How the way I eat reflects how I live my life

Today as I sat eating my lunch I just had to chuckle at myself. I was in the middle of reading my Phonetics textbook and was fairly focused on that task but was also trying to eat my lunch (prepared by my wonderful wife). In the midst of eating I noticed that I had eaten roughly half of each item of my lunch. So my life! I have to be part of multiple things all at once and just can't focus on a single subject? I mean come on how boring would that be. Eat a sandwich all the way through without throwing in a few little bits of different flavors? What'EVEr! One of the reasons I love going to buffets is that I can just pick a small amount of dozens of things and still end up full. My love of lots of different things is also why I love leftovers. I love coming up with crazy combos of things that need to be eaten in our fridge. I guess that's sort of why I'm in school still. I just love learning little things about everything and want to be able to continue to do that and be paid to do it!

Anyway my strange eating habits aside. I wanted to share with you a fun project that I did recently (I know, I'm sharing a crafty thing... pigs still can't fly people, get over it) I have found to be extremely helpful in getting rid of clutter around my house. Using the following process I got rid of not just one but TWO normal trash bags full of papers. For a long time I've wanted to get into book scanning. Mainly because hauling 1000 page text books around isn't exactly the funnest thing in the world. I've also wanted to scan things like old journal entries, those ward directories from when I was single (only pictures I have of that time... yeah I was THAT boring or maybe I was just poor and didn't have a camera?) random papers that I've been moving from house to house. For example I went through our file cabinet and found things from my English class I took at the local community college back in Highschool! Do I want to read that paper and chuckle at myself in the future, yes, but I don't need to move it around. I'm slightly obbsessed with the fluidity between digital and physical things and how that keeps getting closer and closer (can we say replicator Mr. Spock?). Which is why I tease Megan that not only do I need a cupcake but I need a 3d scanner too so I can both print whatever I want out of plastic and "copy" whatever physical objects I want as well. 3d Xerox machine here we come! I digress. Well, a full book scanning rig can run upwards of 300$ even if you build it yourself (cameras aint cheap people). So I've been waiting on the sidelines until recently I went on this take pictures of my papers craze and got really, really, really tired of holding up my camera and dealing with lights etc.

So I googled for a solution and found this which is basically a "duh" design that took like 10 min to make and made my life full of awesome. Basically you build wedges out of a cardboard box that let the book sit at an angle to the camera and using a tripod and a sheet of glass you can "scan" pretty decent copies super fast. I used our 8 mega pixel cheap compact and the results turned out pretty good. Combined with an opensource piece of software called Scan tailor and I can produce some pretty nice PDFs of my stuff. I am working on an OCR solution (image -> text) but am probably going to have to shell out for something commercial as I don't want to deal with the hassle of tuning tesseract to actually recognize the text on some of these pages. Not to mention after the text is recognized trying to make it into a PDF with editable text (IE the original image + the text embedded) is a nightmare and I don't want to program it to make it automatic. I did play around with tesseract in python but it was sort of a hassle, image -> text no problem, it's the image -> text + PDF... yeah it may still work. Also, combine my nice hi-res photos with Carbonite and I never have to worry about losing data again. I've decided to take the plunge and purchase a year's worth of backup because when I combine Dropbox with Carbonite I get all my important data (videos of superman, digital originals of important papers) securely backed up and in most cases available on any of my computers (The select 2gb I have in my dropbox which btw if you'd like to sign up click here and we both get an extra 250mb of space for free!) . I chose Carbonite because you can backup an unlimited amount of data for roughly 5$ a month and I have a lot of data! I use Dropbox as kind of like my jump drive since my jump drive broke in half (I lost a ton of data and the most recent edit of my 30+ page paper on item creation and a TON of code). Anyway, shameless promotion aside here are some shots of my rig. Diaper boxes FTW!

A shot from my camera, it does a horrible job with white balance so everything always looks yellower. It was free :)

This is the output from the photo -> scan tailor -> Tiff -> Jpg again. Not too shabby. You really have to click on the images and see them full size to see how awesome Scan tailor is.

Also in other news Ross can now drink milk. "Whaaat?" you may say to yourself with an incredulous rising tone. For those of you who didn't know already I'm lactose intolerant. Not an "official" diagnoses but lets just say I'm 99% confident within a 1% alpha that I am. Rigorous testing produced those statistics. Side story/tangent what have you. When Megan and I started dating she loved to get ice cream and I was embarrassed to tell her no because it would make me "sick" so we'd go get some and I would pay the price later. I mean who wants to appear weak in front of a hot chick? Much less the woman they are falling hopelessly in love with. Anyway, I have now discovered the miracle of Lactaid, I can eat cereal again! For the past 5 years (since I got home from Taiwan) I have been on and off again on drinking soy milk with my breakfast but have never really found a type that I liked so I usually just skipped breakfast.

You are so jealous, yes you know you are.

Today was stake conference and while it was a little challenge for Kent I'm grateful we went. First I got to see an old friend, however briefly, which was really nice as I don't really know anyone here. Gone are my days of running into someone I know everywhere I go and I don't think those days will ever return. I told Megan "The only reason I know so many different people around Provo and at BYU is that I was in 3 different majors and like 4 different clubs, now that I'm a grad student at CU Boulder, that isn't going to happen anymore and we don't even live near campus..". Anyway, it was nice to see him and his little boy. The second thing was something that Elder Perry said (the conference was one of the "broadcast" kind). He talked about when he and his wife were trying to plan whether to accept a job offer or not. The job would have required them to move to Chicago. Lets just say that it is difficult to stay in school when I have people calling me everyday to interview with them. Let me also say that it is extremely difficult when someone calls you up and wants you to go do what you love doing and doesn't require you to have a MA or a PhD to do it. Anyway, Elder Perry shared a scripture with us and I thought I'd share the whole book. It's D&C 111.

"I, THE Lord your God, am not displeased with your coming this journey, notwithstanding your follies. I have much treasure in this city for you, for the benefit of Zion, and many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time for the benefit of Zion, through your instrumentality. Therefore, it is expedient that you should form acquaintance with men in this city, as you shall be led, and as it shall be given you. And it shall come to pass in due time that I will give this city into your hands, that you shall have power over it, insomuch that they shall not discover your secret parts; and its wealth pertaining to gold and silver shall be yours. Concern not yourselves about your debts, for I will give you power to pay them. Concern not yourselves about Zion, for I will deal mercifully with her. Tarry in this place, and in the regions round about; And the place where it is my will that you should tarry, for the main, shall be signalized unto you by the peace and power of my Spirit, that shall flow unto you. This place you may obtain by hire. And inquire diligently concerning the more ancient inhabitants and founders of this city; For there are more treasures than one for you in this city. Therefore, be ye as wise as serpents and yet without sin; and I will order all things for your good, as fast as ye are able to receive them. Amen."

There were several things that struck me while reading this but the most important was; We are in the right place. The spirit filled my entire bosom with a strong comforting emotion when I read the "it is my will that you should tarry". And that's all I need to know.