Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Family Guy, Volume Three

Volume three of the Family Guy DVDs was released today; I just picked it up. The episodes are amazingly recent. The most recent episode was originally aired on 9/25/2005, just three months ago. Nice!!

Second Blog

I recently started a second blog over at avabloggers.com. It will focus on technology, programming, work, stuff like that. This blog will continue to host content about my personal life, what I had for dinner, what movie I just saw, etc. Subscribe to the RSS or ATOM feeds if you're interested!

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Christmas

I bought a real Christmas tree last night, a 6ft balsam fir. It smells awesome. I decorated it and my apartment today. I got some LED lights at Target for the tree. Low power, low heat, long life. Nice. I figured that if I was gonna do something as metro as decorate my apartment, I might as well do something techy to try and balance it out. I also made an angel out of aluminum foil. Pictures.

Vegas

I went to Vegas a week ago for the weekend. Left Friday, came back Sunday. All in all, it was a fun trip. I went with my brother in-law Mike and his friend Dan. We did some gambling, saw a UFC fight (the Franklin/Quarry fight knockout was awesome: Franklin punched Quarry and the guy went immediately unconscious and fell like a tree.) We stayed at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. It was fairly nice. We didn't get maid service on Saturday, so that sorta detracted from it. I'm still not big on gambling. I played a little roulette, some craps (bought a book on how to play to read on the plane ride there) and casino war. We also ate at some amazing restaurants. A sushi place in Hard Rock casino Friday, and Delmonic's steakhouse on Saturday.

I didn't really enjoy flying America West. It was on time, but the service was sort of unprofessional, and the plane wasn't cleaned while in between legs of the flight (there were empty liquor bottles and goldfish crackers on the floor and in the seat pocket). The passengers were all vacationers, too, not business travelers. When you get used to the orderly progression of flying with business travelers, well, vacationers don't know what they're doing.

I can see myself going back to Vegas, but not anytime real soon. It was fun, but I think amount of fun per dollars spent per hour, there are better weekend getaways. There's a sort of fakeness to it all; like how the hotel was nice, but we didn't get maid service. The design of casinos bugs me, too. It's hard to find an exit or a cashier. They want you to get lost, wander around and spend your money. But, all in all, a very fun weekend.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Bananas

A very interesting article about bananas. Some snippets:

It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn't matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.

A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there's already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or "Big Mike," accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest.