Are you supposed to enjoy beverages?

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee. - Abraham Lincoln

I've come to the realization that if you put a drink in front of me I will drink. I will drink it relatively quickly. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing it wrong. Give me a glass of water. Gone. Give me a milkshake. Gone. Give me a cappuccino, latte, or tea. Gone. Give me a soda. Gone.

I had this habit working from home that I would have an empty glass in front of me and then go fill it with an americano, coke, something, and then give it fifteen minutes and it would be gone. My first step to avoid having an empty cup was to brew a pot of coffee (instead of making an americano). This was a bad idea. You know what happens when I have a pot of coffee available to me? Yeah, that's right. Gone.

Now I've got myself on a beverage regiment at home to keep myself from going overboard. One cup of coffee in the morning. One "something" for lunch - could be coffee, tea, soda, or other. One more "something" at 3pm for afternoon tea. Dinner is an non-caffeinated something. I've mostly been having water. Then I usually treat myself in the evening to one last non-caffeinated beverage.

All drinks beyond that are just water. Water water water. I feel like other people don't need to regiment themselves like that, but if I didn't, I would drink a pot of coffee, a two-liter of soda, and who knows what else - every single day. Because if it's there, I drink it. YUM!

When I go to work - things go out the window. I drink a LOT of coffee. But hey, that's only two days every other week.

 

This Should Be Easier

By the summer of 2012, because the product cycles are long, the majority of the televisions that you see in the television stores here will have Google TV embedded in it. - Eric Schmidt

Our household has a Google TV (Logitech Revue) in the living room and an AppleTV in the bedroom. We have no cable and yet things are not as easy as they should be. I frequently find myself on the couch using Reeder to go through my RSS feeds on my iPhone and when a video comes up I just watch on my iPhone. Sure, I could airplay it to the TV, but why bother.

Last week I found Mrs.Chaos in the bedroom watching a TV show on her iPhone in bed. She was probably twenty minutes into it and just said, "I don't know why I'm still watching this on my phone."

I frequently walk into the living room to find her sitting at the coffee table watching a movie on her external monitor instead of playing it on the GoogleTV. To some extend, when you think about perspective, if it's just you watching than the 24" LED monitor one foot in front of you is larger (relatively speaking) than fifty inch plasma across the room.

I can taste a future where all of this is controlled through my smartphone - but things block me! Abc.com, Nbc.com? Sorry - you cannot play this on your phone. Got the app? That's nice, you can't AirPlay it to your TV.

So we end up with beautiful televisions and we watch the all of television on the iPhone, iPad, or computer. Sheesh.

Nice Things

What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us? - Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey)

I must have been around twelve or thirteen when I was out at a store with my mother and they had cool plastic mugs on super-sale. I think they were four mugs for one dollar. That is a quarter a mug! For reasons I don't understand, I fixated on these mugs and convincing my mother we should get them. For reasons I don't under she gave in and bought them.

That investment paid off. All the time when my friends came over throughout high school I had them use the plastic mugs. Why? You can break the plastic mugs. I remember a time when one of my brother's friends broke one of the glasses and I said, "my friends haven't broken any of the plastic mugs yet!"

When I got my first apartment after university, my mother gave me the mugs to take--along with all her plastic dishes. I took them with great pleasure! She also gave me a bunch of glassware that she didn't have a complete set for any more. A decade later many of the glasses were broken, but the plastic mugs were still going strong. Every time a friends breaks one of my glasses I say, "this is why I can't have nice things!"

I moved into an apartment with two friends and are cabinets were overflowing with dishes. It was suggested that we get rid of the plastic mugs and just stick with the nicer dishes. I fought back - and over the next five years I watched as the nice dishes broke and my plastic mugs came into greater and greater use.

I got married and we combined our kitchens and my plastic mugs lived on. They are "raised" so that there's a couple inches of plastic at the bottom which keeps them from sweating and damaging the surface they are one. They don't need coasters! Mrs.Chaos admitted at one point that she liked them.

We had already gotten rid of all my plastic plates and now we just acquired new really nice plates. As Mrs.Chaos cleaned out all the dishes we no longer need she put the plastic mugs back out. They are on the chopping block! Will they find their way back into the cabinets? Or have they finally been voted off the island?!?

The Pace of Innovation

Most of the world doesn’t want to be revolutionized. - Jon Evans

I suppose that as I get older I will continue to have more and more "the kids these days" moments. While we were picking up the nieces from church I was staring at the nutritional guide board that was explaining how to judge portions and it compared 4 oz to "a roll of film." Like anyone knows what a roll of film is these days.

The nieces had house is a cord cutting house that only has access to television via DVD, Netflix, etc. They were at their grandparents and watched morning cartoons on the TV (Scooby Doo) and later that day they wanted to watch more. They were totally upset with the idea that they couldn't. "It was on TV, so we can't watch it." "Nono! Put the disc back in!" "No, it was on television, we can't watch it again." "Can't you just rewind to it?"

For Christmas Mrs.Chaos got me a TV in the bedroom - because she likes watching TV in bed. She watches a ton of shows off of the network websites (abc.com, nbc.com, hulu.com) on her computer. So I got an AppleTV so that she could AirPlay mirror from her laptop to the TV.

In the living room we have a GoogleTV, which supports AirPlay, but non AirPlay mirroring. We were planning to watch a show out there from the computer and Mrs.Chaos asked how we would do it. 'We'll just attach it like with the cables like we used it." "With cables? Like animals!?!?"

Home Upgradation

The road to success is always under construction. - Lilly Tomlin

The thing is, when I bought a brand new home, I thought I was done. Maybe it comes from all those years of apartment living, but I have this avoidance to making any permanent changes to the house. Mrs.Chaos is always talking about home improvement projects.

For Christmas Mrs.Chaos got a wall mountable vanity mirror. Of course it wasn't one that just sits on the counter top, but requires boring holes into the wall. Okay okay - it's up! But we're never going to get the deposit back at this rate.

Juicing for Fun and Profit

Rumors are mostly a projection of the individual who started them. - Roya Rad

Mrs.Chaos asked me if fruit juice has less nutrients than eating the raw fruit. I did an internet search for it and the first result came from a raw foods propaganda site and said something like, "you must drink juice right after you make it! All nutrients are lost within about fifteen minutes." It didn't pass my common sense test. Where did the nutrients go? Do the nutrients evaporate into the air? What happens?

The internet is a big a scary place. Whatever crazy idea you happen to have, I promise that there is a website out there which is going to support it. It's so much worse when the top hits coming back from the main search engines are written by the crazies. I had a coworker convinced he suffered from electro-magnet sensitivity. He sent me the link to a really well done medical research paper on it which had me pretty convinced. The site hosting the research paper also sold various crystals that could help minimize your symptoms (sigh).

When I was dating Mrs. Chaos she told me that she if she got too cold she would get hives. I did what any loving boyfriend would do, I went to the internet with the purpose of telling her she was crazy and that she should stop whining so much. You know what I found out? "Cold allergy" is a real thing. Allergists can test you for it by placing an ice cub on your arm and seeing if it triggers allergic hives. Crazy, right?

My sister-in-law told me that if you get sick you need to avoid sugar to get healthy? Quackery? Turns out that one is true. It only requires a couple of sodas to have a medically proven bad affect on your immune system's ability to fight off illness. Crazy, right?

Anyway - vitamins in juice degrade due to exposure to oxygen, light and heat. There are numerous studies from the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical Review that juice a fruit or vegetable, story it in a cold, dark, and air-tight location for a months and then show no loss of nutritional value.

MSG does not make you sick. Aspartame does not cause cancer. Organic farming produces more green house gases. You can be allergic to the cold. Sugar makes it hard to fight the flu. The jury is still out on EMF sensitivity, but crystals definitely don't protected you from it.

I Walked 40 Miles and My Shoulders Hurt

Perhaps the Mayans WERE wrong.Maybe we WILL enter a new era of consciousness. - John Hodgman

We went to Disneyland for New Years Eve.  Disneyland must be one of the ten most jam-packed places to ring in the new year.  We got up at 7am to go into the park and didn't leave until 1am.  That is the first and probably last time I will ever spend seventeen hours in Disneyland.  We used our last Fast Pass around 6pm and there were none left to be dispensed.  We looked at one another, "Well, just six more hours until new years."  Four and half hours later we were about to watch Fantasmic and Mrs.Chaos said she was very particular about making sure to see the fireworks over the castle.  "Oh yeah, we're going to do this right this time around, because we are never coming back here on new years again!"  We Hi-Fived each other.  An hour and a half later we watched the fireworks from Main Street.  Happy New 2013!
(ps. don't trust people who can't build straight pyramids to predict the end of the world.)