess I’m done. If I don’t talk to you before then, have a Merry Christmas!!! (or Hanukah, or Kwanzaa, or Winter Festival of Lights). The End.

Today consisted of pizza and a movie. The movie was 2012, which was pretty good, but an hour too long. I might be biases though, because I drank a medium pop during the movie, and towards the end I think I came dangerously close to rupturing my bladder. TMI?

The pizza was Valentino’s. If you have never been fortuanate enough to travel to the great state of Nebraska and have a slice of Valentino’s hamburger pizza with a garlic roll, your life is incomplete, sorry. I also had runza and Spaghetti Works on this trip. Could it get any better? Oh yeah, the Turkey was good too.

I should be back to blogging on my computer tomorrow. I guess that means I won’t have an excuse for the short post filled with spelling and grammatical errors anymore. That sucks. Oh, the dog below is Bebe, he likes to jump and chase squirrels.

The Nebraska Cornhuskers beat the Colorado Buffalos today. Yay. They could have played better, but a wins a win. I think they have a shot of making the Big12 Championship a good game. I doubt they’ll win, but I’m glad to have one more game of Husker football to watch this year.

The pictures below are from a store in Omaha called Husker Hounds. It is packed with husker gear. I ended up buying two t-shirts and a fleece, when I originally had no plans to buy anything.

I hope you got some good Black Friday deals. Hopefully you found the perfect gift for me. I love gifts.

All of us here at Roseyland hope that you had a truly wonderful Thanksgiving. We had the standard Thanksgiving fare, you can see a picture of my plate below. A game of password was also played today. I’m surprisingly good at password. A head full of useless knowledge comes in handy from time to time. I’m watching a mythbusters marathon right now, so much better than pro football. I’m looking forward to watching the Husker game tomorrow. It will be nice to see a Nebraska game in Nebraska. You know, away from all the non-believers. If you are going shopping tomorrow, you are insane and need help, but good luck and have fun!

I have absolutely no time to be writing a blog post right now, so let’s make this quick. Time to break out the bulleted list.

• I’m headed to the great state of Nebraska tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I know it will be fun once I get there, but right now I would kill to just spend the long weekend laying around my condo.
• The bags above are what I take on most trips. Actually, I usually go with a smaller roller bag, but it looks exactly the same. I love that backpack, it has an easy access slot for my MacBook. I always use a backpack as my carry on. I can’t fathom lugging around a bag that I can’t throw over my shoulder. I like to spend my time walking around airports when I’m waiting for my flight. I get bored just sitting around.
• I watched V tonight even though I had no time. My brain needed a break. I had to do some hard math coordinate system timing thinking today. I’m ticked that V isn’t coming back until March. Why do networks do this? This will probably kill V, because nobody will remember what it was by the time it comes back. I understand taking a break over the holidays when people are too distracted to watch TV, but March? Ugh.
• I’m not sure what I’m going to do about blogging when I’m gone. I don’t think I’ll have internet access other than my phone. I also won’t have much time. Either that or I’ll have a ton of time. You never know. I actually can blog from my phone, so I’m thinking that I’ll post a picture every day with a few sentences. We’ll see.
• Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Okay, I need an easy post tonight. How about a bunch of pictures of my cat Earl? Here is Earl right after I adopted him. Notice the giant ears.

I wake up to this view about once a month. I don’t know how he does it, but he loves to throw the cushion off the chair. Notice the duct tape on the chair. That’s because Earl tore the fabric.

Earl is a big fan of nooks and crannies. Here he is in the linen closet.

Earl has a feminine side. He love to accessorize. Here he is in a scarf. He also loves purses. More specifically, he loves digging through purses and removing the contents.

Earl’s arch nemesis is the plastic bag. He love to play with them, but then somehow they get stuck on him. At this point, Earl rationally decides that the bag has come to life and is out to kill him. He runs all over the condo as fast as felinely possible, knocking over everything possible until he becomes trapped under a piece of furniture. Then I rescue him from the evil plastic bag.

In my old kitchen, Earl could get on top of the cabinets. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it a lot.

This is Earl’s most famous picture. I tried to get it posted on one of those cute cat picture sites, but we were rejected. Bastards.

Earl loves to flirt with danger. Here he is getting himself trapped in a bunch of clothes hangers. If I didn’t extract him, I’m pretty sure mass calamity would result.

I don’t know what this is about, but whatever. If you are comfortable, you’re comfortable.

There you have it, a slew of Earl pictures. You know you liked it. You can see more pictures in my Earl Flickr set here.

Hello everyone. Today is a big day. It’s my 100th blogging anniversary. Well, it’s my 100th post. That’s the same thing right? Regardless, this is a big deal, and I’ve decided to get you something. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have. It’s you who should be showering me with gifts and admiration. If it helps, consider this a gift for all of us to share. Without further ado, here it is:

Do you like it? I do. Boxing day is my new favorite holiday. I have no idea what Boxing day is, but judging from the picture above, it’s awesome. You are probably wondering where I got her, I mean it, the picture. I got it at istockphoto.com. That’s right, I paid for her, I mean it, the picture. Here’s another:

I think this picture is cool, but I can’t remember, are you supposed to walk towards the light or away from it? I was going to do this whole long post on where I find images for my blog, but then I thought that just posting a bunch of images would be more fun. I’ll give you the list version though:

• I feel like every post should have a picture. Pictures help set the mood and convey much more information than words alone.
• You can’t just grab any picture you want from the web and put it on your blog. You have to have permission from the content owner. Don’t steel, it’s bad.
• Whenever possible, I try to use my own images, but shockingly, I don’t have a picture of everything.
• If I can’t use my own picture, I try to find a creative commons licensed image. These are images that people allow you to use for free. There are different licenses, but most commonly the images are free for non-commercial use with attribution to the author. All of the images on my Flickr account are licensed under creative commons. The only thing I don’t like about creative commons is the attribution part. It isn’t exactly clear to me what attribution means. If it was just a link on the photo, that would be cool, but I think you are supposed to put a caption under the image, and captions suck. I’ve yet to find a caption scheme that I’m happy with. Currently I use tables, but the code for that is ugly. I feel like there should be a more elegant solution.
• When it comes to celebrities, or commercial products, or any type of image that is all over the web anyways, I just download the picture and use it. I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but if the image is everywhere anyways, I figure it doesn’t really matter.
• After all that, I’ve started using istockphoto.com. You have to pay for these pictures, but you don’t have to attribute them to anyone. It’s feels weird to pay for a picture, but the photos in this post only cost a $1.50 each. I certainly waste more money on less important things. Plus, I love browsing the images. Its fun. Seriously, you should try it.

Here is another picture. I already have lots of pictures of a cat, but I thought this image was particularly striking.

Here is a political picture for you. It’s a tea party with Alice and the Mad Hatter. Hmm. The Mad Hatter is crazy. A crazy person at a tea party. Interesting.

Just for fun, I thought I’d throw in the meaning of life, which is clearly defined in the equations below. I’d explain it, but it’s so obvious. I don’t want to insult your intelligence.

I both love and hate this next picture. I love Buddhism and the whole complex human relationship with spirituality and suffering and stuff. This image would be an awesome illustration of all that, except that it’s fake. The problem with a lot of istockphoto.com images is that they usually use models. Which is fine for some things, but I can tell that the woman in this photo is striking a pose rather than expressing any real experience. That sucks, because if this was a real picture, it would be amazing.

One more image just because I love you. You’re welcome.

See, sometimes models are good. This post cost me $10.50. I think that makes it my most expensive post ever. I doubt I’ll use istockphoto.com images very often, but it’s a nice option to have, if you can’t find the perfect picture any other way. So, what did you get me?

Okay, I need a quick post tonight. This blogging everyday thing is a bit much. How am I supposed to watch TV? I want to watch V tonight, but I also want to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Considering that it’s 9:30 now, that might not be happening. I’ve heard a few people say they don’t like V, but I think it’s been pretty good so far. Mostly I want see the FBI agent’s kid get it on with the blonde lizard girl. That would be hot.

Some guy left the longest comment ever on my blog on the Electoral Vote post I did a few days ago. It’s all about a National Popular Vote plan where a group of states that have at least 270 electoral votes all agree to pledge their votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. It’s a neat idea, and completely constitutional as far as I can tell, but it feels kind of gimmicky. I’d rather fix the problem head on that use a work around. I also heard from a few people who like the electoral college because it prevents mob mentality. I can see this point, but I still don’t like the way presidential candidates spend all their time in a handful of states. Part of me says that electoral votes should be awarded for each house congressional district (plus a few for D.C.), but then we have to worry about gerrymandering. Oh forget it, this is too hard, let’s just appoint a dictator. I’ll do it if nobody else wants to.

I’m currently in this intense internal debate whether or not to take an additional three days off at Christmas. I’m already off from Christmas Eve to January 4th, which is 11 straight days off. Not bad, but if I took 3 vacation days, I could have 16 straight days off. I probably won’t though, I keep thinking of all the trips I’d like to take, and those 3 vacation days might be vital.

Okay, that is all I can manage tonight. I’ll leave you with a Haiku:

Cats Are Not Very Green

Can You Find Me A Blue Cat?

If You Can, You Win!

Yeah, poetry is not my thing.

This post is kind of a cop out, but if I”m going to stick with this NaBloPoMo thing, I’m going to have to take the easy way out a few times. Since starting NaBloPoMo (a whole 3 days ago), I’ve been frantically trying to think of things to blog about. In my first year of blogging, I wrote 64 post. In the next 26 days, I have to write 26 post. That’s a 571.875% increase in my posting rate. I know what you are thinking. Isn’t it a 570.3125% increase? No! you are forgetting that 2008 was a leap year. Silly you. Anyways, here is my list of ideas so far:

• Conversations with Nate Dogg
• The Ramblings of a Mad Man
• Earl and the Ninja Duck (A Children’s Story)
• The History of Earl (Cat Pictures)
• Everywhere I have lived via Google Street View
• Self Driving Cars and Virtual Bubbles
• Staying Positive Amidst all the Crazy
• My Obsession Love Fondness of Lily Allen
• The Self Aware Universe
• Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Book Review)
• Commentary on some random news article of the day
• Christmas in London
• Teleportation Thought Experiment
• Countries I Would Add to Epcot
• The Wine Cube
• Remodeling my Bathroom
• Tour of My Condo
• Places I’d like to go
• NaBloPoMo - Looking Back (My last NaBloPoMo post)
• ???

That is 19 potential posts. I need 7 more. Any ideas? Anything on the list you like? don’t like? Leave a comment. I love comments.