I’m not the greatest chef on earth, but I would consider myself in the top few percent. If you try my recipes, you can judge for yourself.
Spaghetti Bolognaise
Ingredients:
– Ground beef
– 1/4 of an onion
– one beef stock cube
– 1 tablespoon of tomato paste
– Spaghetti
Method: Chop onion into small pieces, and cook in a pan with the meat until done. Add the beef stock and cook for a few minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook for a bit more. Place on top of the cooked spaghetti as shown above and enjoy!
Chip Sandwich
Ingredients:
– white bread
– potato chips (plain or salt and vinegar)
Method: Put chips on bread. Load massive amounts on, as many as possible. The idea is to put several inches of chip between the bread, way more than you’d think was reasonable. Then push the bread together, with the goal being flattening them so much that the chips compress into a superdense thin chip film. Then eat dry. (Note the image is not representative of my version, which is eaten plain with no lettuce, cheese or sauce.)
If you try either of these, please let me know what you think.
First of all, the blog was down due to equipment failure at the host (ie. my brother’s computer). Now it’s back I can get to business!
Last Saturday I bought myself one of these:
Yep thats a (Motorola) Droid smartphone running the Android OS. My old phone was being weird and had battery issues so it was due for an upgrade. I was holding out for Apple to announce a CDMA iPhone which didn’t happen the other week so I caved and went to the competition.
After having the phone for a week my review is “thumbs up”. Aside from the fact it is stylish and fast and nifty, I now have a data plan and full access to the web from anywhere, which means I can make use of services beyond simple text messages. This includes email, a web browser, twitter (more on this in a bit) and of course the app store.
I’m no stranger to a device like this (a portable OS with an app store) since I’ve had an iPad for months now and an iPod Touch for years, but I can’t deny the convenience of carrying it around with me everywhere. The phone also has a GPS chip in it, which means Google Maps runs staggeringly well – even to the point of showing your orientation on the map. I pulled up my location in the living room and it was accurate to 1 meter. I then rotated on the spot and watched my arrow rotate on the screen in real time. Impressive.
There are a few trifling negatives with the phone I have noticed so far: no way to turn the unlock vibration off, the phone can slide open in my pocket and sometimes turn on, people tell me I sometimes sound muffled talking. But some of these are just getting used to a new device. For instance 5 days ago I may have commented on the keyboard being a bit dinky but I’m now very used to it. Similarly what I first thought may have been battery life on the low side got much better when I tweaked settings and installed a task killer app.
The day I got the phone I also (“finally”, some may say) joined Twitter.
Twitter is a social networking mini-blog site that lets user post up to 140 character ‘tweets’ about anything they like. You can follow me at: twitter.com/richardjesper (or click the link on the right)
Twitter will not replace this blog so don’t worry about that. Rather I will use it exclusively from my phone, so it will likely replace the phone blogs I occasionally did (but not the ones with photos – they’ll still go to Robot Claw). If any of you use twitter please post your twitter ID as a comment (or email it to me) so I can follow you (if I am not already).
So overall, I’m digging this Droid phone mostly because of what it now lets me do. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to everyone I know with one reservation – they already have them!
Yep, as is the case with most of my life the world took notice, and once I got a Droid it became the cool thing to do and everyone ran out and got one. This includes KLS, JAF and JBF, and it soon to include (I strongly suspect) SFL. Only BFS is the holdout!
One of the advantages of being a profligate is that when a pollster approaches me in the mall and asks if I have forty minutes free to do a survey I can pause for a second, feign disinterest and then (gleefully) say “Yes!”
In fact I like to think I acted so well she had no idea it was I that hooked her into asking me and not vice versa.
I was led along some labyrinthine hall deep into unknown halls somewhere inside Crossgates Mall and sat with my interviewer (a charming grandmother named Joann) while the survey proceeded.
It began with the usual mix of questions such as how many bottles of pain reliever (and which brands) we had bought in the last 3 months or what brand of soda would I probably never buy (7-Up). There were a couple of dozen of these, which took the first few minutes.
I then looked through a big book of photographs of various products and had to answer questions about them:
“Of the five car manufacturers listed, which one would you buy a car from?” (Toyota)
“Which snack product would you be more likely to buy?” (Wavy Lays)
“Which credit card would you be more likely to apply for?” (Mastercard)
After this came the interesting part: the watching TV segment.
I had three shows that I could freely switch between; The Simpsons, 30 Rock and Forbes Magazine Top 20 Celebrity Weddings. While I am sure valuable data about what show I watched was collected (the wedding one…) the meat and potatoes of the study was the advertisements, no doubt selectively fed to me as I was watching (the entire process being controlled by a computer). I watched about 20 minutes of TV, and afterwards had to answer questions about the ads I had seen.
Fairly quickly the questions narrowed themselves down to one single advert, and specifically one product. This was the ad:
Dull eh?
The questions went on ad infinitum. What did I think of the advert? Of the product? Did you trust the ad? The product? Which of the following words would you use to describe the ad? The product? How do you feel about the product? Etcetera, etcetera.
Many of the questions I had to answer again (the same questions) holding an image of the product in my hands whilst doing so. All told; I’d guess there were 50 odd Wheat Thins related questions.
This wrapped up the survey, for which I was paid $15. I answered the questions as honestly as I could and hope my data is in some way useful, but I have to say I found the experience intriguing enough I didn’t even care about remuneration.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing to come from this was overhearing another interviewee who gave his salary as $25,000-$35,000 and his occupation as ‘sniper’. (And yes, he meant sniper in the military).
Uncle Sam wants him to kill people for a living and they only pay him up to $35,000? Something about that just doesn’t add up.
