Out of The PIT

Okay, I would probably put severe snow storms above this, but we ended up getting a fire alarm in the middle of a thunderstorm. We had a short power outage after which the fire alarms rang. As per procedure, I went out the route that was designated for me, which led outside. I walked around the building on the outside to our assembly point where we discovered that nobody was actually assembled. In fact, people were being ushered back inside, to walk through the corridors back through the building to an adjacent build that was not affected by the alarms. I should have noticed that nobody else was following me and Derelict was the only other person who was actually following procedure. I should have just followed everybody else! Oh yes, and I also got very wet.

I was given a link to ASCII Street View from AI. Pretty neat! Green mode is like Matrix mode except that they need to use Japanese characters..

So my experiment with saline solution to deal with canker sores has been a dismal failure. Now, I'm not sure if my application and approach was incorrect as there could be a number of things that I could have done differently when I use the solution. For one, I think my initial saline solution was too weak. For the first two days I added too much water which did two things: it diluted the salt, and I was only able to use a third of the solution to rinse. After a week, I decided to try something else: instead of rinsing my mouth with water after the saline rinse, I'd leave the salt in my mouth hoping that by keeping the sodium content high in my mouth that the antibacterial effects would last longer. Still no dice. Well, maybe next time I'll go back to Listerine again just to make sure that was not a fluke. Until then, I will be chewing on the left side of the mouth for a little while..

I got a link to The Internet Map from AI. Very neat.

Over the years, I have kept track of all of my expenditures and kept every receipt for every transaction. I have been doing this since 1997. As you may have guessed, I have collected quite a number of receipts over the years. Several months ago I went through a quick purge of my old ATM receipts and shredded them all. That got rid of half of my non-credit card receipts and freed up space in my drawers. I'm now going through my receipts again and throwing away all food, parking, and movie related transactions and so far about half of my remaining non-credit card receipts seem to fall into this category. I have also started aiming my guns at my old credit card statements and the receipts attached to them. Using the same culling criteria, most of the paper is shred-able and my once tight cabinet is becoming much more easy to manage. I still want to keep some of the receipts, especially for goods. You never know when you might need them. I am, however throwing out all of my gas recei

I am still in the middle of my experiment with using saline solution to prevent canker sores from forming, but I think I know the next experiment I want to run on myself: overcome my lactose intolerance. I want to do this mostly because lactose free milk is WAY more expensive than regular milk (especially if more people start drinking my milk), and I just do not like being intolerant in general. I never had a severe intolerance to lactose, but I did notice that my system ran a lot better when I started drinking lactose free milk. However, I usually do not notice any issues when I eat ice cream, cheese, yogurt, or any other dairy products. This makes be believe that my system can tolerate lactose, but because I have been limiting it quite a bit (I used to drink a lot of milk) my system might not be quite ready for a sudden surge of lactose to my diet. I think I had a number of stomach upset episodes where I had a "large" (half a cup) amount of regular milk. It usually is mix

I found the Crash Course: World History videos while watching the Sci Show . They're both entertaining, educational, and very interesting. (Although I know most of the general world history already.) Oh yeah, I came across Sci Show from FAILBlog .

First I found out that FLy somehow knows CY, which is not too crazy. Jeanious knows CY too. But I found out that FLy knows KP, and also, KP knows VL! Six degrees.. (or less)

One recurring issue that I have are these canker sores that keep popping up in my mouth. It always starts when I bite myself on the inside of the cheek or tongue. I notice nothing until the end of the first week when that small cut in my mouth turns into a nice sized sore, bright white, indented, and extremely painful. This carries on for over a week while I try my best to eat foods without touching that part of my mouth. Eventually the area will stop being painful and I can eat (and talk) normally while the sore finally completes healing. I do practice good oral hygiene: I brush my teeth twice a day, floss daily and even scrape my tongue. But these oral habits do not seem to be enough to prevent the sores from forming every time I cut myself in my mouth. The worst one yet occurred last last month. I had bitten the bottom of my tongue somehow, but I completely forgot about it. Just before we left for the Dominican Republic, I started noticing an annoying stinging sensation whenever

I got home today and decided that I should pick up my mail from downstairs. Pretty normal stuff. When I got back to my apartment, I unlocked the door and turned the handle. I heard a strange "clink" sound. I tried the door. It would not budge. I turned the handle again and tried the door. No budge. I tried unlocking the door again. No dice. Oh crap! To make a long story short - I waited a couple of hours for the superindendent to come back to the condo from his house (far to the west) to fix my door. MJNL was actually downtown at this time and did not get back to the condo until after all of this stuff was done and over with. I spent most of the waiting time playing pool in the games room. I did have quite an appetite when I got back in though.

Okay, I came across BBotE on Penny Arcade and I have to admit that it looks interesting! Anyone want to try a sip?

MJNL and I went to watch War Horse tonight. Normally we would have ridden downtown to save on parking, but the rear brake on the motorcycle was pooched so I did not want to risk anything especially with a passenger. So we drove. We found street parking really easily. I was surprised about how many parking spots were available on the street, and the prices were reasonable: $3.50 an hour. They were reasonable until I saw that paid parking was enforced until midnight. Normally on the other city streets, paid parking is only enforced until nine, but an extra three hours of paid parking will more than double the cost of parking on the street! I am glad I did not blindly accept the "max time" as the parking meters do not actually show how much money you pay until you've paid for that ticket. (If you manually increase the payment amount, you can see how much the ticket will cost, but clicking on "max time" just shows "OVERPAYMENT".) In any case, MJNL had