Cheerful Celebrations

While other things are commemorated today, I choose to recognize the following:

Bubble Wrap (R) Appreciation Day!
-I love bubble wrap. I have yet to meet an individual who does not at least enjoy bubble wrap. This fellow is fairly entertaining (though his spelling error in the text that keeps popping up makes me cringe a little. EDIT, PEOPLE).

Happy Birthday Lego Brick!
-It is the Lego brick's 50th birthday.


That is probably all of the postings for today.

Wii Apps

Carnegie Mellon Researcher Johnny Chung Lee has developed a new application for the Wii: a virtual reality head tracker. It's startlingly realistic, and shows a great application of a technology criticised by some. And, as he pleads for near the end of the video, maybe Wii game developers will make use of the idea for some new games.

Gorgeous art, hilarious lines...

...what's not to love? Dinosaur Comics lead me to The Abominable Charles Christopher. It's wonderful. I particularly love the skunks in panel 6 of this comic.

Stimulating conversations

I think I've found the solution to awkward social situations where you don't really know what to talk about: cheese.

Seriously. I've used it many times, and you can actually go off on some great tangents and learn things about people, hence leading to perhaps more "relevant" topics. But that part doesn't really matter, right? [edit: note sarcasm]

Personally, I love cheese; I used to be lactose intolerant so I can really appreciate it now. There are so many varieties, flavours, textures, methods of consumption (fondue, on a cracker, straight up, in a sandwich, on pizza, etc.)...the only cheese I've eaten that I truly do not enjoy is blue cheese. I've given it a fair shot on a number of occasions (even some Gouda shot through with blue cheese) and I always end up wildly searching for the nearest beverage or edible foodstuff. Blech. I think the most interesting kind I've had was Gjetost, which is a brown caramel-ish goat cheese. Not unpleasant, but definitely a unique flavour.

And that's my cheese spiel for the evening.

Partial List

Among other "New Year's resolutions" that I've made, I have resolved (happily) to listen to more Canadian music. As such, I have now embedded a CBC Radio 3 player on the right hand side of this blog. I have not yet learned how to make it not auto-play, as change the code from "true" to "false" apparently did not work, so be warned that you will be serenaded every time you visit this blog. Unless I decide to change it. Which is more than possible. The playlist is currently their top 100 songs of 2007.

Other resolutions/plans:
-be more disciplined in getting things done. I'm pretty organized, I just sometimes get distracted. Which is not always a bad HEY LOOK IT'S SNOWING
-read at LEAST one book for fun every two months.
-cook more. Learn how to cook more interesting things. Please give me recipes if you have any good ones. I can share my recipe for lentil soup!
-take up the clarinet again.
-write for fun, more often.
-write more "meat and potatoes-y" blog posts. Maybe. The one-line posts won't go away.
-attend lots of concerts.
-have a wine and cheese party.

and hey! I did a bunch of stuff from my last list!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year and all that jazz. I have to things to say and do, but first I get to fix router issues. woohoo!