It has come to pass recently that we’ve discovered that I may be a “supertaster“. I have almost all the hallmarks – cooked cabbage, brussels sprouts and kale make me gag (although I can eat raw cabbage). I dislike beer and several other forms of alcoholic beverages, eschewing them only for sweet mixed drinks. I can’t stand the taste of coffee. Soy products often give me a burning sensation in my mouth when I consume them. Although I love grapefruit juice and tonic water, it is the sheer intensity of the flavour that I like so much. I had no idea that three-quarters of the population didn’t drink grapefruit juice and go “OH YEAH… WHAT A RUSH!”

We’ve wondered if it was something that could be passed along to the kids. We thought perhaps my daughter was a supertaster, too, as she sometimes decides that a food she liked “tastes funny” and won’t eat it again. It’s hard to tell, though, as she seems to have some very mild Aspie traits she’s inherited from her mother (the discussion of mild Asperger’s/Autism probably could take a year of posts, so I won’t elaborate at the moment). So – it could be that she tastes things more intensely. Or it could be that she just simply has an internal on/off switch for certain foods when the mood strikes her.

A friend bought me a bottle of vitamin water today. I’ve had it before. I’ve never liked it. This was a different brand, so I decided to try it.

It tastes awful. HORRIBLE. It tastes like chemicals. I’m sure it tastes like the urine of someone who takes a lot of medications… that will surely be confirmed if I am ever inclined to taste urine. Read the rest of this entry »

2.5 stars out of 5.

I’ve loved playing The Sims for years, and I was delighted to find this social-networking version. I’ve been playing regularly since a few days after it went public. Sadly, as a “hard core” player, visiting many times a day has shown that many gameplay elements are severely broken.

As it’s a “social” game, you’re expected to share back-and-forth with your game “neighbours”. Unfortunately, the internal messaging/sharing system is severely broken. Your requests often won’t get to their recipients, and when they do your friends try responses frequently vanish. The game asks you to post your in-game milestones to your wall, yet it won’t let anyone CLAIM all the simoleons from those posts. There are situations where the integration with facebook’s messaging system causes the game to hang and other random crashes. Your sim’s condition completely unpredictable when you re-enter the game – I’ve left for 2 mins and found almost every stat red upon returning, while leaving for hours has left a virtually all-green sim. And I won’t even go into detail about the ridiculous real-money pricing on in-game items – to buy just a few of skill items, it costs more than it cost me to furnish my first real-life apartment! Considering there’s already sponsorship from Dunkin’ Donuts and other exceptional income opportunities from in-game product ads, EA is clearly being greedy, trying to make this a MAJOR cash cow (forget about the fact that it is an advertisement and gateway drug for their not-free-at-all-expansion-pack-ridden free-standing Sims games).

I don’t begrudge a business making money, but between the bugs and the outrageous SimCash store, I can’t endorse this at this time for anyone except those who may play for only a few minutes per week. Instead, buy The Sims 3 and ALL the expansions – it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

Our new kitty Harley Quinn has been showing too much interest in the budgies.

As in, WAY too much interest.

As in, lunging and jumping at the cage when they’re moving around, too much interest.

I decided that I was going to train her while she’s still young and, at least theoretically, trainable. In the past, I’ve trained cats with squirt bottles and various other methods (noisemakers like squeakers or cans filled with coins, putting things with undesirable smells/textures in locations cats aren’t allowed, etc) and it’s been only semi-effective, depending on the cat. This time, I decided I’d step the squirt bottle up a notch and about 3 weeks ago I bought a medium-sized squirt gun – the kind that pumps up, but not the huge version of that type that sends the kind wall of water that would destroy Japan.

We have a clicker that was given to us for training the dog, but it hasn’t been in proper use because we had only one, with too many people handling it – so of course, it’s been misplaced. Last week, I was in the pet store and found they had clickers for $1.49, so I bought two. This purchase was, you understand, for training the dog.

Now, in first 2 weeks after I got the squirt gun, I’d actually fired it at the cat twice. It’s never nearby when I catch her doing something she isn’t supposed to be, so she’s been getting away with a lot of stuff – including harassing the bird cage. I’d only actually HIT her with water once out of those two attempts.

After I got the clickers, I got a brilliant idea. Seriously, brilliant. Write it down. Go ahead, get a pencil… I’ll wait. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back, we were given some painted turtles. Apparently someone bought them and their young kids didn’t pay any attention to them at all, so they decided to get rid of them. With the turtles came the whole setup to make them a home for several years, including a filter and a large aquarium. The filter alone is worth about $92, so for the incredibly low price of free, we could not turn down the offer. (The cynical side of me thinks it’s equally likely that alternatively, they bought turtles, heard something about the over-hyped salmonella fears, and decided to get rid of them tout-de-suite.)

The day we brought them home, the kids chose names for their turtles. We hadn’t observed them at all, so knew nothing about their personalities – heck, we didn’t even know they really HAD personalities because our turtle knowledge was very rudimentary. We put them in a small fish tank with no filter Read the rest of this entry »

Late yesterday, I decided to make a signature image for forums relating to Star Trek/STO.

I wanted to incorporate one of my ships, my captains, and so on and so forth to personalize it.

I took screenshots in-game and lifted the various components off their backgrounds, and merged the images together last night. It didn’t take that long. I added the text that I wanted, spending about 10 minutes trying out different fonts, finally settling on the one used for the Original Series titles. (I tried out TNG, DS9, various movie fonts, stuff that appeared onscreen in the shows, and about everything else Trek-ish I could think of).

All told, all that took maybe an hour and a half.

But I didn’t like it. I really didn’t have a space to put my in-game name or forum name short of making a frame around the pic or just randomly placing it in the image, which I didn’t think suited it. So I decided to use a sort of Star Trek computer interface (LCARS) to tie it together and give me text spaces.

So, before going to sleep, I tried to find a simplistic guide to creating LCARS – just how to place the colours, what formats and layouts the various shows used, and so on. I bookmarked a couple of pages, and resumed today when I was functional for the day. Then, the more I read, the more I wanted to be accurate.. and there was a lot of contradictory info out there. So I read, and searched, and searched and read…

I just finished this 15 minutes ago, after agonizing over every decision. I kept getting hung up on details and flaws. It is neither perfectionism nor OCD, as it isn’t really entirely right – I took some minor liberties, and it is far from perfect. I just wanted it to be sort-of right, and not have glaring inconsistencies with established designs. Yet, it has still taken me around 6 hours to do what should have been the EASY part when it only took 90 minutes to do the “hard” part.

And this, folks, is why I will never be a graphic designer.