Misc

Last night I did my fourth appearance on Confab.  Go ahead and click on the link to hear the latest show.  We go to Richard's, wear headsets and discuss whatever topics come to mind, and then Gavin puts our discussion as a podcast on ITunes.  Richard, Gavin, Adrien, Andy, Keith, Jeff and I discussed the jaywalking law, the major automakers, and what we think there are the differences between Asian management/processes versus those in US companies.

Every now and then I feel the need to tackle a home project.  This usually happens when I'm frustrated and need to blow off some steam.  And the last time I was in this state, I painted several of my walls.  I'm not the most handy person, so it takes me a lot longer to figure it out.  The one thing on my side is that I'm not afraid of just diving in and figuring it out.  Today's project was to switch the direction of the doors on my refridgerator/freezer.  It sounded pretty simple, but there were a lot of parts involved.  I had to use my allen wrenches, phillips head screwdriver, screwdriver, and a torx driver.  Yes, I learned a new tool today..torx driver.  It is a trademark screw that was created by Textron Fastening Systems, and is characterized by a 6-point, star-shaped pattern as shown below.  The funny thing was that I actually had a torx driver in my toolbox (thanks, Dad!)

Torx Screw

Needless to say, I had duct tape, screws, screwdrivers, and shelves flying everywhere!  It also took me a couple of attempts to realign and change all direction of the hardware (no, you can't just move each piece to the other side...it doesn't work).  I took a break to visit with friends, then tackled it again.  They offered to help, but by now, it's a personal vendetta for me!  If I can't handle it, I'll ask for help tomorrow.  I resisted the urge to call my dad for advice and tackled the project again.  After dropping a shelf on my foot and getting grease all over my sweats, I conquered!

With a bit of delay, I'm responding to Richard's Five Things Meme tag.  It's actually hard for me to find five amusing things that you may not know about me because I usually share my quirks.

1. When I was 4 years old, my Kindergarten teacher came to my parents house to persuade them to keep me from enrolling in school.  He felt that I was too young.  My parents stayed with their decision to start me in kindergarten, and for the next three years, the school kept me in the slower kid class.  Things didn't change for me until we moved and my new school district actually had their pyschologist give me an IQ test.  This is when they bumped me into "gifted" classes based on my actual performance instead of my age.
2. When I went to college, they stated facts about the entering class.  We were about 80% male, a quarter of us were National Merit Scholars, and so forth.  One factoid was that our class had one cheerleader and my classmates were obsessed with finding out who was the cheerleader.  I don't know why, but everyone thought I was the cheerleader. I'm putting this down for the record...I was never a cheerleader.  I just dressed well. I played in the band, competed on the math team, performed on our TV show, was in ASB, lead a volunteer group at the local convalesant home, class Salutatorian and the captain of the tennis team.  Pretty nerdy, huh? 
3. I love biking up hill and on the flats, but I'm deathly afraid of biking downhill.  Sometimes I whimper as I "fly" down.  The fastest I've ever gone was a little more than 30 mph and I think I was silently praying until I reached the bottom.  I even had to get off my bike at Danskin (my only Tri) as we rode down the fireroad from I-90 because I was afraid that I would cause an accident as I rode my brakes.
4. I am double-jointed.  I can clap my fingers while my palms are still touching.
5. The one material gift I want more than anything is the talking Barbie that came out in the early 90's.  There are not very many of them since they were pulled off the shelf.  She said the phrase, "Math class is tough."  I love math and it's so stereotypical to have Barbie say that...I am laughing right now thinking about it.

Last night we saw snow again in Seattle.  Since I grew up and went to college in CA, the idea of snow around my home is still new to me.  I have at least one appointment rescheduled and another one still in question because of the icy roads. Some of the snow has melted, but here's the view outside my window right now.  Hopefully, it'll be dry enough to run later this afternoon...maybe we should stick to flat roads today, though. 

I recently watched "What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole."  It's a documentary, interlaced with theatrical scenes to help explain the concepts.  The main character is played by Marlee Matlin.  Without trying to sound too dorky, if you like physics and math, you'll really like this movie.  If you moderately like science, but like hearing about mind-bending phenomena you'll also find some interesting points to this movie.  Anyways, the movie is a look at how our thoughts and reaction to events and other things around us change the outcome of our physical reality.  There are examples of experiments done to try to prove this.

You'll have to give me a little room for creative interpretation here because it's been many years since I've taken quantum physics and my math only goes up to Differential Equations (which was also long forgotten).  The movie explores how we perceive reality and process the images we see by using analogies from quantum mechanics and neurobiology.  There is the idea that thought carries a wave of energy and that different thoughts emit different energies, and therefore effect our physical world in different ways.  Huh?  Okay, there is an experiement done by Dr. Masaru Emoto involving water crystals.  He had one drop of water on the petri dish, and a word or phrase next to each drop.  He treated the controls and each experiement the same way.  Each drop was at room temperature for the same amount of time, each was put in the same freezer for the same amount of time, etc.  The dishes that had the words, "Chi of Love," "thank you," and other positive phrases all had beautiful, symmetric crystal patterns.  The dishes that held phrases such as "I hate you," or "I want to kill you," had very disruptive, assymetrical crystal patterns.