Wed Sep 07 17:47:57 bruschalsa:

In a culinary brainstorm that could only be called Richardsonian, Peter A. H. Peterson thought, why not combine the great taste of salsa with the great taste (and similar ingredients) of bruschetta? You could call it Bruschalsa™ and die penniless. Or you could call it Salsetta™ and make millions instead!

I've tried twice now to implement and improve Salsetta (or you might unimaginatively call it "Spicy Bruschetta"). The first effort was a C-... edible, but not actually better than (or even as good as) either salsa or bruschetta alone. I worked from two recipes -- one for bruschetta and one for salsa -- and it turned out gross. Too oily, the bruschetta recipe called for balsamic vinegar (a mistake, IMHO), etc. It failed because I had never even tried to make either foodstuff.

The second time around I was more prepared, and also less ambitious. I bought some fresh Pico de Gallo from the grocery store, to which I added minced garlic and chopped fresh basil. It's pretty good! The basil has toned down after a night of mingling in the fridge. I think it is more successful as a "spicy bruschetta" than as a "basiley salsa." I'm just not sure if basil is good in salsa, or if it's just a distraction. Anyway, it's an interesting thing to play with. I think the overnight sitting in the fridge definitely helps.

Wed Sep 07 18:45:58 activities:

I finally found out what I can do with all my free time.

Fri Sep 09 12:16:14 Now I know my E-S-I's, let's go out and eat some fries!:

So, as I was sitting in class last night, I had a question. "Why is the alphabet we know sorted in 'abc' order? Or why is the (English) alphabetic order 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'? I figured that it must have something to do with usage; a is very common, x,y, and z are not that common. Clearly though, it is not a strict order by usage or commonality. I thought, why don't we learn the alphabet in order of usage? It would certainly be interesting to see. Then I figured that it must be on the Internet somewhere, or if it wasn't, it would be a pretty easy program to write.

Well, I couldn't find the answer on the 'net, so I wrote a quick Perl script to count the letters in a list of words. I used the Enable2K list, which is a "Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary"-like list of words. It's good for this purpose because it doesn't contain things like, "dog, dogs, and dogs'" which lists purposed towards spell checking often do -- it contains each word once and let's you haggle about suffixes.

On closer inspection, usage really has nothing to do with the alphabetic order, and there were even a few surprises... here it is:

e s i a r n t o l c d u p m g h b y f v k w z x q j

I knew that e, s, i, a, r, n, and t would be way up there. Anyone who watched Wheel of Fortune knows that -- "RSTLN and E", right? But there were some surprises (for me). I didn't realize that m would be in the middle, and I certainly wouldn't have thought of b as being less common than m. I really wouldn't have guessed that j was less common than q.

Here is the software I wrote. It allows you to interchange or add lists easily... but be careful what lists you use.

A-ha! Just now, by searching for "the least common letter in english" I found a more scholarly (and slightly different) version of this information. Their list is:

e a r i o t n s l c u d p m h g b f y w k v x z j q (ask oxford)

e s i a r n t o l c d u p m g h b y f v k w z x q j (tastytronic)

Discuss.

(3) Fri Sep 16 01:40:11 food is expensive -- and other random thoughts:

I went to Quizno's tonight to get a regular sub combo and the total was $8.85 by the time it was done. Is that normal, people? I might as well eat out at a real restaurant if a Quizno's sub is going to set me back 10 bucks.

My Computer Architecture class is really interesting, although it is (understandably) a huge nerd-fest. I'm just one of the nerds, don't get me wrong... but wow. Nerds of all stripes.

Played Halo 2 with some friends in Chicago the other night... the Internet is great.

I also have a line on a job which is pretty exciting -- I'm really looking forward to seeing how this stuff pans out. I have enjoyed having a little "vacation" (or, as my mom said this summer, "You're not on vacation, you're *unemployed*!" -- hi mom!), but I'm just about ready to be back in the saddle doing something constructive and I've just about worked through the pile of "things I told people I would do but never got around to." I need a job so that pile can start growing again and I can get stressed out about it. Just kidding.

I have been really good at trusting God lately -- I feel like that's a major theme in my life; trusting that God will put me (and alhp) where we need to be, and give us the things we need to be there, if we are open to his leading. But I feel like, in being so trusting, I have let other areas of my spiritual life, like general prayer, or study, or just "quiet time" really fall by the wayside and I've been starting to feel a little needy in that regard. I haven't really talked about religion/faith much in this venue, but I'm a religious person and there's no point in hiding that here.

What else has been noteworthy? I'm sure a lot, but I guess that's it for now.

(1) Mon Sep 19 08:05:34 PST monday, monday la laaaa la la la laa:

Had a great weekend. Friday night we stayed in. We started the evening by going for a long run in the Santa Monica mountains. There are so many different trails and ways to get on them that it's hard to get bored. There are also mountain lions, and they help you stay not bored as well. Also helping you is your huffing and puffing as you run straight up for 30 minutes. But I'm a wuss. Then we went to the Reel Inn on PCH (very close by)_for fish. They're a fresh fish restaurant where you tell them at the counter what you want and then they grill it and give it to you... like a cross between fast food and red lobster or something. Fans or owners of the Reel Inn would probably be mortified by the comparison but I promise I mean that in a good way (and I recognize that it's a poor description). It's also a lot like the Southern California Fish Market version of Moody's Pub from Chicago. Really chill atmosphere, super good food, not too expensive, considering.

Then we went home and watched both episodes of The Office's "Christmas Special". For those of you who don't know, The Office was the british "mockumentary" that inspired the American show (also called The Office). We're not big fans of the American show, but that's no surprise I guess. The British show is, IMO, probably one of the greatest things ever made for the small screen. It's BBC so it's not G-rated television (just warning you). Anyway, they only made two seasons of the show because that's all they had to say... mostly. Almost 3 years later, they went back and did a "where are they now" show to tie up some loose ends and revisit the characters in two episodes centering around the office Christmas Party. Brilliant.

Then Saturday we slept in and kind of lazed around. Anna did some homework, I worked on some hacking projects, and then Saturday night our friends Laura and Jon came over and we just hung out and chatted.

Sunday Anna went for a run with her trail-running club; then we made eggs florentine (benedict with sauteed spinach instead of ham) -- hollandaise sauce is not nearly as high-maintenance as I expected it to be, it's basically an egg yolk, some lemon juice, and butter -- and then we just worked on stuff around here. Sunday night we went out for sushi at this place in Santa Monica called Wabi Sabi... instead of ordering for ourselves we just asked the chef to make a big plate for the table. It was awesome. I feel like people (or maybe just me as a kid) have this aversion to the idea of sushi because it's "raw fish" and that idea is foreign to western tastebuds (unless you like steak tartar). But really, the idea is foreign but the flavor is not -- good sushi tastes so good on it's own that you don't even think about the fact that you're eating raw fish (in a negative way -- I think about the fact that it's raw fish but I like that now), it could just be some kind of "thing" the chef made in the kitchen. Another part of that is the kind of fish and the way they cut it makes it so delicious and melt-in-your-mouthey that it's really nothing like what we would normally think taking a bite out of a salmon filet would be like. Without that knowledge, the idea of sushi does seem kind of weird to a Westerner. So my recommendation to you is that you try a good sushi restaurant, and just don't think of it as raw fish. Or do, but get over it -- sushi is good!

I have a job in the works, but the people actually doing the hiring are in Britain right now and won't be back until next week, so I'm going to keep looking just in case this other job falls through. But I'm very excited for this opportunity!

(2) Tue Sep 20 09:25:47 PST it's raining poached eggs:

It rained today for the first time since we've been in LA -- over a month and a half. It was great to see the rain; one thing I'm definitely starting to be annoyed by is the almost total lack of weather (especially on this side of the Santa Monica mountains). I guess for some people, weather is made up for by earthquakes, or perhaps traffic... but that's not likely to work for me. Anyway, it was great to have it rain... but it brings up maybe my least favorite thing about LA: water usage.

Don't get me wrong; the traffic here is ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. It is crazy that a city like Los Angeles relies on everyone having cars to get around. The city is so spread out, and so "mountainous" (not really so much mountainous as just hilly) that roads can't be straight, must be curvy, and must go up and down a lot, which includes freeways, and which necessarily builds congestion. Also because of the mountains, there are places (like out where we live) where there is really only one or two good ways to get from point A to point B, and you really only have one or two opportunities to change over to one or the other. Contrast this to Chicago where, if you wanted to take Cicero Ave. all the way to Midway Imitation Airport because 90/94 was blocked up, you could, easily, and you could get onto the surface streets from the freeway just about every half mile if you wanted to. Not only could you do that, but taking Cicero all the way there was not that much dramatically slower (with traffic) than taking the freeway, because the surface streets are direct and traffic flows. None of that is true here, as far as I can tell.

So the fact that there is no good public transportation here is really shameful. How many hours of peoples' lives do they give up every single day? Most people here drive an average of an hour, I would think, each way. Averaget that together with the old chestnut "Time is Money" and figure out how much pain the lack of good transit costs Los Angeles every day. I for one would much rather ride in a train that sit stuck in traffic, even if it ended up taking the same amount of time.

But the problem is that putting in public transit here would be a nonstop project that would cost a lot of money. At least a billion, I would think, to put in real public transit in LA. (Especially because they wouldn't do it the cheap way out here.) I'm making these numbers up, but I bet they're pretty ballpark.

No, that is not the most annoying thing to me about LA. The most annoying thing to me is water usage here.

I never really understood growing up how LA is really virtually in a desert. I don't think that fact is quite obvious unless you drive here from Las Vegas, and you see firsthand how much desert surrounds the city. Sure, it's not Death Valley, but there is practically no precipitation and all the vegetation in the mountains is low-water usage. It's scrub. Scrub on rocky soil that doesn't hold water.

Most people know that LA gets most of it's water from outside reservoirs and sources, many of which are far away, because the aquifers here aren't nearly enough to support the size of the city. The Owens River (near Yosemite), and the Colorado River (which no longer reaches the ocean due to overuse) are major sources. Yet practically *every day* when I walk down the street I see *rivers* of water running down the gutters straight to the ocean because people watering their lawns or plants do not care enough to actually watch and see what is getting absorbed and what is simply running off. Literally, gallons and gallons of water just running down the street into the drains. I sort of have a philosophical problem with cities built in areas which cannot even *hope* to naturally sustain themselves. But when residents of that city, living on resources borrowed from other ecosystems (sometimes borrowed at great cost) care so little about the resources they have that they can't even be bothered to think about it, it tells me a few things: 1., that people are selfish, self-centered beings. Big surprise. 2., that the water system here is very inefficient. The street drains run into the ocean because the water doesn't in theory need to be "processed" for safety but it also won't be reused. What? And 3., water in LA doesn't cost nearly enough. We have rivers being dried up, lakes and other communities destroyed hundreds of miles away, but water is so cheap here that people can just afford to let it run down the street because they can't afford to pay their groundkeeper (who is probably getting less than minimum wage, wink wink) to turn off the water when it overflows. It's so cheap I don't even know what it costs. I try to conserve water -- not because it has any economoic penalty for me (as a person living on savings) -- but because I care. Water should be expensive, and maybe it should be billed on a sliding scale -- rich people are no more morally or ethically justified in wasting -- literally wasting -- water any more than average citizens.

I'm not a "crazy environmentalist" -- at all -- but this is just totally insane and I'm looking it straight in the face every day.

Oh yeah. Also, we poached eggs for breakfast this morning.

Tue Sep 20 17:52:33 PST losangeles.craigslist.org > software jobs:

spam post or target marketing?

Thu Sep 22 12:55:11 PST waiting is the hardest part:

I'm waiting to hear about a Linux-related job that sounds really cool and I am extremely excited about. I'm also doing my homework for Computer Architecture, which I enjoy. It's fascinating to me how the elementary basics of binary computers are such valuable concepts, because literally everything inside a computer can be boiled down to those basic concepts. I find that learning those basics really assists you in learning at any level in the field. So that's cool.

We've been here in LA for over a month and a half now, and all this time I've been out of work ("on vacation"). I'd like to say that I was squeezing every last drop of life-giving freedom from these days, but when I'm honest about it, I can't really say that I have. Too much time surfing Wikipedia and the web in general, and not enough time making music or writing code. I have gotten a lot of constructive things done however, many projects which have been waiting for months to be picked up again, and I've been able to do a lot of housework and errands so that they didn't swallow our evenings when Anna is back from school. So maybe it's a wash. I'd like to have produced some tangible, important things in this month and a half, but I feel like instead I've produced a lot of intangible, small things. You can't be creative all the time, right? Anyway, that struggle is the story of my life.

Therefore, I'm going to get out of this chair and get my interview clothes ready in case they call.

Fri Sep 23 14:32:23 PST time!:

So, as I was doing dishes today, I listened to the Skates Sharpened and Repaired Christmas demos, and was really taken back a long way in space and time. My good friends Dave and Crystal are getting married next weekend, and I'm participating in the wedding (I'm the Master of Ceremonies), and I remember being really excited about this music, sitting in my van in the cold outside Dave's apartment, playing it for him. He had helped me record one of the songs, and we had just had a goofy night of hanging out in Duluth. I remember feeling very joyful about the music that I was making, and joyful of the process and the product. Listening to the music now, I understand why it made me feel that way; I'm still proud of it, and I still feel like it captured something then that was unique and simple -- a one of a kind moment, and something that I created that nobody else could have. That music was all recorded, or mostly recorded, 4 years ago, and I have been too busy with other things in the meantime to do anything quite like it. That needs to change.

Tue Sep 27 19:26:07 PST tuesday afternoon:

Getting ready for my friends' wedding this weekend. Also spent some time working on a new music project that is pretty exciting... I'll be sure to link to it as soon as there's something to show.

I've been thinking that I will declare the original "skates sharpened and repaired" project as complete (for what it's worth), and put together a CD of the best of that project (maybe all of that project). I have two new things in the works, both similar, but different than *Skates*, and I don't plan on adding to *Skates* any time soon. I still like that name though, and can definitely see using it for something else down the road.

Wed Sep 28 09:44:10 PST Who said "God helps those who help themselves"?:

I don't think that one person can really sum everything up in one article in a way that is completely fair yet incisively truthful but also won't offend anyone, but I think if you are "...quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger” (James 1:19) you might learn something interesting in this article.

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