Bad Sign

There's a cool website called Midomi, where you can hum a tune and see what songs have that tune.

I tried it out on a tune that I wrote recently. I find it catchy and I like it a lot. The good news is that it doesn't appear to be a rip off of anything else, so I can go forward with it. The bad news is that the music it apparently sounds the most like is Hillary Duff and Hanna Montana.

That gets to me.

The ABCs Of My Internet (Courtesy of Google Chrome)

For those of you who still use IE or Firefox: When one types into Google Chrome's search bar, the browser automatically tries to help you find what you are looking for, based on your browsing history.  Even a single letter will prompt a suggestion.  

Here is what Google Chrome suggests for me, letter by letter.  

A is for amazon

B is for better place

C is for chicago climate index

D is for diigo

E is for ebay

F is for fdu (unclear why...)

G is for google (duh)

H is for hulu

I is for google images

J is for janglo

K is for keytar inc

L is for linkedin

M is for maalot

N is for google news

O is for online stopwatch

P is for paypal

Q is for nothing (search google for q? perhaps q tip?)
R is for rotten tomatoes

S is for sustainability index
T is for twitter

U is for UN global compact

V is for verizon

W is for weather

X is for xkcd

Y is for youtube

Z is for zipcar

Just What We Need

From the music and direction of this clip, you'd this this guy has invented a cure for cancer.

But seriously, it's about time that someone out there designed a plane that guys like me can buy!  Oh wait, I don't have 150 grand.  

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/17-01/mf_icon_air 

What's with WIRED and small sporty aircraft, anyway?  Remember the Air Wolf?

OneNote

I've been using Microsoft OneNote a lot lately; I really like it.  I like the fact that my writing automatically has the date on it.  It'd kind of like an electronic journal that takes care of the repetitive stuff for you.

And as far as a note-taking tool, it's got a lot of features and is pretty simple to navigate.  If I was still in school and taking classes, you'd bet I'd use this thing for every one. 

One drawback is that you don't have all the functionality of Word.  You can't do shortcut keys for symbols, or write equations via the equation editor (for all you science and math geeks).  On the other hand, I never really found it all that efficient to try and write equations on the computer.  I never was fast enough to keep up with the teacher.  So no great loss.  If you want them you can type them in Word and just paste it into OneNote.

Give it a shot, people!

Left, Right

I used to think that I was good with numbers - a leftbrained person (for the record, I just had to look up on Wikipedia which qualities are left brained and which are right, even though I just asked someone about this a few days ago, which only goes to further the point, I suppose).  

Not that I was every particularly bad at rightbrained stuff like art and music.  I just always thought of myself as a math and science kind of guy.

Then I got to college and started scoring lower on tests.  Math tests, chemistry tests, physics tests - I just kept getting things wrong.  I became used to red ink all over my work.  By the end of college I decided that I was, in fact, rightbrained.  That would explain why I was so bad with numbers no matter how hard I tried.

Now, as I take these MCAT preparatory tests, I'm still making those math mistakes, but I'm evaluating them more closely.  More often than making fundamental mistakes in my analytical approach to solving a numbers question, I tend to just make plain old careless mistakes.  I missed a decimal point.  I left out a constant, or a minus sign.  That kind of thing.

Can a person be strong in his leftbrainedness but still make careless errors?  Or is it part and parcel of being leftbrained to not make those errors.

More importantly, maybe I should go into engineering after all.  

Guactastic

It seems that the more I turn to blogging as a profession, the less appealing I find blogging as recreation. But as with other noble enterprises, such as exercise and Talmud Torah, that initial feeling of reluctance often belies the pleasure derived from the act itself. I will try to remember that in the future.

I couldn't resist the chance to share today's lunch, a throwback to my 209 days. Though we would never serve ours with store bought bread, nor leave out the sun-dried tomatoes, the characteristic guacamole-mozz duo brought me back.

Without the acidity of the tomatoes, though, the savor lacked a tangy kick. A little Frank's did the trick.

Is it just me, or are these guys antisemites?

I was driving along in the car this morning, listening to 92.3 K-Rock.  It was just around rush hour, a time this station usually devotes more to talk and less to actual music.  The program - the Opie and Anthony Show - generally consists of frat-guy-like banter about topics ranging from sports to women to, occasionally music.  It's light talk, meant to entertain.

All of a sudden, they announced some kind of special segment.  I don't remember what it was called, but it was Jewish something.  Naturally they had klezmer music playing in the background.  They started talking about "David", their Jewish intern.  They brought him on the air and started bullying him about something that happened in the office.  At this point, it wasn't so different from other frat-guy-like talk shows, which often feature some person who gets bullied a lot for laughs.

But then they started teasing him about being Jewish.  They asked about why he was out yesterday, and he told them about Yom Kippur and fasting and all that.  They responded by saying things like "how come you Jews are always suffering?" and ridiculing what they understood Yom Kippur to be.  "David" was clearly not cut out to respond in an intelligent way, and his answers often made him look silly, encouraging the hosts to egg him on even more.

Then they started talking about Chanuka and accused Jews of "stealing" it because we were "jealous" of Christmas.  It was revealed that at least one of the hosts was Catholic, and he told David that having a holiday about oil was silly and that at least Christmas was "about baby Jesus".  At that point I turned it off.

Now I know, I know - these guys shouldn't be taken too seriously.  They are the kind of people who get paid to talk off the cuff.  Often, it seems like "inflammatory" is something they aim for. 

Still, though, it ticked me off.  The guy was in no position to argue back - he was clearly low down on the totem pole, and they were goading him for laughs, not genuine responses.  It was frustrating, because religion always looks stupid when you know very little about it (don't get me started on Bill Maher and the trailers for his new movie "Religulous").  Plus these guys had the gall to suggest that Judaism was crazy - as opposed to Catholicism, which makes tons of sense.  

I don't know, something about the meek stammering Jew being the blunt of everyone's humor, getting verbally abused over public airwaves by his non-Jewish bosses... wasn't so much fun to hear.