Zibblog

While my car is in the shop, I’m driving a rental car. For some reason, I decided that I needed to make a new mix for listening to in the rental car. The mix is presented below in all its glory. It was limited by the amount of space on a single CD so great songs like Dust in the Wind and Breakfast at Tiffany’s didn’t quite make the cut. Before you ask, I do believe that I own a legal copy of everything in the playlist. I’m sure that some of you will chuckle at some of the songs, and I can only think of about 3 people who read my blog that have probably ever heard of Larry Gatlin.

1. If You’re Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows) – Rodney Atkins
2. Something More – Sugarland
3. These Words – Natasha Bedingfield
4. Nothin’ to Lose – Josh Gracin
5. You’re Beautiful – James Blunt
6. Sophmore Slump or Comeback of the Year – Fall Out Boy
7. Did You Get My Message? – Jason Mraz
8. All the Gold in California – Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers
9. Some Beach – Blake Shelton
10. It’s For The Best – Straylight Run
11. Change – Sons of the Desert
12. I Know I Know I Know – Tegan and Sara
13. Don’t Ever – Missy Higgins
14. Numb – Linkin Park
15. Where Does the Good Go? – Tegan and Sara
16. Bubble Pop Electric Feat Joh – Gwen Stefani
17. Geek In The Pink – Jason Mraz
18. Come By Me – Harry Connick, Jr.
19. Scar – Missy Higgins
20. Small Town – John Mellencamp
21. White Kids Love Hip Hop – MC Chris
22. If Your Gonna – Natasha Bedingfield

If you use iTunes, I recommend finding any listening to the first track as an example that you can have a song about how much life can suck and still have it be upbeat and catchy.

Update: Scott suggested that I make an iTunes iMix out of it and since I put it together in iTunes anyway, I went ahead and published the iMix here. The odd thing is the songs that aren’t on iTunes like Numb by Linkin Park.

I’m going to start this post by declaring my distaste for personal networking web sites. I used Friendster for a little while and the idea of having a numerical value assigned to the number of friends that I have was kind of amusing and at the same time a little scary. I realize that life is not a popularity contest (except for when it is) and I like to feel like I’ve grown past the need for external validation (well, at least, as grown past it as the average adult with a good level of self esteem), but I’ve never been much for online communities so I tended to log in and see myself with only a handful of connections. Personally, I’m waiting for the eHarmony of business networking sites to come about (it worked for dating so why not apply its principles everywhere). It would set you up on business lunches and conference calls with random people chosen by your field and personality profile. That way, no one person would get a disproportionate amount of business contacts due to the load balancing of the system. Just think of the possibilities if you had sites to load balance everything based on surveys and stable marriage algorithms: dinner reservations, plane tickets, parking spots, etc.

Anyway, if you know me and have a LinkedIn account, link up and be part of the zibnet.

Yesterday, I was listening to the Science Friday Podcast and they had an interesting segment on how scientists believe they have discovered a gene that help predict likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. It seems to be very common on my mother’s side of the family (my mother, uncle, and multiple cousins have it), which I didn’t really know about until my mom was diagnosed. I originally thought it would be nice if you could have a test in a few years and get a basic percentage of how likely it was, but I now wonder if I would just turn into a hypochondriac if they started finding genes for all sorts of diseases.

In an effort to get my blog post count a little bit higher, I decided to blog a little more randomly for a while. For some of you, this may even seem a little more “Zibblerish”. In the end, it mostly just means more head scratching for my readers and less links.

After many weeks of seeing quesadillas being made while I was waiting for my grilled chicken on a ciabatta roll at the company cafeteria, I decided that a quesadilla is probably fairly easy to make. After the superbowl, I decided to test this assumption. I’m one of those people who tends to eat food low on toppings, so I bought some chicken breasts, some pregrated cheese in a bag, some burrito sized tortillas, and a packet of taco seasoning. Personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that Una Mas quesadillas are pretty greasy, so I went with no oil in the final toasting of the tortilla with the cheese on it and I really liked the crispness of the end product. Everyone involved thought that the end product turned out pretty well.

On a totally unrelated note, if you haven’t seen it yet, here is a page of facts about Chuck Norris.