This is a response to Friday5.org’s recent blog post, in where it has questions regarding our individual tastes. I don’t participate in these often but, when I do, it usually pertains to my interests in some way. Sometimes I just think they’re good questions. This time around, the questions not only apply to my tastes but, in some cases, apply to my health as well. I figured this would make a good blog post here, so let’s just dive in right now!

1. What’s too spicy for your tastes?

As some of you know, I love spicy food. I usually make my blow-your-nose-off chili, complete with jalapenos, habaneros, chili powder and a extra ingredient that I’ll mention in a bit. However, it needs to have some flavor; it can’t be hot for hot’s sake. That being said, the extra ingredient I put in a pot of chili is a couple of drops of Dave’s Ultimate Insanity hot pepper sauce. It’s very close to qualifying as an extract, really. Many mortals have regretted putting a small drop of this stuff on their tongue, resulting in liberal chugging of water or milk. I won’t dare do it!

2. What’s too sweet for your tastes?

Anything that’s geared to give you high energy due to the sugar content. I’m hypoglycemic, so I have to watch the sugar intake and eat sensibly; snack often on complex carbs and protein to keep my blood sugar going. If I have too much sugar at once, my body crashes and I’ll be dragging myself on the ground for the rest of the day. Sooooo… unfortunately, most candy bars and energy bars are off limits for me. Energy drinks like Monster and Red Bull are dangerous for me to have. But I can have a dessert-type item when it’s getting close to bedtime. I just can’t go nuts with it. However, I’m a sucker for anything with dark chocolate in it!! Now I’ve gotten to the point where Diet Coke w/Splenda is as sweet as I’ll go. If someone accidentally hands me a fountain-dispensed Coke in a restaurant, I can (almost, if it’s mixed right) tell immediately, as it’s sickeningly sweet to me!

3. What’s too salty for your tastes?

Dairy Queen has this bad habit of topping some of their sundaes with salted peanuts. I’m sorry, but salt and ice cream doesn’t go together for me. Yuck! I don’t really even add any extra salt to anything I cook, unless I really have to, which is rare.

4. What’s too bitter for your tastes?

I take a Ginko Biloba supplement every morning with my vitamins. I’m very careful not to let it hit my tongue, as the taste of that stuff almost made me vomit on a few occasions, even though I have a very strong stomach.

5. What’s too sour for your tastes?

This is one I have to think about. Straight lemon juice, which I still have to use on occasion to help unblock a problematic salivary gland.

Well, I hope all my readers learned more about me than what they wanted to know, heh-heh! I’ll come back and write another entry this week, hopefully really soon. As of this moment right now, I’m having too much fun hanging out with our birds and jamming to some Epic Rock Radio!

Cheers, and enjoy some good eats for me!!

Remember when I said I was hungering for a new challenge? Well, I got it. I normally don’t like to do virtual puzzles like this; I like to have it physically in my hands. However, this was just too good to pass up. I’m used to solving a physical Megaminx in around ten or so minutes. This one, as you can see when you click the picture, is taking me quite longer to try and solve. It’s all one dodecahedal-type object; the left image is the “front” and the right is the “back”. The time in the pic reads 48 minutes, and I have all of the centers solved except for two. What’s left to do is match up the edge pieces and then solve it like a regular Megaminx.

The problem with this is time. Last night, between trying to get through this, talking to others in chat and making and eating dinner, I couldn’t solve it before I just got too tired. Today, I’m doing it, but I have to abandon the poor Gigaminx because I have a birthday celebration to go to (Happy birthday to Bill K., my dad-in-law!). I will solve this thing soon; it will just take some time. Unfortunately, you can’t save your progress… if it’s abandoned, you’ll have to start all over again!

If any of you out there want to try this challenge, head on over to this address: http://users.skynet.be/gelatinbrain/Applets/Magic%20Polyhedra/dodeca_f8.htm. Word of warning… please be prepared to set aside a few hours if you really think you can do it. Just hit the “Scramble” button and go crazygonutz with it. Make sure you also set aside some time for brain-rest breaks!

Rotsa ruck!

For this Esoterik Blog post, I’m gonna borrow Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and transport myself back to Hanover Park, Il. sometime around 1986. Around the time that I was finishing junior high and entering high school. This was also the time where my musical tastes were starting to transition from Top 40 Pop/Dance to Hard Rock/Metal. I wasn’t buying any albums yet, but I had a radio with a tape player/recorder and some spare recording cassettes laying around. What was a budding music appreciator to do but start recording his favorite songs and shows off of the radio. Those homebrewed mixtapes had some charm to them; little imperfections like the tail-ends to commercials, beginnings of songs accidentally cut off, station DJ blurbs and special show introductions lent the tapes a lot of personality! (Side note: the mixed-format Chicago station WVVX in Highland Park had this kick-ass metal show that aired during the weekends (or on most nights, at one point!). Not only did I tape that show when I had tapes to use, but that show’s intro is still memorable to this day!! I miss it soooo much!)

When I met friends who did their own tapes, we often traded and got exposed to other music that we may not have found on our own. You could say that was the social music revolution of the day, akin to how Last.fm and iLike.com work today (but without the personal touch of trading; you can only look at and sample what others are listening to!). When I started dating, I often made mixtapes of various lovey-dovey songs that were special to me, or that reminded me of the girl I was dating at the time, and of course gave those tapes to them. Some thought it either cool or silly, but… that’s besides the point! Also, when CD’s became the standard album format, that made it so much easier to make these tapes rather than holding the FF/REW buttons on the playback tape to find the right spot to start the music. (I’m 35, so I grew up around the time when tapes were king, the 8-track was all but dead and vinyl was dying a slow (kicking and screaming) death!)

For me, this continued until some things changed in my musical life. Along with getting a couple of portable CD players, I finally could afford a CD writer for Christine’s computer when we were engaged. So, tapes went into permanent storage and the almighty CD became completely standard for me. This also meant… mix-CDs! I mainly made these for myself and Christine. However, as my working relations grew around me, I did enjoy making mix-CDs for my friends and co-workers with whom I talked music with the most (which I still do; I just made one recently for my fellow work partner!)

Now, as of 3 years ago, the iPod and other portable media players have replaced the almighty CD, which has now been relegated to permanent hard-copy use (music) or rewrite-able recording and playback (video). Once Solid-State Memory (SSM, or flash memory) goes way up in capacity and way down in price, that will herald the death-knell of the CD format. I’m sure some who read this will be, like, “Well, DUH!”

So why am I writing all this? Because a new music site just took me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I experienced the satisfaction of making and trading mixtapes. Muxtape.com is a free storage medium that is set up like your own personal “mixtape”. All you do is upload songs to it (a maximum of 12 files, each one with a 10MB limit) and it gives you your own account URL to share your virtual mixtape to others. This is a very simple, bare-bones interface (I think it’s AJAX), that is even RSS-enabled. It only allows for 12 songs on one account, so it’s not like having a bunch of blank tapes to work with, but I can understand this limitation, given the (albeit dropping) costs of online storage. Of course, another difference is that you can skip around to other songs at will, unlike riding the FF/REW buttons on a tape deck. You can pause songs, but not skip or jog to parts of songs, which is somewhat bad IMHO; I encounter lots of songs with lame beginnings that end up being great songs afterwards. However, this is a promising service with some room for growth.

Well, I will share my Muxtape URL with all my readers here: http://chrisw357.muxtape.com/. Not only did I try to use all my favorites, but I also included songs from diverse genres and sub-genres. When you do listen to it, I hope you will enjoy at least one or two selections. It even has a length of almost an hour, just like one of those beloved blank tapes!

Take care, all!

Hello to all!! I’m sorry I haven’t written here in a while. As the title suggests, I’ve had my time occupied with some new toys in my life. You know it’s true what some people say; when men get older, they still play with toys… but they’re either more expensive, imported or have tons of neat useless features!

Nintendo Wii

In one of my postings before last Christmas, I was pining for this system. I was also being realistic; I didn’t expect to get one as long as retailers kept jacking the price up because of near-unavailability. Well, since Nintendo boosted production on the Wii, the store I work at finally got them in at the regular price. I just had to buy one that day, especially since one guy earlier in the day was trying to buy all of them!

If you’ve read anything about this console, I don’t need to tell you how cool this thing is. However, for those who haven’t paid much attention to tech matters like this, I’ll fill in the gaps here. This is probably the very first console to have an emphasis on actual physical movement while playing some of its games. Wii Sports, the game disk that it comes with, has five games on it that make full use of this functionality. The bowling, golf and tennis games were rather low impact, but the boxing and baseball games actually made me break a small sweat! There’s virtually no lag time between swinging the wireless controllers and movement on screen, showing just how far this kind of technology has come for home use. Thus the reason why I haven’t been blogging lately… I’ve been on my feet playing video games and being somewhat active at the same time. (speaking of which, I started rollerblading again… but I digress!)

There’s more to the Wii than just its own games. There’s built-in online functionality, with access to Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel… a place that, admittedly, had me asking my wife to chain down my credit/debit card! You can buy points there, which enable you to get applications and games for download into the Wii console. The games are part of Wii’s Virtual Console, and the shop has access to lots of older games from classic systems, with more being added every week. That leads to another feature; the Wii is backwards-compatible with my GameCube games! Add those things to the Wii’s main home screen, which has other channels such as news, weather and social interaction channels (all free use!), and you’ve got a great diversion from everyday life.

Games And (even more!) New Cubes

In addition to going a bit crazy on Wii’s Virtual Console, buying three classic games, I got two new games for it (ow… my aching wallet!). The first one is The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Yes, I know I already have it for the GameCube, but the Wii version is somewhat different. First, the entire game is right/left inverse and, second, the game makes full use of user movement with the wireless controllers. The first time I swung the sword around with Link, I broke into the biggest grin my face has ever endured! The second game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It’s a game where famous video game characters (mainly from Nintendo), duke it out in arena-style combat. It’s a very enjoyable game, with an immense challenge factor. Also, it makes use of the Wii’s online capability, enabling you to play against other players from around the world.

I also finally got the new cubes I had talked about in my last post! These are different than the 4×4x4 and 5×5x5 cubes I have with the Rubik’s name. They’re made by a Far East company called Eastsheen. I’ve worked with them for the past three days and I have to say that they are made better than their Rubik’s counterparts; they turn much smoother and tighter, due to different internal mechanisms. Because of this, my times have improved to around 5 minutes on the 4×4x4 and 11 minutes on the 5×5x5. So what’s going on with my shattered Rubik’s 5×5x5? Well, I’ll probably put that back together and just have it for display, with minimal use.

I won’t be getting any more puzzles or games for some time now; I want to save for better things. However, if I can find a Pyraminx at a good price, that will be the next puzzle. Rumor has it that, in September, a company in Greece is going to be mass-producing their new Rubik’s-style cubes. These will go by the name of V-Cubes, and they have had working prototypes of 6×6x6 and 7×7x7 configurations. Look them up on YouTube; I already featured the video of internationally-known cuber Frank Morris solving their 7×7x7 prototype in an earlier blog entry. If and when these become available, you know I’m going to be in line itching to get my hands on one!

Before I leave, I have one tidbit of useless trivia for you, garnered from Wikipedia and the original paper on the subject. Did you know that a 5×5x5 puzzle cube has approximately 283 trevigintillion combinations in it? Just to give you an idea of the size of the number we’re talking about, that’s 283 followed by 72 zeroes. A research paper stated that the number is also a very rough estimate of the number of hydrogen atoms in the known universe!!

With that thought, I bid you all a good day. Cheers!

Another video blog entry… this time, I was trying out a beta feature, for editing, on YouTube. It didn’t work out, so I re-did the whole thing on iMovie. It really bites not having the correct processor speed for running both iMovie and a separate cam effects program. I wonder if anyone can point me to a free picture-in-picture plug-in for iMovie?