Driving Lessons

I was talking with my friend yesterday and he mentioned that he was taking a driving lesson that day.  There are driving, highway driving and defensive driving lessons.  I got an idea for a new driving course.  The Drunk Driving Lessons.  Drunk drives cause a huge amount of accidents and deaths in America and the government is always trying to minimize drunk driving.  The problem is that they'll never be able to get rid of the problem.  Since they know that people will drive drunk anyway, they should offer drunk driving lessons where people will be taught to drive safer while intoxicated.  The government's reason for teaching sex in school is that since the kids will do it anyway, this way, they'll be at least educated about it and hopefully, if they do have sex, will use condoms.  Drunk Driving Lessons are the same, people will still drive drunk no matter what penalty they may face, why not educate them to drive drunk in a safer way.

30

Now I'm officially 30.  That really sucks.  People start expecting you to behave and tone down the crazy, not that I'm planning on complying.  There are a couple of pivotal dates before 30 like finishing college, hitting 25, getting married, having kids, not necessarily in that particular order.  Still, when you're in your 20's, even late 20's, you're still technically 20.  Once you hit 30, 40 is just one number away.  Your 20 something friends are now a decade away.  You're supposed to be mature and responsible.  You shouldn't take risks, you gotta watch what you eat and look after your health.  You know what, I don't wanna.  I don't wanna grow up, I'm a toys r' us kid.  I can be mature and responsible when I need to be, the rest of the time, insanity now, insanity later, insanity forever!

One positive thing about being 30 is that now I have a great excuse for not being able to do certain things in karate.  What do you want?  I'm old!

Stir-Fry Beef

This is a pretty fast and simple recipe and hard to screw up. The cooking time is under 10 minutes, though the preparation can be somewhat annoying. You'll need beef, fresh or frozen, shelled edamame edamame, bamboo shoots, teriyaki sauce and cooking ramen. For cooking, you'll need a wok and wooden, unpainted, chopsticks.

Take partially defrosted meat and using a sharp knife cut from it 1 inch squares, 1/8 inch thick. Marinade for 30 minutes in teriyaki sauce. Add the bamboo shoots to the marinade. Defrost some shelled edamame. Cook and drain the ramen.

Place the wok on medium to high heat. Add the beef without the sauce and stir-fry for 2 minutes making sure that both sides are cooked. Add bamboo shoots and edamame beans and stir-fry for a minute or 2. Lower the flame a little and add the ramen and teriaki sauce. Stir-fry for 2 more minutes, making sure that the ramen doesn't burn. Enjoy.

Sale Alert - Glatt Mart

Prices are with a $10 non-sale purchase.

Peaches and Nectarines - $.69/lb
Tomatoes on the Vine - $1.29/lb
Givat Ice Pops (10pk) - $2.69
Hunts BBQ sauce - $.99
Plastic Plates - $4.99
Chicken Cutlets - $3.99/lb
Tuna & Avacado sushi - $3.95

Meat with bone, a lot of pieces are from flanken, the always cheap $3.99/lb

USPS doing their work

When I speaking with the local branch manager about the incident in the previous posts, he told me that they're doing their work and everything else is none of their problem. Here's another example of USPS doing their "work".

Monday, June 23rd, I dropped two netflix envelopes, into the same mailbox and at the same time. This was after the 9AM pickup and before the 3PM pickup. Netflix received one dvd on the 24th and the other on the 25th.

Since this was a Monday, I assume that most of the mail was dropped off on Sunday and Monday morning and was picked up and sorted by 3PM. There are very few mailboxes with 3PM pickup and also Monday was a business day so there shouldn't be too much mail to sort through by the time they got my envelopes. So what could possibly happen that would cause two pieces of mail that were sent at the same time to arrive a day apart? Incompetence. Let's not forget this is the same branch where I had to wait for around half an hour each time I came there, regardless of time of day, day of week or length of line.

Redirect after login

One of my pet peeves is sites that don't redirect you back after you log in. I can kinda understand a developer being too lazy to redirect back after session timeout or bookmark, but when the site sends you an email with a link and after logging in to view the link you get thrown somewhere else, that's completely unacceptable.

Do not send the url the user was trying to reach as a url variable. This is ugly and error prone. Sites that do this, forget to preserve the url if user enters incorrect username or password or tries to retrieve the password.

After verifying that the user is logged in and before redirecting to log in screen, save the current url as a session variable.
ColdFusion:

<cfset fromurl = cgi.script_name & "?" & cgi.query_string />

PHP:

$_SESSION["fromurl"] = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

After the user has successfully logged in, assign the url to a variable and delete the session variable and then redirect.
ColdFusion:

<cfset variables.fromurl = session.fromurl />
<cfset structdelete(session, "fromurl") />
<cflocation url="#variables.fromurl#" addtoken="no" />

PHP:

if (isset($_SESSION['fromurl'])) {
$url = $_SESSION['fromurl'];
unset($_SESSION['fromurl']);
header('location:'.$url);
}

Plastic yisroel cups

Why settle for plastic stam cups when you can buy plastic yisroel and ensure that you Pesach is chometz free.

When you use plastic stam cups on Pesach, you face the real danger of using something that contains chometz. A worker may have been eating chometz and accidentally dropped it into the vat of molten plastic. A rodent, carrying chometz may have fallen in at any point of the manufacturing process. Would you risk drinking from something that may contain rat, or, worst of all, chometz?

At our factory, we have mashgichim stationed at every critical area of the manufacturing process to ensure that such accidents never happen. We pride ourselves on manufacturing the best, cleanest and chometz free plastic yisroel cups possible.

Don't give in to your yetzer hara, buy plastic yisroel!