I brought home three exotic yogurts from the grocery store yesterday, and tonight my roomies and i had a taste test.  Here's how it turned out.  All yogurts were the Plain flavor.

Bufala (water buffalo) milk
Bufala di Vermont
http://bufaladivermont.com/
Taste and consistency a bit like fluffy ricotta cheese.  You can totally imagine this yogurt as a filling in an italian dish or dessert.  On later tasting (after the others had been sampled), I noticed a slight hint of bitterness.

Goat's milk
Redwood Hill Farm
http://www.redwoodhill.com/
Very creamy and rich mouthfeel.  Mild salty taste at first, and then a few seconds later a HUGE "meaty" kick as it goes down.  The big noticeable delay between the first taste and the distinct animaly aftertaste was kind of shocking in fact.

Sheep's Milk
Old Chatham Sheepherding Company
http://www.blacksheepcheese.com/
The immediate word that came to mind with this one is "grassy."  I felt like i must be tasting whatever these sheep ate.  It felt light on the tongue, but was actually the most fatty of the three varieties.

More changes.  more changes.  will explain soon.   (not enough sleep lately)

Meanwhile, I'm working on an art project and i need help from programmer friends (and others interested in data viz).

Question:  What elements of a coding (learning) project would be interesting to visualize over the course of say a month?   Anywhere from the profound to the banal.  Here are some ideas i've had (and others have suggested) thus far.

A graph could plot "lines of code written per hour" or "number and type of crashes" and even poke fun at the procrastination process by comparing those numbers with “number of times Facebook is checked.”   The data visualization framework will be built in such a way that new variables can be added and tracked over the course of the month, as new trackable behavior emerges in context.  A word/tag cloud would be an obvious possibility.

The words of the code itself could be incorporated into a visualization, maybe even pulling in content from the internet that relates to the code or vocabulary being used.

you could have a whole bunch of procedural effects
based on a whole bunch of different things
like, completed functions, # of lines code, classes, bla bla bla
its kind of a gold mine
like, the stuff gets more hectic the more lines of code are written
it could even do stuff based on what characters are typed

So now tell me yours.  feel free to get crazy.  also if you have ideas about what form the visualization would take.   I want the vizs to be meaningful/grokkable as much as possible, not just looking like sparkly scribbles.

This morning as I hear the bells ringing, I am glad to have been born.

this is a little lazy of me but i am giving you a link to my new creative project work log.   it will probably have some personal-ish stuff too, but most of the real life stuff will stay here.

http://www.rapport.moboid.com/

the post there now has updates on all the crazy shiz i'm working on at the moment!

I'm thinking about getting an eee or something like it.  Does any one have opinions/advice either way about this category of machine?  My main concerns are:

- Battery life - it should last longer than the 3 hours of my MacBook Pro
- Keyboard comfort - I have normal sized girl hands, but i don't like to angle my wrists excessively, so it needs to be fairly comfortable
- OS and storage - I will try to run Linux and freeware.   I will try.
- Price - Max out at $500

NYTimes review of the category:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/technology/personaltech/05basics.html

Everything started to make a lot more sense this year when I realized my totem animal is the 19-year-old boy.

I'm helping take care of my friend's two kids.  Her daughter is 3 years, and her son is 3 weeks.   Well, almost 4, now.

Most who know me would be pretty shocked to hear this.  I'm not a "kid person."   I'm really doing it to help my friend.... but also to face my fear.  If I can face my terror of deep water and go diving to 70 feet around a submerged wreck... I should be able to face plenty of other similar (at least no smaller) terrors, like constantly interacting with and being personally responsible for the life of a small human.  I started in April helping for a week with the newborn of another good friend, and now I'm moving up to the two-kid experience.

So I can understand a little bit better, being here day in and day out, what it's like for people (especially mothers) who do this.

One thing I noticed, which made a lot of sense, is that kids, quite obviously, take you out of yourself.  When I'm engaged with them, I "live in the moment," like what's all the rage in new age circles these days (WASP philosophy by way of Eastern religion.)  I don't think or worry about myself.  I just do what I'm gonna do without over analyzing it.  I pretend, I play, I communicate.  In a way, I cease to exist.  I become only what this other being needs me to be.  And that can be existentially fulfilling.

Add a heaping helping of social validation and biological imperative on top of that phenomenon, and you've got quite a compelling package to slip a life into.

STILL can't see myself doing that though.  It's Aunt Heather all the way, until (much) further notice.

I made my first muxtape.

This will hopefully console you all for the fact that I want to upload a photo of my ass-bruise, but can't find crop lines that would both show the magnitude of the thing, while preserving my internet propriety somewhat.

Sorry about that.

So i was supposed to be in Chicago right now, visiting my sister.
But I had a little bicycle incident last Thursday, and I postponed my trip a bit.

I was riding home along the awesome city bike path, and passed a bike shop.  I needed chain grease so I made a sudden decision to pull over.   There was no one coming toward me, so I thought I was OK, but apparently there was a guy right behind me, possibly even trying to pass me on the left.  He was so close, had no choice but to ram into me, and we both fell splayed in the middle of the bike path intersection.  
So I'm OK, but what a pain!  The swelling and pain are going away bit by bit.  I can type now, and hold a pen (i'm left handed). My main frustration is not being able to ride my bike, or do other actions that would engage my left wrist in any way.  But hopefully it'll be sufficiently healed before I have to leave for Chicago on Wednesday.  I'm not looking forward to dealing with my luggage like this.

Oh so as it turns out?  (and after 2 separate trips to Ikea at the expense of large amounts of social capital) I actually DID have the missing bed parts, in my tool chest.  I discovered them at the bottom of it while looking for a different tool.  It's a good thing too because they stopped making them!   So, I've had my bed together for a week or so now.  Two?

Also I got a TV.  And... it's HUGE.  32 inch monstrosity, bought cheap from a friend who upgraded to projector (which I'm dying to do, myself).  I told myself I'd never get another tube TV but here it sits, in the middle of my floor, because it's TOO DAMNED HEAVY to go on top of the table i intended as my TV stand.  I nearly broke the backs of 3 men - two friends and a complete stranger from down the street - getting it down to my Basement Lair.  Now I have to figure out what to put it on, and how to get it onto that.

Also, I need my Xbox back from Cindy and Derek!  I loaned it out for the Rock Band Pixies Party cuz theirs is broken.   Finally I will be able to finish the last level of Portal!

Pretty soon I'll be able to take some pictures of the new place.

Work-wise, I'm in a holding pattern for a bunch of different opportunities, contract and full time.  My cash reserves are holding out fairly well but I think I can only go about one more month like this before I need a real income.   One more month to really commit time to making my own game.  At the moment I am looking at Sims Carnival Game Creator.  It may sound cheesy, but it's from a project headed up by Rod Humble, so I'm inclined to give it a solid look.  It seems like a good drag-and-drop tool to teach myself the higher level coding/scripting concept stuff.  Kind of like GameMaker but with a better interface?  (That's what I imagine.)  Also a LOT like Gendai Games' GameSalad, which I'm also hoping to check out when the Alpha program opens.