we ((e:matthew) and (e:I)) went to see a movie. It was random. Pretty good. I have a picture as proof.




Now it's Saturday night, and I wonder what's on the menu. Just made some smash-ed potato-es. With garlic, parmesean, rosemary and dill, set to music of course. Tasty, as are many products which strive to utilize as many separate dairy products as possible. I've gotta change my userpic, it's starting to freak me out. So, anyone have any last minute suggestions for an awesome Buff-nite-out? Or in for that matter?

It's been awhile. Except for my erroneous post about the elephant, over two weeks in fact. I've been away from the computer a lot, and been engrossed with house guests and Dragonball Z (I found out I could download all the episodes auf Deutsch). I'm also lost in some new boring state of mind. The new place hasn't helped, in fact, I think the new ultra-comfort level may be making it worse. Why ever leave such a nice cozy space? I'm struggling with all the normal problems. What should I be doing with myself? Should I be doing something with myself at all? What is something? Should it mean something? Open-mindedness can lead you down a bewildering road. I've become so open-minded that I have trouble drawing any kind of conclusions. Especially when it comes to myself.

I always feel that something's got to change. I feel this way almost constantly, and have for years now. But looking back, things have changed. I've moved between places (cities, states, countries, continents), between friends, between different ways of looking at life. I've considered myself a student of math, music, politics, and science. I've tried-out a couple different relationships, and even altered the basic unit of a relationship. And after all that, I'm still looking for something.

The guy sitting behind the couch tells me now that the problem is that I'm trying to alter my environment when what I should be altering is myself. I agree to a certain extent. Maybe I'm set in this pattern of searching for a perfect world that I'm just not ready to find. Maybe I've been sitting in it for years and haven't been able to recognize it for what it is. Maybe. But maybe there really is some other type of experience that is out there waiting for me. I don't believe in destiny, but I do believe in infinity, which means there's always going to be many more experiences out there than I can possibly fit in one lifetime. And it comes back to the decision, which I'm so bad at, making a choice. So I slide along, waiting for things to bump me into new ruts, and never taking the wheel in my own hand.

when you have this:



In Aceh, India the elephants are helping with the relief effort. Wow.

Mexican food is my favorite. I like to eat it all the time. One of my favorite recipes is for tasty chicken enchiladas in a green (verde) sauce. They are tastalicious, and oh-so bad for you. Like all my favorites, it combines just about all types of dairy products: butter, cheese, cream, and you can have sour cream on top!!! Here's a link to the recipe (which I dabble a bit with, so feel free to dabble a bit yourself).



Voila! The finished product! And I can't believe I managed to post the whole thing before diving in. [bgcolor]#ffff00[/bgcolor]

Five major libraries (The Oxford University library, the New York Public Library and three big US university libraries - Michigan, Stanford and Harvard) have teamed up with Google to make portions (or in some cases, all) of their book collections available online. The idea is to allow Google users to search through the actual page-by-page contents of books when using the Google interface. The service is called Google Print and their web page has an example:

"To use Google Print, just do an ordinary Google search. For example, when you search on "Books about Ecuador Trekking" or "Romeo and Juliet," and we find a book that contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book at the top of your search results. Click on the book title and you'll see the page of the book that contains your search terms, as well as other information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the book. Click "Buy this Book" and you'll go straight to an online bookstore selling it. If the book was scanned from a library, click the library link to find a local library that has it."

This sounds pretty neat and I think it is about time that we get the books digitized and available to the masses. I'm just wondering what the catch is. According to Google, as long as the book is not copyrighted (which means most "classics" and stuff older than 50-100 years), it will be available in its entirety (which is already being done by a couple different services today: Project Gutenberg Literature.org Bibbliomania ). But there are already a couple sites that are charging for the same services (see Questia which charges $15.00/month, but to be fair also has Scientific journals and other online resources). Even if it's not outright charging for services, but only making users view an ad per page or some other obnoxious device, I'm sure that the now publicly-traded Google has something up its sleeve to please the shareholders. So I just hope that these libraries, for example, haven't given the rights to digitize their libraries solely to Google. Otherwise eventually we'll be left with a company or two controlling all this information, which for the most part should be public. Hmmm, maybe it'll all be fine and I'm a nut though...very possible.