an irregular muse

Bobby Morris Reservoir

2009-02-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

Bobby Morris Reservoir, it's in Capital Hill!

It sucks when your exposure settings are off and you capture an interesting scene, but thank goodness for photoshop!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Bread

2009-01-27T01:12:00.000-08:00

This banana bread takes a well known classic recipe and adds peanut butter and chocolate chips to give you a loaf that is moist and even more bursting in flavour. This was inspired by Jamba Juice's peanut butter moo'd smoothie.

Ingredients:

1 cup brown sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
2 large eggs
3 ripe bananas
2/3 cup of peanut butter
2/3 cup of milk chocolate chips
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon of rolled oats

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F
Peel and mash up the bananas in a large mixing bowl
Add peanut butter and stir in until blended
Melt butter, add to the mixing bowl
Add brown sugar, mix
Beat eggs, add to the mixing bowl
Add cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, mix
Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, fold it in with spatula until a thick but even consistency
Add most of the chocolate chips into the batter (leaving a few for the top), fold it in
Butter a bread pan, pour in loaf batter and level off the surface roughly
Add the remaining chocolate chips to the top
Sprinkle rolled oats on top
Bake for about an hour*, it is ready when a knife can be inserted and removed cleanly
Set aside to cool for 10 minutes
Remove from pan, cut into slices

Best served hot, à la mode.

*Banana bread goes from gooey and undone to moist and perfect within a few minutes. So be sure to check every few minutes after about an hour (depending on the oven). If overdone, the loaf will come out dry. Moistness timing will come with practice.

Good luck and enjoy!

Open response to Mr. Grassley

2009-01-26T01:18:00.000-08:00

This is a response to the open letter sent by Iowa senator, Mr. Grassley
[http://grassley.senate.gov/news/Article.cfm?customel_dataPageID_1502=18922]

The first thing that came to mind was equal opportunity employment. The EOCC states that employers can not discriminate based on gender, race, nationality, origin, age, etc. which would fit exactly into this situation.

In the letter, Grassley suggests that American talent be given priority over H1-B class employees. In this case, equal employment rights might not come into play given the nature of the H1-B visa. The visa allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers that have the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree. Though the intent of the visa is for the cases where US talent is not available for the given position, the DOL does not mandate that the employer look locally before hiring abroad.

This puts us in an interesting situation... on one hand there's no requirement that American workers get preferential treatment but on the other hand, given the economic conditions, it makes sense to do that if the EOCC guidelines do not apply. In the eyes of the government, I would definitely go for the former but in the eyes of the employer, Microsoft in this case, it does NOT make sense to selectively lay off H1-B workers.

I say this because the company executes layoff based on strict methodology - either the person is part of a non contributive team or is performing poory. In the case of the non-contributive team, it does not make sense to keep American workers because it is the product unit that is not functional not the individual in question. Although employee reshuffling between teams is possible, it does not make sense given the relevant experience people already would have from being on their specific teams.

I'm sure Microsoft will have a response to this letter, but I think it will along the lines of 'yes we'll consider what you've said while making our decisions but our priority is the functioning of our business which drives the US economy anyways'. So suck on that Mr. Iowa senator.

PS. Iowa? Really? wtf

The Final Cylon Model of Battlestar Galactica

2009-01-11T03:23:00.000-08:00

Battlestar Galactica is about to complete its final season. Over the 3.5 seasons we have seen great plot and character development as the surviving human population makes its desperate voyage towards Earth while trying to escape the Cylons. If you don't watch the show but enjoy science fiction, I'd definitely recommend it! If you watch it but are not caught up then consider this your ** spoiler alert **.

At the end of the first half of Season 4, we are left with the humans and the half of the Cylons (2s, 3s, 6s and 8s) , who at this point are allied and on earth. However we are left with at least two very important questions:

Why is Earth in nuclear ruins?
Who is the final cylon model?

According to the scriptures in the show, life began with god and people on Kobol. At some point, humans split up into thirteen tribes, twelve founding the colonies that the show is based on, and the thirteenth with their destination as Earth. Since all of the prophecies of the scriptures come true in the show, we'll assume that the Earth was indeed populated by the thirteenth colony at some point.

So, why is the Earth in nuclear ruin? Civil war seems stupid but pretty much the only reasonable answer. This is because it is completely within human nature to be destructive. Other reasons do not seem very likely, for example:

Cylons - They do not know the location of Earth
12 Colonies - They do not know the location of Earth
The last Cylon - Somehow covertly killed the entire colony on its own? unlikely
Natural Causes - Lame
God - Lame again

It seems even more plausible when you think of how there is a recurring notion of 'It has happened before and it will happen again'. The thirteenth colony destroyed themselves by their creations (weapons) and so did the twelve other colonies by their creations (cylons). But there must be some more significance to this planet. Especially since somehow Kara Thrace was resurrected on it and obtained a new viper that had its bearings fixed on the signal coming from Earth. Although being suspicious for those unexplainable actions it seems unlikely that she is the final cylon.

So then who could the last cylon model be and with what significance? Let's do this by the process of elimination:

Lee Adama, William Adama, and most of the Galactica crew
This leaves: Roslin and Baltar
I don't think it's Roslin because of the way D'Anna talked to her (and she knows the identities of all 5 final cylons).
Baltar is a more likely candidate since he keeps seeing visions of 6 BUT he survives the cylon virus in space, so again not very likely
That leaves no one from the known characters!

So this means that the last Cylon will be introduced as a new character or as a metaphor for something else. What can the symbolism be? Well, there's a BSG poster for season 4 that portrays the characters as Jesus and his disciples from The Last Supper. We notice that the missing spot is where Judas from the original painting. This implies that the character or symbolism belonging to the position represents something negative. Perhaps it's the destructive nature of people that's the final cylon? It's also worth noting that the final Cylon would fall into the series as model seven. Which again would go back to the negative nature of people, this time referring to the seven deadly sins. To finally tie it all together, we could say that the thirteenth tribe is the last cylon (13 being a unlucky number) deemed model seven (from the 7 sins) and was destroyed by themselves by their destructive nature or sins.

Well regardless of what happens, let's hope the writers do something cool and end the show on a brilliantly high note.

Adding a FavIcon to your Personal Website

2008-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

A favourites icon, more commonly referred to as a favicon, is the icon that shows up beside the addressbar in your web browser as well as the icon that shows up in your favourites when that site is added. Usually a representative image or a logo is put in the icon.

I decided to give it a try for my site, it turns out it's a lot easier than you'd think. All you need is to add the following to your region in your html:

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="design/favicon.ico">

and then before you know it, your site will be twice as awesome. In order to make your icon, you can just pop open your favourite image editor and make a 16x16 image with transparency. Then use a icon maker program to generate the .ico file for you. For my site, I decided to stick with the theme I have and made a logo made up of a few square bubbles.

Here's a few applications that you can use for generating a favicon:

Online - http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/
Desktop - IcoFx 1.6.2

Renewed, Refreshed and Ready to go

2008-12-16T23:27:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the redesigned 'random nonsensicals', now dubbed 'an irregular muse'. As you can see (if you are viewing via RSS, click here), I went for a clean look while maintaining all of the features of a typical blogger theme. The interface was designed with just plain ol' html/css via notepad. Then all the good stuff from blogger was adding via their custom scripting language.

Blogger has a few resources for getting started, although personally I did not find them useful. The only thing that worked for me was reading through those resources and then playing with one of blogger's prebuild themes.

Outside of blogger, there's plenty of third party widgets you can add, as well as resources for custom widgets. One cool thing I found was adding label cloud support, which is something you see in blogs from wordpress or other blogging platforms. I also found a blog page enumeration resource which could have been cool, but I was too lazy to implement.

A few more websites that were useful in getting the design together:

ColorSchemer - Choosing colours and Pallettes
W3Schools RSS Reference - A good reference for Cascading Style Sheets
DeviantArt - PhotoShop Brushes and general Inspiration

So on top of redesigning the blog, the same theme was used to redo my personal website. Now when browsing there is a seamless transition from the portfolio to the blog, which I find cool in a totally useless way.

Known issues: IE 6+, javascript error causes label cloud to not render, IE <6 struggles at transparent pngs (if you are running IE <6, you don't deserve to live), and comments are currently implemented as popups (will change to embedded when I get a chance). Send any and all feedback for design / scheme / features via comments. Thanks!