Les Bonnes Choses

Go Me! Itsyerbirthday! Go Me! Itsyerbirthday!

I'm taking the evening off from writing serious brain business (partly because I attribute last night's writing up until my bedtime to my inability to sleep). As soon as I finish here, I'm going to watch the Season 2 finale of Game of Thrones, which ties in nicely with the House of Stark themed birthday cake I had at lunch. I was delighted, though the Starks haven't had very good luck in the book series, so I hope it doesn't bode ill.

Anyways, I wrote just the other day about the iPhone 5, which connects nicely to a story I just read online. In short: Samsung hired some brain trust to come up with a social media marketing campaign. Unsurprisingly, it backfired. I suppose everyone is entitled to make a living, but the only purpose of marketing is to convince you to buy crap you actually don't really need. Seriously. If we really needed it, we would've evolved to sprout it out of our heads or something. Given that my job description basically entails trying to figure out how people think (literally), I really have to wonder what sort of qualifications you have to have to be a marketer, and what sort of training they get. In particular, the fact that these people don't seem to have an intuition that nobody wants to feel like they are being manipulated does nothing to improve the regard in which I hold them. Incidentally, I read yesterday that the Samsung phone being advertised actually has better technical specs than does the iPhone 5. Just saying. Full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 and an android tablet running Jellybean.

Hopefully Jellybean will give me an interesting segue for my next entry. I wonder what I'll do with that?

My summer hiatus from blogging has ended with the season. Mostly. To be sure, I was writing like a fiend. It's just that all my writing energy went to revising the academic papers that I need to get published if I am ever to get myself a job that lets me live in the same city as my wife and children. Ah, yes, and the wife and children were also with me for much of the summer. That meant that when I wasn't writing papers, I was doing stuff with my wife and children. Unfortunately, none of them blog.

So now that fall is upon us, so is the next iteration of the iPhone. The iPhone 5. Rebecca and I each got the iPhone 4 when it came out so we could take advantage of the Facetime feature. The addition of the iMessage feature, just ahead of the release of the iPhone 4S, was a welcome upgrade that didn't even require us to purchase anything. I have some friends with the 4S, and, in my opinion, it's a downgrade from the iPhone 4: the battery life is worse, and the Siri application is proof positive that a great deal of research in to natural language recognition remains to be done. Now the iPhone 5 is available for preorder, and I'm left wondering, WWJD? (what would Jobs do?) When it was first spoiled that they were messing around with the connector cable, I was nonplussed. Is this a contrivance to stimulate the economy? I cannot even imagine how many third party accessories are obsoleted by this change and will have to be replaced.  Sure, you can get an adaptor. But there's bound to be applications for which an adaptor just isn't going to work very well. For example, I just read that BMW and Mini owners will not be able to use the car's built-in iPod-Out functionality. Yeah, I know...

I've reached critical mass where I can tie together some otherwise disparate topics into a nice thematic bundle.

There will also be a number reductions in southwestern Ontario, where GO Transit and other services are available to commuters. London, Aldershot, Kitchener, Niagara Falls and other cities will see reduced Via service.

I glimpsed a headline in an old newspaper, now being used as a tray liner. It, and the accompanying by-line, indicated that the Canadian federal government was legislating more clarity in the bills that your cable and phone companies send you every month. The problem that this legislation addresses is that these bills may span multiple pages and include an Amount Owing figure that bears little resemblance to the rate you were quoted when you first subscribed. These bills include recurring equipment rental charges, extra charges for using a touch-tone phone, and, in a move that really tickles my self-reference funny-bone, even charges for receiving a bill in the first place.

I received a text message from Telus a couple days ago. I have (for the time being) a pre-paid plan with them, which I top up every couple of months, for when I'm in Canada. The idea is to avoid paying roaming charges when I visit, thereby allowing me to actually use my phone. It seemed like a good idea in my head, but maybe I should put it to paper to see if I'm actually ahead of the game by paying $25 for 250MB of data and 200 text messages for 30 days (after which time it expires, though I am left with $5 worth of calling time which lasts another 30 days).  I used the strikethrough text decoration in the previous sentence because the text message I received was to say that, as of July 17, that same $25 will now get me just 100MB of data. If I never use even 100MB of data in a 30 day period, it really doesn't matter -- I might as well call it unlimited, because I never run in to my limit. But it's the principle of it all. Plus, it actually would make a difference if the litigants in a class action lawsuit against Bell get their way. This lawsuit alleges that prepaid service is not fundamentally different from a gift card, which is not allowed to expire.


I mention this related event because I don't know that the legislation about phone/cable/utility bill clarity is actually required. I doubt many customers are terribly puzzled by these line-item charges tacked on to their monthly statements. They know very well that they are being nickel-and-dimed in a bait-and-switch routine that suggests a monthly bill of x but winds up sending out a bill of 2x. They could probably save a bit of money and fire the marketing people tasked with coming up with benign or important-sounding charges to use on their bills. Just end the charade and give them nice utilitarian names like gouging fees 1 through 8. I think the only puzzlement that most people experience when reading their bills is how some business sectors got the privilege of printing their own money.

I'm enjoying a strawberry-banana smoothie, made with two overripe pureed bananas, some frozen strawberries and some homemade yogurt that was being made even as I blogged last Friday. After reading Kelsey's blog post about making yogurt, Rebecca and I (mostly Rebecca) became obsessed with making yogurt, and I've been trying to get it right ever since. In my attempts to create a nice, warm environment for the yogurt culture to do its thing, I overheated (and killed) the yogurt twice. I've gotten it to work on two consecutive attempts in the last week, so I guess I've mostly got it figured out. I still think I should get a heating pad for the job.

Incidentally, I made the smoothie using a blender magic-bullet hack that I read about somewhere online. If you have a conventional blender and, for whatever reason, don't want to use the blender pitcher that came with it, you will probably find that the blade, gasket and ring that screws to the base of the pitcher will also conveniently fit a standard mason jar. You can, for example, make a quart of smoothie, enjoy half of it, and refrigerate the rest. Brilliant. Just make sure the gasket doesn't fall into the jar when you attach the blade, or you will have blended rubber in your food. I did that. I was frowny-face emoticon. Fortunately, I found replacement gaskets for cheap on eBay.

The other day, I forgot to mention the topic that brought me back to the computer to blog.

I had been trying to book a trip for Rebecca and myself, involving a Robert Q shuttle to Detroit, and then a flight from Detroit to NYC. I'm not a fan of planning these sorts of things. So I tried to use a London travel agent to make the arrangements. No dice. I was calling from Chicago. They don't take credit card information over the phone. Why? Because they had recently been burned by credit card fraud over the phone. The only way to book with these people is to physically go in and hand them your credit card -- much as you would do if you wanted to pay in cash. This means that, in this situation, using a credit card is strictly worse than cash, as it had no upside (e.g., not having to physically present the payment) and several downsides (e.g., interest charges, standard 3% transaction fee and additional fees imposed by the card issuer). I sympathized with the manager, who I spoke to in order to get to the bottom of the matter. Certainly, he cannot afford to bear the cost of a fraudulent transaction, as the profit margins for travel agents has become quite slim. But I find it difficult to comprehend how, with the services and technology available to facilitate financial transactions, I could not persuade someone to take my business.

Incidentally, this blog post is effectively advertising an opportunity for anyone out there with any background in electronic commerce. I won't even ask for a cut. I just want to be able to get someone to book my damn vacation because I don't get off on bargain hunting and attending to the minutiae associated with trip planning.

I was in the middle of writing a Matlab script to carry out a tedious analysis. I'll happily spend an hour doing the problem solving required to automate doing something I could otherwise tediously carry out by hand in half that time. Unfortunately, the remote computer stopped responding, and I took that as a cue to switch tasks. It's not like I don't have a dozen other things I could do anyways -- for example, update my blog before I forgot what I might want to write about.

So, I started to type lesbonnes... into my Chrome addressbar. Chrome has google instant search built into it, so when you type in the address bar, your browser is basically searching google for you automatically. And this is how I discovered that my blog has a peculiar URL neighbour. When you type "lesb..." in Chrome, the browser helpfully suggests websites starting with "lesb...". You can see where this is going? Despite that I regularly visit my own blog, Chrome's #1 suggestion was that I might be interested in visiting Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber. It's a tumblr website, not a porn site, so there was no risk (I think) in clicking the link. And indeed, as advertised, the website posts submitted photos of (presumably?) lesbians who do indeed resemble Justin Bieber. That's niche. So just a heads up for visitors from Google: double check your URL before you click "Go". But if you don't there won't be any real consequences. I don't think there's any danger of anything terribly lascivious ever showing up on that site, because a hoodie is pretty much obligatory. Also, Chrome's behaviour has nothing to do with my search history, if that's what you're thinking.

Uh, so what else?

Right. I've got an empty plate beside me. It had a hamburger on it, which I had barbecued. I feel a little icky about it because I had several bites of it before I actually looked at a cross-section of my burger and discovered that the inside was not fully cooked. I hope I don't go all Walkerton or something.

While outside barbecuing, I discovered evidence that I had suffered a mini-stroke yesterday afternoon. It appears that when I arrived home, I put my bicycle kickstand down and dismounted. Then I went to the side garage door, opened it and reached in to push the garage door opener button. Then ... I went inside. I had left my bike sitting there in the driveway overnight, and the garage door wide open. Just about two years ago, Jenni Minas sent me a Thar Be Dragons type of map of Evanston. Moving here with Rebecca and two little boys (one newborn), we lucked into a nice single family house far from any dragons. It appears Jenni's map was very accurate, if it is the case that dragons steal bicycles and lawnmowers, as is rumoured.

It is rumoured. I just said it, so it's rumoured. Go spread the word.

I was sitting at the desk in the "office area" at the back of my house last night. On my computer monitor was a walk-through on disabling superfluous notifications on my phone. Despite my personality deficiencies, I find myself with friends, some of whom live in Europe, and some of whom are night-owls. Consequently, I have had my room illuminated at odd hours in the night as the charging iPhone beside my bed notifies me about some comment or other on Facebook. So I sat back in my swivel chair and put my foot up on the desk to locate the facility on my phone to make the appropriate changes to my phone's settings.

A small dark spot moved quickly across my right peripheral vision along the lip of the desk, only to disappear underside the desktop.

I am keenly interested in how your various senses are wired together. I would wager heavily that those neurons that fire in response to rapid peripheral visual motion have a communication super-highway leading to the most ancient part of your brain stem that registers terror.

An expletive later, I was blindly spraying toxic bug spray under the desk, not for the first time that evening. The first application of what is no doubt an airborne carcinogen was to get a cocooning garden spider out of the corner of the ceiling. I asked myself, not for the first time, what the hell these damn things are doing in my house. I felt my objections, though rhetorical, were worth repeating in an open letter to the spiders and centipedes that cause me so much grief:

Dear Spiders and Centipedes,

I understand you perform a valuable service in the ecosystem. You are both predatory arthropods, and therefore can be counted on to control the populations of other pests that may otherwise damage my garden or get into my Cheerios. The problem is this: the only pests I regularly have in my house are you.

I see you in the corner, Mr. Spider. When you move into a room, I can always count on you to take up your position where the wall meets the ceiling. I knew you were in the room because I just walked through a strand of silk you cast off when you dropped from the ceiling. I didn't see the silk of course, which is why I walked into it. I never see it, because you never catch anything in it! There are no flies in the house, Mr. Spider. Why do you think that you will have better luck in the opposite corner of the room? You do not starve to death fast enough for my liking.

I see you in the bathtub, Mr. Centipede. I used to think you came up through the drains, which really creeped me out. But then I learned that you do not swim, and instead are finding yourself trapped by the too-slick enamel when you went looking for water. I resent having to look in the bathtub before I take a shower. I know you eat ants and other insects, but I really only had an ant problem for a month or two back in 2010, which I solved with a clever application of Borax. You know what Borax doesn't do? Scurry across your desk. It also helps clean laundry. Mr. Centipede, you are bloody useless at cleaning laundry. In fact, the one time I found your ilk in my laundry, it freaked me the hell out. I know that you are purported to hunt spiders, which might be construed as useful given the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, as I'm still seeing them, you seem kind of useless at carrying out even that function.

So I propose Mr. Spider go outside where the flies are, and Mr. Centipede can follow Mr. Spider out the door, and the two of you can have a little Sharks versus Jets face-off in my back yard and stay the hell out of my peripheral vision.

I walked with Jude and his cousins to school this morning before I made the drive back to Chicago. As the two older cousins fell back with their Lolo, Jude and Lydia walked just ahead of me. Crossing one of the two playgrounds on the school yard, Jude was practicing balancing along the wooden rail-tie edging as two older girls, perhaps second-graders, approached them. There was a brief exchange with one of the girls that I unfortunately didn't hear. But it left Jude flustered as I caught up to him.

"She keeps saying I'm cute," he complained, but in a way that didn't suggest that the problem was with the compliment. Unfortunately, he is not going to get any lessons in being slick from me, so he's on his own with this one.

"Good for you," I said, and touseled his hair.

Um, in other news, Apple was granted a patent for a steering wheel remote control? What the hell? Has anyone in the US patent office ever seen a single episode of Mythbusters? I'd like to see them bust the myth that the patent system has any credibility.

This one thematically goes out to my nephew Elli, who loves the cookie monster.

I had enough of a hankering for peanut butter cookies this evening that I went to the grocery store to pick up some key ingredients (namely, peanut butter). This is very uncharacteristic of me. For one thing, I hate grocery shopping. For another thing, I don't bake. In my house, Rebecca handles all the baking requirements because we have a nice little ecosystem in our family wherein she tends to like (or at least not despise) the activities that I hate. Like shopping, baking, and folding laundry. I'd like to hear C-3PO call the odds on my behaviour this evening. Then I'd turn him off again, because that character always annoyed the hell out of me.

But wait, isn't this a blog where I routinely (okay, disproportionately) post recipe sketches? Yes, it is. That's cooking. Some people cook; some people bake. The personalities required for each activity are completely different. Cooking is a slap-dash affair. Sure, you need an idea of what ingredients to combine, and maybe some general proportions. But really, anyone who rigorously follows a cookbook doesn't want to be cooking. They want to be baking.

Baking is an entirely different beast. My friend John and I learned that first hand when we joined the Regina Mundi baking club in our senior year of high school so that we could bake -- jeez, what was it? I know it was something chocolate. A mousse or something like that. Anyways, for whatever reason one afternoon we felt like we should plan to eat a chocolate dessert that week using as much of the school's resources as possible. So we joined the baking club that day, which allowed us to use the school ovens, mixing bowls, et cetera.

The ensuing dessert event probably turned out better than it might have, had we made it on our own. But that's only because the home economics teacher who supervised the baking club was a task-master. Flour, she said, needs to be spooned into the measuring cup (so as not to compact it), and then leveled off with a knife. Clearly, I learned something that afternoon, but learning something certainly didn't cause me to roll my eyes any less.

With our mission accomplished, we didn't go back to the school kitchens again. And I really haven't been much of a baker since then, either. Instead, I walk the world, doomed, to have my precisely-measured flour-based preparations fail miserably.

But that reminds me: I had promised a recipe sketch a couple weeks back. This one is a two-parter.

Part 1: spiced simple syrup.
This is a spin on a basic heavy simple syrup, which is dead easy.
In a large saucepan, combine equal parts sugar and water (say, 2 cups of each).
Measure out some amount of mulling spices (you can buy this online, or just mix up some bits of whole cinnamon, cloves, allspice, dried orange peel and anything else that smells like Christmas that isn't a pine tree). Put the mulling spices in a tea ball or a cheesecloth pouch. Drop your mulling spices in your saucepan.
Bring to a boil, whisking occasionally to get the sugar good and dissolved. Remove from heat. Let cool. Store in an appropriate vessel.
I use this stuff when I make apple chips. I also decided to use this in ...

Part 2: Fennel Salad
Finely slice up a fennel bulb (fennel is also called anise - it smells faintly of black licorice). I used a mandoline to do this. If you're creative, find a use for the stalks and fronds, but they don't go in the salad. Next, finely slice a Granny Smith apple or two. All these ingredients go in your salad bowl, by the way. Now try celery. You like celery? Good. Add it to your salad. How much? I don't know, how much do you like celery? Same goes for some dried cranberries and for some pecans, which I kind of crushed up a bit first.

Here's where the awesome happens. In a lidded jar, combine 1 parts cider vinegar, 2 parts canola oil, 1 part of that spiced simple syrup, salt and pepper to taste and maybe some lemon juice. I also find that adding a nice dollop of dijon mustard (an emulsifier) is good if  you don't want your dressing to separate. Shake to combine and pour over your salad. Toss to coat. Be amazing. Ask someone else to bring the dessert because baking is a hassle.

By the way, don't let the black licorice thing throw you off. Many people hate black licorice. I get that. I happen to love it, but Rebecca hates the stuff and loves fennel salad. And she's going to love it even more when I make it with this dressing.

You might have guessed there people in the park playing games in the dark. From what I could piece together, however, the scenario involved some kind of candy factory tour.

I was standing with a group looking over a railing into a huge vat containing tons of colourful jellybean-like candies. Arnold Schwarzenegger was some kind of health czar and either touring with the group, or else was just a disembodied voice. His comment on the candies below:

You think those candies are awesome because there are thousands of flavours. But they're not! They're thousands of LIES!

Weird things happen in public washrooms. Though I have never witnessed any of the really weird things that might go on, I have nonetheless recently been party to some odd McDonald's washroom events along Michigan's highways.

First off, I feel sufficiently self-conscious about this to want to note upfront that I am not a particular fan of the McDonalds franchise. I do, however, appreciate that these restaurants are both ubiquitous (frequently located near gas stations near highway exits) and, importantly, well-maintained. I don't think anyone wants to face the dilemma of either entering a washroom where it looks like someone exploded or risk exploding oneself.

So that explains how I found myself in McDonald's washrooms twice in recent weeks. As for what transpired:

The first story to relate will require me to set the scene. My modesty will require that you not imagine the scene too vividly. Suffice it to say, the scenario begins with me alone in the men's room using the facilities en plein air. The door opened, and a boy of about ten years entered the washroom. He saw me, and walked up beside me and said, "you're probably wondering how my shirt got ripped..."

His guess about what I was wondering at that moment couldn't possibly have been farther off the mark.

The second event occurred yesterday in Capac, MI., which is one of the last gas stations along the highway before you get to the Bluewater Bridge. The McDonald's washroom there is properly part of the gas station, and thus doesn't have that swanky McDonald's decor, nor is it particularly large. But it is at least decently well-maintained, so it has that going for it at least. Because of it's small size (Max. Occupancy: 2), one is likely to be alone in the washroom. It is thus surprising to hear another voice in the washroom.

Normally, when I hear talking in the washroom coming from a stall, it's a dad with a child.

Now you see where this is going.

There was no child. Instead, I was hearing a telemarketer who canvasses to raise money to "support the troops". How do I know? Because he was carrying out a conversation on his cell phone from a stall in a gas station bathroom. He was quite proud of his debating skills.

"...so I asked, do you support our troops? ... uh huh. Yeah, so then I said, 'Well, do you pay taxes? Did you know that your taxes go to pay for our troops?'"

It was like peeing into the twilight zone.

The part of me that can't abide stupidity wanted to yell over the door that meeting one's legal tax obligation has nothing to do with whether or not one supports a standing military because citizens have no direct say over how their individual tax dollars are allocated. But that part of me was overruled by the part of me that observed nothing can be gained by arguing with a guy placing phone calls from the crapper.

In the end, I felt the best way to voice my objection and perhaps alert the other end of the conversation to the true nature of the phone call was to wash my hands and use the air dryer. Speaking of which, I hope nobody asks that idiot to borrow his phone. That's just gross.

A friend of mine shared a link on facebook, presumably having endorsed a criminal justice petition named Tori's Law, named after Tori Stafford, a young girl who lived in a town about 30 minutes from where I grew up. The details of her murder are horrible, and I understand the outrage that people feel. One of her abductors is in prison, having plead guilty to the crime. The other is currently on trial. Anyways, the first comment on the petition reads,

We are all humans, if you decide to take another humans life, then you don't deserve to live yours.

I assume you keep coming back because you have come to appreciate my out-of-the-box thinking. This evening I stood in the kitchen, mop in hand, on hold with the telephone banking people when I got to thinking about alternative financing arrangements. By alternative, I mean using something other than a major financial institution. I am also excluding from consideration the prospect of hitting your parents up for money.

Warning: if you believe in moral absolutism, please select another link from your bookmarks and click it. Yeah, that one there -- the one with the cats.

Still here? Okay, first, to forewarn you, I don't care what you believe in. I don't have a say in it, because I wasn't there. And, frankly, the thing about religion is that it's based on faith, and therefore no set of beliefs is any more justifiable than any others, objectively speaking.

Did you know you run the risk of an overachieving Mormon changing your beliefs behind your back? No, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney's election machine managing to win over so many Republican voters. At worst, that sort of hoodwinking will persuade just enough independent voters to wreck eight years of your life, and that's nothing compared to eternity. Apparently the Mormons have been running around baptising people in absentia. Dead people, even. This is, of course, an outrage to the millions of holocaust victims who had a date with the Patriarchs and found themselves instead talking with some guy named Peter, who naturally did not have a reservation under their names. That's awkward, and so the Mormons have agreed to stop. Or at least, stop making it so obvious.

This sort of thing isn't just a spiritual problem, either. Dungeon Masters have long have had to wrestle with the problem of what happens when Paladins from different pantheons fight each other. I mean, does their protection from evil aura still work?

The offensiveness of the proxy baptisms is obvious to me. What I don't get here is why it's a serious spiritual problem. Either these baptisms are done under divine authority, or they're not. If a Supreme Being is acknowledging the baptisms, then the baptised should be thankful they escaped eternal damnation. If not, then why are we concerned with the declarations of a bunch of crackpots in Utah? Furthermore:

But the practice offends members of many other religions, especially Jews, who have expressed outrage at attempts to alter the religion of Holocaust victims because they were killed based on their beliefs.

Tada! All it took was a little bit of asshattery to bring me to the keyboard again.

Today I'm going to talk about something that was covered in one of my intro-psych classes that I probably zoned out on: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Go ahead. Check out the link in a new window. The stuff at the bottom: that's less negotiable than the stuff at the top. In other words, if you die before reaching Nirvana, that's maybe not so bad compared to, say, living the last few years of your life with CF and being unable to breathe. Note the second tier from the bottom: your immediate survival doesn't hinge on these things, but they come in a close second, and impact that lower tier in many important ways. Note also that just about every item in this second tier is a hot-button political topic. That's actually quite interesting. If you're at all interested in pursuing politics, you should probably make a mental note about that.

Anyways, I always thought the small-c conservative side was all about reducing the size of government. That is, unless, you're talking about a needlessly expensive and onerously invasive program that, if nothing else, at least gives the impression that the reigning party has got your back on at least one of these second tier items.

A quote from the linked article:

"In the U.S., interceptions have become a business model, so there are cases where large telecommunications companies have set up entire branches where 200 employees sit in a room, and all they do is assist law enforcement with interception and monitor requests, but they make money on every request that comes in."

In other words, he says, the government is paying private companies to spy. 

An experiment gone satisfactorily well. I had my fats and proteins at lunch today when I had leftover chili con carne from last night, so I was fine to spare an animal at dinner. I happened to have a bunch of potatoes, and a bunch of carrots. My first thought was the potato soup I always make, but decided against it because I always make it, which got me googling carrot soup. I found a Rachel Ray recipe for curried carrot soup, and I found a recipe for potato and carrot soup. So I blended them, just like I blend my soup

I sauteed half a yellow onion in olive oil in my pressure cooker, then added 4 shredded carrots and 2 shredded potatoes and sauteed that as well. When the onions were translucent and starting to caramelize, I added about 4 cups of chicken broth, some unknown amount of curry, salt and ground coriander. Did you know coriander is in the carrot family? I don't know how I knew that, but it's true, I just checked it out. That's probably why the taste worked out.

So anyways, my soup has probably cooled sufficiently to eat it, so I'm going to stop writing about my dinner and eat it.

This one is a public service announcement. A little light on the entertainment value. Sorry.
So here's the deal: sometimes you're writing a document that has specific word count requirements for various sections. I run into this all the time writing manuscripts. Various journals will have word limits for different sections: an abstract of no more than 250 words, an introduction of no more than 1500 words, and so on. As you type, Microsoft Word gives you the total word count for your document, so you only have an idea about whether the first section of your document fits within the allotted word count. The kludgy workaround is to copy and paste each section into a new document, which will give you the total word count for that section. Annoying. Even more annoying if you were over-budget, and have to make repeated edits and checks until you come in under the limit. Wouldn't it be great if you could get a section-by-section word count breakdown? You can. I wrote a macro to do just this. To begin, you have to make use of section breaks, which are nothing more than a means to group different sections of text together. You can insert them between any chunks of text you would like, according to your needs. Once you've done this, you can get the word count for each section with this macro:

Sub SectionWordCount()

    Dim NumSec As Integer
    Dim S As Integer
    Dim Summary As String

    NumSec = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
    Summary = "Word Count" & vbCrLf


    For S = 1 To NumSec
        Summary = Summary & "Section " & S & ": " _
          & ActiveDocument.Sections(S).Range.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticWords) _
          & vbCrLf
    Next

    Summary = Summary & "Document: " & _
      ActiveDocument.Range.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticWords)
    MsgBox Summary
End Sub

Create a new macro in MS Word, copy and paste this code into the VB Editor and you're good to go.

I don't think this one will be nearly as popular as my Catan series.

When I eat out (anywhere), I'm just as interested in reverse engineering my meal as I am in enjoying it. Moreso, perhaps. Far from having the stereotypical bachelor's* limited repertoire of meals I can cook, I've mastered a number of classics in my adult life. Lately, my best meals have been those involving a cheese sauce: macaroni and cheese, cheese and potato or broccoli soup being my go-to favourites.

The reason for this proclivity is not so I can have culinary arts as a fall-back career, but the more practical concern of being able to make something edible out of my refrigerator contents given my grocery shopping habits: First, I hate grocery shopping so in the days leading up to my grocery excursion, the foods I work seldom present an obvious menu. Second, when I do buy groceries, I go completely nuts in the produce department. On one hand, that's how the finger-waggers would say you should shop. On the other hand, it means thins in my shopping cart start expiring at random intervals over the next week or two in a manner not dissimilar to the spontaneous ejection of subatomic particles from a decaying radioactive isotope. Monitoring these decaying food items often results in questions like, "hmm, these green onions and these pears are going to have to go in the bin after tomorrow. What can I make with green onions and pears?" Hence the need to build a library of reverse-engineered food items in my head, for my required food pairings may necessitate unconventional substitutions.

One saving grace, however, has been my box-fan blow-hard 3000 (dehydrator) made to Alton Brown's specifications. After attempting to turn some overripe plum tomatoes into their sun-dried variant, I inadvertently discovered that completely dehydrated vegetables can be run through a spice mill and turned into a vegetable powder. In the case of powdered tomato, it makes pasta sauce extra tangy and thick.


 *These are the sorts of projects one can only do when living alone, and that is the sense in which I am a bachelor. I remain married to my wonderful wife.

I subscribe to both Netflix services: streaming video (which has replaced cable) and the 1 DVD service, which is more than enough to accommodate the very slow trickle of new releases I find worth watching. I often resort to adding old favourites to fill in the long gaps in between worthwhile new releases -- for example, Unbreakable, which even ranks among my wife's favourites.

The disk arrived in the mail last week and, well...

I just read to my delight that the honourable Peter Mackay, Canadian Defense Minister, wed former Miss Canada World Nazanin Afshin-Jam. Though I'm quite happy for the couple, I couldn't help but wonder whether he went with the traditional wedding limo, or planned to call the reception dinner a military exercise so the blissful couple could be whisked away to the carribean on a CF-18. Passenger jets are for suckers.

A little less than three weeks ago, I packed up for my holidays, tucking my office keys into a pouch in my extremely pockety Prism U backpack. I had forgotten about them until this morning, as I was leaving for work. I found them before leaving the house. I did not have them when I got to my office door. Thinking this was yet another case of absent-minded organization, I figured I had left them on a counter at home. When I got home, I found this not to be the case. I retraced my path to the shuttle bus stop and found my carabiner key chain on the ground in the middle of the parking lot.

So, I admit this perhaps isn't the most amazing story ever, but it seemed really triumphant at the time, because I was in a really, really sour mood until I found my keys.

Still feel this entry a little lacking? Okay, let me sweeten the pot a little by sharing a billion dollar idea I had last night. I know many people are not very keen on genetically modified organisms, but I think those people will change their tune when they consider how awesome it would be if some entrepreneurial spirit released a swarm of bees altered to inject you with Botox. Crow's feet got you down? Throw a few rocks at the hive up in the tree and wait for the magic to happen! You're welcome!

Little known fact: Before Moses brought down the ten commandments from Mount Sinai, his first challenge was to select an appropriate tablet. The usual depiction of Moses bearing two tablets illustrates that he was ultimately unable to decide between iOS and Android.