Wasting Food

It annoys me to no end to see restaurants (and customers) waste food. The demand for food worldwide has been increasing faster than our ability to produce food has increased. Why are people so wasteful?

On several occasions, I've been in Chipotle, when the person ahead of me changed their mind about their order. The Chipotle employee was left with a mostly made burrito (or whatever) that he couldn't really do anything with so they just throw it in the trash. This rubs me the wrong way because I'm someone who has voluntarily given up eating meat for the sake of the world whereas the person right next to me not only is consuming meat, but is throwing meat straight into the garbage.

I understand that the restaurant would rather please the customer so the customer comes back again at the cost of wasting some food. However, it seems kind of silly that a customer could theoretically change his mind multiple times and waste many times the actual ingredient cost of what he purchases with no penalty. I'm not exactly sure what could be done except that the customers need to change their attitude toward food.

Lama, Llama, Lllama

I was chatting with a friend today and I accidentally misspelled "llama" as "lllama" and this classic Ogden Nash poem came to mind.

'The Lama'

The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.*

-- Ogden Nash

Earth Hour

Dangit, I missed most of Earth Hour cuz I was having dinner with some friends. =( It's basically a movement that for one hour, everybody turns off their lights to reduce power consumption and raise awareness of the burden we're putting on the environment.

I'm sad I missed it. Gonna turn off my lights for the last bit of it, though. =(

Google Docs Exporting Is Terrible

I tried exporting my Google Docs resume as a PDF because I figured that was pretty platform neutral. The resulting document looked nothing like the original. So I tried exporting it as a Microsoft Word Document. The resulting file crashes Microsoft WordPad. I then tried exporting it as a Rich Text Document and the resulting document again looked nothing like the original.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the export formatting problems have to do with the use of tables.

Anyways, I guess I can just export it as HTML since that works flawlessly. It damn well better since that's what it uses to display in the browser. Beware if you're planning on using Google Docs to work with any of the other formats and you plan on using tables.

Google Docs Is Not Quite Solid

Today, I tried importing my resume from Microsoft Word into Google Docs to update it (and to avoid having to install Microsoft Word). I was impressed by how well it worked. All the tables and formatting looked about right except for the position of one small table. My disappointment only began when I tried editing it.

I first tried to add a new entry in the work experience section for my most recent job at The Collective Studios. The editor continually had issues attempting to figure out what text belonged in which bulleted list and the spacing was totally unmanageable (perhaps for the same reason). I verified over and over that the spacing was all set to single space and the text was all the same size, but I had to end up re-entering text a few times to get the spacing to be consistent.

Then I tried to fix the little table. It was utterly impossible to move it. I ended up just remaking a new version of the same table so I had better control over it.

All in all, the Google Docs editor works amazingly well, but it still can't quite compete with good old fashioned word processors like Microsoft Word.

Another Odd Dream

Last night, I remember one segment of my dreams where I had to try to memorize the answers to some sort of like fill in the blank type questions and answer them in front of a group of people. However, the fill in the blank type questions were in a language I didn't understand. It felt like Japanese (written with English characters though).

I tried and tried but couldn't remember them because they were basically gibberish to me. Then when it came time for me to answer them in front of the people, I couldn't do it. I woke up at that point and was like sweating.

I wonder if that dream was some sort of manifestation of my doubts about my ability to succeed.

Barack Obama's Amazing Speech

Today, Barack Obama delivered one of the most amazing speeches of recent years. I highly recommend listening to it or watching it. He does an awesome job of boiling down why there are still racial tensions in our country and asks us to try to find common ground to move forward. If everyone in the country would listen to this speech and think about what it meant, there would be a lot more progress in general. The people of our country really do need to unite to move forward.