Drinkable Chicken

The collectible card game Magic the Gathering uses five colors (red, green, blue, white and black). These colors are basically “profiles” that stand for certain attitudes and principles. For example, red stands for impulsiveness, following your emotions, and action, among other things. In the game, this translates to mechanics like “direct damage” and many creatures that pack a punch in the early stage of the game, but that are not as suitable long-term.

Anyway, these five colors can also be seen as psychological profiles. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and applying it to some situations (which caused a friend to call it “uncharacteristically nerdy”, or something to that effect :-). Apparently I’m not the only one who does this; this appeared today on the Wizards site: What Magic color or colors best describe your personality, and why?

Here are a few articles that describe the colors. Note that these are fairly long, and not everything necessarily applies to personalities, at least not without some tweaking. (For example, one of black’s characteristics is that it’s “parasitic”… that does not mean that everyone who associates with black is a parasite! On the other hand, someone who shows parasitic and abusive behavior does have a black streak, at the very least.)

• green
• red
• black
• blue
• white

Also, there’s this article about opposing colors. (Again, this is written from a gaming perspective.)

For those who don’t want to read the articles, here’s a summary, adapted from Wikipedia:

• White is the color of order, equality, righteousness, healing, law, community, absolutism/totalitarianism, and light, although not necessarily “good”.

• Blue is the color of intellect, reason, illusion, logic, knowledge, manipulation, and trickery, as well as the classical elements of air and water.

• Black is the color of power, ambition, greed, death, corruption, and amorality, although not necessarily “evil”. 

• Red is the color of freedom, chaos, passion, creativity, impulse, fury, lightning, the classical element of fire, and the non-living geological aspects of the classical element earth.

• Green is the color of life, instinct, nature, evolution, ecology and interdependence.

Personally, I am mostly blue/white, while my wife is red/green, and my evil stepdaughter is red/black. (Which explains a lot, as red opposes blue and white, and black opposes white… :-)

Like all personality type indicators, this shouldn’t be taken too seriously… especially not this one. :-) But I think it’s an interesting alternative to the more traditional ones.

Now that I have used Mac OS X professionally (and on a modern machine :-) for over a year, let’s take a look at the applications I use on a daily basis (or almost).

☯ Carbon Emacs: The OS X version of Emacs that gives me the least hassle. (Your mileage may vary; there are those who like Aquamacs, for example… maybe someday I’ll give it another try and see what’s new.)

☯ MacVim: I use this rather than the newer version, mostly because it has a “drawer” which I like better than tabs.

☯ TextMate is useful as well.

(So yeah, I use these three editors and more… no Emacs-vs-Vim wars here. Emacs is my editor of choice for Scheme (and hopefully it supports Clojure as well). OCaml, on the other hand, seems to like Vim more. For Python editing, I tend to use all three, depending on my mood and the type of project. :-)

☯ Adium seems to be the best for instant messaging. I have MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, Google Talk, and Facebook accounts, and it supports them all, so I don’t have to juggle multiple messenger clients.

☯ Skype: The Mac client is a bit lacking, but it’s the only game in town, as far as I’m aware.

☯ Thunderbird: Not spectacular, but it does the job. (But if you know of a newsreader (Usenet news, not RSS) that supports easy extraction of yEnc files and the like, please drop me a note.)

☯ Firefox: Runs on OS X with few problems nowadays. In some cases, I found that Safari is faster, which is especially noticeable on slower machines. (Like a G3… ^_^’)

☯ Tomato: BitTorrent client. Maybe not the one with the most features, but it works for me.

☯ Corel Painter IX: Great to use with my new Bamboo Fun. ^_^

☯ aMule: eMule/eDonkey client that has a Mac version as well. Doesn’t look great on the Mac, but it serves its purpose.

☯ Chmox: CHM file reader. I have quite a few e-books in this format, and it’s nice to be able to read them on the Mac.

☯ Colloquy: Decent IRC client. Great for lurking in #clojure. ;-)

☯ Google Notifier: No more overlooked emails.

☯ Nocturne: Useful for hacking in the dark. :-)

☯ UnRarX: Extract RAR files. This compression format is not as common on the Mac as it is (was?) in the Windows world, but it *is* used, and also helps to extract old DOS games and such (to run them in DOSBox, perhaps).

☯ ViewIt: Picture viewer, useful if you have truckloads of manga and comics stored on CD.

☯ VLC: Video and MP3 player… still flaky, but often better than iTunes or QuickTime. Supports a fairly large number of formats.

Honorable mention:

☯ Shiira: Interesting new browser concept. At this point, there’s no real reason to use it over e.g. Safari or Firefox, but if you want something different, this may be worth checking out. Personally, I like the “tab” bar that shows little thumbnails of open pages.

Anyway, these are just the apps that see a lot of play at the moment. Feel free to post your recommendations or suggestions in the comments. :-)

Eat! You’re skin and bones!

Here’s a Dutch waffle recipe. (Translating the amounts to their non-metric equivalents is left as an exercise to the reader. :-)

Ingredients:

• 250 g butter (melted or liquid)
• 250 g sugar
• 5 large eggs
• 500 g flour
• pinch of salt
• small amount of milk (optional)

Mix the butter, the sugar and the salt until smooth. You may add vanilla sugar or liquids to change the taste (e.g. almond).

Add eggs to the mixture, and mix again.

Add the flour (self-rising or otherwise), and mix again until smooth. If the dough is too thick, you may add a little bit of milk; this will make the waffles fluffier (but they won’t stay fresh as long).

Now use this mixture in your waffle iron of choice. Add powdered sugar on top when done. Enjoy! :-)