beefy experiment

Last night I may have committed husband abuse, though I can assure you it was unintentional. Let me explain. Lately I've been trying to become more efficient in my use of time and dishes in the kitchen, the former because we get home so late on weeknights; the latter because we don't have a dishwasher.

On Monday I made a beef and mushroom dish served over rotini pasta. It was tasty, and I had made a large pot so we would have leftovers. Rather than put the extra beef in one container and the pasta in another (as most would do), I weighed out my portion (4oz meat, 1c pasta) and stored it in one container. I stuffed all the rest in a second.

So last night, thinking about time and dish conservation, and more importantly having a desire to avoid wasting or saving a partial meal, I efficiently dumped the two containers into two bowls. Brent's had a full half-pound of beef and two cups of noodles (2x the recommended serving), I realized while serving, though I didn't mention it at the time. During dinner I gloated about getting a home-cooked meal on the table in less than 15 minutes, but as we all know, pride always leads to a fall.

Shortly after the meal (during which Brent impressed me by consuming all of it), Brent looked alarmed and began to moan about being extremely full. I told him how I may have served him more than usual in an attempt to avoid inefficiency, and he got this accusatory look on his face and said, "YOU MADE ME OVEREAT!" Laughing at the absurdity of MAKING someone eat (that only happens in movies like "Seven"), I tried to brush it off by saying a few extra pounds might not be a bad thing for him.

Well, the upshot is, I had to eat dessert solo because Brent was so stuffed, and he suffered the rest of the evening. Sorry, Brent!

Tiger Tale

Tiger Woods and company were in San Diego this past weekend for the Buick Invitational. I went to the tournament on Saturday with a buddy and felt pretty good about being able to stand 15 feet away from The Man himself as he teed off on 18.



That is, until Kat told me that she was lifting weights with him at her gym a few days earlier!

OK - Here's the story. Kat's fitness center is literally right next to Torrey Pines, where the tournament was held. Kat was running on the treadmill, and very much "in the zone," as she puts it.

A rather familiar-looking, lighter-complected black man walked in, and started using the lat machine, not 5 feet from her. He was doing low weights but high reps... more like stretching that would be useful for... A GOLFER! The fitness center staff later confirmed that this was an actual Tiger-sighting.

But as Kat told me, she was too "in the zone" to do the obvious thing, which would be to rush over like a crazed paparazi and start snapping photos and asking him to sign anything and everything in her posession.

Nonetheless, it was an exciting brush with greatness... on Tiger's part, of course. I'd say Kat's steely focus definitely rubbed off on him, as he was able to win the tournament by a good 8 shots or so. *grin*

Dilemmas and Distractions

Psst...Brent is thinking about shutting down the blog. Seems our readership is down, and Blogger's Guilt really isn't fun, especially because blogging should be a leisure activity in the first place. If you'd like to see it continue, please post a comment. Thanks! :) That's my shameless plug.

And now for a different kind of plug. I am curious whether anyone has ideas about how to maintain politeness while avoiding distractions in the office. I'm in a big room with 5-6 other people, and I really need focused time to write my code. Lately I have resorted to blasting classical music through earplugs (yes, that's right: I wear silicone earplugs and put the headphones over them). For a while I was doing that without playing the music, because I found that people would still talk to me if I had just the earplugs in, since they couldn't see them. The earphones also keep me warm, an added bonus. My most recent problem is that when people talk to me, I have to surreptitiously remove the hot pink earplug at the same time as the earphones. Usually that's easy, but yesterday one of them got stuck in my hair, and the whole thing was just really awkward. So I thought about those industrial style earmuffs, but sheesh, they're huge. Any thoughts?

Clone Wars

San Diego is aflutter about a recent announcement from a small biotech about the cloning of a human embryo from adult skin cells.

Pro/Con/Right/Wrong - Hard to say... It does serve as a reminder of the amazing things that scientists are doing, right here in our town. Pretty cool.

Cloned Human Embryo Created From Skin Cells
ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2008) — Stemagen, a privately held embryonic stem cell research company, announced January 17 it has become the first in the world to create, and meticulously document, a cloned human embryo using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

Bio-Rad - Scientists for Better PCR

Bio-Rad - Scientists for Better PCR

Just watch... You won't regret it.

My Favorite Snack

I recently discovered Pop-Secret's 100-kcal bag of microwave popcorn. The kettle corn variety is the perfect afternoon snack, even though the popping sound and the occasional burnt-popcorn smell must be distracting to my labmates. (After many repetitions, I have found that popcorn left unattended ALWAYS burns, even if you cook it for less time than it usually takes when you're standing there watching it.) The main other disadvantage* to this snack, besides distracting others, is two fold: a) it is harder to type with one hand, since the other hand remains busy transporting light and fluffy kernels from bag to face, and b) the real and perceived gross-ness factor about touching your keyboard after consuming. Nevertheless, these detractors are easily dismissed when compared to guilt-free tastiness factor.

I would like to contrast this variety of popcorn with some recent info about movie popcorn found in the Hungry Girl column on weightwatchers.com:

"If you're used to popcorn being a better-for-you option, you'll probably fall out of your chair when you find out the stats on the movie theater version. A large size with butter packs in around 1500 calories and 130 grams of fat. That's a POINTS® value around 40 and almost two days worth of POINTS values for many people—ouch! Opt for the smallest one, leave off the butter and it'll still set you back around 500 calories and 25 grams of fat (POINTS value around 11). It doesn't seem worth it at all...So sneak in some microwave-popped bags—or just chomp on it at home, because movie theater popcorn + you = larger pants (sad, but likely true)."

Whoa. For those of you unfamiliar with the Points program at WW, I get 24 points a day, where the 100-kcal pack of Pop-Secret kettle corn is 2 points. Don't say I didn't warn you!

* A lesser-known but serious side-effect from eating too much popcorn is Popcorn Lung disease.

One week ...

One week into the new school year at UCSD, and already I am buried under a mountain of case studies, HBS articles, and things to do. Somehow I had this notion that going back to school was going to be a nice, relaxing way to enjoy a couple of years. What exactly was I thinking?

In better news, our good friends Gord and Lis very recently delivered a happy, healthy baby girl. We got to go over and visit little Madeline Emma just a few days after she was born. I love pictures of Kat holding babies ~



So that is life and all. Pretty much Babies and B-School around here. Hope life is treating you well in your part of the world. Cheers!

End of the Day

This is ridiculous! I have spent a good 8-10 hours from Christmas to the present trying to solve my grandmother Omie's bridge problem. I've even written a schnazzy algorithm to do it using Matlab, but it's going to be crunching all night and I'm not convinced I'll arrive at a solution that meets the criteria. I'm thus opening it up to whoever else deems him/herself worthy or bored enough to solve it:

There are 28 bridge teams that meet in groups of 4 (at 7 houses) over a span of 8 meetings. There seems to be an uproar in New Braunfels, TX, because too many teams keep playing teams they have already played. The goal is to set up a schedule such that each team has minimal repeats.

Sounds easy, right? It's not. Say team 1 plays teams 2, 3, and 4 at the first meeting. Then you have teams 5-28 to work with for the remaining 7 meetings. But team 2 now can't play team 3 or 4 ever again, in an ideal world. I've gotten to the point where I have around 300 schedules that work so that the average team plays only 6 other teams twice (and no team repeats more than once). Now I'm optimizing those schedules by rearranging the meetings (random permutations) so that none of the repeated teams play in consecutive meetings. I don't think it's possible to avoid repeats at all - a mean of 5.3 teams is the lowest I could routinely get after thousands of random trials.

If you have Matlab and you want my code, email me. :) I would love some help!

New Look for the New Year

Hi friends! Happy New Year! 2008 is shaping up to be a fun and exciting year. Elections, Olympics, a new Spears baby... Who could ask for anything more?

I added a new little widget to the blog, over on the right hand side. You can enter your email address to get automatic emails of new posts. Its a nice way keep up to date if you don't use a feedreader like Google Reader or something.

Ok, when we last left our Californians, they were heading to Arkansas for a Thompson Family Christmas. The week in Fayetteville was very relaxing and enjoyable. I have to say the time was dominated by either a) Eating wonderful food, or b) Watching to see what cute thing the 1.5 year old nephew would do next.

Here's what you would have seen:









What nerds do for New Years has been a subject of much debate for years. This year, we have shown conclusively that they have more fun than cool people. Witness, the merriment that ensued with the ol' "Post-it on the Forehead, Guess who I am" game. For the record, I was the first person to ask the right yes/no questions to narrow down my guess to "William Wilberforce"



Seriously, our friends Dinah and Raffie hosted us and a friend, Ann, from England for a most enjoyable soiree. The year is shaping up well. We'd love to hear about what you did for New Year's, too!