- I hate PowerPoint presentations. I'm currently in the middle of a diversity training at work (along with 150 of my co-workers), and everything is presented in PP. And on a piece of paper in front of you. I'm the kind of person who learns by taking notes. Thus, PP kills presentations for me. I generally just end up doodling while the speaker is talking, which helps me learn and process what the speaker is saying. Sometimes. Sometimes I just get lost in doodleworld. When I was in high school and college, and here I sound like an old fogey, there were no PP presentations. Teachers wrote notes on blackboards or overheads, and we copied them/took notes from them. Also, when I can read ahead of a speaker, I will. Which means I often read a speaker's points beforehand, and thus am bored while they are speaking. And give me a packet, and you're doomed. Usually I read the whole thing within the first 10 min and am then spending 1 hour and 50 minute bored. Anyway, PP is death.
- This is another college-related note. There is a small bowl of candies on top of our reference desk. It maybe holds about two handfuls of Jolly Ranchers. I swear to God, how do people live with themselves when they feel comfortable taking five or six ranchers at a time? Right in front of my staring face? I don't mind if someone takes two, but six? I find the greed unbelievable. Which reminds me of a time I was at a well-known sandwich chain that happens to keep a bread basket with samples in it by the end of the line. Once, I watched a man take the equivalent of a loaf of bread out of the sample basket. Twice. He tonged the bread onto his empty food tray--a massive pile of little chunks of bread--and then made his way back to his table. And then he ate those, and came back for a second helping. What the hell? Greed.
- Per the recommendation of my friend Kelly, I took a gander at aNobii, which is a LibraryThing type book cataloguing place. There are intriguing aspects of it, such as a built-in read/unread/unfinished catagorization system. Intriguing enough that I attempted to import books from LT to aNobii. Unfortunately, it didn't work. It didn't work to the tune of 500 books that weren't mine ending up on my list. I couldn't leave them there, so I manually deleted 500 books from the account. I wrote a comment on Kelly's post about this, and one of the guys from aNobii contacted me through that comment. (If you look at her post comments, you can see this.) I emailed him with some details, and at the end of my email, thanked him for contacting me, and said this: "I can't use it if I can't somehow get all those books from LibraryThing to aNobii." He emailed me back, told me that him and his co-workers (co-inventors?) had tacked that up on the wall, and were working toward a way to make it a reality. (I have 1000+ books on LT now, and there's no way in hell I'm manually entering those all into aNobii.) Holy crap, people. With this simple act, Greg @ aNobii has made me aNobii biggest cheerleader. I hope they can make it work, because I'd love to use aNobii. I really would. I envision it as the repository for every book I read, in place of my excel spreadsheet. LT can be the place where I catalog what I own. Anyway, go Greg go! Go aNobii team go! Make it so that I can easily transfer my library. I'll be a fan for life. Hell, I'm already a huge fan, and I'm not even using aNobii.
- Remember when I said I'd never make that icky pasta again? I lied. I made it, only I changed every single thing about it but the pasta and the chicken sausage. I used grape tomatoes and broccoli, and lemon juice. Very little olive oil and added garlic powder and cayenne pepper. And you know what? Even though I overcooked the broccoli a little bit, it was yummilicious. And pretty damn low point, considering the lack of fats--besides the sausage. I rock. I rock the WW cooking. I think my next big attempt will be a beef stew. (Also, and this is unrelated, but I love love love cornichons. They're these little tangy pickles I get at WF. I want a big ol' vat of them right now.)
Phew. Done.