(Neo pops his head over the cubicle wall into Bob's cubicle, which is decorated with his cardboard box of assorted cables. Bob is a chubby, clearly long-suffering guy with circular glasses and a bad haircut, trying to work on something at his computer.)
"Hey Bob, did you see that girl, with the-"
(Bob looks up, with a weary expression on his face as he makes the minimum and most effective effort necessary to get rid of the interruption.)
"Go away, please."
"OK"
(Neo bobs down behind the cubicle wall again and we all realize that this act is played out several times each day and Bob has learnt exactly what to say and do to get rid of Neo as quickly as possible without crossing the line and being rude.)
Even if a company can't afford pretty offices, there's no reason to put everyone to work in septic flourescent batteries. A few colour-corrected flouros mimics the feel of working next to the window! You could put in a few well-placed indoor plants, and with careful choice of colour (ie NOT prison turquoise) it feels perfectly delightful being at work. The advantage of windows is natural light and fresh air - if you can keep those coming in, it doesn't matter whether you're adjacent to the exterior wall. Colours and foliage simply enhance the feeling of calm/peace.
Yes, if you are easily distracted, have trouble getting into a mental/emotional state where you can work and think clearly, and once in "the zone" you are hyperfocused on your goal, then you may have ADD. It might be associated with hyperactivity, or with inattention/phasing out. In my case, it's associated with an astonishingly small amount of mental RAM and extreme sluggishness in the morning before my first dose of (no I don't believe in Xenu) drugs.
If you're a coffee addict or smoker, and you feel large amounts of these stimulants help you to function normally (and when you try to come off them you just CAN'T), that's more evidence that ADD may be responsible. Ask your doctor for a referral to a (good) psychiatrist!
By the way, ADD can be successfully managed with a lot less drugs and a lot more yoga, and it has been associated with people like Einstein who clearly had a "nerd personality" but definitely not ASD. So it's not a delinquency/criminal illness and it's not mental retardation and it's DEFINITELY not an excuse for lazy people to get high! (I am a Buddhist and I hate drugs - I won't even take strong herbs without a doctor's orders.) Actually, there's often a genetic cause and usually related to the ASD gene (but with a different expression in brain function).
Bring on the pink Hello Kitty labcoat for use in all those laser labs where my sparkly things are banned!
I think we're talking past each other. Knowing that your country has a primitive health system, I am relieved that you have enough money to access it. My detailed comment may have offended you - sorry, I was flattered that you took the time to reply to my offhand comment (which hardly explains the topic properly) and decided the least I could do was to provide some information for you.
One of these days, I'll get around to writing a proper article to explain how the vegetarian thing works, and then you'll be able to access it if you so choose. For the meantime, you can consider karma to be a (completely unmeasurable) field which affects our actions and is in turn affected by them. I try to keep violence the hell away from my karma. The disease thing and waiting to see if quarantine stops the chicken flu (unlikely) is just annoying!
The symptoms of protein deficiency are fatigue, irritability and lethargy followed by growth failure (in children), loss of muscle mass, swelling and immune deficiency. Your wife is not dizzy from a lack of protein. You already knew this, because you're pumping her full of protein and it's not helping - if her problem is anaemia, your "treatment" can even be considered counter-productive. Now please take her to a doctor to find out what is really wrong.
Dizziness could be a symptom of many problems. If I was a doctor (and I'm not, but I have had plenty of opportunity to make use of them for vague, chronic complaints, so I'm familiar with the procedure), I would check the state of your wife's circulatory system. They do a blood pressure test straight away, then test the blood to make sure that the body is making enough and it's not full of cholesterol (not likely to be a problem if your wife is vegan, but still quite possible if she eats eggs and milk) and a haemoglobin test is routine for women who menstruate and feel chronically weak, tired or dizzy. Finally, with dizziness as the main complaint I would test for diabetes and related problems. (Wouldn't you be mad if you were shoving tofu down your wife's throat and all along it was her chocolate habit that caused her problem?) It may also be appropriate to test for a chronic disease - these can be quite local, so you'll have to depend on your doctor's expertise. I would also ask her what her meal habits are. Someone who skips breakfast can expect to get dizzy in the mornings. Someone who eats lunch at 12 o'clock and then has nothing until dinner at 7:30 can expect to get dizzy in the evenings. If her diet seemed to lack variety or her problems persisted, another test of her vitamin and trace mineral levels would follow.
Is it just dizziness, or is it also fatigue/headaches/depression/apathy/weakness/derma titis/paleness/panic/palpiations? Think about it, make a list and tell the doctor. This is an engineering/analysis problem for a very complex system, so don't just guess based on information you picked up on TV ads for beef. For more on nutrition, see http://www.vnv.org.au/Nutrients.htm
Now, I can have all this done for free. I understand that you will probably have to pay a few hundred dollars for very thorough tests. So it is very easy for me to sit here and say that you are neglecting your wife because you don't go and pay a lot of money for something I get for free (as it happens, I pay a little less than $USA20 for all this, because I go to a very good doctor who costs about that much more than I can get refunded - but the blood tests are still free), but if you loved her enough to buy her a few thousand dollars worth of diamond, then this should be nothing - it's a matter of her health and it's definitely not a few thousand dollars!
I'm not going to get into an argument about catching salmonella from vegetables. Yes it's possible for germs to come to rest on vegetables. It almost exlusively occurs when vegetables are stored underneath festering dead flesh in a refrigerator, but it could happen any way you care to imagine. Vegetables do not have a force field around them. I just want to suggest that if hepatitis A is a concern for you, it would probably be wise to consider vaccination. The schedule in my country is free vaccination against hepatits B from birth and a moderately expensive round of hepatitis A recommended when travelling. So, I can only assume that you have access to hepatitis A vaccination for a moderate expense (I don't travel, but off the top of my head, it's somehwere in $20-$50 times about 3 injections.)
When I started undergraduate law/science (in Aussieland, 16yo high school graduates can go straight into a law or medicine degree) I was so excited about my shiny laptop computer.
I think I took it to my first day of school, and no more.
Laptops are useless in lectures. They're too heavy to sit on the little desks properly. They slide off and especially in old theatres, the little desk goes down, taking the computer with it.
Laptops are awful for taking notes. You've got to start it up, get the right programme going (and it might crash etc) and then you're the dude tapping away in the theatre while everyone else is trying to listen to a lecturer with a funny accent talking about obscure technical stuff. Also, the screen is distracting.
Laptops don't last the day. You've got to do several hours of lectures, study and tutorials each day, and you might not have time to go home and plug in. There are hardly any plugs for computers in the library (but plenty of computers) and maybe one or two spare in an awkward corner of the computer lab.
My campus has no wireless anywhere. If you want internet/intranet/course stuff, you have to log in on one of the many computers in the many labs and libaries. So the only other option is to use 3G on my phone or network my phone to my computer - not worth it.
Computers are heavy but books are light.
Computers are fragile but books are not - spiral notebooks are not failsafe (the metal spiral thingy tends to get out of shape) but they're still an improvement and they only cost a dollar or two for your trouble. You can't get your backpack rained on if it's got a computer in it. You also can't throw it around, have it fall off a desk, or take your eyes off it for a second.
For maths/science lectures, you want to take your notes by hand so you can draw wavefunctions, enter equations with funny symbols and calculus etc. Otherwise you've got to spend a few minutes and take up more space with more gadgets and gizmos.
Filing paper is easier than filing computer files. Or, at least it's not harder.
I've got my own gorgeous Compaq widescreen notebook useful for surfing slashdot, obtaining class notes, participating in discussion (assignments and class material), getting maths things like trig identities, reading background info, buying textbooks from Amazon... just your normal student computer use. But as for taking notes and writing weekly assignments, I don't think it's worth my while. Even using TeXmacs for assignments, it's not worth taking the time (since most of my assignment work is scribbling and crossing out and scribbling again), better to save that formal stuff for only the biggest assignments and published works.
I've even found that at my university, it's not worth taking my own computer to computer labs. The computers at the lab can have all sorts of expensive IDEs and cool software that I can't afford. The exception is Scilab labs, where the advantage is computational crunch, but often you need Maple, Mathematica, Matlab and oh, maybe Fortran and Scilab within a year. Easier to just run them on the big computer which has all we need. There's an advantage in having a computer at home if you want to write at home, then ftp your files over to school and telnet in to run them.
So it helps to have your own computer, but it needn't be portable, and if you don't have one you can do just as well using the labs.
And for those who aren't willing (able) to pay for organic beef, just eat vegetables! It's got less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less prions, less pesticides, less contribution to creating a disease that's going to kill us all (SARS, bird flu, staph, BSE, etc.)
And it's yummier and you feel better - that's why the hare krishnas dance! (Although I can't say I like their fashion sense...)
No, they're great. But in New South Wales (the part of Australia where Sydney is) religious discrimination is totally OK except if discriminating against a religious group is really just your way of being racist. There's a precedent where a Jewish guy was discriminated against, but the judge found that Jews are a race for the purpose of anti-discrimination law.
In the same way, a no-muslim law would be considered anti-Arab and anti-Indonesian (whatever you happen to be that's mostly muslim).
If, however, you're a tall, blonde Buddhist, you're totally unable to pursue action against discrimination, victimisation and vilification (and it happens!) Most states and territories have written laws to cover this gap in the Commonwealth law. New South Wales has not.
But Australia's Commonwealth anti-discrimination law is supposed to be our version of the International treaty. (I used to be a law student and after my most recent victimisation and vilification episode, I looked it up.) And the treaty explicitly states that religious discrimination is right out.
So, yes, I too have experienced religious discrimination, but not in an employment situation.
It seems like your work isn't being respected when people want to criticize you about how you dress and that's true.
Good bosses won't tell you how to dress and will accept your input. Even medium quality bosses will accept the clothing difference between a guy at a desk and a guy in the ceiling.
But we don't all get the luxury of good bosses. We get marketing managers who transfer to IT thinking the "multimedia database group" will look good on the resume and have no idea how to manage geeks or why they dress so weird.
So, to avoid being negatively judged based on appearance, and to gain the opportunity to be positively judged based on ability, it's necessary to let them see you dressed for "business". In this situation, dressing for work is not an exercise in fashion or comfort, but simply a matter of putting on a uniform for a few hours so that it's easier for the unenlightened to see you as part of the team.
Keep your subculture fashion for social occasions, and your career will benefit.
Well now that we're "friends", I'd suggest you go have a chat with the old Italian guys sitting out front of your local caffe and then with the guru in the nearest wholesale place.
The best way to learn how to make coffee is to learn how to drink it. The rest follows.
Re:Everything bad for you is good for you again
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Drink Decaf and Die
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· Score: 1
When I had lost a lot of weight I had to learn a lot about eating habits to gain it back.
Although I had lost the weight for mostly physiological and nutritional reasons, anorexia sort of kicks in anyway. Something about psychological feedback and the famine mentality.
The initial step was to graze, which is associated with weight gain.
The next step was to stop grazing. I had to stop what I was doing, sit down and eat at a table. That's the hard bit, and it's people who eat in this way who are healthiest.
There's no secret to what you eat and when - you just need to stop to enjoy your meal and the rest sort of follows. Foodies can get a bit overweight, but only eating when totally focussed on it means they get kind of bored with actually overeating.
The problem with most processed food isn't that it's actively bad - it just isn't good.
My idea of a lolly is halva or marzipan. At any shop, you can see that lolly means sugar, jelly and a bit of flavouring. Nice start, but there's nothing healthy in that little snack.
Now suppose you have a sandwich for your next meal. Mine's on good brown bread, yours is on supermarket white. Yours has had the fibre and vitamins removed. Also, I'm having hommus and vegies, while you're having plastic cheese and sausage. You've got a bit of vitamins, but I've got more. Mine also tastes better, but you've forgotten about that. Also, yours likely has trans fats in it. Quite common now that they don't bother raising the bread anymore, but sort of whip it and cut it into rectangles.
I enjoy juice. It's made out of fruits. Soft drinks look soft of like juice to a toddler who sees them and gets excited, but they're just flavoured sweet water with colouring in.
Convenience packaged foods might be mostly "safe" but if that's how you usually eat, you're looking at malnutrition, which is definitely bad.
If tofu with its phytoestrogens (like estrogen but weaker) gives you mood swings, then I can only hope you are staying away from eggs and milk, which are full of real hormones. And animal flesh for that matter.
Be careful of leafy green vegies that may have phytoestrogens in them.
I accept that the parent has difficulty tolerating tofu. Personally, I have had a lot of trouble with certain fruit, and my own father, like 10% of the population is lactose intolerant.
But this is not something I've ever heard of and it's possible that the parent has a very unusual, even unique condition, not something that would be considered a health risk for the same reason that peanut butter is not considered a health risk: it's quite healthy for the billions of the rest of us.
In the government town I had to move to for school, if you order espresso, you're likely to get half-espresso, half water. They have to fill up the cup so the customer doesn't feel ripped off. Oddly, if you have a conversation with them, explain that you're used to meditteranian strength and not going to be disappointed with the normal size, they make quite good coffee.
Generally, it's cappuccino at breakfast, espresso (or macchiato etc) at any other time, especially dessert...and during the afternoon you might have something sweet and milky with your cake or order "affogato" (coffee with ice cream in) and put it down to personality.
I usually stick with cappuccino as late as morning tea or even lunch time if it's the first one for the day. Then it's espresso only, with occasional macchiato if I feel like something gentler.
We certainly do suffer from regional differences. Over here, everyone will serve you espresso, including the local Turkish (although you have to remind them you'll divorce your husband if they serve dishwater because you happen to be blonde). After hours, I go for caffe to the gelateria and nobody thinks that's weird. A casual restaurant that didn't serve espresso would just not be popular, although many do plungers for those who prefer a larger drink.
I enjoy plungers, but you have a different blend in them - lighter for a start, but probably a different source, too. I'm with you on Americano, or "long black"... I just couldn't comprehend that Americans would order watered down coffee and call it American, thus confirming every joke about Americans drinking watered down coffee.
I'm not sure if that's a case of Americans with big hair taking themselves too seriously, or a healthy ability to laugh at yourselves. I'll guess a little from column A, a little from column B.
Re:Blame Evolution: It's In Our Genes
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Drink Decaf and Die
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· Score: 2, Funny
Since coffee is indiginous to Ethiopia where humans appear to have evolved*, I'm glad that it's such a natural food stuff and totally good for me.
The researchers have clearly made a mistake. Pass the goofballs.
*Humans from Kansas are known not to have evolved.
The parent asserts that traditional remedies are healthier and is flamed with talk of leaches and bibles under the bed.
The parent is from India and speaks of Turmeric. India was never Christian and didn't have a European style dark age. Instead, doctors slowly experimented with herbs and dosages to create a manual of natural medicine.
The research done that established that turmeric and ginger are healthy was much better than the research that asserts that decaf is not. If looking for a dietary change, I'll take the advice of the ayurveda over Science By Press Release any day.
As a vegan, I can promise you that drinking soy milk won't make you grow big girly breasts. If it did, I assure you it would be more popular with the ladies and far less popular with my macho hairy boyfriend.
Do you see your girlfriend, sister or colleague hooked on tofu for no good reason but looking FABULOUS lately?
Some things that do have this affect are: fennel (eaten by Roman warriors because it directs weight gain into muscle mass), barley (a majoy ingredient in beer), fenugreek (a stinky Indian herb some people like), and vitamin E (which is apparently the "beauty" vitamin).
Also, tofu doesn't cause cancer - it's hardly a cure but it's the sort of thing you eat if you hope to catch out the free radicals before they go injuring your DNA.
There's sometimes talk of soymilk being "unnatural" and "soy beans are traditionally only ever eaten fermented" - not true. Some people are allergic to soy, but then agian I'm allergic to my country's national flower, and I'd say the latter is much more common than the former.
Given the way that they raise and process animals and given that you can get good tofu at the supermarket and it's usually organic and always labelled GMO Free, I'd say eat tofu.
Even more important than the freshness of the roast is the freshness of the grind. The roast can be a week or two old or even a month if it's been properly vacuum packed, but once ground, the coffee will start going stale if not brewed within a minute.
My grinder's right there next to my Gaggia Classic. When the light goes out to let me know everything's heated up properly, that's when I start grinding. And that's why you've never been to a cafe that does the grinding out back once an hour and then brings it in to be scooped up.
We call it "long black" and tend to laugh at the person ordering it who would rather drink dishwater for a long time than have a short moment of joyous coffee ecstasy. (That's ecstasy the emotion, not eccies the drug which is very bad for you if you get in the habit and which I suggest you avoid. Just so you're all clear.)
We tend to go by the names "long black" and "short black", although if I get a blank stare when I order espresso, I know the barista is going by the size of the cup and I should leave.
How is Starbucks a specialty shop? What do they do that is special?
If I go to a roaster, I expect a very fresh, careful, passionately produced coffee made with love.
But of course Starbucks isn't a roaster... their stuff is no different from the Lavazza - made by a company, served by different people who also work for a company.
Also, as a barista, I'm curious to know what you think an "Americano" is. Just in case an Americano ever asks me for one...
Stop it, troll! Your post is hurting my brain on so many levels!
Gaahh... paper filters for espresso at 17 bars! Doing the milk at the same time as the coffee! Spending over $1000 on a fully automatic espresso machine and not knowing what espresso is! Not realizing espresso only takes a few seconds! Wanting coffee to be good but not wanting to touch it, feel it, interact with it and attach the handle, carefully watch the crema settle, turn it off when the crema starts to fade. GAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!
If anyone ever deserved the score 5, Troll, my friend, it is you.
Starbucks is cheap, stale, tasteless foul rubbish sold to people who want the Arabica brand name because they read somewhere that it's better but are happy to drink whatever is sold to them because they can barely taste the coffee once it's been filled with cream, ice cream, caramel, vanilla and sugar with chocolate poured over the top.
People go to Starbucks because it's closest, on impulse, or because it's the only place with a couch and good lighting. I agree with the couch and good lighting, but they sell awful coffee undeserving of the name!
Slashdot Mirror
You're Bob from Computer Boy aren't you?
(Neo pops his head over the cubicle wall into Bob's cubicle, which is decorated with his cardboard box of assorted cables. Bob is a chubby, clearly long-suffering guy with circular glasses and a bad haircut, trying to work on something at his computer.)
"Hey Bob, did you see that girl, with the-"
(Bob looks up, with a weary expression on his face as he makes the minimum and most effective effort necessary to get rid of the interruption.)
"Go away, please."
"OK"
(Neo bobs down behind the cubicle wall again and we all realize that this act is played out several times each day and Bob has learnt exactly what to say and do to get rid of Neo as quickly as possible without crossing the line and being rude.)
Even if a company can't afford pretty offices, there's no reason to put everyone to work in septic flourescent batteries. A few colour-corrected flouros mimics the feel of working next to the window! You could put in a few well-placed indoor plants, and with careful choice of colour (ie NOT prison turquoise) it feels perfectly delightful being at work. The advantage of windows is natural light and fresh air - if you can keep those coming in, it doesn't matter whether you're adjacent to the exterior wall. Colours and foliage simply enhance the feeling of calm/peace.
SNAP!!!
Yes, if you are easily distracted, have trouble getting into a mental/emotional state where you can work and think clearly, and once in "the zone" you are hyperfocused on your goal, then you may have ADD. It might be associated with hyperactivity, or with inattention/phasing out. In my case, it's associated with an astonishingly small amount of mental RAM and extreme sluggishness in the morning before my first dose of (no I don't believe in Xenu) drugs.
If you're a coffee addict or smoker, and you feel large amounts of these stimulants help you to function normally (and when you try to come off them you just CAN'T), that's more evidence that ADD may be responsible. Ask your doctor for a referral to a (good) psychiatrist!
By the way, ADD can be successfully managed with a lot less drugs and a lot more yoga, and it has been associated with people like Einstein who clearly had a "nerd personality" but definitely not ASD. So it's not a delinquency/criminal illness and it's not mental retardation and it's DEFINITELY not an excuse for lazy people to get high! (I am a Buddhist and I hate drugs - I won't even take strong herbs without a doctor's orders.) Actually, there's often a genetic cause and usually related to the ASD gene (but with a different expression in brain function).
Bring on the pink Hello Kitty labcoat for use in all those laser labs where my sparkly things are banned!
xx
Rocket
I think we're talking past each other. Knowing that your country has a primitive health system, I am relieved that you have enough money to access it. My detailed comment may have offended you - sorry, I was flattered that you took the time to reply to my offhand comment (which hardly explains the topic properly) and decided the least I could do was to provide some information for you.
One of these days, I'll get around to writing a proper article to explain how the vegetarian thing works, and then you'll be able to access it if you so choose. For the meantime, you can consider karma to be a (completely unmeasurable) field which affects our actions and is in turn affected by them. I try to keep violence the hell away from my karma. The disease thing and waiting to see if quarantine stops the chicken flu (unlikely) is just annoying!
The symptoms of protein deficiency are fatigue, irritability and lethargy followed by growth failure (in children), loss of muscle mass, swelling and immune deficiency. Your wife is not dizzy from a lack of protein. You already knew this, because you're pumping her full of protein and it's not helping - if her problem is anaemia, your "treatment" can even be considered counter-productive. Now please take her to a doctor to find out what is really wrong.
a titis/paleness/panic/palpiations? Think about it, make a list and tell the doctor. This is an engineering/analysis problem for a very complex system, so don't just guess based on information you picked up on TV ads for beef. For more on nutrition, see http://www.vnv.org.au/Nutrients.htm
Dizziness could be a symptom of many problems. If I was a doctor (and I'm not, but I have had plenty of opportunity to make use of them for vague, chronic complaints, so I'm familiar with the procedure), I would check the state of your wife's circulatory system. They do a blood pressure test straight away, then test the blood to make sure that the body is making enough and it's not full of cholesterol (not likely to be a problem if your wife is vegan, but still quite possible if she eats eggs and milk) and a haemoglobin test is routine for women who menstruate and feel chronically weak, tired or dizzy. Finally, with dizziness as the main complaint I would test for diabetes and related problems. (Wouldn't you be mad if you were shoving tofu down your wife's throat and all along it was her chocolate habit that caused her problem?) It may also be appropriate to test for a chronic disease - these can be quite local, so you'll have to depend on your doctor's expertise. I would also ask her what her meal habits are. Someone who skips breakfast can expect to get dizzy in the mornings. Someone who eats lunch at 12 o'clock and then has nothing until dinner at 7:30 can expect to get dizzy in the evenings. If her diet seemed to lack variety or her problems persisted, another test of her vitamin and trace mineral levels would follow.
Is it just dizziness, or is it also fatigue/headaches/depression/apathy/weakness/derm
Now, I can have all this done for free. I understand that you will probably have to pay a few hundred dollars for very thorough tests. So it is very easy for me to sit here and say that you are neglecting your wife because you don't go and pay a lot of money for something I get for free (as it happens, I pay a little less than $USA20 for all this, because I go to a very good doctor who costs about that much more than I can get refunded - but the blood tests are still free), but if you loved her enough to buy her a few thousand dollars worth of diamond, then this should be nothing - it's a matter of her health and it's definitely not a few thousand dollars!
I'm not going to get into an argument about catching salmonella from vegetables. Yes it's possible for germs to come to rest on vegetables. It almost exlusively occurs when vegetables are stored underneath festering dead flesh in a refrigerator, but it could happen any way you care to imagine. Vegetables do not have a force field around them. I just want to suggest that if hepatitis A is a concern for you, it would probably be wise to consider vaccination. The schedule in my country is free vaccination against hepatits B from birth and a moderately expensive round of hepatitis A recommended when travelling. So, I can only assume that you have access to hepatitis A vaccination for a moderate expense (I don't travel, but off the top of my head, it's somehwere in $20-$50 times about 3 injections.)
When I started undergraduate law/science (in Aussieland, 16yo high school graduates can go straight into a law or medicine degree) I was so excited about my shiny laptop computer.
I think I took it to my first day of school, and no more.
Laptops are useless in lectures. They're too heavy to sit on the little desks properly. They slide off and especially in old theatres, the little desk goes down, taking the computer with it.
Laptops are awful for taking notes. You've got to start it up, get the right programme going (and it might crash etc) and then you're the dude tapping away in the theatre while everyone else is trying to listen to a lecturer with a funny accent talking about obscure technical stuff. Also, the screen is distracting.
Laptops don't last the day. You've got to do several hours of lectures, study and tutorials each day, and you might not have time to go home and plug in. There are hardly any plugs for computers in the library (but plenty of computers) and maybe one or two spare in an awkward corner of the computer lab.
My campus has no wireless anywhere. If you want internet/intranet/course stuff, you have to log in on one of the many computers in the many labs and libaries. So the only other option is to use 3G on my phone or network my phone to my computer - not worth it.
Computers are heavy but books are light.
Computers are fragile but books are not - spiral notebooks are not failsafe (the metal spiral thingy tends to get out of shape) but they're still an improvement and they only cost a dollar or two for your trouble. You can't get your backpack rained on if it's got a computer in it. You also can't throw it around, have it fall off a desk, or take your eyes off it for a second.
For maths/science lectures, you want to take your notes by hand so you can draw wavefunctions, enter equations with funny symbols and calculus etc. Otherwise you've got to spend a few minutes and take up more space with more gadgets and gizmos.
Filing paper is easier than filing computer files. Or, at least it's not harder.
I've got my own gorgeous Compaq widescreen notebook useful for surfing slashdot, obtaining class notes, participating in discussion (assignments and class material), getting maths things like trig identities, reading background info, buying textbooks from Amazon... just your normal student computer use. But as for taking notes and writing weekly assignments, I don't think it's worth my while. Even using TeXmacs for assignments, it's not worth taking the time (since most of my assignment work is scribbling and crossing out and scribbling again), better to save that formal stuff for only the biggest assignments and published works.
I've even found that at my university, it's not worth taking my own computer to computer labs. The computers at the lab can have all sorts of expensive IDEs and cool software that I can't afford. The exception is Scilab labs, where the advantage is computational crunch, but often you need Maple, Mathematica, Matlab and oh, maybe Fortran and Scilab within a year. Easier to just run them on the big computer which has all we need. There's an advantage in having a computer at home if you want to write at home, then ftp your files over to school and telnet in to run them.
So it helps to have your own computer, but it needn't be portable, and if you don't have one you can do just as well using the labs.
And it's yummier and you feel better - that's why the hare krishnas dance! (Although I can't say I like their fashion sense...)
$@%#^* Christians!
No, they're great. But in New South Wales (the part of Australia where Sydney is) religious discrimination is totally OK except if discriminating against a religious group is really just your way of being racist. There's a precedent where a Jewish guy was discriminated against, but the judge found that Jews are a race for the purpose of anti-discrimination law.
In the same way, a no-muslim law would be considered anti-Arab and anti-Indonesian (whatever you happen to be that's mostly muslim).
If, however, you're a tall, blonde Buddhist, you're totally unable to pursue action against discrimination, victimisation and vilification (and it happens!) Most states and territories have written laws to cover this gap in the Commonwealth law. New South Wales has not.
But Australia's Commonwealth anti-discrimination law is supposed to be our version of the International treaty. (I used to be a law student and after my most recent victimisation and vilification episode, I looked it up.) And the treaty explicitly states that religious discrimination is right out.
So, yes, I too have experienced religious discrimination, but not in an employment situation.
I've written a bit about this subject.
It seems like your work isn't being respected when people want to criticize you about how you dress and that's true.
Good bosses won't tell you how to dress and will accept your input. Even medium quality bosses will accept the clothing difference between a guy at a desk and a guy in the ceiling.
But we don't all get the luxury of good bosses. We get marketing managers who transfer to IT thinking the "multimedia database group" will look good on the resume and have no idea how to manage geeks or why they dress so weird.
So, to avoid being negatively judged based on appearance, and to gain the opportunity to be positively judged based on ability, it's necessary to let them see you dressed for "business". In this situation, dressing for work is not an exercise in fashion or comfort, but simply a matter of putting on a uniform for a few hours so that it's easier for the unenlightened to see you as part of the team.
Keep your subculture fashion for social occasions, and your career will benefit.
Well now that we're "friends", I'd suggest you go have a chat with the old Italian guys sitting out front of your local caffe and then with the guru in the nearest wholesale place.
The best way to learn how to make coffee is to learn how to drink it. The rest follows.
When I had lost a lot of weight I had to learn a lot about eating habits to gain it back.
Although I had lost the weight for mostly physiological and nutritional reasons, anorexia sort of kicks in anyway. Something about psychological feedback and the famine mentality.
The initial step was to graze, which is associated with weight gain.
The next step was to stop grazing. I had to stop what I was doing, sit down and eat at a table. That's the hard bit, and it's people who eat in this way who are healthiest.
There's no secret to what you eat and when - you just need to stop to enjoy your meal and the rest sort of follows. Foodies can get a bit overweight, but only eating when totally focussed on it means they get kind of bored with actually overeating.
The problem with most processed food isn't that it's actively bad - it just isn't good.
My idea of a lolly is halva or marzipan. At any shop, you can see that lolly means sugar, jelly and a bit of flavouring. Nice start, but there's nothing healthy in that little snack.
Now suppose you have a sandwich for your next meal. Mine's on good brown bread, yours is on supermarket white. Yours has had the fibre and vitamins removed. Also, I'm having hommus and vegies, while you're having plastic cheese and sausage. You've got a bit of vitamins, but I've got more. Mine also tastes better, but you've forgotten about that. Also, yours likely has trans fats in it. Quite common now that they don't bother raising the bread anymore, but sort of whip it and cut it into rectangles.
I enjoy juice. It's made out of fruits. Soft drinks look soft of like juice to a toddler who sees them and gets excited, but they're just flavoured sweet water with colouring in.
Convenience packaged foods might be mostly "safe" but if that's how you usually eat, you're looking at malnutrition, which is definitely bad.
If tofu with its phytoestrogens (like estrogen but weaker) gives you mood swings, then I can only hope you are staying away from eggs and milk, which are full of real hormones. And animal flesh for that matter.
Be careful of leafy green vegies that may have phytoestrogens in them.
I accept that the parent has difficulty tolerating tofu. Personally, I have had a lot of trouble with certain fruit, and my own father, like 10% of the population is lactose intolerant.
But this is not something I've ever heard of and it's possible that the parent has a very unusual, even unique condition, not something that would be considered a health risk for the same reason that peanut butter is not considered a health risk: it's quite healthy for the billions of the rest of us.
In the government town I had to move to for school, if you order espresso, you're likely to get half-espresso, half water. They have to fill up the cup so the customer doesn't feel ripped off. Oddly, if you have a conversation with them, explain that you're used to meditteranian strength and not going to be disappointed with the normal size, they make quite good coffee.
...and during the afternoon you might have something sweet and milky with your cake or order "affogato" (coffee with ice cream in) and put it down to personality.
Generally, it's cappuccino at breakfast, espresso (or macchiato etc) at any other time, especially dessert
I usually stick with cappuccino as late as morning tea or even lunch time if it's the first one for the day. Then it's espresso only, with occasional macchiato if I feel like something gentler.
We certainly do suffer from regional differences. Over here, everyone will serve you espresso, including the local Turkish (although you have to remind them you'll divorce your husband if they serve dishwater because you happen to be blonde). After hours, I go for caffe to the gelateria and nobody thinks that's weird. A casual restaurant that didn't serve espresso would just not be popular, although many do plungers for those who prefer a larger drink.
I enjoy plungers, but you have a different blend in them - lighter for a start, but probably a different source, too. I'm with you on Americano, or "long black"... I just couldn't comprehend that Americans would order watered down coffee and call it American, thus confirming every joke about Americans drinking watered down coffee.
I'm not sure if that's a case of Americans with big hair taking themselves too seriously, or a healthy ability to laugh at yourselves. I'll guess a little from column A, a little from column B.
Since coffee is indiginous to Ethiopia where humans appear to have evolved*, I'm glad that it's such a natural food stuff and totally good for me.
The researchers have clearly made a mistake. Pass the goofballs.
*Humans from Kansas are known not to have evolved.
The parent asserts that traditional remedies are healthier and is flamed with talk of leaches and bibles under the bed.
The parent is from India and speaks of Turmeric. India was never Christian and didn't have a European style dark age. Instead, doctors slowly experimented with herbs and dosages to create a manual of natural medicine.
The research done that established that turmeric and ginger are healthy was much better than the research that asserts that decaf is not. If looking for a dietary change, I'll take the advice of the ayurveda over Science By Press Release any day.
As a vegan, I can promise you that drinking soy milk won't make you grow big girly breasts. If it did, I assure you it would be more popular with the ladies and far less popular with my macho hairy boyfriend.
Do you see your girlfriend, sister or colleague hooked on tofu for no good reason but looking FABULOUS lately?
Some things that do have this affect are: fennel (eaten by Roman warriors because it directs weight gain into muscle mass), barley (a majoy ingredient in beer), fenugreek (a stinky Indian herb some people like), and vitamin E (which is apparently the "beauty" vitamin).
Also, tofu doesn't cause cancer - it's hardly a cure but it's the sort of thing you eat if you hope to catch out the free radicals before they go injuring your DNA.
There's sometimes talk of soymilk being "unnatural" and "soy beans are traditionally only ever eaten fermented" - not true. Some people are allergic to soy, but then agian I'm allergic to my country's national flower, and I'd say the latter is much more common than the former.
Given the way that they raise and process animals and given that you can get good tofu at the supermarket and it's usually organic and always labelled GMO Free, I'd say eat tofu.
Even more important than the freshness of the roast is the freshness of the grind. The roast can be a week or two old or even a month if it's been properly vacuum packed, but once ground, the coffee will start going stale if not brewed within a minute.
My grinder's right there next to my Gaggia Classic. When the light goes out to let me know everything's heated up properly, that's when I start grinding. And that's why you've never been to a cafe that does the grinding out back once an hour and then brings it in to be scooped up.
We call it "long black" and tend to laugh at the person ordering it who would rather drink dishwater for a long time than have a short moment of joyous coffee ecstasy. (That's ecstasy the emotion, not eccies the drug which is very bad for you if you get in the habit and which I suggest you avoid. Just so you're all clear.)
We tend to go by the names "long black" and "short black", although if I get a blank stare when I order espresso, I know the barista is going by the size of the cup and I should leave.
I'm so glad I know that now.
I'm confused...
How is Starbucks a specialty shop? What do they do that is special?
If I go to a roaster, I expect a very fresh, careful, passionately produced coffee made with love.
But of course Starbucks isn't a roaster... their stuff is no different from the Lavazza - made by a company, served by different people who also work for a company.
Also, as a barista, I'm curious to know what you think an "Americano" is. Just in case an Americano ever asks me for one...
What's a regular coffee?
Stop it, troll! Your post is hurting my brain on so many levels!
Gaahh... paper filters for espresso at 17 bars! Doing the milk at the same time as the coffee! Spending over $1000 on a fully automatic espresso machine and not knowing what espresso is! Not realizing espresso only takes a few seconds! Wanting coffee to be good but not wanting to touch it, feel it, interact with it and attach the handle, carefully watch the crema settle, turn it off when the crema starts to fade. GAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!
If anyone ever deserved the score 5, Troll, my friend, it is you.
Kisses!
Rocket
Let's just get this over with straight away.
Starbucks is cheap, stale, tasteless foul rubbish sold to people who want the Arabica brand name because they read somewhere that it's better but are happy to drink whatever is sold to them because they can barely taste the coffee once it's been filled with cream, ice cream, caramel, vanilla and sugar with chocolate poured over the top.
People go to Starbucks because it's closest, on impulse, or because it's the only place with a couch and good lighting. I agree with the couch and good lighting, but they sell awful coffee undeserving of the name!