I’m pleased to announce that Jesse Printz and I have began an epic journey of discovery and scientific delight with the purchase of a desktop carnivorous plant kit from ThinkGeek for our office at CIS.
We’ll be launching our project site here very soon, I can’t wait!
As Dave put it, “This is a big step! Are you sure you two are ready for this?” We definitely are, and as of last night Lindsay and I are on a Family Plan with T-Mobile sharing 700 anytime minutes and unlimited messaging.
I’m very pleased so far with the way that everything works. I already payed almost $70 for my plan after adding $15 worth of text messaging and $6 worth of internet access to my plan each month. With the new family plan, Lindsay and I split $60 in plan and $20 in text messaging. Overall, my personal bill went from $70 to $40, and I think I’m getting a better deal. In fact, since Lindsay previously didn’t have coverage at her new appartment and it was always a pain to get a hold of her there, I know I’m getting a good deal.
Lindsay is picking up her first personal bill, however. She was previously on her Mom’s family plan with Sprint and now will be paying a phone bill for the first time. So in a way, I guess it was two “big steps”. It was a big step for us, to commit to a joint financial obligation, and it was a big step for her, a step towards financial independance from her Mom.
I don’t know about you, but all this talk about relationships and independance makes me think of a mushy fireworks show.
I left a pretty open ended blog post about wanting to switch to one of the hot new Intel x86 Mac Pros, whenever they came out. Well they’ve came out, and are just about as glorious as I thought they could be. (Although they did go a little stingy in the video card department, which I think kind of stinks.)
However, despite my lust for a new Mac Pro, I have decided not to switch. Instead, I spent about $300 upgrading my computer to bring it up to the latest generation of games and I’m just going to call it good. I ended up grabbing a new motherboard, a new PCIe GeForce 7600GT, and a new hard drive to bring my PC back into the swing of things.
Now WoW should play great, and I should be able to handle Quake Wars whenever it hits the shelves. Of course you’ll notice “should” play great, rather that “plays great”. I’ve had the hardware for a while, but ran into an unexpected problem. I have a gig of CAS2 RAM of which I’m very happy with. Unfortunately Vista isn’t particularly happy with it, and even with a gig of RAM it runs out pretty frequently and starts thrashing, killing my sweet frame rate.
I haven’t yet decided what my solution will be. Sadly, I only have two memory slots and they are both full with 512meg sticks. So if I am to increase my total amount of RAM, I’ll have to replace everything I have. Bummer.
But, anyway, the point of this post is to say: I’m not switching. At least not for a couple years. After I graduate, we’ll see. 
Well, for quite some time I’ve been procrastinating a number of certain… legalities… in my life. I misplaced my drivers license long ago in a taxi-cab at KCI airport and my tag has expired for my motorcycle.
I’ve just let it go for months now, just because it sucks to pay the fees for this junk even when the protections provided for those fees are minimally desired at best. (Plus I like having my SSN as my KS-DL id number, I’m not in the sheep-like minority that thinks “hiding” one’s social security number can undo the security concerns of the nation’s security policies. You can’t re-secret something.) However, recently two important things happened.
So as of lunch today, I’m sporting a brand new drivers license–albeit printed on dangerously feeble thermal paper–a new tag, and new insurance from Progressive for the 1991 Suzuki Katana I’ve purchased from Cole.
Recently the Panda Express in the K-State Student Union opened a sushi bar in the middle of the food court. This has opened a unique opportunity for me–to have sushi on a regular basis–but not without it’s concerns.
I suppose the best way to start a review about Panda Express’s Sushi would be to start with a mini review of Panda Express. In short: I love it. I find that Panda Express is apex of homogenized Americanized chinese food. They take the majority of cliche “chinese” food, and they produce it in mass quantities with a consistancy that is nothing short of professional. You can get a heaping scoop of Orange Chicken any time of day and night and always expect a charming, savory entree of breaded and sauce covered delightfulness.
Panda Express is not in the same category as Happy Valley or Royal Thai, and when you are looking for authentic or extremely high quality asian cuisine one of those would be a good choice. But if you’re looking for quick, satisfying, inexpensive, delicious Chinese food, Panda Express dominates the category. Even the local buffets can’t come close.
So with that out of the way, what about sushi? I was initially a bit torn. I love sushi and sashimi in all it’s forms–typically reveling in it even more as it becomes more foreign–but I’ve always considered sushi a premium food. I think most would agree. After all, “sushi grade” fish is fish that has been marked of the highest quality. On top of that, we’re in Kansas here… not the Gulf or Pacific Coast. Seafood in general suffers greatly at the hand of frozen transport to the land locked midwest.
So the question remained, could Panda Express, the pinnacle of good-enough-to-be-delightful, pull off what I considered to be a premium food?
Today at lunch I decided to find out, and in the boldest way I could think of. I showed up at the food court at 1:35, after the rush, after the Panda Express Sushi stand closed, and all that was left were little plastic containers of pre-made sushi that had been sitting for an indeterminate amount of time. Not a recipe for success, but that was exactly the point. In addition, after purchasing my meal I didn’t eat it right away. Instead I wandered over to my office in Nichols Hall to dine at my keyboard.
My little platter consisted of four norimaki, three nigiri, a little squirt of wasabi, a touch of ginger, and two decorative fake grass things that looked like a cross between wax paper and tissue paper cut with fringe. Sadly the sushi preparer did not choose to mark my package with what sushi I was served. While I had no problem identifying my food, I think that the “average” customer here at Kansas State would probably benefit from an explicit list of ingredients. My particular package had the “nigiri combo”, which was a shrimp nagiri, a tuna nagiri, and a salmon nagiri, and four identical California rolls.
The verdict? Good! I was pleasantly surprised, indeed! Each of the items were very tasty with most of the qualities I’ve come to expect. They were well formed, they stayed together great, they looked good, they had an excellent texture, and they tasted both delicious and “clean”. That’s probably one of my favorite parts about sushi, how it just tastes like such a refined, subtle, “clean” food item.
So the one thing that this sushi was missing? Well, I guess one would say quality. I was very happy with the dish, it was very much worth the $6.99 that it cost to purchase. However most of my run-ins with sushi have been at excellent locations and venues to which I have grown accustom to not just “good” or “great” sushi, but “oh my goodness this is like a b-boy dance of excitement in my mouth” sushi.
Panda Express Sushi isn’t going to take the place of Kyoto’s steakhose any time soon as my favorite place to get sushi, but when I’m looking for a nice quick lunch and don’t feel like a heavy carton of orange chicken, Panda Express Sushi definitely fits the bill.
Recently I’ve been getting the urge to start blogging again, but without much enthusiasm for my personal site. In that vein, I’m going to give it a bit of an overhaul. Normally a “I’m still alive” or “I’m working on things” post is a little passe, but I’ve decided to work on the site more-or-less live, so I thought that it would be nice to fire up a little blurb.
I’ve also had a request from a number of friends and colleagues have asked me to start putting “reviews” on my blog, since I just like to try new things a lot and then talk about them. Seems like a good idea to me, as well. So hopefully in addition to the usual this-is-my-life fluff, I’ll see about getting some decent reviews up here as well.