Random stuff

I wish there was a way to just import my Google calendar onto my iPhone. It supports iCal, which I never uesd because I have a PC, but I don't see any way to make it recognize the data on the calendar I already have. It's so complicated that I kind of don't want to have to redo it manually, but it would be nice to be able to access my schedule wherever I was.

My parents got me some beautiful All-Clad cookware for this past Christmas, and I'm so in love with it that whenever anybody on Food Network, which I watch a lot of when I'm at home, uses the stuff I recognize it immediately and am pleased. :-) Apparently a lot of TV chefs use it, including the lovely Giada di Laurentiis, whom I love because she's tiny and gorgeous and Italian. Oh, and she cooks yummy stuff. Yeah, that too. :-)

I made an artichoke pie for my parents last night. It came out very nicely, except I used marinated artichoke hearts instead of plain ones by mistake, and the flavor of that marinade kind of overpowered everything else. Ah, well. It was still pretty good.

Today is my last day at home. I didn't use the free time nearly as well as I'd hoped I would, but i think my last week of work was so intense that I was just too blasted to really focus much. At least I feel recharged a little, so I can go back to working for real again.
 

Way to go, Susan Boyle

I read something really cool today. Apparently on "Britain's Got Talent," a TV show where British people show off their performative talents, there was an unlikely woman named Susan Boyle. She's a forty-eight-year-old woman from a tiny village in Scotland, as unworldly and old-fashioned as they come. She's kind of homely and she wore very dated clothes. To say the judges and everyone in the audience didn't take her seriously when she first came out is an understatement-- they rolled their eyes, they sneered, Simon Cowell spoke to her with exquisite condescenion. But she sang with the voice of an angel, and by the end of her song, everyone was crying and cheering for how beautiful her song was. She wowed the judges and now the public, everyone is so impressed with what this unlikely little lady could do. I'll bet she's going to get a recording deal now, and realize her dream of being a singer.

You really can't judge a book by it's cover.

This makes me so happy. God bless her.

REFUSE.

The most frustrating thing about my new iPhone is that it doesn't have a function that will let it vibrate for a few rings before the ringtone kicks in. My old phone could do that, and I loved it. Why doesn't the iPhone have this? Why?

I thought of a way around it, though. Apparently there's a way on GarageBand, if you have a Mac, to cut any song you want into a ringtone. I could design a file that had several seconds of silence in the beginning before it launched into the actual song so that it would buzz silently for a bit before it actually started making sound. That would be a reasonable facsimile of that function.

But no. I refuse. I refuse to do this.

I REFUSE. 

Why do I refuse? It's the principle of the thing. I should NOT have to be a COMPUTER PROGRAMMER playing TRICKS on a PIECE OF PERIPHERAL MACHINERY to make my STATE OF THE ART BRAND-NEW PHONE that I paid HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS for perform an OBVIOUS FUNCTION that my EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PIECE OF JUNK PHONE could do. 

That this is the state of affairs, Apple should be ASHAMED of themselves.

ASHAMED, I say.