rhymes with milk » Life

I’m getting really excited for NYC.

Mike — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:02:43 +0000

It feels like it’s just around the corner now. This next week at work is probably going to be pretty stressful, so I’m so ready to go on vacation.

My goals are to: stay up late, wake up early, do shit, avoid the hotel as much as possible.

can burping dislodge your liver?

Mike — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 03:32:05 +0000

I just drank a whole lot of Diet Coke with Lime, and it all came out in one monsterous burp. Ally asked me if I had just dislodged my liver due to the violence of the burp. I checked all my typical vitals (still breathing, still have vision, balls still attached) and everything checked out, so I figured my liver must still be in good health.

Then I got to wondering if you actually could dislodge your liver after burping. As it turns out, my research was cut off at the source. Google had no search results for me*. As far as I can see, there are two reasons for this:

Nobody else has ever asked that question before on the world wide webs. Duh. Despite Yahoo! Answers having over 200 million users, none of them have ever been curious about this before.
The question is so complex, research results have yet to answer the question. Research scientists are unlikely to post questions to answers they have yet to obtain, so I can only guess that they’re still looking into it. In the event that no scientists are tackling this problem right now, I’ve notified the Mythbusters about it, so hopefully they’ll be able to find an answer. On national TV no less.

*UPDATE: This post now comes up, but it’s the only thing that does, so my point still stands. I am currently the foremost authority on whether burping and dislodged livers can indeed be correlated.

old spice

Mike — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:32:28 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-IHk6FKyeg

cyclemeter

Mike — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 04:44:38 +0000

Two awesome things blew my mind today.

Cyclemeter, the iphone app, is awesome. Tangent: I’ve been opposed to buying apps since I got my phone. I think I realized why recently. The money isn’t paying for anything tangible. I’m not even getting a disk with the software installation on it. I rarely pay for anything I download, so the concept is foreign to me. But I’ve recently realized the irrationality in that. If I get use out of the app, it’s worth paying for. I buy myself lunch at least once per week, and after tip I rarely pay less than $10. This Cyclemeter GPS tracking app is incredible, robust, simple, and useful, and it only cost half as much as my weekly lunch. The question of whether or not it’s a worthy puchase is a no-brainer, and I now see that.
The Google Earth browser plugin is awesome. I’ve never seen much point in having a separate application on my computer for what I can basically already do online, but now I can actually do it online. The fact that I can now see the Taco Bell at Baseline and Broadway in 3D — all in browser — is priceless.

It’s pretty cool seeing the correlation between elevation gains and speed changes. Sometimes the speed seems to inexplicably swing without reason, but over a longish ride like this, a lot of data has to be crunched into a very small space. Naturally, some of the info gets lost in translation.

This one goes out to Mario and his goofy hair and big-bird-yellow Saturn.

Mike — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:23:06 +0000

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

sleigh bells

Mike — Thu, 13 May 2010 04:49:25 +0000

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

I can’t figure out if I fucking love this band, or if they annoy me to no end.

Paste magazine thinks they’re phenomenal, so I guess I’ll follow the the crowd for now…

MyUS

Mike — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:48:20 +0000

This morning I was lying in bed coming up with great ideas that could change the world. One such idea was a concept for a service that I think is desperately needed. I got the idea while thinking about the iPad’s limited release, and how it’s not yet available outside the US. I bet there are some people in other countries that would pay well above retail prices to get one early, and whoever provided this service for them could make a hefty profit. And it doesn’t have to be limited to useless Apple gadgets.

Then tonight — literally less than 15 hours after my stroke of inspired genius — I was reading about absolutely awesome websites, and I found out that somebody had my idea first. MyUS is apparently a pretty big deal. Though I’m not going to make any money off of it, I at least know that my original ideas are worth millions. Awesome.

nothing much

Mike — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:18:40 +0000

I have a backlog of posts that I’ve just never finished. I tend to start posts, make them much longer than they were originally supposed to be, then lose interest 3/4 of the way through. It’s a bad sign when a blog’s content bores the author.

So until I come back with some real content that’s worth a damn, check out duplos.org. It’s incredible what’s possible with some jQuery and a pinch of creativity. Ah creativity, how you elude me.

(none)

Mike — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:40:56 +0000

Not that it was a living hell. It wasn’t. But it sure as hell wasn’t heaven, either.
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

how to talk with a 5 year old

Mike — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:22:14 +0000

Ally and I are going to a Bar Mitzvah in Miami later in the year, and when I found out about it I started panicking about all of the 5 year old cousins I’d be surrounded by. I’m not so good with the lil’ ones, you see. I don’t know how to talk to them, or what even to talk to them about. They’re quite dumb creatures if you think about it. They have few reasoning skills, and their abilities to carry on complex conversations are limited (to put it lightly). They’re still in that phase of their life when they’re not psychologically capable of handling emotions in an appropriate manner, so they cry a lot. Hell, when I introduce myself and hold my hand out expecting theirs in return, I’m usually met either with silence and overwhelming shyness, or a crusty booger-covered set of toothpick fingers.

So how am I going to deal with a long weekend—mere days before I begin taking upper division university courses about complex algorithms and low-level machine representations of data, no less—talking with these developmentally primitive miniature humanoids? I’ve decided to come up with a few talking points to initiate conversations that would both be engaging for me, and dumb enough for them to understand and relate to. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

“I can solve a Rubik’s cube in about 1 minute. What colorful toys are you that good at?”
“I see you have hot dogs in that mac & cheese you’re eating.” [side note: I totally expect to be referencing the food on their bibs] ” I once ate an entire package of 8 hot dogs—including buns!—in under 5 minutes. Boom goes the dynamite!”
“Come on, think about it logically. What sort of physical explanation can you come up with for how those reindeer stay in the air? It’s just not feasible.”
“If you were an animal on Arthur, what kind of animal would you be? I call lion. I’d never go hungry with all of those aardvarks around, that’s for sure!”
“Don’t hang out with little Suzie too much. Before you know it middle school will roll around, and you’ll be stuck in the ‘friend zone’ when it actually counts.”
“Back in my day, garbage men used to hang off the back of the truck! It’s never too late for you to change your aspirations, kid. If you really put your mind to it, you too could hang off the back of a garbage truck someday.”
“So your twitter background is a photo of elmo, huh?”

Hopefully Ally has seven or fewer 5 year old cousins. I’d be completely stumped with what to talk to number eight about.

Let me know if you can come up with any.