Cooking

I really need to learn how to look at the ingredient list for a recipe and estimate how many servings it will make.  Says the guy who's going to be eating Baked Ziti until summer......

Back This Up!!!

Travel

I now have a legit excuse to go to France in October.

Rollin...

This is both fascinating and creepy.

Found at JoyReactor

Surviving

This is actually a reference to a comment that a Canadian friend made about whether she'd be able to handle it if a gift I had sent got lost in the mail  -- I mean, it's so far from the United States to Canada! -- but it reminded me of how much I like this movie:

Anki

I really like the Anki flashcard software, but its hard sometimes to remember that while having, say, five hundred words and phrases to review routinely is good, that does not mean that having two or three thousand would be ever so much better.  The effect on my motivation is in fact exactly the opposite.  I have to remember that.

But Anki itself is pretty cool.

As I Said About Paper....

From, of course, XKCD.

Observation

It's kind of self-defeating to write someone a letter to say that you've intentionally not been writing because you don't want to disturb them.

Anki

Anki's supposed to be this great flashcard system, and it kind of is, especially if you use Version 1 (which, by the way, isn't available any more, but I have it on my PC).  It uses the concept of Spaced Repetition for memorization, which really does work.

But then the guy who wrote it improved it, calling it Version 2, and it feels like he wrote most of it, then got tired of working on it, and when he came back he didn't remember how he'd done stuff before, so he did it another way instead.  I keep thinking that the reason I'm having trouble using the Version 2 of the tool is because I'm just not seeing it, but now I think no, it's Anki. It's messed up.  Buttons that you'd think would be there, aren't.  Deletes are not confirmable; you delete something, babe, its gone.  Tags don't seem to have any purpose. Templates seem to get created randomly.

And then there's CLOZE:  I still haven't figured out what that's all about.

I prefer version 1.

Yeah, What HE Said

Painting

I have a friend who's a painter.  She is successful, which means she earns money from it.  I don't really know how much, but enough so that she exhibits in galleries that are hundreds of miles from where she lives, and so that she was able to build a studio, separate from her home, which is big enough that it could be a home all by itself.

But she paints in abstracts.

I like abstracts.  One of my favorite paintings (okay, yes, its a reproduction, and I know that to some people, that's important) is an abstract of a city skyline.  You can tell it's a skyline, and you might guess that it's New York (though it could be Vladivostok for all I know, or possibly not exist anywhere but the painter's imagination), but there isn't much more detail than that.  The bulk of the buildings is vague, and that could be water in front of them.... or maybe not.  I like it.  I like the feel, I like the color, I like the shapes.

My friend's abstracts are different.  There's more of a let me throw colors on here feeling to them.  We visited once, and she was discussing a current work with my daughter, who said to her that she liked the painting, but it seemed as if it would be better, rotated.  So my friend rotated it 90 degrees (to the left, if that's significant) and they agreed that it was better.  To which I thought oh, this is some kind of in-the-club painter joke.  But my daughter swore to me later that it was better.

As I say, my friend is successful, and I'm pleased for her.  But to me - this, by Andrew Atroshenko, and found here on ODDMAN,  is painting. It has color, texture, form. You can recognize what it's a painting of.

If I could paint, this is what I'd want to be able to do.  (And yes, I have thought about taking a class.  One time, when my daughter was taking one during the summer, I met the woman who taught the class.  She was.... odd.  Nice enough, but things were important to her that I didn't even recognize as things.  The depth of this color, the shape of that line.  So, no.)

I may not know art, but I know what I like.

Persistance

The counter shows how many tries it took to perform a successful throw.

 

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Found at Joy Reactor.