Yeehaw!

As a kid, I always wanted to use the science fair as a way to show to the world that I could be someone great. Unfortunately, my proposals in school were consistently rejected. As I grew older, I began to doubt that my dream would ever become reality. I became disillusioned and cynical. Would the world even care if I just, just, disappeared?… I knew I would never amount to anything, so I went to school to become an economist.

HOWEVER, I now again see hope for this world! Some strappin’ young boy or girl has lived the life that many like me have only dreamed about… This wunderkind has now answered a question that has plagued me for most of my conscious life, “How does the fat content of a worm affect its duration in a microwave?” Enough from me, I will let the results speak for themselves.

-Trevor

I have always been interested in Amazon's Kindle. The thought that I could carry around a small tablet to read books and textbooks was relatively intriguing. However the high cost and limited PDF support has left me wary. Ultimately, as a few book readers have found since purchasing the Kindle, those are small costs for owning an ebook reader. The Digital Rights Management on the books sold on Amazon has provided book publishers with a a surprising amount of control over the content AFTER it has been purchased. This provides a huge potential for abuse.

DRM on most software, such as video games, seems mostly content to only prevent copying. DRM on Amazon's proprietary ebook format allows publishers and Amazon itself to change the rights of book purchaser's with very little notice after the book was purchased by the consumer. It largely began with publishers, such as Random House, disabling the text-to-speech features on books as so it will not compete with their audiobook purchases .

This was definitely not a deal breaker, but the next one was. A couple of weeks back, it was discovered that there are a limited number of times one can download a book onto a Kindle device before you need to REPURCHASE the item. Seriously!? Some books can be downloaded a few times, but others maybe only once or twice, but customer service won't tell you how many times a book can be downloaded.

As for the most recent news the publisher Secker and Warburg (I believe) has recently decided that they no longer wish to have a couple of their books on Amazon. They also decided that they did not want ANYONE who had previously purchased the books to have them either. Thus Amazon complied and deleted the books off everyone's Kindle. While they received a refund, I see this as equivalent to theft.

As you can see in the picture, Secker and Warburg publish George Orwell's classics such as "1984" and "Animal Farm". A publisher using rather authoritarian measures in order to control a book on oppression and censorship is rather humorous. It is a rather good symbol on who information providers seem to enjoy alienating their paying customer base. I am going to shake my head, but at the same time enjoy the fact that I did not spend over $400 on a device that will allow you to buy a book for a limited time, either because you run out of downloads or because the publisher decides that you no longer have the right to own a book you purchased.

-Trevor

I came across a rather catchy song on how United Airlines broke a musician's guitar. Enjoy.

-Trevor

Eve Online is one of those games that if I was to start playing I would be sucked in. Eventually I would have to drop out of school and end up living in a basement. Thus I have to content myself to settle by playing X3: Terran Conflict. Unfortunately, I found it slightly alarming when I started to talk to my computer wingman so perhaps playing an online game may be better for my mental health .

In any case, Eve Online is awesome because it not only has a resident economist who produces awesome economic reports it also has some pretty awesome stories of deceit in which players infiltrate an in-game corporation (like a guild) and then assassinate the leader and take money. It has also happened again recently. There are even cases of bank fraud!

I mention these because a media professor from Loyola University (click title for link) ran an experiment on online social culture using City of Heroes. For those who don't know, City of Heroes is a game based on Heroes/Villains. They are supposed to be morally opposed to each other, thus fighting each other to the bitter end. Though when Twixt (alias for the professor) entered, he found that most were idly chatting in the city! Rather than living in some Bizarro world, he chose to smite the evil villains like the scum that they obviously are. In a sad unintentional parody to "Make Love, Not Warcraft," the villains found it impossible to beat Twixt in the game, even after ganging up on him, while Twixt's supposed allies (also known as the French) sat by like the sad pacifists they are.

Real problems arose of course when players posted death threats and other harassing comments towards Twixt, who was only playing the game as the designers intended, unlike one of my college roommates who enjoyed using the flashbang on Counter-Strike on his own teammates until either enemies killed us or it crashed the game server, Thanks Dan.

In any case, I have a message for the players of CoH, go play the Second Life. There you will only have to worry about annoying floating penises.

-Trevor

I was shopping at Albertsons the other day (though as Mike had mentioned when down here, it is not owned by Supervalu) when I came across some rhubarb for only $1.99 a pound. Of course everyone knows what one does with Rhubarb other than to collect its leaves for the toxic oxalic acid, make Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. I was going to originally use a recipe from Grandma's recipe books, but she did not include cook temperatures and times, definitely a no-no for someone just starting out in the pie trade. Instead I came across a rather simple recipe off of the Food Network. The ingredients are shown above.

The preparation was amazingly simple and I was amazed at how the sugar turned the mixture into a quasi-jelly. Even more amazing is my physics lesson on volume. I was certain I messed up my measuring that there was no way the amount in my mixing bowl would fit into my small pie tin (which I was able to by with a graham cracker crust in there.






I found out how unhealthy my pie is as well. I found a neat website at shopncook.com which can create custom nutrition labels so I gathered the nutrition information for my pie and created this label which should give everyone the impact that just one slice can have. Though it is definitely not as unhealthy as Death Pies. Though I suppose one could argue that even the Death Pies can be part of a balanced diet if kept to special occasions though I do wonder how my grade school classmates who had these every day for a snack didn't end up morbidly obese, though this may also be due to the fact that we weren't as slothful back then??

-Trevor

I woke up this morning and went for a run with a friend; it has certainly been a while since I have run a couple of miles. It felt really good to get up at 6 in the morning, sort of. It rained steadily during the night so it is very humid today, but at least there is not any dust in the air.

Hopefully everyone is going out and having a good day today. By virtue of not working all day as I did last year, I will have a wonderful day. I am attempting my first Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, I'm very excited. I will probably even document the experience. Also going to do some grilling this afternoon. Hopefully the pesky monsoon rains will hold off long enough.

By the way, I found a different host which seems to have more responsive servers than what I currently have. You can go check out my progress at my new site. I will eventually have this domain point to the new server so hopefully there should not be any problems with the transition, though if you happen to get the RSS feed of the blog, you may want to grab the new one.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

-Trevor

It has been over a year since I have last posted anything to this blog . After someone had hacked my host they posted a nasty little script on my site. I guess at the time I was rather busy in DC at the time and didn't have a chance to look at it and then time sort of passed. I thought I would spend a couple of minutes last night fixing the site, but that turned out longer than I had planned, but this was largely due (in my humble opinion) to my host whose server doesn't seem to be working consistently; I seem to be getting random errors that I don't seem to be able to consistently figure out. I am considering finding another host, but we will see what happens.

Everything does not seem to be yet fully functional, such as my Gallery, but I will have to look at that later.

-Trevor

I try and try to think that I will consistently post on here, but perhaps it is not meant to be. Anyways, had a pretty relaxing week, with the exception of a rather large mechanic bill that will definitely make my summer living a bit more conservative. But anyways, on to the good stuff.

About two weeks ago, my neighbor (in my duplex) asked me whether my swamp cooler was working, which was about the same as usual, not too much, but I have survived a couple years. Anyways, she was pretty crabby with a bad back and 85 degrees in her place, so of course she complained to our landlord about the swamp coolers, who decided that she would have them replaced. The new coolers are amazing, it not only keeps me cool throughout the day, it has temperature control! Before, it would continuously pump in the cool desert air at night and I would wake up to 60 degrees in my house in the morning (very cold) to a not so cool 80-85 degrees in my house when the temperature would reach 105 outside. While that is cooler than outside, I can now keep my place at 75-77.

On another note, I had the pleasure of watching my same neighbor's cat hunt a pigeon today. I was up fairly early and while reading, heard some crashing sound in the back, only to see the cat pawing at a pigeon with a rather large gash in the back. Sadly the pigeon was still alive and making some sounds. The pigeon tried to run off, but wasn't too successful. Later the cat decided to have the pigeon for breakfast right outside my front porch. I got some poor quality photos of it that I may upload later.

As an aside, I just finished "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. It is about Chris McCandless who tried unsuccessfully to live in the Alaskan wild for a summer. It is a pretty amazing book, definitely worth the read. For me the book surfaced memories of the road trips that I have taken across the country either by myself (down to AZ) or with family and friends. While my trips are significantly less rugged, my road trips always bring about feelings of limitless possibility, and I am sure that McCandless certainly must have felt that when in Alaska. Some of my fondest memories are when I was riding along with Dad in his old van as a kid and I would see an out-of-state license plate. I would dream about where they were from and the amazing places they were going to go visit.

The book has recently been adapted into a movie. I think after reading the book, I don't believe the movie can capture the emotions that Krakauer conveyed, so unless anyone has seen it and can vouch for the movie, I will pass.

-Trevor

For those of you who wonder what I've been up to this year, and of course I'm wondering that myself some days, I've been working a lot on analyzing the housing market during the Great Depression. This all dates back to me going to College Park, MD last summer and taking thousands of photos at the National Archives, though of course through the grant that my adviser got, so I definitely can't take much credit. Anyways...

Some of the photos I took during my trip to the National Archives last summer were of various maps that indicated survey neighborhoods. These surveys contained a lot of neighborhood level information that we can do some pretty cool stuff with. Anyways, a side project of mine which may be useful in my dissertation is to digitize some of the old maps. My initial work has been in New York City, which unfortunately a hired gun took some not so fantastic photos of the maps . However they are mostly good enough to get started on digitizing. Anyways, take a look at the photo that I uploaded where I'm transferring the old map of Staten Island onto Google Earth. It is a bit tedious, but surprisingly a lot of fun (at least for me).

-Trevor

It has been a while since I've consistently posted, but I thought I wanted to let those who read this know about a classmate of mine who has some tough luck recently. For those who don't know Steve, he's got to be one of the greatest guys that I've known who always has something good to say about everybody. Furthermore he knows of and has been to St. Joseph, MN, so that instantly puts him in a league of his own. Anyways, earlier this year he was diagnosed with cancer on his tongue which spread to his lymph nodes. What's worse is that it has now spread to his lungs.

Anyways, I basically hope that if you get a second, check out his blog: http://stevenmanos.blogspot.com and make sure to keep him in your thoughts.

-Trevor

I think this may have been the longest it has taken me between posts. Hopefully I will be a little bit faster next time. However, a stalker with an ip address near Avon spurred me to post lest I find myself kidnapped and raped. Anyways, this post is unrelated to my return from my squash hiatus. It was certainly good to be back on the squash court tonight, though it will be awhile until I am back in form.

BTW, here are a couple of shots of Tucson as viewed from the Catalina highway up to Mt. Lemmon.

-Trevor

Here's a video of Robosaurus that I took while at the Barrett-Jackson car auction. It looks pretty scary, so try not to defecate yourself.

-Trevor

Christmas ended up being much busier than Christmas Eve this year. Dad and I went to my Grandma's this year and had lunch with her and my Aunt Elaine and Uncle Bob. Anyways, lunch was not bad for $3.00: chicken kiev, wild rice, and some mint cheesecake for dessert. As usual when my Dad, Grandma and aunt get together, I get to learn about some "ancient" Stearns county history; however, it is pretty interesting .

When we got home, we began preparing dinner for the Kollmann family's 1st Annual Authentic German Christmas Dinner. I originally came up with the idea after thinking about my unfortunate birthday experience from last year. After going through some websites and cookbooks, I decided that it would awesome to make up some rouladen, sp?tzle, and pfeffern?sse for dessert. If you think we are good "Germans", you'd be wrong since no one in my immediate family (myself included) ever had prepared any of this before. Basically, rouladen is a sliced roast that we wrap up around some bacon (we used turkey bacon), pickles, and some onion. Sp?tzle is an egg noodle, and pfeffern?sse is a christmas cookie.

The dinner definitely required more work than I originally thought and got some great help from the whole family which really added to the whole "togetherness" feel which I hoped. BTW, the picture is of the rouladen cooking. The sp?tzle definitely required some work as well. I had grabbed a recipe online for it and the directions were sort of vague, like a particular direction telling us to add "some" lukewarm water to the dough. We used a potato ricer to make the noodles which only take about 30 seconds to cook in boiling water.

Overall, the dinner turned out awesome, but mostly thanks to my family. We were all pretty surprised and definitely hope that it turns out this well every time we experiment on random food, though I suppose it doesn't make me feel more German . I think we've all agreed that this is a tradition we should keep going for a while.

-Trevor

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas / Holiday Season. My parents and I are having a low-key Christmas eve this year as my parents are recovering from a cold and don't want to spread the cold at my relatives since my grandpa just got back from the hospital . However, we are still planning on having an authentic German dinner tomorrow. We are making some Rouladen with some sp?tzle with pfeffern?sse (cookies) for dessert. However, we bought some Argentine wine, but it came highly recommended, so we were willing to make some sacrifices.

BTW, I was in the giving spirit today so I uploaded some photos from Sweden in my gallery. Check them out, they are chock full of useful information if you want to take your next trip in Sweden.

I'm also in the process of redesigning my website. What better way to spend my off hours on vacation than doing a little PHP programming. I picked up a couple of books to help me with a few things I've been working on. I even created a couple of b2evolution plugins, I was pretty excited about that. I don't know if you will see the redesign before the New Year, but you can see how the design is developing by checking out my Test Blog.

-Trevor

Sorry for the late post, I kept on putting off this post. I originally wrote it while waiting in New Jersey, so it was fresh in my memory.

How can I spend my last day in Europe? Well, it did not end quite as well as I would have liked. It was fairly cold today, being cloudy, cool, and breezy. So since I had planned this day as a walking tour of Copenhagen, I decided that dressing in layers was the only way to go. With two t-shirts underneath my sweater as well as two pairs of socks, I thought I would be well off. It helped. However, despite the cold weather, the walk ended up turning out pretty decent, I saw plenty of very interesting sites.

I started off checking out the royal palace at Christiansborg Slot. While it is no longer used as the royal palace, it is still used for important state functions. However, tours did not open until 1 pm, so I did not think I would make it back in time, so I thought pictures of fa?ade was sufficient. Actually, from the outside the building was fairly unremarkable, but the guards had nice bushy hats. Afterwards I checked out a couple of churches (Copenhagen seems to have plenty), one being the city?s cathedral, Vor Frue Kirke. To say that it was the brightest church is an understatement. The exterior is drab, but the interior practically radiates light. If I was a better Catholic, I think it would be easy to be moved spiritually.

Maybe I was just getting tired from traveling over time, but it seemed that after a while, many of the buildings sort of looked the same. Of course in central Copenhagen there is Nynhavn, which has a pretty rough past. It is next to a navigable canal and once was essentially the red light district for incoming sailors. Walking through, it seems to have cleaned up, and is now content to house plenty of trendy cafes.

In northern Copenhagen, I first walked to the Amalienborg Slot. Most of the palaces there appeared to be under renovation, but there was, yeah you guessed it, another church. However, Marmorkirken (aka. Frederikskirken) has a very unique dome and really dominated the buildings in the area while not clashing. Inside were some pretty nice postcards for 5 DKK each. Luckily for the church, I only wanted two and only had a 20 DKK coin on me, but I thought donating a little extra to the church probably won't come to any harm.

After this church, it was time to walk further north and find the famous statue, ?The Little Mermaid? cast by Edvard Eriksen who used his wife as the model. It was around this time that a group of Chinese tourists came out of a bus with their stereotypical SLRs strapped on their neck (Actually I think the stereotype is Japanese, but anyways, they fit a stereotype as perhaps I did as well). I was glad that I was no longer the only tourist who goes to Northern Europe in the winter. The mermaid statue is near Kastellet which was a fortress surrounded by a star-shaped moat. The fort evidently is used as an academy, so no luck on entering any buildings (I was able to walk around the hill that followed the moat).

By the time I made my journey around the moat, I was freezing. I had been walking around town for almost three hours and my mouth was getting a little numb. So I thought it was an excellent time to get some lunch. It seems that Europeans are really in no rush to eat lunch, so the whole process will always take a minimum of an hour. That was fine by me. I found a little basement caf? and had an open-faced sandwich with smoked salmon, cheese, and a sauce which I believed contained avocado. It turned out to be pretty decent and much improved over the wrap from the night before.

After lunch, I knew I was getting pretty tired, so I wanted to finish up the day on a good note, so I stopped at Rosenberg Slot. The castle/palace is set around a park that I imagine must be gorgeous during the summer months. I was able to get tickets for the treasury and a couple rooms of the castle. Inside they had some royal jewelry, including some crowns. The details on the crowns were amazing, it is so amazing that anyone was able to manipulate gold and precious stones as well as that. I finished up the day by checking out the botanical gardens. It seemed to be reminiscent of Munsinger Gardens in St. Cloud, but on a larger scale. They had some greenhouses featuring cacti (some of them were from Arizona!), as well as other exotic plants.

Maybe, I didn?t quite end the day on a good note. As I had mentioned, I wanted to check out McDonalds, and I had a huge hankering for a good American burger. I got there, and the atmosphere is much different. Being Denmark, the McDonalds has a lego themed playroom, while Euro-techno music is playing through the speakers. It seems to be a fairly trendy area. I ordered a cheeseburger from the centomenu which most items being about 10 Danish crowns (about $2). I also ordered my usual strawberry shake, but I found the food to be disappointing. While McDonalds is not great, I expect a certain level of quality that just was not present. I think it still must be good enough for most Europeans, but the shake tasted just too much like cardboard to be able to finish it. However, one bad meal does not a ruined journey make.

While I won?t bore you with the details of flying home, overall this was a great trip. I was amazed about the level and range of emotions I felt on this journey. I learned a bit about myself as well as other parts of the world. I also learned how to swallow a lot of pride and ask people directions; Arnab has some firsthand experience on how difficult it was for me to ask for directions when lost in San Francisco (maybe not lost, we were just getting our bearings.) Overall, while I am going to be a bit financially constrained for a while, I think I would go on this trip again if I had to do it over again. I would like to say thanks to everybody for being very supportive. It made the trip much more bearable when I know that there were people in the U.S. wishing me well. I really appreciated seeing e-mails and comments about my trip. BTW, I have postcards from the trip, some with stamps on them, but unfortunately, I wasn?t able to find a mailbox in Sweden to send them off in and the worker in the hostel in Stockholm would not mail them off for me. For those who requested postcards, you will be seeing yours shipped via first class U.S. mail.

-Trevor

P.S. The flight from New Jersey was delayed, but I was lucky enough to get an in-flight meal as a way of saying sorry. This was good considering that I had no food at home and all the grocery stores near my place was closed by the time I got home after 1 am.