I AM A SUPER DUPER GENIUS

W00H0000000!

Finished, for the first time in forever, with one peg left! (Just picked up the game again after a few years.)

Well, this can be one more thing added to my modest list of accomplishments this year...

mi profondo in scusi

So che per niente ho stato stupido stupido stupido, e forse distrugguto la nostra amicizia, ma ti vorrei chiedere un perdon e se puoi trovare nel tuo cuore a perdonarmi...

(Not So) Brainy

A Case for RSTLNE

When Wheel of Fortune goes to the bonus round, they automatically give the contestant the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E as a "gimme", and then ask the contestant for three more consonants and a vowel.

So it got me thinking, are they really the most frequent letters? I remember, when I was growing up, that almost all contestants guessed RSTLNE for their letters. I also remember an episode of The A-Team where H.M. goes on Wheel of Fortune for some reason, and I remember that he studied letter frequency charts to gain an advantage. I decided to make my own letter frequency charts off that Boggle program that I have laying about. 26 nicely-formatted lines of code later, the results are in!

The top five occurring consonants are: S (140948), R, (105133), N (101329), T (99367), and L (78503). So, that's OK. The highest-frequency vowel is far and away E (170788) -- so that's OK, too.

Now comes the tricky part. What should the next three consonants be? If memory serves me correctly, most contestants currently pick C, D, and G. Is that just following a pattern, or is that based on frequency? According to my chart, the three next-most occurring letters are C (59257), D (50962), and M (41840). In fairness, G is next in line, and I think people pick M frequently, too. Vowels at this point are a toss-up, as long as you don't pick U (this assumes that you have no idea what the word is when picking letters -- one puzzle about a month or so ago was URUGUAY, which obviously was picked to blow the letter-frequency charts out of the water).

I think I've had way too much time on my hands to think about this sort of thing...

Last night

Yesterday I somewhat randomly popped over to the FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) website at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute to see what they had. I wasn't really sure what I would find there, but I knew I needed some reading material to keep me occupied while I was scanning a whole bunch of documents at work.

What I found completely fascinated me. I printed out two articles to read at my leisure: an article on the records kept by the Jaredite people, and another article on Moroni, more specifically comparing and contrasting his three attempts to close the record of the Book of Mormon.

I especially enjoyed the article on Moroni. As I read through the final pages of the Book of Mormon, his life really came alive before my eyes, and I understood a lot about his narrations and his commentaries on the stories he was telling. I came to understand how he, like us, was a spiritual wanderer in a strange land, unsure of what the Lord had in store for him, but having complete faith and trust in His plan. The main difference between us and Moroni is that Moroni knows exactly what we are to "get" from the Book of Mormon. He saw our time, and knows the important lessons that we are to learn. And fortunately for us, he recorded them all in Moroni 10.

I've always seen Moroni 10 as the "conclusion" to the Book of Mormon. Well, what I managed to forget in this case is a basic principle of good writing: the conclusion needs to re-state the thesis statement of the work, and summarize it clearly and concisely. Reading the final chapter of the Book of Mormon as both introduction and conclusion, I was able to gain a large amount of insight as to what is important to look for while reading the Book of Mormon, and I am extremely excited to re-read the Book of Mormon yet again, and really focus on the things that Moroni emphasized in his final exhortation to us.

I've been trying really hard recently to study the scriptures, but not only that, to be a student of the scriptures -- really apply them to my life. I picked up a study manual for the second half of the Old Testament, and began reading about the rise and fall of King Solomon (1 Kings 1-11). The manual helped point out that the fall of King Solomon was mostly due to three things: pride, mismanagement of wealth, and a strong desire for acceptance by the world around him. I started thinking about my own life, and the past couple of months. I've really seen a lot of that in my personal life as well, I'm ashamed to say, and I've almost completely gotten away from the things that helped me identify myself as, well, me. So, I made a list, and I carry it around with me on my PDA, and I'm going to be referring to it frequently as I try to keep myself on course. I think this is a good thing to start the new year off with, seeing as how last year was made up mostly of ambiguous goals and scattershot attempts to be 'productive' and 'improve myself'.

Word coinage

Adding new words to the Calabresi-coined lexicon today:

"AIMspeak": the multitude of abbreviations and shortenings that take place within instant message windows, text message conversations, MySpace, etc.

"Intellectual Ice Age": what is going to result from the continual dumbing-down of our society.

Oh yeah

On a completely unrelated note to anything, I just wanted to say that Pantera's album Vulgar Display of Power is awesome to listen to when I want to:

• get something done
• drown out co-workers
• do both at the same time

In fact, the only thing it's probably not good for is driving late at night while tired (I missed my exit way back in 1999), and cooking... I can't imagine working in the kitchen to this kind of music, unless I was cleaning or something. Come to think of it, I think I'm going to play this stuff really freaking loud this week while Michelle and the kids are gone...

Indignancy

Dennis Miller once said something to the effect of: "You know you're never more indignant in life than when you are shopping in a store you feel to be beneath you and someone mistakes you for an employee."

Well, I've never had that happen to me, but I have had an "almost"... I've decided to start dressing better, and not short-changing my reputation or first impressions on the basis of a t-shirt with a nifty slogan ("I'M BIG IN EUROPE") and some baggy jeans. So, it's mostly nice pants (sometimes jeans), a collared shirt, and a sweater if the weather warrants (which, recently, it has been).

Last night I went somewhere, and if I wasn't "dressed up" per se, I was at least dressed better than I usually have been. And I still felt underdressed for the function I was at. Sigh... no win for me this time around... :-(

Recapturing some of the magic

It's time for Animaniacs / And we're zany to the max / So just sit back and relax / You'll laugh till you collapse / We're Animaniacs!

I downloaded got the first few episodes of Animaniacs on DVD yesterday, and spent this morning reliving some of my better TV-watching moments from my younger days. It's pretty cool to watch all of this stuff; in fact, it's the hardest I've laughed at something on TV or in the movies in a long, long time. That says a lot, seeing as how I don't care to watch TV or movies all that much. I need to get my hands on some more episodes, maybe even the whole first couple of seasons, so I can share them with everybody.

On a slightly-related note, I'm anxious for a career change. Not that my current job hasn't been good to me and my family, but I'm just not creating anything at my job. I figured out that that's what is at the bottom of my desire to be a cook -- the act of creating things for other people to enjoy. I made my first bûche de noël (Yule log) this weekend, and it went over well enough that I'm going to make one more for my friends at work, and another one for my mother's birthday, coming up in a couple of weeks. It's good to know how to make them, because they're really good, but they're also very expensive (I think about $15 for a small one) at the local French bakery. Also, with practice, my skills improve. :-)

Albums of the Year (so far)

Two albums really stand out for me this year -- I know technically the Imogen Heap album was released in late 2005, but I didn't get my hands on it until this year.

By "Albums of the Year", I mean albums that were released relatively recently that spent the most time in my car or CD player, or in my playlist at the office.

I have nothing to say.

But, after getting thrown up on tonight and with both kids asleep and everyone else perched in front of the television, I have really nothing else to do. I've read up enough on Jericho, and the constant buzz of background noise, coupled with my fatigue, is enough to really block any sort of creative juices from flowing right now. While STephen is recovering very nicely from his bronchitis, I think that he may be somewhat allergic to the cat here, and he is not sleeping well at all. Very noisy and I was up constantly last night. I got some sleep in the recliner during the day today, but other than that, I am found wanting, as I have proceeded to eat myself into oblivion.

There's a talent show coming up in one week for church... I've decided on doing a solo bass guitar rendition of O Holy Night. I'm excited, as that has been one of my most favorite Christmas carols for a long time, even if I don't know the words all that well. I'm not sure if I will be intruding upon a ward tradition by playing that; generally it's not Christmas in the ward if Ssiter Halula doesn't sing it in her operatic voice. Not that I have anything against that, but I generally don't like being stuck in ruts. I have big ideas, or so I think, and acting on them is very important to me.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be doing some shopping for Christmas... Home Depot has a sale on a set of really nice power tools, so hopefully I'll be able to do what I want to do, and get some custom furniture and accessories made for the house. I'd really love to get the booth for the dining room taken care of, so we can get rid of the dining room set, or at least put it into storage until we need it again.

We'll see what happens.

Me vs. my job.

Cripes, I hate it. I just realized that the work our team is currently doing is known as "non-value-add"... in other words, even though I am sitting here working my butt off, I'm not really contributing anything. I want out.

Me vs. my car(s)

I am slowly but surely learning how to repair an automobile. It's out of necessity, really, as I've never really considered myself the type of person to be a mechanic. Strange, because I do consider myself somewhat mechanically-inclined. But that's another story.

We have one car whose trunk doesn't shut. It's been held shut by clothesline and a bungee cord for a few months now, because we haven't really needed to have it fixed. It's served our purposes quite well, and other than that, it's been sitting in our driveway while we make payments on it.

Over the weekend, our primary car (the bigger one, the one that lets us carry both kids have room left over for something else) took a giant poop, necessitating a repair job in the immediate future. It needs a new thermostat, a new water pump, and a new timing panel cover. Or so the dealership told us. We had to shell out $100 for them to tell us what was wrong and that it would take $1200 to fix it if we wanted our car by Thanksgiving. We called a friend of ours who knows mechanics, and he told us to tell the dealer to take a hike, and gave us a number. It's still too early for us to call him, but in any case, we are going to have to take the smaller car to my parents' house this weekend.

Now, I can't imagine the kind of person that would enjoy making a 90-mile-plus car ride with the trunk lid bumping loudly every time the car went over a small hill, but I can tell you that I am not one of them, and my wife DEFINITELY isn't one of them. So, I spent Saturday trying to dismantle the latch on the trunk to see what was wrong with it. I couldn't find anything, but I was able to locate a shop in town that had the part. I just want to make sure that it's the part which is malfunctioning, as there is a slight chance that the body of the car itself could be damaged, and that could be causing the latch to fail.

Re-reading that last paragraph, I realize that it actually sounds like I know what I'm talking about. For someone who has sworn up and down that the only thing I know about cars is to put gas in them before the needle hits "E", this is showing some promise.

Sad this morning...

One of the blogs I frequent, I Will Teach You to be Rich, had an article this morning about MLM and similar schemes. While the author, Ramit, was vilifying MLM schemes, he mentioned that he would never destroy a friendship by introducing a sales element into it. I thought of some people that I met through a friend of mine, and later re-met through church. We got along pretty well and stuff, and talked about our common interests.

Then later on, they tried to recruit us for an MLM scheme... I forget the name of it, but it was pretty much "networked marketing"... we buy a starter package of vitamins, buy some other materials, and then we too can become an independent distributor. Not too much pressure, they weren't overbearing, but they made enough follow-up calls that eventually we had to be firm with them and tell them we weren't interested, no really, we weren't interested. Our relationship wasn't really the same after that.

They didn't make any exorbitant promises to us, and one thing I remember was that they both had full-time jobs, as a realtor and a computer network technician... jobs you think would be sufficient to generate a decent income for a young family of five. Well, with three kids, there can never be enough income, but you get my drift. They obviously weren't in it to have a yacht on the side, or to be able to retire to their mansion in the hills... anyway, I'm rambling.

I'm just sad for that family because I know they're probably caught in something that doesn't add a lot of value to their lives, and I wonder how many potential friendships they've traded for income opportunities.

Feels like Autumn.

The sun was shining in my office this morning... directly in my face, as a matter of fact. So, to add to the complete ghetto-ness of my office decor, I have been forced to hang the matching fitted sheet to the bedsheet I have hanging in here already. It's a nice beige color, and now, later in the day (around 12:15), it is dim enough in here that I am finding it almost like autumn in New York when I was growing up... I could almost imagine that it was a nice, crisp 55 degrees outside, although I know it's actually about 85. Sigh...

Me vs. my computer

Oh man... so after I get home from the Scouting trip, I turned on my computer to install XP Pro (I previously had Home). After going through the motions of installing (read: sit and wait), I finally got to the point of Setup where it says "37 minutes remaining". I got up, did something, and came back, and my computer was rebooting. Strange, I never remembered a reboot at this stage of the install, but maybe this time is different.

Oh no. It's stuck in an endless loop of rebooting. I'm screwed.

What do you mean it can't find the boot record on my setup CD?

What's that noise?

In the middle of all this, my power supply (older computer with a PROPRIETARY CASE) decides to make this noise: 'WHIRRRRRRRRBUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZWHIRRRRRRRRRR'

Then the CD-ROM goes: "ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"

And Matthew says:
"#(*&(#*&$)(@*#)*%)(%*&^_*^&%)(*&$(#*"

The computer eventually stopped rebooting. It actually stopped booting altogether. I had to run to the store and snag a bare-bones system, against my will, and then spend my Saturday evening (with VERY sore legs) assembling and installing it.

The good news, we have a working computer again. Sure, I have to re-install everything (and I mean EVERYTHING), and switch a whole bunch of stuff around because due to circumstances I had to make the old archive drive the master with the boot record, with the big monster drive as the slave... but yeah. It's working. I'm working, and man, am I tired.

Me vs. Boy Scout Troop 337

On Friday we left for a 5.9-mile backpacking excursion starting at Douglas Springs Trailhead, with our destination being the campsites at Douglas Springs. The Scoutmaster, three Scouts, and myself (playing the role of the Assistant Scoutmaster / Token Second Adult Acting as Supervisor) left the meeting point at 2 PM sharp. It was a relatively uneventful hike, with the Scoutmaster being the slowest of the group -- but that turned out to be due to the five gallons of water he decided to bring along, "just in case." About a mile into the trek, he had jettisonned about half of his water, and we continued. The early part of the hike was punctuated by many bathroom breaks by our intrepid Scouts, as well as rest breaks to rest bones and muscles that weren't used to going this far at one time.
At 5:00 PM, the sun started to set, and it was apparent that we were not going to get to camp before nightfall. Flashlights were produced. Cries of "are we there yet?" alternating with "how much longer?" and "what time is it?" echoed through the Rincon Mountains. Alas, our destination was never to be found, as by majority vote, we stopped hiking shortly after 7:00 PM, where a clearing large enough for two tents and a small campfire was located. We camped the night.
In the morning, a hiker came by, and we asked him, jokingly, to tell us on his way back how far the Springs campsite was. We ate breakfast, had a couple of Scout activities, then packed up and commenced the return trip. We had a few factors to our advantage on the return hike: 1) it was downhill most of the way, 2) we knew where we were going, and 3) we could see Tucson from our vantage point in the mountains. After a few minutes, our hiker friend passed us and let us know that the campsite was about 6-8 minutes from where we camped. Ah well.
After much pausing and cajoling our young Scouts to set a good pace so we could reach the trailhead before our rides arrived, we arrived about three hours after breaking camp. It was a good experience, and we were able to bond as a troop.
I've discovered an enthusiasm for Scouting that I didn't know I had, as well as a love of camping. It was a really cool experience, even if my pack wasn't packed the most strategically, and my legs got torn up a bit on the trail. I hiked 12 miles in less than 24 hours. That's pretty good stuff for someone who was the oldest on the expedition, and hadn't walked a large distance in a long time. All in all, a great way to spend my weekend.

What on earth?

Hooray for BBC News...

Plans for human-cow embryos

Wow... OK, first off, this is for stem cell research. The scientists will take cow eggs, strip the genetic information, then add human DNA to get a quasi-human embryo, from which they will harvest stem cells, then destroy the embryo. All of this would take about six days' time.

My grandfather died of Parkinson's, my grandmother of Alzheimer's, and it appears that my mom will have one, the other, or both by the end of her life. I'm in favor of stem cell research because it's helping us unlock various mysteries about the human body, and it has the potential to use the new knowledge to develop cures for diseases and other afflictions.

However, creating a human-cow hybrid? Nuh-uh. That's not natural. There needs to be a way to do this without mixing species. I understand that if a human embryo is used, then the whole "right to life" debate comes into play (I am against abortion for the most part).

Maybe this is a sign that this is not something we should be researching?

Me vs. Gordon Ramsay

Yesterday I went up to Scottsdale to audition for season 3 of the FOX reality show "Hell's Kitchen." It was a very interesting experience. Of course, it's a game, and the game started right when I walked into the hotel. I chose to play the role of the "quiet, unassuming person who will get underestimated", and hopefully they're going to cast someone in that role this year. If they don't, then oh well, I can at least say I tried out. If they do cast someone, then I knocked the audition out of the park. I impressed the casting assistants, I had good camera presence, and doggone it, I'm good-looking enough for a TV show.

We'll see what happens... if they decide to take me to the next step (whatever that is), I will know by the end of the month.

Oh, yeah, I saw Ozzie Guillen at the hotel, too. No idea what he was doing in Scottsdale this far into the offseason, but it was pretty cool. I didn't have the nerve to go up and talk to him, though... I've heard he's a little nuts, and besides, I like giving celebrities their privacy.

And then there were 31...

Went to the dentist on Tuesday to get some cleaning, a filling (first ever!), and one of my wisdom teeth pulled. All I have to say is, kids, BRUSH AND FLOSS. Wow. Getting a tooth pulled -- even an "auxiliary" one -- is no fun whatsoever. And I have to get two more taken care of soon.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one. :-(

At least the anaesthesia was fun. My nose and my ear was pretty numb.

Me vs. National Novel Writing Month

NaNoWriMo.org

It's almost November, and it's National Novel Writing Month! 50,000+ words, a finished novel by midnight local time on November 30. I'm getting set up and gearing up for this; with a huge deadline and the motivation to get it done, I have no doubt that I can succeed.

One of the main themes in my life is "apply myself", and I'm working on actually "applying myself" so I can continue to get good things done in my life, grow, develop, and oh yeah, not have 230948108 bazillion different unfinished projects laying about. It's time to still the needle of the compass.