blogwaffe

Ever had a picnic in a parking garage? Didn’t think so. Neither had I until today when, after much delay, Caltech’s new underground parking structure was officially opened. To celebrate, the president, a trustee or two, and staff person who was actually involved in the construction project cut the ribbon and led all three hundred plus of us down in to the depths to eat free hot dogs and hamburgers (vegetarian options available).

It was really kind of neat. All the food was cooked just ouside the garage and served just inside. There were picnic tables set up deeper in, and people were happily chatting and eating where tomorrow there will be seven hundred cars parked. The folks in charge encouraged people to look around and scope out the scene; many people did.

The food was good (as in free as in beer) and the structure looked pretty cool (as far as parking garages go). I imagine the only people sorry to see it open are those like Dixie. Tough luck, girl. No more free cash for you.

When looking about for something to eat for dinner, I noticed an old bottle of Trader Joe’s General Tsao’s Stir Fry Sauce in the fridge. By ‘old’, I mean seven months or so. Don’t worry, it (apparently) keeps well. General Tsao’s is, perhaps, the material good I miss most from my days in Rochester. I think it was statuatory that all Chinese restaurants make it, make it well, and give it to you free if you phone in a sufficiently large delivery. I bought the sauce on a whim many moons ago to see If I could recreate the delicious dish I had grown to love. The answer: no. But I could make something pretty tasty nonetheless.

Cook up some chicken on George, slice up some arbitrary vegetables (tonight I found tomato and red pepper in the kitchen [uh… yeah, yours Paul.za]; broccoli and/or snow peas would have been awesome), and mix the lot together in your favorite metal stir frying object. Best served over sticky rice, but pasta serves well in a pinch (by ‘pinch’, I mean I was lazy).

A damn fine dinner.

The other rediscovery is quicker to explain but no less delicious: Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I feel no description is necessary.

As promised, I have started running. And, as predicted, the schedule is kicking my pansy ass. I was supposed to run one and a half miles the first day (yesterday) but only managed to run the first half a mile before having to walk a bit. Overall, I ran a total of one mile. Go me.

Today I was scheduled to run three miles. Though I managed better than the day before, I still couldn’t run the whole thing. I ran one mile before having to walk; I ran a bit over two miles overall. On the plus side, the path I took turned out to be four miles instead of three. So, adding the walking I did when I should have been running and the walking I did back and forth to campus, I walked nearly four miles today. Walking’s nice; I like it.

“How do I feel?” you ask. Thank you for asking. I feel horrible :) I typically don’t get sore until two days after working out (rather than the next day). Right now I can barely move my legs. That means this running nonsense has made me sore just the day after or perhaps even the very same day. I shudder to think how I’ll feel tomorrow morning. Plus my foot hurts. Same for some funny tendon in my groinal region. And my back is stiff.

This is supposed to be good for me?

The schedule puts me back to one and a half miles tomorrow. I might just have a chance, assuming my groinal region doesn’t brast all to shivers.

A bit silly to keep writing about sandwiches, but I’ve just eaten a most delicious concoction and felt I should share it with the world: An Egg and Herbs on Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Grilled Ham and Cheese Sandwich Sandwich.

Parse that!

That’s right: a sandwich of sandwiches.

• Layer 1: Grilled Cheese Sandwich (Bread, Cheese, Bread)
• Layer 2: Eggs (cooked omelette style with mixed Herbs)
• Layer 3: Grilled Ham and Cheese Sandwich (Bread, Cheese, Ham, Bread)

I’ve done this before but put the ham (or bacon) inside the folded in half omelette. That way even the interior layer could (by some) be called a sandwich.

Delicious. I encourage you all to try it and/or to construct other novel sandwiched sandwhiches.

Ok, so I’ve been saying for… years? that I’m going to try and get back into shape. To the many people thinking “‘back into shape’? He means ‘in shape in the first place’ right?”, screw off. I was totally in shape when I was in eighth grade.

Telling Joanna that I needed distraction and some healthy endorphins, she kindly sent me a training schedule for novices wanting to get into running and into shape. By ‘novice’, the site means ‘this will kick your pansy ass, you scrawny weakling. Yes I’m talking to you, patsy. Yeah. You. The one in the DeCSS shirt. What the hell is that, anyway? Shut it! Go run six thousand miles. And eat something for Christ’s sake!’.

I start on Tuesday the tenth. I’m totally screwed.

Have you ever taken any functional derivatives? Because as of now, I can honestly say I have taken an infinite number of them. Multiple times. All you variational calculus jocks out there are laughing in mockery (“Have I ever taken a functional derivative? Please.”), but I’ve never messed with the things before this Quantum Field Theory course I’m taking (Path Integral Formalism rocks). Well, not messed with them to the extent I have now, anyway.

They play a little hard to get, functional derivatives do. But once you get the hang of them, they’re reasonably straightforward to cope with. I’ve known and loved various sorts of delta functions for quite some time; functional differentiation isn’t such a step from there. It’s the functional integration that gets a little tricky. As far as I’m concerned, defining and comparing measures is done by waving tiny little hands over yellow bits of paper and writing down an equal sign here or there.

I have never once thought, “I know enough math.”

For those of you who use my rss feeds, I have a question. For those of you who don’t (why not?), just ignore me.

I think my feeds might be broken, but in a subtle way (for the curious, I think they’re sending out 304s when they shouldn’t). If you use either my post feed or my comments feed, can you tell me what feed reader you use (Sage, NetNewsWire, Firefox‘s live bookmarks…) and whether or not the feeds have been getting updated corectly when new posts or comments get submitted?

Thanks. (This is what you get when you use alpha version software. Bleeding edge, baby!)

This plugin will send an email notification to the blog’s administrator when a draft is written or edited by a user that cannot publish posts (these users are called “Contributors“). You may find such notification useful since these posts must be subsequently approved (published) by a user who can publish other people’s posts.

NOTE: Notification is sent to the email address defined in the Administration Panels: Options->General / Email address. This is not, in general, the same address as that specified for the Admin user account.

Instructions:

1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ directory (i.e. wp-content/plugins/draft-notifier.php).
3. Make sure the file has sufficient File Permissions to be read by your web server (you probably don’t have to worry about this step).
4. Activate the plugin called “Draft Notifier” from your Administration Panel’s Plugin Manager.

That should be it. No configuration is necessary.

UPDATE: This plugin is now hosted on http://wp-plugins.org and is called “Draft Notifier“.