Muffin Pizzas FTW!

Since Cherry is experiencing morning sickness on and off, she has a hard time eating or cooking anything that has any sort of flavor whatsoever. So, I've been pretty much fending for myself and making meals with whatever is left in the house that Cherry can't or won't eat!

I made these muffin pizzas for brunch today by scrapping together the following ingredients: two English Muffins, some Ragu pasta sauce, Cheeseheads branded string mozzarella cheese, fresh mushrooms, and Ballpark brand all-beef hot dogs, sliced up into little disks!

I couldn't help myself and took a few bites before remembering to blog about it!

Screw You, MySpace!!!

I never did like MySpace. Sure, it came before Facebook and Google's Buzz, but to me it is and always was a wreck. Pages are highly customizable - usually a good thing - but unfortunately, MySpace users, brought together by some romanticized notion of music connoisseurship, aren't the brightest web developers in the bunch, and the flexibility of MySpace led to countless atrocities of perfectly good webspace.

Not that I'm against social websites focusing on music appreciation - far from it. In fact, that's the thing that made imeem so good. As a social networking site, it was pretty barebones, but when it comes to music networking, it kicked ass, allowing users to put together playlists of their own music and stream them online to share. For me, it was also a great online source for streaming music that is just hard to find elsewhere - like the vast majority of old Chinese pop.

Which leads me to MySpace's latest atrocity. Apparently, as I learned today, MySpace has recently acquired imeem and pretty much completely stripped it of its seamless playlist-sharing capabilities. In fact, the URL imeem.com doesn't even lead to an independent site anymore - it's now a MySpace profile, of all things!!!

Who's going to hook me up with Asian hits from the 80s and 90s now??!?!

Milk Tea, Office Style

Now, I've never been much of a coffee drinker, but sitting at a desk for extended periods of time call for help by way of caffeinated beverage. So, as an alternative, I've been brewing regular ol' Lipton tea in the mornings. Today, I took my tea-brewing to a whole new level.

The Chinese are generally more renowned for classical inventions, such as paper, porcelain, the abacus, and gunpowder. However, one of my favorite Chinese inventions is far more practical in modern times, and hails from Taiwan in the 1980s. That, of course, could be none other than bubble tea, which can be made infinitely better if served in the fashion shown below:


Today, bubble tea comes in a vast variety of flavors, but the original is still the best - plain ol' milk tea with tapioca pearls. The tapioca pearls give the drink a unique texture, but the milk tea on its own is pretty good in and of itself. In the absence of properly prepared tapioca pearls (which actually takes more work than one would expect), I would have to settle for milk tea.

Of course, that led to the next question. I have hot water, bags of black tea, and sugar, but alas, no milk. What's a non-coffee-drinking-cubicle-monkey to do? Why, take advantage of the resources intended for coffee-drinking-cubicle-monkeys of course! Several scoops of non-dairy creamer in powdered form later, I had my first mug of office-style milk tea. Brilliant!

Vikings Endorse Brett Favre Wrangler Jeans

Been a while since a good ol' fashioned YouTube cop-out! Nick actually told me about this clip, which aired during the Vikings' playoff run this past January, but I wasn't able to find the YouTube version till now... Pretty funny stuff! Enjoy!

Stores I Miss

So, I was reading a bit from the course pack of my Global Strategic Management pack this morning (a very rare event for me - just looking at that binder is intimidating). Among the articles that caught my eye were one that was entitled "Toys 'Were Us?" which was of course discussing the struggling toy chain once loved by throngs of children throughout the 80s and 90s.

The article reference the recent demise of KB Toys, the mall-based toy store chain. I guess I'd not thought about it before, but I did indeed notice the absence of KB Toys stores in my trips to the mall over the past year. Not only KB Toys, but also other favorite stores in the mall that Ed and I used to love visiting whenever my parents would go to the mall, such as Electronics Boutique and Waldenbooks. Now, Electronics Boutique still lives on in spirit through video game store Gamestop, but Waldenbooks declining presence in malls is actually somewhat of a shock to me. Has the public become so disheartened with the classic art or reading that they no longer feel the need to put bookstores in the mall? I feel like I should be the last person to complain, since I haven't read a book in who knows how long, but it's still a little sad to not see those stores that we spent countless hours in as children.

What are some stores you used to visit that aren't around any more, or are hard to find nowadays?

Cherry and I...

...Are gonna be Mommy and Daddy!

Permission to Buzz the Tower, Over

Today's word of the day is "Buzz". This week, secret NSA shell corporation Web giant Google launched its new Google Buzz web-application. I still haven't worked my bearings around on it yet, but it seems to essentially be another Twitter-like microblogging application that syncs to your Gmail contacts. The nice part about it is that it is fully integrated into Gmail, so you don't have to log into anything special. However, it will be another way for Google to tap further into our minds!!1!1one! Still, if you have Gmail, see if you can't follow me on Google Buzz! We can get watched by Big Brother together!

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I had started Private Pilot Ground School. Thus far, we've read a few chapters and listened to a lot of lecture about airfoils and stability of flight. This past Tuesday, we got pizza, which helped us tide over the three-hour session. For homework, I got to build a little balsa wood plane to demonstrate how to use rudder and ailerons to counteract the plane's natural tendency to yaw left because of various forces from the propeller's motion.

Today, however, we got to go on our very first field trip. Well, most of us did, anyway. Mark had to stay back because he isn't a U.S. citizen (though I don't know that they would have actually stopped him anyway - they were really cool about letting us in).

So, our first field trip was to Melbourne International Airport's (MLB) very own Ground Control Tower! This tower is responsible for all air traffic in and around the Space Coast area and also has influence over airspace as far south as Broward County!

At the tower, we listened to the three control officers talk about their job, and asked questions about how busy it gets and how difficult it is to coordinate in high traffic times. Turns out most of the traffic at MLB is actually student pilot traffic rather than airliners, but in that sense, it is even more chaotic because student pilots pretty much fly whenever they want to and primarily fly VFR rather than IFR, which means that they use visual cues and thus rely on snap decisions from ground control more than your typical scheduled airliner flight.

It seems like a pretty neat job, and we got to hear them say things like "Alpha bravo, you are cleared for landing at runway 5, over!" But perhaps the highlight of the visit was watching one of the controllers surprise the other when he turned on the window washing sprinklers!

Solution to Iron Gym's Black Pad Stains

Cherry got me an Iron Gym as a late Christmas present earlier this year. It's a fantastic tool for guys (and gals) who like to work out and want to work on their pull-ups and chin-ups on a regular basis without necessarily having to visit the gym. In just the month since I've owned it, I've increased my maximum chin-up load in one set from about 12 half-assed chin-ups to 18 clean ones (on a good day - most days I can only seem to get 16, but in any case, the point is, it's effective). Most days I'll do about 5-10 sets of 10, spread throughout the day, so it doesn't really even feel like much work, and certainly doesn't take much time. Best of all, it installs in seconds on most doorframes and claims not to leave any permanent damage because there is no need for screwing any part of it into your doorframe or wall.

Unfortunately, the black foam pads on the Iron Gym tend to leave black stains over time. Also, if you use it as much as I do or more, the padding around the ends of the bar where it meets your doorframe tends to get scary thin and threaten to dent your frame. I thought to myself (and to my Facebook status), "You know, if they would just make these pads white, that would solve this problem!"

Unfortunately, they don't. Neither do any of the other manufacturers of door-mounted pull-up bars. Fortunately, your friendly resident engineer devised this elegant solution:

That's right. I've wrapped the two ends that meet the door with two free white towels that I got at a Florida Gators game. I have to admit, I got this idea from my brother, Ed, who wrapped his Doorgym branded bar in towels when he mounted it at my parents house. However since I use my Iron Gym for pull-ups, chin-ups, and push-ups, I have to be able to take the Iron Gym on and off the door frame quickly. Ed's solution precluded this functionality, because there was nothing securing the towels to the bar. However, in my implementation, if you look closely at the photo, you'll see that I have secured the towel using the assistance of two ordinary paper clips! I have chosen not to file for IP protection on this practical solution, choosing instead to rely on industry secrets...

Now, if I can only think of a way to prevent the plastic crossbar on the other side of the Iron Gym cantilever assembly from digging into the wall...

我要GT-"AO"!

For the many of you who don't read Chinese, the title above says "I want GT-R!", but pronouncing the name of the car with a very thick Chinglish accent. Even with that hint, most of you probably don't get the reference to Chapman To's character in Jay Chou's mediocre live action film version of Initial D.

Anyway, I think I've had to explain that joke waaay too much. Holla back if you actually know what I was talking about!

The actual purpose of this post really does have some relation to my haplessly selected title. Below is from a video series by Motor Trend. In this segment, they showcase the technologically superior Nissan GT-R, but in an odd matchup, they compare it against two heavily modified high-profile Scion tC  drift cars. The video is loud, fast, and fun - better than Initial D! Enjoy!

I Feel the Need...

Some of you may know that I work at a major avionics provider. In order to increase our understanding of aviation and gain more appreciation of pilots' needs, my company has offered a group of employees the opportunity to go through Private Pilot Ground School, which is a series of in-class sessions you must take before going into flight school to get your Private Pilot's license and beyond.

It's going to be a lot of work - fourteen three-hour sessions over the next seven weeks, but I will learn a lot and maybe get hooked enough to go on to learn to fly!

So, from henceforth, you all can just refer to me by my callsign, "Mantis"!

An Awesome New Webcomic

Longtime visitors to Grant's Pad may have seen the list of webcomics in the sidebar, listed generally from my most highly regarded to the ones that are probably not updated all that often (cough cough, ED!!!).

Brian Clevinger was single-handedly responsible for my first foray into webcomic reading, with his parody/homage to the 8-bit Final Fantasy video games, 8-Bit Theater. To be completely fair, Brian wasn't actually responsible for me reading his comic - he just wrote it. In actuality, Kir-Wei was the one who introduced me to the comic itself, so technically he probably has more to do with my webcomic patronage.

However, as the years went by, I remained a loyal reader of 8-Bit-Theater, but Ryan Sohmer's Least I Could Do took over as my favorite webcomic due to his genius writing and the artistic prowess of his artist, Lar DeSouza. Brian Clevinger was now a distant second in my book.

Recently, Brian Clevinger struck back in fine fashion. In what he has claimed to be "A Kung Fu Movie, but a Comic", I bring to you How I Killed Your Master:

He's still no Sohmer, but with this well-drawn, well-written (and quite frankly well researched, as Clevinger  comic, Brian has now addressed two of my few passions with his webcomics: old-school video games, and now the Chinese Martial Arts. Consider it sidebar-marked!