Tone deafness, anemic health food and more

I have a couple of things to note today:

- Do you know if you are tone deaf? I thought I was pretty good but as it turns out, I am just below average at 69.5%, on the trailing edge of the bell curve. Test yourself out here.

- I spent some time with some friends who ate bio-everything food and were serious about macrobiotics etc. and found it to be an enlightening experience. I am a bacon and steak kind of guy but I pretty much only eat relatively fresh veggies and meat - no processed food. I find that people who are really serious about bio food and supplements seem to be fragile, scared and ummm - unhealthy. For sure there are some serious Olympic athletes who are on the program but it seems to me that eating trail mix, yogurt and salad all week long is going to make you sick even if you pump ten gallons of flax seed oil up your butt.

- A good place to spend some time expanding your mind is here at TED where some of the smartest dudes on our planet brain dump to their peers. They've put the sessions online for us common folk.

And finally, here's another track from Juliete

Some rich dude in Nosara owns this glass castle. I'm sure he'll sell it to me when he gets bored of it ;)

This glass castle is in Lagosta near Tamarindo. Must get hot in there.

How nice is this little bird. No matter how many times I drove by him throwing a wall of mud and chocolate milk up 20', he still managed to stay pearly white. 

A random Costa Rican pig. 

These third world cows never fail to make me laugh. 

This is why I didn't make it out to Samara this time. 

Microsoft Expression Web Designer

We are doing a whole lot of work with pure CSS and XHTML at work. Pretty much all of our web apps are now pure CSS. At first I really hated it but now I am a convert. MS Expression Web Designer beta just came out making it really easy to build web apps with Visual Studio.

Installing it was a pain in the ass, I constantly got a 1402 error - something about a registry key with .tiff shellopen thing. Seems like a lot of people get that error with Office, IE, and other MS apps.

The easy way to fix this 1402 error is to rename the .tiff key to .tiffx, the installer will re-create the keys for you and install properly. Hopefully this will save some random googler a bunch of work.

I am back

10 days of surfing and drinking Tequila was exactly what I needed. Spent 4 days on a long board and the rest on a shortboard, Nosara and then Tamarindo. 4 hours a day, sunrise and sunset - hit the spot in a big way. My arms are swollen, my hair is frizzy and I'm scraped and bruised everywhere but totally loving life. I wish I could do that every day. Maybe next year ;)

Here's my favorite song of the trip from a lovely Mexican artiste named Juliete Venegas;

Whoah, when the snow falls sideways and the waves are chest high in a lake, it's a good time to stay out of the water. 

Big ass november lake waves 

Canadians screwed out of 50 Billion Bucks

No shit, did you know that by 2007 us Canadians will have overpaid unemployment premiums by an accumulated 50 Billion bucks??

That adds up to $1700/person or $3500/working person in Canada. The accumulated surplus on EI is 50 billion bucks!!!!! Holy crap, that's like 10% of our federal debt.

So you're probably thinking why don't they give the money back? For fucks sakes they spent it on other stuff. Like debt reduction and "program spending". So all those record surpluses you see every year are at least 10-30% funded by you the taxpayer and your employer getting screwed.

Rocks and beer

And now for a touching story about beer and no, I didn't make it up myself;

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2" in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The students laughed. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. "Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life."

"The rocks are the important things -- your family,your spouse, your health, your children -- things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full."

"The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car.
The sand is everything else. The small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks."

"The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you."

"Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first -- the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

But then...

A student then took the jar which the other students and the professor agreed was full, and proceeded to pour in a glass of beer. Of course the beer filled the remaining spaces within the jar making the jar truly full.

Which proves: that no matter how full your life is, there is always room for a beer.

On that note, I will be in Nosara, Costa Rica next week with two lovely ladies and my good friend Don Julio. I will have a cervaza for each of you my friends.