Cars and Consumer Reports

When I first started seriously thinking about what kind of car I wanted I became enamored of the Volkswagen Rabbit.  I loved the idea of the tiny little hatchback that I'd be able to park pretty much anywhere.  I expressed my interest to my father and he immediately handed me his authority on used cars.  Cue my first significant encounter with Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports is an American magazine and "the world's largest independent consumer-product testing organization". Every month, CR comes out with an issue full of reviews of consumer products including, but not at all limited to, cars, electronics, appliances, kitchen gadgets--even things like health insurance.

They buy all of the products they review, they don't accept paid advertising or free test samples, and are a nonprofit organization.

So when my dad handed me that year's used car dedicated issue of CR, I was more than willing to trust their results.  I was a little sad to find that the Rabbit ranked so poorly overall as a reliable car, but the same section turned me on to the existence of the Honda Fit, the Nissan Versa and the Toyota Echo (what is now the Yaris).  Those cars, all equally tiny and available as hatchbacks, all scored significantly better across the board with Consumer Reports and became the new objects of my automobile affection.

The ultimate moral of the story is that even though a particular make, model, and year of car may be what you want technically speaking, it's a really good idea to look into the car's long term reliability.  Consumer Reports is a great resource for doing just that.

This is a little bit of what I've been putting together for the potential book on dealing with adulthood that I mentioned in a previous entry.  One sizable section (or one of a series in this vein; I haven't decided yet) will be about cars, buying vs. leasing, new vs used, etc.

Route Loops

While listening to NPR with my parents a few weeks ago, I heard about a gentleman who had, in his quest to change up his bike route, developed a program that would take your starting/ending address and requested route distance and generate a random route over your immediate geography for you.

I’ve been walking my dogs along the same basic route for years now and, every once in awhile, I’d felt the urge to go a completely different route.  I was not quite willing, however, to just wander off into random exploration.  So when I heard about this website, RouteLoops.com, on the radio, I skipped on over as soon as I was back at my computer.

http://www.routeloops.com/

I was firstly pleased to find that the website offered a free iPhone app which I promptly downloaded to play with later.

My default browser is Google Chrome for Mac and I was a little dismayed to find that for some reason the website would not let me enter a Start/End Location in that browser.  I was presented with the same issue in Safari, but it turned out the Firefox could handle it just fine.

So I asked RouteLoops to build me a 2 mile walk/run starting and ending at the Kennedy Plaza bus terminal in Providence, RI and it quickly and dutifully executed it’s function.

From there I had a bit of fun pressing the “Create a Different Route of the Same Length” button, each time being rewarded with a new, random route I could run.

There are a number of options to fiddle around with on here.

-You can choose between a walk/run, bike, or car/motorcycle route.
-You can set the route to run clockwise or counter clockwise,
-start out heading in whatever direction (north, south, north-east, etc.) you want,
-and toggle between miles and kilometers.
-You can even tell it you're willing to take a ferry while on your route.
-They even have options for importing and exporting from/to a GPS unit, including advanced controls for Garmin users.

I've been playing with the app (which, I believe, is also available for Android users) a bit on my iPad.  I had a little difficulty setting the route length initially, but going back a page and selecting "Create New Route" solved this problem for me.  Most all of the other options for the app appear in the preferences tab.  The app does not appear to have the same fun little randomizing button, and the user must go back to the Routes page to re-enter the info.

In any case, the app provides you with a map and written directions to guide you along your route and the option to save that specific route to your favorites should you find it particularly pleasing or interesting, or fitting to the level of physical challenge you were looking for from your run or bike.

Since I'll be house and dog sitting for a family friend during the next two weeks, I'll be testing the app out frequently to change up my walks with their german shepherd mix, Sam.

To Do Redo

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while which is something I’m a bit sad about.

Camp was downright demanding.  Any time you weren’t spending teaching or supervising you spent hanging out with co-workers and students anyway or just simply crashed and asleep in your room.

But camp has been over for about two months now, so that excuse for neglect is right out.

I have started a new job as a Teacher’s Assistant/After School Counselor at Magic Years Child Care.  The age group is notably different than what I’m used to (infants to age 12 as opposed to iD’s 7 through 17) as is the structure of the day.  It’s tiring and interesting in its own unique way and I’m considering it a sort of crash course in behavior management.

In any case, now that I’ve settled into my new job and my new apartment and what is a pleasantly routine daily life, it’s high time to revisit the blog.

I have a few things I’m thinking of for the coming week or so, but for the moment I’d like to revisit my To Do list.  I’m scrapping the previous ones in favor of a complete rework since the flow of my life has changed so much over the past couple of months.  I’m going to start this off big.

Learn to Fly

This may seem like an off base goal, but it’s actually one I’ve had sitting in the periphery of my mind for a while now.  As I have mentioned previously, my grandfather was an aeronautical engineer and served for a time in the Air Force.  His love of planes had at one point driven him to purchase a small private plane whose make and model I cannot at this moment remember.  He and the rest of my mother’s family would often take trips in the plane.

The most interesting result of his owning this plane was, to me, that my mother learned to fly it a good deal before she learned to drive a car.  So, as I watch one of my room mates continually looking for new and interesting (and sometimes dangerous) hobbies to take up, I found myself remembering that old echo of a dream to learn to fly.

As such, I’m now seriously looking into it and have found a number of semi-local organizations by which I may accomplish this goal.  I will surely write more on this as I go about the process over the coming months.

Ride a horse

            This may seem relatively simple, but I mean to actually RIDE a horse, not sit on one in a line with other tourists on a trail.

I mean to ride a horse such that I am actively guiding it to move where I would like it to.  This goal may ultimately require some form of riding lessons, which I honestly may be totally willing to endure.  I haven’t taken lessons since I was… probably ten years old.

Join a gym

            I’ve made a lot of good progress health wise over the past 10 months.  Winter in RI, however, does not make for great outdoor running and walking weather.  There are a couple of gyms within reasonable walking distance of my apartment that I’m currently looking into.

Write, design, and publish a book

            This is something I’ve had on my mind for almost a year at this point.  As I was coming into adulthood, I would often wish that I had a manual for it (“it” being “adulthood”).  I kept finding myself wondering about things like buying and maintaining a car, paying taxes, renting a home as opposed to buying one, what kinds of insurance I was likely to start needing out of college, etc.

It occurred to me that creating such a thorough but concise guide to figuring out those things would be an interesting challenge for myself as a writer and a designer.  It’s definitely something I will be working on in the long-term, and pieces of it may show up here.

Is there a doctor on the plane?

Day 1 of my California adventure-

My view out the window somewhere between Boston and Dallas.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are having a medical emergency at this time. If anyone on the plane is a doctor or medical professional, please turn on your attendant call light."

I've seen this happen in movies or on tv often enough, but it was a little surreal to hear those words over the intercom on my flight from Dallas, Texas to Ontario, CA.  The gentleman sitting in front of my row mate was, in fact, having some form of mild heart attack.  I say mild since he was able to stay impressively calm throughout the whole ordeal and because, during the hour and a half he spent in his condition on the plane, it was never necessary to break out the AED.  There was a doctor on board and they did move the both of them to first class.  This is the second time that I have been flying by myself and some medical emergency has occurred in my immediate proximity.

So, my cross country journey was not without some excitement.

The rest of it went by without incident: short layovers, on-time planes, etc.  Also, some interesting airport art.

From a neat sea scape sculpture in the Dallas Fortworth airport.

So my flight came in to CA at about 6 PM pacific time (9 PM to my body clock). My aunt picked me up and we drove to Temecula to get dinner at this pretty neat restaurant called The Lazy Dog Cafe.  She and I got two different, but both ridiculously delicious, steak based meals.

My bacon wrapped coulotte.  The sauce was delicious.

The Lazy Dog had adopted a fun brand of humor.  For instance, the signs on the bathroom had, rather than the standard human silhouettes, silhouettes of dogs in their gender-typical positions (e.g. the boys had a raised leg, the girls in a squat) with the words "good boy" or "good girl" above them.

After dinner, we trotted across the street to the Apple store and I bought the iD green version of my iPad's flip cover.  Yes.  I am that big of a dork.  I'm glad that Jane will be sporting the company color for camp.

My aunt lives in Hemet, CA which was about another 30 minutes worth of driving away.  By the time we got back to her house it was around 9 PM (midnight for my body) and I quickly gave in to the jet lag.

Day 2 -

It's been largely uneventful day, but I did make my pilgrimage to IN-N-OUT Burger.  Which is, you know, super important.

Best fast food burger in the world.

One of the things that I like about IN-N-OUT, besides it being delicious (the food is always fresh – never ever frozen), is that it's got a little bit of a secret society going on.  The regular display menu is really simple.  There's only four things on the menu besides shakes and soda.  But if you know the magic words, you can get all sorts of tasty treats.  There are other hidden goodies in the world of IN-N-OUT, but I won't give you all of them :)

We wrapped up the day with a nice long walk through the golf course in my aunt's community.

The view from the golf course.

A really good abdominal workout

As I vaguely mentioned in Monday's recipe post, I've been trying to improve my running stamina.  This is part of a greater effort to improve my overall health, strength, and fitness.  I've developed a number of really good habits over the past 10 months, and I've managed to see a fair bit of encouraging progress over that time.

That said,  my routine was until recently lacking in exercise that would strengthen or tone my abs.  I'd experimented with a number of exercise regimens designed for the purpose but found that many of them, for some reason or other, presented with pretty awful back pain after the fact.  Additionally, my core is so out of shape that performing most regular abdominal exercises (like sit-ups) is discouragingly difficult and painful.

When presented with this information, my youngest brother Kevin suggested a particular regimen referred to as 7 minute abs, which he would do every morning during track season.  As Kevin is by far and long the single healthiest and fittest member of my family, I took his suggestion seriously.

The 7 minute abs routine requires you to do two rounds of 7 exercises for 30 seconds each but at your own pace.  YouTube provides us with a useful instructive video on the subject.  I like this video a lot because it provides instruction, proper timing, gives you variations on the moves to make them either easier or more difficult, and gives you a visual representation of each group on abdominal muscles as you work them.



Now, because my abdominals are so thoroughly out of shape, I have started out just doing the first cycle of exercises (3.5 minute abs) rather than strain something and seriously hurt myself.

My first go at the routine was pleasantly successful.  I was pleased to find that all seven exercises were quite simple to execute, and allowed me to actively feel which muscle groups were being used for each move.  What's more, by that evening my abs were actively sore; not the kind of sore that denotes strain, but the kind that lets you know those muscles actually did good work that day.  Because of the soreness, and because I didn't want to overdo things right off the bat, I gave my abs a day or two of rest after that initial run.  Since then, I've been doing them almost every day with little or no soreness.  I've also been quite happy to find that even after a week and a half of doing this regularly, I've had no back pain.

Beginning next week, I will likely start pushing myself to do the full 7 minute routine.  Hopefully I will be well on my way to doing the full set every morning before I head off to CA for camp.

Spicy Tuna Wrap

I was beginning to feel like it was time again to share one of my little culinary creations.  I've been working on improving my running stamina (usually with the encouraging presence of a cheerful yellow labrador by my side).  Often I come back from these steadily more strenuous runs around lunch time, notably hungry from the effort.  The following recipe was developed to answer that hunger without undoing all the good I'd done with a fast, unhealthy snack.

A quick note for those who don't like (or think they don't like) tuna: growing up, I hated the look and smell of tuna (notably, it didn't help that my dad would mix it up with five others things I didn't like).  As an adult becoming more conscious of nutrition and healthy choices, I recognized it's value as a quick and easy way to get proteins and good fats into your diet.

As such, I set out to develop a recipe that combatted my distaste for tuna, giving birth to the following tuna concoction.  I was more than pleased with what I came up with as it has turned out to be pretty tasty.

You will need the following for the tuna mixture:

-5oz can of tuna (once drained it's really just 4oz)

-Grey Poupon mustard (or your favorite yellow or spicy mustard)

-Paprika

-Crushed red pepper

-Ground cayenne pepper (optional)

-Cheese (not pictured, because I won't be using it, and also optional; I'd recommend provolone or a shredded mexican blend, though)

Drain the tuna and place it in a bowl.  You should add the spices to your taste, but I recommend a few teaspoons of paprika, a couple shakes of crushed red pepper, and a little pinch of the ground cayenne.  Mix those into the tuna and then add one to two tablespoons of mustard and mix.  I love Grey Poupon for the taste and the nostalgia, but I'm pretty sure this would be tasty with a nice helping of any kind of mustard (maybe even honey mustard…  Sounds like a nice experiment for another day).

You can leave this cold, heat it up in a pan, or zap it in the microwave--depends on your preference.  From here, you either have a tasty snack with crackers (like Wheat Thins) or you can pull together a tasty wrap.

For my regular wrap you will need the additional following:

-Your favorite whole grain wrap

-Baby spinach

Lay down a thick layer of baby spinach along the center of your wrap:

Fork your tuna mixture over the spinach.

And wrap!

It's delicious AND nutritious.  I will tell you how nutritious it is!

We found the tortillas I use for wraps at Trader Joes and they're great.  They're whole grain, only 100 calories per tortilla, have no trans fats, and give you 27% of your daily recommended amount dietary fiber.

All of that spinach amounts to about 15 total calories, another 6% towards dietary fiber, a little protein, and lots of spiffy vitamins.

The tuna, which clocks in at about 120 calories, gives you 13 grams of protein, and almost no fat at all.  Tuna is also a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids.

The mustard comes in at an almost negligible 20 calories.  If you did go with a spicier mustard, you probably got a fair little dose of sodium, though.

The spices add big flavor and pretty much no nutritional value either way which is great.

So, all told, this filling wrap gives you:

-About 255 calories

-9 grams of dietary fiber (33% of your recommended daily amount)

-About 15 grams of protein

-Less than 7 grams of fat (NO trans fats)

-And a fair smattering of healthy vitamins and minerals

If you melted some cheese into your tuna, you would of course need to add some calories (~98 cal. for a slice of provolone; ~90 cal for a quarter cup of reduced fat mexican blend shredded cheese) and fat (around 8 grams for both).  Also approximately 21% of your daily recommended calcium :)

My life in Apple computers

Macintosh SE/30.  Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I have been a Mac user since I was old enough to understand what a computer was.  Around the time I was four, my father bought his first computer which I believe was a Macintosh SE/30 (the poor thing's still knocking around in my family's basement somewhere).  It was a big beige box, had a grey-scale screen, and I could play Lemmings and a pretty graphically interesting version of Chess on it.

In the mid to late 90s, the Mac Performa 5200 showed up.  It had a color screen, provided me with access to SimAnt and Warcraft II, and introduced my family to this crazy thing called the "Internet".

In the intervening decade or so, my parents and two brothers have cumulatively owned three more desktop macs, six mac laptops, numerous iPods that represent a pretty complete timeline of the product's history, and my mother's first generation iPad.  I am currently on my fourth iPod (Touch), my second laptop (a spiffy 15-inch MacBook Pro), and, as previously mentioned, an iPad 2.

So, all told, my family could probably furnish a half decent Apple museum.

Given my technological background, I find it serendipitous that I should end up in a career field that favors the macintosh platform so much.  Apple computers are, and have been for a long time it seems, the technological companion of choice for creatives of all types; graphic design and desktop publishing included.

These days, the self-projected Apple image is very young and hip; very much a plug in with my generation.  But, getting just slightly more to the point of my post today, I am intrigued by a particular, much less main stream population of mac users.  Back in the day when Apple first appeared, the Apple I was just a kit for hard core technology hobbyists.  From there and from the ever advancing succession of Apple computers, clubs were formed to provide support networks and forums for discussion among mac users.

The neat bit is that a lot of these old groups still exist--often with original members still intact.  Not terribly long after my family first moved to Rhode Island, my father found one such group and has been attending their monthly meetings with fair consistency since.

The group, known simply as the Aquidneck Island Macintosh User Group (or AIMUG) is one of those clubs that has existed since the dawn of Apple, and seems to consist mostly of my father's generation or older with an occasional tentative appearance by someone's child or grandchild.  I've attended with my father on at least one occasion and found the company to be fairly pleasant.  The group seems to largely fulfill its original purpose as a forum in which questions may be answered, and new applications for the technology can be explored.

It's a bit of a bummer that the group has not, for whatever reasons, managed to phase in the younger, and not at all sparse, generations of mac users.  I don't know whether it's a question of effective PR, the prospective cohabitation of widely diverse age groups, or simply that, for my generation, computers have become less the hobby and more the vehicle for our hobbies.

Trying to incorporate younger mac users would be, at the very least, an interesting social experiment.  Perhaps that's a project for the future.

Career considerations

College is essentially behind me now.  With two months of iD Tech at UC Irvine in my pretty much immediate future, it's tempting to put off thoughts of my career until August.  But my brain doesn't work that way.

Any 'conversation' I have with myself about my career has to include the two major influences in my professional life: graphics and iD Tech.

Through Rhode Island College and my work with the newspaper, I've found a love of design, of publishing, of managing, and of communicating content (and acquired formidable skills at it to boot!).

Through iD, I've found of love of teaching, organizing fun, and being involved in child development.

Ultimately, I would like my main career to be set in the publishing world; I think I'd greatly enjoy doing layout or being art director for a magazine, or designing and typesetting book's for a major publishing house.  It's a bit dorky, but I think that'd be great fun.

That said, I've thought fairly seriously about pursuing a career with iD.  'What career,' one might ask, 'is there in seasonal employment with a tech camp company?'  The answer being to reach for their full-time positions, namely, to eventually become a regional manager.  One would do this by eventually becoming Director at one of their smaller locations (like Brown), then directing at increasingly larger locations, taking on more responsibility, honing big camp organizational and problem solving skills.  From there one could be hired as a Regional Manager, and be in charge of several camps.

It's a tempting thought.  iD has only benefitted from its growth, it's continued to do well in spite of the poor economic climate, and it's just a great place to work.

This means figuring out a way to work in the meantime while keeping my summers open for iD.  One way I've devised to potentially do this is to get certified to substitute teach in RI (something that only requires a college degree), and do freelance graphic design and publishing work.

That being said, I've got a couple of self-motivated publishing projects in mind for the longterm.  I will probably go into more detail on those in the future.

Just sayin'

In composing this post it started as, and was meant to be, about divining my career path for the relatively near future.  As I got further in, however, I found that it was becoming less about my potential careers and more about what I have learned and experienced with iD Tech Camps.  So, I cut out the career stuff to save for later, and we'll get right in to iD.

Through iDTech I have found a love of teaching and being involved in child development though, notably, in a short term setting (I honestly just can't see myself standing in front of a classroom of the same 30 kids for 180 days).  I love the culture of camp, the silly games we get to play, that moment when your students finally start getting what you've been teaching them and begin to understand the possibilities suddenly available to them.  But I think what really appeals to me is that sense you get that you're making a potentially positive contribution to who that kid's going to be one day.  Because camp isn't just classes and curricula-it's this great big social experience, perhaps even more so at iD.

All of iD's camps are held at Universities across the country; it's one of their big selling points.  The kids sleep in university dorms.  We wake up early in the morning and stroll over to the closest dining hall and eat university food.  We greet the day campers, lessons are had.  The instructors are teaching, but sometimes so are the students.  A kid will forget how to perform a function and his neighbor will lean over and say, "Oh, listen, you just do this, this, and this," followed by the obligatory, "Oh, that's right.  Thanks!"

We all eat lunch together, socialize together, and go out to play capture the flag, or have giant rock-paper-scissors tournaments.  And before the day campers go home for the day, we have an entire period where people can say thanks or good job to other students for being awesome.  We play games, we hang out, we watch awesome old 80s movies (I'm still floored by the fact that 20 kids can sit around completely and quietly immersed in WarGames).

It's amazing.  And I get to witness moments like the following.

Every week, the preteens have an Armagetron tournament (essentially the light bikes from Tron; the game is free and awesome).  I had this kid, no older than 12 but definitely intelligent, clever as a fox and really good at this game.  Half way through he was clear in the lead and it was obvious no one could beat him if he was even vaguely trying (myself included).  In this situation, most kids would be hamming it up, boasting, etc.  This kid, though, he reigned himself in, started giving absolutely non-condescending advice to the other children, and actively and heartily cheered his friends when they won a round.

Sometimes, especially with the older teens, there come moments where you just sit down and have a perfectly serious conversation.  I've talked to kids about what they want to do for careers, where they're thinking of going to college, how they feel about the climate in the mobile phone services market.  Sometimes the conversation is about how they wish they'd known about iD years ago because they're 17 and they won't get to come back as a camper and how they'd like to work for iD one day.  And in those situations I get the pleasure of encouraging them to come work at iD, and I get to tell them that camp is still awesome as an instructor.

I'll wrap this up lest it get long winded, but I think I've made my point.  Camp is just this amazing experience, and I'd like to keep it in my life as long as possible.

Dewey Decimal in the home

I know I just said I'd be talking about neat iPad apps I've found, but I realized that I'd discovered a regular old computer application a few days ago that I think is well worth sharing.

The discovery came amidst my spring cleaning when I wondered whether there was a convenient way to electronically keep track of all of my books.  In my mind's eye, I wanted what most public libraries have: a system that allows you to search for books, provides their location, and where you could note that the book was "out" or that you'd lent it to a friend, etc.  Preferably, my hypothetical home library system would be accessible to, at least, everyone else in the house.

Assuming that I would not find such a useful program for free, I queried my programmer friend (hi, Danny) about the difficulty of building such a thing myself given that I'm not awful with computers and have some very basic understanding of programming theory.  I figured that what I wanted was essentially just a searchable database that could be accessed through an online interface.

After talking to him for awhile about it, I determined that I might eventually be capable of such a thing, but that it would take a significant amount of time.  As such, and not really expecting to find what I wanted, I did a quick Google search to see if I could find something close.

And I was ever so pleasantly surprised to find Book Hunter.

Book Hunter has everything I was looking for and more and it's free to boot!  Here are a few things I rather like about it:

-The interface is simple and easy to navigate.
-Adding books to your electronic library is a cinch.  You can, of course, enter all of the book's information manually but it also has the option of looking them up for you.  You can enter the title and perhaps an author name and it'll search Amazon.com for the book and fill in the rest of its information.  OR you can press a little button, it will activate your webcam (if you have one attached) and prompt you to hold the book's ISBN bard code up to the camera.  The program will recognize and read the barcode automatically and look the book up.  I think this is very cool and it definitely streamlines the process of logging all of your books.
-When you add a book, you can specify whether it belongs to a collection, its location (e.g., upstairs hall-second bookcase- third shelf), whether you've loaned it to someone, who you loaned it to three months ago, whether you've read it yet or not, etc.
-It's not just for books.  You can use it to keep track of all of your DVDs, magazines, CDs, comic books, etc.

The form for adding a new book.

So, overall, I think this is pretty neat.  My longterm goal for Book Hunter is to register my family's entire book collection (no small feat; we have so many books...) which will likely be a significant time commitment, but ultimately worth it, I think.  Too often I know we have a book that I want to read and I eventually give up because I simply can't find it.  With some luck, Book Hunter will bring a bit more needed organization to my possessions and life.

On a fun, related note, let's say you wanted to go old school with your home library. Well, ThinkGeek offers a really neat kit for running your library the classic way :) 

"I don't work for money, I work for you."

Yesterday morning I, and a few of my good friends, Commenced from Rhode Island College.  This is all very good and wonderful but one of the more interesting, as the commencement ceremony most certainly was not, points of the day was receiving of my graduation/birthday gift.  It was an iPad 2.

Now, I should preface by saying that I and my family are a little weird about our mechanical and/or electronic paraphernalia (this includes cars, as well as phones and computers and such) in that we tend to give them names and treat them as if they have sorts of personalities.  I've had friends and significant others who find this practice somewhat odd, but I'm pretty sure that most people are passively guilty of this activity (tell me you've never sworn at your computer as if there was any chance that it could understand you).

So we name our computers, etc, and more often than not those names have some sort of meaning attached.  So when I opened up consideration for the iPad's name to my family, the name Jane was offered up almost immediately and just as immediately accepted.  'Why' requires some explanation.

My family and I are fans of a novel called Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and all that follow it in the series.  In the book's reality, computers are pretty much all flat, touch screen tablets and table faces and are called "desks".  So when I first heard about what the iPad was, I thought to myself that here was the frontrunner of desk technology.

Within the Ender series there is a character named Jane who I cannot describe further without spoiling the story.  Just know that the name is appropriate.

Jane has proved to be an auspicious gift given what I will be doing for the majority of the summer (teaching Game Design for the iPhone and iPad as is further detailed in a previous post).

So for the past couple of hours Jane and I have been getting to know one another and I've downloaded a bunch of potentially useful (and free) apps to play with.  I may periodically mention them here if I find some really neat ones.

One of the things that has me most smitten with the iPad as a useful device is how absolutely natural it is to type on one.  This entire post, for example, was composed in the simple notepad app that comes standard with the machine from my living room couch, from the middle seat of the car as we drove to and from seeing the new Thor movie, and from the movie theater itself.

So.  New toy, new tool, new prospects, new things to learn, and yet another platform on which I can test my budding ePublishing skills.  There is surely more to follow :)

Also, if you were wondering where the title came from, it' a quote from First Meetings.

To Do (2)

So, I was reviewing the To Do list I made two months ago and I've made pretty poor progress on it.  I got comfortable with about half of morse code before midterms distracted me from that and I only really managed to master one new origami pattern (a lily) but made significant progress on two others (the crane and the lotus flower).  As for all of the reading, I haven't had time.

So all of that will stay tentatively on the list with a few additions as follows:

5. Spring cleaning 

I'm already knee deep in this.  There's been a fair amount of dusting, vacuuming, and moving furniture, but major de-cluttering an reorganization are looming in my future.  I have difficulty with letting items with any nostalgic value go.  I'm working on this.

6. Learning my curriculum for camp

My assigned courses this year include Video Game Creation, Adventures in Game Design, and the RPG Design/Graphic Arts hybrid course, all of which use Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 (though the last incorporates Photoshop as well).  After teaching Fusion for three years, I'm pretty comfortable with it.  I really only need a little refresher before the season begins.

My difficulty comes with the new course I'm teaching this year, which is Game Design for the iPhone and iPad.  My Regional Manager keeps telling me that enrollment is high for this course and, having now just checked the Course Availability tab on iD's UCI location, it looks like he's been adding weeks where the course is available.  It's looking more and more like this will be the only course I'm teaching this summer, and to full classes as well.  @_@

Anyway, the course uses a program called Game Salad which, like Fusion, is an interface that allows non-programmers to build games.  I've been running myself through most of their basic tutorials and have found the interface to be somewhat less user friendly than Fusion.  On the flip side, it also feels like you ultimately have more control over the physics of the game.  So, on the whole, while I think you could probably turn out some pretty neat material in one week of camp with Game Salad, I'm not necessarily looking forward to teaching it to the more difficult 10 year olds that I will invariably be in charge of. 

Game Salad is a free program, by the way, and comes loaded with a variety of tutorials in case any of you are the type to try and play around with that sort of thing :)

7. Graduate

Yeah, that's happening soon :)  I'm walkin' the walk this Saturday.

Dressing up ramen

As a (soon to no longer be) college student, I have of course developed a taste for the quintessential cheap college food, Ramen.  Specifically, I'm rather partial to Shin Ramyun which is a very spicy ramen.  Like, seriously spicy.  I like spicy foods and I won't even use the entire spice packet for this stuff.

The responsible adult in me, however, recognizes that ramen just isn't a nutritious or complete meal at all.  As a result, I often find myself looking for ways to dress it up and make it more interesting.

My most successful concoction so far went something like this.  I added about three fourths of the spice package to the noodles, poured in boiling water to cover the noodles as per the instructions on the bowl, and placed a small plate over the bowl to keep in the steam and help cook the noodles.

I then threw some cut up green beans and sausage chunks in a small skillet with a tiny bit of olive oil, sprinkled the remaining contents of the spice packet on top, and cooked thoroughly.

Once the noodles had been stewing for about five minutes, I removed the cover and poured about a third of the spiced water over the beans and sausage and let it reduce.  I drained the rest of the water at the sink.  Once the liquid in the skillet had mostly reduced, I threw the noodles in the skillet as well and tossed all of it together for about twenty seconds.

And serve.

Came out pretty tasty.  I imagine this would be pretty good with chicken, too, instead of sausage.

Lisa's Wedding

My mother is a great fan of throwing parties.  So, when she heard that one of my best friends from high school was getting married and that I was co-Maid of Honor, she insisted on hosting and throwing the bridal shower.  It was decided that the shower would be a traditional English tea.

This has mainly been a trial for me, as my mother has spent the last month or so talking about what jams we should get for the favors, how many tea pots we'll need to employ at any one time, scone recipes, tasting of a number of small, very froofy sounding sandwich recipes (though, notably, the asparagus and prosciutto one was very tasty), etc., etc.  And there's still almost an entire month before the shower.

Besides driving me mad with discussions about tweaking the fairy cake recipe, my mother has also asked me to design the invitations and then carry that design over to the menus and name tags, etc.  I have actually finished the invitations.

Personal information has of course been removed for the purpose of sharing.

In searching for examples of tea invitations, I found that most of them were just a bit too cute with their pastel pinks and cartoon tea pots.  As a result, I decided to go with a more traditional, classy look while utilizing Lisa's basic wedding palette.  We've printed them and nestled them in their envelopes to await sending and I think they look rather nice.

It gets better

A good friend of mine posted this video.  I think the message is wonderful and the idea and execution are amazing.  Please watch.

It Gets Better

Shoreline update

I forgot to mention it at the time, but the finished hard copies of Shoreline came in a couple of weeks ago.  They look so nice.

I am exceedingly pleased with them.  We've gotten tons of compliments on the look, the reading party was crowded and a success, we sold a whole bunch of copies, AND I got an A in the class :)

I've also succeeded in properly formatting all of the text portions of Shoreline for .epub and have the issue (minus art) on my iPod currently by way of the Kindle app.  There are still a few kinks I have to work out like adding the art in an aesthetically pleasing way and getting italics to work in-text, but I'm getting there.

Not your average camp experience

During the summers I work at a technology camp.  The company, called iDTech Camps, runs camps in over 50 prestigious universities across the country including Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, etc.  We teach a variety of things from programming, game design, video editing, web development, robotics, etc. to kids aged seven to seventeen.

For the past three years I've been at the Brown University location teaching Video Game Creation and Adventures in Game Design (with Multimedia Fusion Developer 2), Graphic Arts (Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop mainly) and a hybrid course that combines the two. This year I'll be Lead Instructor at their UC Irvine location.

I could go on forever, and perhaps I will at some point, about how much I love working for iD.  It's hand's down the best job I've ever had.

But I specifically wanted to share one of my little side projects for camp.  I thought it would be fun to incorporate a Hogwartian house system into the iD camp culture but instead of Hufflepuff and Slytherin, there'd be video game mascots for each house.

In the planning, I wanted each mascot to represent a different game company.  I also tried to avoid non-creatures, machines, and player characters.  I've nailed down my definite choices for the first three houses and I think I know what I want for the fourth (even though it's a player character).  They are as follows:

Creature - Games - Company
Chocobo - Final Fantasy - Square Enix
Epona - Zelda - Nintendo
Zergling - Starcraft - Blizzard
Amaterasu - Okami - Capcom

I even went as far as making crests for each house.

I'm fairly pleased with how these have turned out.  I started with the chocobo and tried a technique of illustration with Adobe Illustrator that I had never tried before.

It starts with a scanned in sketch.

Then the entire area of the image is traced with the pen tool.

Then the individual color areas are traced.

Until each area is defined.  With your white to-be-colored areas overlaid on top of your black shape, the line art is formed.

Assign each area a base color.

Add shadows and highlights and dress it up a bit.

And voila!

It things like this that I seem to do purely for amusement.

And while we're on the subject...

...the subject being graphics and design, here is the image I made for The Anchor's new twitter profile picture.

Adventures in Publishing

A lot of my time recently has been taken up by one particular project.  I joined my college's Literary Magazine (which is also a class) not because I have any outstanding interest in creating literary works but because I was interested in doing the layout and publishing for the mag.  For the first semester this meant playing "Art Editor" which, because we didn't really have contributors yet, mostly meant making fliers sometimes and playing with the thought of building a website to streamline our submission process.

I do enjoy reading (mostly in the SciFi/Fantasy/Jane Austen realm), but I'm not exactly a literary person. This has led to some interesting moments as far as communicating and collaborating with my literary cohorts (though mostly the difficulty has been with our Faculty Advisor/Professor).

In any case, production time finally rolled around this semester.  I have put something like 20 total hours into building, tweaking, and editing our 120-page magazine as well as the cover art pictured below:

The process has been extremely tiring, frustrating, and harrowing, but I am looking forward to holding the finished product in my hands.  I feel like this has been an extremely valuable learning experience for me and I think I'm actually looking forward to doing this sort of work in the future.

So much so, in fact that, now that I've (hopefully) touched Shoreline's for-print file for the last time (knock on wood), I've found myself looking more into the realm of "self publishing".  Right now, specifically, this means ePublishing for things like Kindle and iBook, etc.

I was pleased to find that InDesign, the program I used to layout Shoreline and most other page layouts I do, can export to the .epub standard.  I've been learning how to best prepare and format your project to properly convert into .epub.  I think I'm going to try and do it with Shoreline.  I may end up with a version of Shoreline that I can read on my iPod.

I feel like this is a very productive road for me.  Being competent in publishing in .epub could be a potentially very marketable skill in the coming years.  I look forward to the challenge.

In other graphic-related news, I also made the following spread for The Anchor two weeks ago:

I utilized a bunch of new tricks I learned at the conference over spring break.  I feel like I'm truly growing as a designer.

Twilight

When the tired sun
sets at 5PM, I feel
my heart sets as well.

To Do:

I've decided to form a To Do list here of all the things I would like to read or accomplish (for fun or personal development) and keep track of my progress. So:

1. Read the Bible

This goal stems from no particular religious leaning of mine, but rather from an off hand comment my english teacher made sophomore year of high school; that literate, scholarly people have generally read the Bible. This makes sense to me in that so much of literature draws from or refers to the Bible. In any case, I started in on this particular goal a long time ago (years ago) and have only managed to make it as far as Kings 2. Though I have read the previous books, I can't really recall what happened in them.

So, I think, to really gain something from the experience, I think I need to start again, and challenge myself to write down a synopsis and my thoughts every couple of chapters so the gist of the information isn't lost to me when I'm done. Enough on that, then.

2. Learn morse code

I'm a fan of codes and alternate alphabets and I think it'd be cool to learn one that has some significance, historically and otherwise. The trick will be learning to translate it while hearing it; learning the dashes and dots will be a cinch. The other trick will be finding a friend who will learn it as well so we can send messages to each other secretly.

3. Learn origami

Well, more than just the little paper cup. I'm going to set a tentative goal of 10 different patterns of origami, preferably known by heart. I need to go to Michael's or somewhere and get myself some origami paper.

4. Read... 

...the silly number of odd books I've accumulated in my "random light reading" category.  This list includes: US History for Dummies, Sex, Time, and Power, Were You Raised By Wolves, Mein Kampf, Auto Repair for Dummies, and, maybe, The Book of Mormon.

That's enough for now.  I'll add to this as I think of things.

Oh, oh oh, oh.

An ode to college
where my weekend starts early
on Thursday at 4.

Yeah.

Write five syllables,
then seven, then five; they swoon.
Bitches love haiku.

Memes are great

Can I write, each day,
a new and unique haiku?
Challenge accepted.

While it's on my mind...

Some of my most interesting culinary discoveries tend to be made when I'm alone and improvising meals from what's in the pantry. I had one such successful experiment this evening.

I warmed a small pan and coated it with butter. I put one chicken breast in the pan, sprinkled on some red pepper flakes, and drizzled some light, zesty italian dressing over and around the chicken.

I let this cook on medium-ish heat while I was boiling some rotini, occasionally drizzling on more italian dressing and flipping the breast over. At some point I pulled the wheat germ out of the pantry and sprinkled it on both sides of the chicken, allowing it to crust up a little.

Pasta drained, I began to worry that pan-frying the chicken wasn't getting the center cooked properly, so I put the chicken on the pan for my little toaster oven, dumped the remaining butter-dressing-germ-etc remnants from the pan over the chicken, and baked it for a few, closely-watched minutes.

I sprinkled a fair amount of parmesan cheese over my pasta and served my chicken breast on top.

The chicken was really tasty. I'm pretty sure if I added more dressing to the pan near the end on the process that the butter-dressing-germ-etc mixture would have mixed deliciously into the pasta to compliment the chicken.

Overall I was extremely pleased with the outcome and I'll probably try the recipe out on my room mate sometime this week and see what he thinks.

Update: I made a recipe card for it.

Making drinks...

I had a couple of friends over last night and was mixing them drinks. This one was made up in the process:

Blue Raspberry Sour

It is reportedly delicious.

Actually, I think there was something more like 3.5 oz. of the UV in there, but the person in question takes his drinks stronger than the average bear would probably like, so I dialed it back a bit.

Breaking the ice

First posts are awkward
Mine is no different, I fear
Yet I forge onward