Andrew Underwood

How much food do you buy at once?

Usually I’m on foot when I go to the grocery store and how much I buy there is limited by how much I can carry.  I go for the baskets, for me one basket holds $30 worth of food.  This is an average, but it’s often very close to this.  Using just a basket, you’re bound to have to return fairly soon.  This isn’t all bad since your food is always fresh.

You could take your TankUV to the store and load up on 15% off day and save money.  This requires you to arrive early since later on in the day all the good stuff that was on sale is out of stock.  You have to brave the crowds.  Also, you are required to have sufficient storage space at home.  Personally, my roommate and I share the freezer attached to the fridge which isn’t too big.  However if you have a house and a big freezer it sure is economical to use this method.

I’ve been thinking about this after visiting my parents where they only go to the grocery store once in a while since they live out of town.  As a result, some of their food isn’t that fresh.  Some garlic I was going to use while there was almost sprouting.  Still good they say.

I am the lizzard King!

After coming back from snowboarding in Montana I got really sick. I’m not sure if it was a really bad cold or a flu but it had me on the chesterfield for 5 days. I spent my time playing the original Civilization. I came upon it while rooting through my archived disks in my room looking for something my Dad’s laptop could run. I never actually beat the game so this is what I’ve been trying to do ever since I picked it up. My previous blog about marathon gaming with Gears of War pales in comparison to the amount of time playing this pixelated turn based strategy game. At the moment I’m very confident I’ll be able to take over the world soon. It’s just the slightly tedious process of ferrying in units to other continents that’s left to do.

Home for a while

I’m in the Crowsnest Pass until I decide to go back up to Edmonton and eventually find a job. Saturday I’m heading into the States with three friends for skiing/snowboarding in Whitefish. We will be there over new years. That’s the skinny on my schedule… On to complaining about Internet Explorer.

While I’m at my parents place I am forced to use IE 6 for browsing if I want to use high speed internet. Browsing with this thing is like having to sleep on a hard bed after being used to your usual much softer bed. Alright, I suppose there might be more imaginative analogies but it’s all I can think of spur of the moment. There’s no tabbed browsing, pages don’t render properly (even this page), and inferior autoscroll are the things that annoy me the most. In conclusion: IE bad, beef jerky good.

The bell tower

City Hall is adjacent to the block where I live.  It sports a bell tower chock full of different sized bells capable of producing a wide range of audible tones.  Every hour during the day it plays some cutesy song, followed by a sequence of evenly spaced tones to indicate the hour.  It’s starting to annoy me, and the thing is it’s not repetition that’s the culprit.  It sure has a wide range of songs it can play, from themes from “The Sound of Music” to the usual Christmas melodies.  The annoying thing is that it tends to “oversing” everything.  It throws in lots of extra notes, sort of like those people who sing the national anthem at sporting events.  You know what I’m talking about.  Whoooaaaoooowhaaa oooohhhhhweeee hoooooowooowooo!  I especially hate this in regular music.

Funday

This fun day took place on Saturday, it all started with me going to the mall and buying a boat load of things I needed.  Coincidentally I bought some jeans and then later in day the older pair of jeans I was wearing ripped.  Almost as soon as I got back my roommate Michael came home too, at which point we ventured back to the mall.  City Center Mall is really close and thanks to pedways we are only required to walk outside to cross the street.  Thus going back and forth to the mall is really convenient and sometimes justified.

This time we went to the video game store to get an extra Xbox 360 controller.  During our time there we tried out the new Nintendo Wii.  A off-road racing game was loaded, and the steering is done by physically tilting the controller.  It’s fun, give it a shot next time you’re in one of those stores… if you’re ever in one of those stores.  It’s the cat’s pajamas.

Upon arriving home we started playing the new Gears of War game in co-op mode for the Xbox 360 with the newly acquired controller.  This is quite possibly the most cinematic game I have ever played.  It’s not cinematic in the sense of the cut-scenes so much but the actual gameplay itself.  The whole game is based on hiding behind objects and then reaching out and shooting out over them.  Then there’s the rodeo run, the crouched sprint with the the camera following at a low elevation behind.  The story line is really lacking, but this obviously wasn’t a focus during dev.  What ended up happening was an eight hour marathon of gaming only stopping for a short lasagna break.

We finished the whole game on hardcore difficulty in that time.  The credits rolled at about 2:30 am, way later than either of us though it was.  I haven’t played a game the whole way through in one day since the days of the Turbo Grafix 16.

In other news I finished my last university lab every today creating a few different types of digital circuits.  More importantly I finished my third last final exam ever.  I’m not going to talk about that right now.

Binary Analog Clock

The last place I moved into had a clock hanging on the wall, didn’t ever pay much attention to it since it was in an unnoticeable place in the kitchen. When I moved out I took it with me and had plans to make it into something more interesting since it was as plain as clocks come.

I put this background on it that turns it into a binary clock. Black is low, white is high. Read it by seeing if the blocks the hands intersect are high or low (the minute hand isn’t quite long enough and the hour hand is a bit too long). It’s read from the outside to inside. The inner 4 rings correspond to the hours and the 6 rings past those are for minutes. This clock is a bit different since it counts from 0 to 11 instead of 1 to 12.

In this picture (it’s not upright) the hour hand is over black, white, white, black. Which corresponds to 0110 in binary equals 6 hours. The minute hand is over black, white, black, white, white, white. Equivalent to 111010 binary = 32 + 16 + 8 + 2 decimal = 58. So the time is 6:58.

CD/MP3 Player

I’ve had my CD player for three years now and I dropped it tonight while out running.  It exploded sending parts everywhere.  This is most likely due to me taking out all the screws two years ago and never bothering to put them back in.  The reason I was trying to take it apart was that I had dropped it before and the only thing that broke was the spring on the open/close slider.  I wanted to fix it but never was able to since I couldn’t even seem to get it open.  Thus the reasoning that it doesn’t need screws.

I picked up all the parts after it was dropped tonight and went home.  I’ve been thinking about MP3 players for a long time now but I wasn’t going to buy one until my CD player gave out.  This is because it plays MP3s too.  Storage was cheap, just writable CDs and it had great battery life. The biggest downside was the large size of it, even though it’s small for CD players.
When I got home I spent some time surfing around different MP3 player sites.  I didn’t really find anything that I liked that wasn’t really expensive.  Finally I had a look at my broken CD player and amazingly I was able to put it back together.  I put a CD and it works fine, it just has one more dent.  So it looks like I won’t be buying a new MP3 player quite yet.

Unveiling

Almost this whole long weekend I’ve been working on my new photo gallery. I already had a gallery that was more of a place to dump lots of pictures, more of a filing system than anything else. Now there is an additional gallery that just shows some of my better pictures in a slick design with titles and descriptions. Click the pictures for the description. Check it out and witness it’s operation, there is a tab above for it. It might be best to press F11 to fullsize your browser.

The gallery doesn’t use any Flash, just Ajax. I had huge problems embedding Gallery2 into this Wordpress site because of having to merge two CSSs and making things mesh. I think the end result was worth it though. Although it’s easy to have a neat Flash photo gallery, it blocks search engine bots from spidering your images.

At times the Gallery2 program can be slow on my server for some reason. If anything goes wrong just click reload (refresh).

Build up stupid

Upon seeing huge snowflakes falling past our apartment windows last night, Kyla, Allan and I went outside. We made our way to Churchill Square and decided to start rolling snowballs. These snowballs turned out to be more cylindrical shaped than anything else. The cool thing was, since the grounds are covered in smooth cement it made rolling them really easy and they gained mass and volume very quickly.

What else could we do with our cylinders besides build a snowman. We had to cut two of the cylinders into sections to lift them up to the next level. I had to stand on a garbage can to put the head on.

In the end it was over 10 feet high and covered with all sorts of designs and mathematical equations. Despite me carving a huge PLO into the front, it was gone when I walked past there today on my way to class. The whole grounds had been bobcated I suppose. At least there are pictures, and this video.

Worst Acronym Ever

I just received an email newsletter from the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. One really has to laugh at this. The following was taken right out of it:

WTF?

The Dean of Arts, in conjunction with the Office of the Provost, established in September 2005 a joint Arts/University Task Force to complete a thorough assessment of writing instruction and writing competencies at the University of Alberta. As a result of its work over the last year, the Writing Task Force has made recommendations (see www.arts.ualberta.ca/wtf/) about writing at the U of A and is now asking for input from students, faculty and staff. Make your voice heard at the upcoming WTF Open Forum on November 23, 2006 from 3:30 to 5:30 pm in Education North Room 2-115.