Purely Random

I had a few weeks of vacation between my last day at CMU and my first day on the new Job, and I celebrated my last day of that time off by going out for Breakfast with Sally on not-a-Sunday (in this case, Wednesday). We figured that was a good time to hit up the Original Pancake House on McKnight Road. While not actually right in Pittsburgh, it’s just a 15 minute drive from Squirrel Hill. I had found it on the Internet at some point when Sally had a pancake craving, but we never got a chance to go…until now. (more…)

NPR, which is currently my favorite source of news, maintains an excellent blog discussing current news stories. For anyone without much time to keep up with the news, I think it’s a great way to pick out just a few of the most interesting stories each day. Of course, the stories selected are based on the personal interests of the host, Joe Palca, but I think he does a pretty good job. Today, he posted a pointer to a Morning Edition piece on colliding values from different cultures. (more…)

The other day, Sally called to ask about creating a PDF file from a Word document. We eventually decided that the easiest path was for her to send me the file for conversion. That’s easy for me, because I’m using Word 2004 for Mac: I can print to a PDF file just as easily as I can print to my Epson Stylus C68. The trouble is that Microsoft appears to intend on disabling that capability in future versions. Why? Because Adobe is suing them over it. (more…)

Over the weekend, I went to my home town in Ohio for my mom’s Birthday. As a gift, I put together an exciting vegetarian barbecue and brought home all the fixin’s from the Whole Foods in Pittsburgh (my mom is a vegetarian—that’s why I sometimes lean that way). As always, the barbecue was tasty and exciting. But that’s not what this post is about. This post, is about the leftovers. My mom almost always sends all her leftovers home with me because I have housemates that might potentially eat it, and it would just sit in the fridge at her place. The result: I have a lot of leftovers in my fridge. It also seems as if it’s up to me to eat it; my housemates all seem to ask, “isn’t there any meat in it?” and go on to heat up a frozen dinner. (more…)

Here’s a New York Times article that puts President Bush’s May 15 immigration speech in an interesting light. The article points out that Bush, being from Texas, actually has a long history of firmly supporting immigrants from Mexico. Sure, he’s also being advised that there’s a potential benefit of Hispanic support of the Republican Party, but the article tries to show that he really does support the immigrants—and I believe it. I’m not a big supporter of Bush, and I think that’s why I found the article to be so interesting. I don’t know; it’s definitely worth a read. Of course, I would also be interested in finding out how and why people are ripping him apart for the same speech. Any pointers?

I was thrilled to see a current event aligning with the topic of socially conscious big business: Wal-Mart has decided to jump into the organic food market. There are some other reports and discussions taking place around the Internet, but I’m a big fan of NPR (if you’re willing/able to deal with the non-text story content). The topic of socially-aware big business is something that I have discussed with Sally in the past, and we we agree that it is a necessary step for a world in which the superpowers are all corporations rather than nation-states.

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