Pizza experiment

This is probably the site that inspired me to try this experiment. I wanted to mix two foods I enjoy eating. One of them is pizza, which I didn't bother making it, since I had a frozen one I could use. So I started by ripping all the healthy ingredients off the pizza. Then, I decided to cook my second ingredient, Pogos (corn-dogs, you silly Americans). But I only half-cooked then, since I wanted to put then on the pizza while it was cooking, so they both could integrated each other's flavor.

I started cutting slices of Pogos and put then on the pizza, then put the whole thing in the oven for a while.

This is the result.

This is the result, half-eaten.

I couldn't even eat everything and didn't feel very well after having done so. It was tasty though, you just can't eat tons of it. I give this experiment 3.5 out of 5. I still prefer eating both separately.

Chocolate madness

Chocolate. Who doesn’t like chocolate? I like chocolate. I enjoy all kinds of chocolate. Dark chocolate is my favourite, it’s like classy chocolate. Well, unless it’s extremely pure...ever tried 99% pure dark chocolate? If you did, you’ll agree with me that it’s disgusting. The packaging even tells you to eat it with something else, like tea or coffee. I only like chocolate with milk, or maybe fruits, which might be why I like chocolate fondue.

Milk chocolate is so overrated. The sad thing is most people refer to milk chocolate when they talk about “chocolate”. I consider it cheap chocolate, the one you always get for Christmas or Easter, and you get tons of it, it’s not even a treat anymore.

White chocolate is the unsung hero of the chocolate family. It has lost popularity in recent years. I remember getting some when I was really young, and it was always the special chocolate, the one you wouldn’t eat too much because it was so rich, also because you only had a few of them, next to the huge pile of milk chocolate.

[random food]-flavored chocolate is overdoing it. You know those chocolate oranges you have to hit on something before eating them? Yeah, that’s not so good. I’ve had raspberry-flavored chocolate too. The concept it good, because chocolate is usually good with fruits, but the flavors mix up too quickly, and it ends up ruining everything. I don’t recommend it.

Kinder Surprise. Admit it, it’s awesome. I think I asked for one every time I went shopping with my parents, as a kid. This one isn’t so much about the chocolate though; you get a free toy inside! Oh my god! Although Kinder chocolate is still milk chocolate, I have to say it’s really tasty. As I grow older, the toys also get lamer, but you can’t beat the nostalgic aspect of this one.

Oh, I almost forgot about chocolate covered food! For example, when you get an ice cream and decide to treat yourself with something special? Yeah, dip it into the liquid chocolate and you have upgraded your ice cream from good to great. Also, the chocolate-covered cherries they give at Pacini with your bill? Genius. That’s a tip booster right there.

On a side note: PK, chocolate eggs are okay, but as long as the eggs are made out of chocolate. If that’s real egg covered in chocolate, that’s just gross, dammit!

(The picture if from a chocolate hotel room where everything is made out of chocolate. Godiva and The Bryant Park Hotel in New York teamed up for this. Madness.)

Exploring foreign sounds

Voler de ses propres ailes

I’ve been a college student for almost 2 years now. Having to travel a few hours just to get there makes one wonder: is the comfort of your parents’ home worth all the trouble? Of course, some might say it’s just a bad moment you have to endure, but then again, aren’t college years supposed to be one of the best parts of life? I feel like I’ve been missing out because of the current situation. Example: I can’t hang out until 4 in the morning because public transportation ceases all activity after 11:30pm. Sure, Kevin will offer me his couch once in a while, but I can’t always rely on that.

So I’ve been thinking of moving out for a while now. Just the thought of not spending 3 hours a day in the bus/metro gives me the impression I’ll have so much more time on my hands that I won't even know what to do with it. Yet the parents don’t seem to think it’s that simple. It’s kind of ironic though; after getting yelled at for years, threatened to be kicked out if I didn’t help out around the house enough, suddenly, when I became serious about the idea of moving out, they confronted my ideal with everything they got. Their arguments ranged from the economic situation of our country to my tendency to procrastinate. I don’t blame them; I can understand being worried about someone who has never had to deal with complete autonomy, but god dammit, I wouldn’t be the first idiot to dive into unknown responsibilities.

Anyway, I think my parents just don’t want to be responsible if I fuck up and can’t pay the rent. They seem pretty confident that I can’t make it on my own. I guess I’ll have to prove myself. We’ll see.

In other news, I just finished Tales of the Abyss. That took a while!

Third time's the charm

I got my good ol’ laptop back in September 2007. Back then it came with Windows Vista. Little did I know back then that this eye-candied OS wasn’t meant to be on this mean machine. The “Windows Vista” sticker was a trick! Although it wasn’t the best computer ever made, it was fully capable of running a mainstream OS with basic applications, or so I thought... an Intel 1.67GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM is still a decent laptop, a year and a half later, but it wasn’t enough for Vista. Oh, but I can already hear the nerd hoards, blaming me for not tweaking my settings and cleaning my registries and unused program files. Shut up, I always took care of my computer like and semi-skilled computer nerd would. The OS was unusable on Power Saver settings (what can you do when you’re in a class with no electrical output for 3 hours?), Windows Explorer crashed every now and then and most of my peripheral simply wouldn’t work with my laptop, because pretty much every company gave up on Vista support from the start. I would try to plug in my HP scanner and my computer would send me to their website, thinking I would find a driver for it. But no, the only solution HP found for my Vista/scanner problem was something like this: “No driver has been developed for the OS you are currently using. Please consider our new Vista-compatible line of products [link]”. Thanks a lot, HP. Heck, even one of my optical mouses wouldn’t work with Vista. And no, Service Pack 1 didn’t fix anything.

So I ended up thinking about how happy my life was when I was using Windows XP. Sure, XP might not be as pretty, but at least it’s fucking functional. I decided to switch from Vista Home Premium SP1 to XP Professional SP3. That was probably the best decision I made that year. Suddenly, all my performance problems disappeared, explorer didn’t crash anymore, all my peripherals worked right out of the box. No problems at all. How could Microsoft create something they call an “upgrade” if it actually feels like I have upgraded from Vista to XP? All went well until about 2 weeks ago. I started getting blue screens, right when I was studying for my mid-term exams. I did try to fix the problem by looking up the blue screen error numbers. It pretty much came up as “You have a software and/or hardware file and/or driver malfunctioning and/or corrupted.” Good luck trying to find what it was. The blue screen problems disappeared as soon as I finished my exams. Ironic.

Windows 7 has been in public beta stages for a while now. I know a few people who have been using it, and I haven’t heard anything really bad about it yet. The deal is that the OS in beta is free to download and use until the 1^st day of august. Of course, they stress out that Windows 7 is still “for testing purposes only”. What the heck, it can’t possibly be worse than Vista, right?

I have been using Windows 7 Build 7022 for a few days now. A new build came out, but that also means a new Windows install, so I guess I’ll pass until they get a major update out. The OS is a mix of Windows XP and Windows Vista, with an interface that strangely resembles to Mac’s OS. The Action Center makes any problem you might have disappear in an instant, probably the only feature that made Vista look like a more user-friendly OS compared to XP.

I have to say, having made a fresh install of Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 7, the later is by far the easiest. The only concern about installing XP or Vista is dealing with driver installations. You basically need another computer to get the drivers online if you didn’t get a CD including them with your computer (most laptops don’t come with them nowadays, companies like to pre-install all the crap) for XP or Vista, but with 7, the OS automatically detects available networks, asks for the password, and a few moments later, the OS works its magic and everything is fully functional, nothing to install, no drivers to mess with. Windows 7 wins at being user-friendly. Most people don’t like to mess with computer settings, so why not? Action Center detected a problem for my Bluetooth driver, but the “Fix it” button really did fix it. 30 seconds later, I pretty much had the same computer I had merely 3 hours earlier sans blue screens, thanks to my backed up data on my external HDD.

Compared to XP, some programs are faster on Windows 7, some are slower. I noticed Skype started up in a fraction of the time it use to take on XP and Firefox 3 (3.0.7) is a lot slower. The minimum requirements for Windows 7 are a lot higher than the ones for XP, but with my 1.5 years old laptop, it’s fairly similar. I think Microsoft finally got it right this time, but it’s still a long way until they make a final release. To quote Kevin : “ils ont encore 6 mois pour scrapper ça avant de le sortir”. Indeed.

One laptop. One year and a half. Three operating systems.