Plaidophile

All he does is keep piling stuff dead-center and letting them spill around however they spill, even if there's absolutely no chance that the stuff he's piling up will stay in the middle.

Plus, he keeps adding stuff which both overcomplicates and masks the flavors of what he's preparing. I shudder to think what he'd do to delicate Japanese food.

Meanwhile, work has me too busy to even think about cooking lately. So it's pretty convenient that all this week I'm going out to dinner with various friends or family every night. Tonight it was with two of my cousins and their spouses (the cousin and her husband who live here, and her brother and his wife who are visiting for some business trip reason). We had Szechwan food. It was okay, but I'd had Korean barbecue for lunch so oh well.

Tomorrow night it's hanging out with Spud and Maddog, Friday it's the cousins again, and then Saturday it's a friend of mine from the SF bay area who is up here visiting someone else. Though said dinner is at Olive Garden (not exactly his first choice either).

Also I've come to realize that phone+PDA is great for personal contact/scheduling stuff but not so good for personal+work together, for a variety of reasons (mostly the security policies at Amazon which prevent me from using a Bluetooth adaptor), so I went and ordered a Tapwave Zodiac (1st generation) since I'll be able to sync it with Outlook at work, with iSync at home, and use it with my cellphone to get online with a much better browser than what comes in phones these days. Also it'll be fun to program for, what with the built-in 3D chip and high-end sound processor (I'm thinking of various musical instrumenty things and sonic toys and so on).

Anyway, what prompted me getting a standalone PDA was today I actually forgot about a meeting and was at a "fishbowl" presentation (which is where Amazon invites various authors and musicians and so on to present excerpts of their writing or to give a little free concert or whatever). Anyway, about 5 minutes into the meeting (as I was on my way back), my manager called to ask where I was (not angry or anything, he just thought I never got invited to the meeting to begin with) and I told him I was on my way back. So I got to the meeting a little late but it was okay. But I'd definitely like to avoid a repeat of this.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't provide employees with PDAs; employees are expected to buy their own. And, as I said above, syncing via Bluetooth is verboten (due to fear of bluejacking leading to the downloading of confidential files and so on), so it all has to happen by data cable. Considering I like to try different phones all the time, and I'd rather not keep on buying data cables for phones, it seems like it's just easier to get a Palm-based PDA. Though then that gets into some interesting issues when it comes to data retention and so on, but I wouldn't sync my email with it, just my schedule and maybe contacts (but probably just schedule) but just to be safe I guess I'll only sync the PDA with my system at work and keep it completely separate from my personal life.

foop