I was eating leftovers of last night’s shepherd’s pie but I wasn’t paying much attention, just kind of guiding the spoon to my mouth while I read online. Then I noticed the taste, and my brain had this conversation with itself:

Wait, what? What is this I’m eating? Am I eating shit?? Ugh!

No, no wait. It just needs salt.

Honestly, though, I can’t stand most unsalted foods. I like plenty of salt and black pepper on most everything I eat, thanks. I do like unsalted potato chips and pretzels, though. Heck, taking the salt off of pretzels makes them like a godsend: there’s no fat, there’s no salt, and if you aren’t on some stupid Atkins diet, there’s nothing wrong with eating pretzels mindlessly while you veg out on TV.

I used to never read blogs except for a select few belonging to people I knew because I didn’t want their feeds taking up prime real estate in my Netvibes page. However, I’ve recently discovered Google Reader and have been using the bejeezus out of it. It keeps all my feeds in a sidebar and their data shows up in the main column, as opposed to Netvibes’s setup of having little individual boxes of recent posts for each feed, with them all showing up at once. I’ve subscribed to my usual tech sites, but I’ve also been actively looking for personal blogs that sound interesting. These are the ones I have so far:

• Aneesah
• Becky
• Bubs
• Carina
• Claire
• Denise
• Han
• Jacky
• Jem
• Jordan
• Kat
• Meggan
• Melissa
• Nikki
• Roni
• Tish
• Todd
• Tracy
• Trin

I’ve been looking for pretty sites with humorous blog entries about the author’s daily life. If you have any to suggest to me, by all means, leave a comment! I’ve got it set up so that updates show up on my Google homepage so I get a mix of new entries each day from various people. Keeps things interesting.

I created a new page on 3till7 today titled What are you here for?, aimed at helping visitors that are only interested in a particular type of blog entry find RSS feeds for just those entries. I know some of my visitors care about what I’m cooking and how my classes are going, that sort of thing, but others just come here for the Linux and programming talk.

I ate at a nice Japanese restaurant tonight with Todd, Bentley, Michael, Angie, Kelly, Eric, Kathy, and Jess, as a kind of belated birthday celebration. I received more gifts, too, which was fun: a whisk from Bentley because he, Todd, and Jess are sick of my lumpy pudding; a plastic coconut bra from Bentley because, well, he’s Bentley; a funny card from Jess and promises of a geeky t-shirt that says “Mac users swear by their computers; Windows users swear at their computers” that she found online; dangly earrings from Angie, which were neat because she made them herself; and various chocolate from Kathy. After dinner, which was paid for by the lovely Todd, he and I went to Joseph Beth to use my gift card and buy 1) a preorder for the new Harry Potter book and 2) Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark. I’ve read three chapters in that so far and have been chuckling a lot.

I was surfing some blogs earlier today, trying to find new ones to read, and got annoyed by one whose author was whining about “making low A’s” in her classes. That kind of attitude just annoys me because I can imagine the person not posting that to vent, but rather to sound all high and mighty and brilliant at being dissatisfied with making a slightly less than perfect grade. Saying something like that makes you come off as an asshole. Beyond that, it annoyed me because it seemed like the person was in high school, and it reminds me of myself when I was that age. I thought it was sooo bad to make less than an A on my report card, and anything less than a B was just unspeakable–I couldn’t do such a thing. Then I got to college and learned that not everything revolves around your grades, nor are B’s and C’s so terrible. C is supposed to represent average, and if me having a social life and actually doing something other than sweating over making perfect scores means that I’m just average when it comes to grades, okay. I still love making A’s and would prefer to make them, sure, but B’s are damn good now, and I don’t want to kill myself over a C.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but the next sites I’m going to review are Amelie’s and Tracy’s. I’ve been having fun with this whole reviewing-on-my-own-time thing. It’s got all the perks of having a WPR but without the huge drawback of the pressure involved in sticking to a deadline.

A neat idea for a web app came to me earlier today, and it sounds like something I would enjoy writing in Rails, especially since I’d benefit from it. There are all kinds of calendar applications out there, but I’m one for not realizing when I need to start preparing for an event. If I had a calendar in which I could enter a deadline along with an approximation of how much time I would need to complete the project, it would be great. The app could then intersperse in my existing schedule little appointments for me to work on the project X amount of time to complete Y percent of it. I’m all the time writing in my schedule book that I have a test on one day, and then for several days in front of it, I write “study for X test!”. This kind of app would do that stuff for me, and I think it’d be pretty useful.

A nifty tool I’ve discovered in the Feisty Fawn Ubuntu update was the Disk Analyzer. It shows a directory listing and you can scan any given directory, your home directory, or the entire filesystem. It then shows a neat little pie chart showing what directories are taking up how much of your space. In mine, my music directory, for example, takes up over 90% of my home directory’s space. I’d post a screenshot but I’m on the Powerbook at Todd’s place right now.