My friend Meghan was in town this evening so we had a Trader Joe’s date after work.
I’m only a recent convert to TJ’s. I had heard of it, but I always wrote it off as being overpriced and over-hyped. I’m strictly a Kroger girl as a general rule. But Meghan and Elizabeth took me to TJ’s a couple months ago and I’ve been hooked ever since. Where else can you buy moderately priced salmon burgers? Or yummy instant Thai meals?
Anyway, I found carrot juice on today’s TJ’s run — a whole half gallon of it. For only $4.99! (Although why I felt compelled to take a picture if it, I do not know.)
I love carrot juice. I used to order it occasionally in a neat little juice bar in Boston — where 4 bucks would buy you a measly 6-oz glass of the stuff. That was during my lentil-eating vegetarian phase. Remember when juice bars were semi-big, back in the early- to mid-90s? Do those even exist anymore?
Here’s a little trivia: a single 8-oz serving of carrot juice supplies you with 690% of the daily recommended allowance of Vitamin A!
I went to Bloomington last weekend because Les Miserables was playing at the IU Auditorium. I love the music from that show, but I had never seen it in real life. And it did not disappoint.
Here’s Adam’s impression of the plotline:
So Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread… gets thrown in jail for twenty years… then steals a candlestick from a priest… who gives him even more expensive stuff so he can redeem himself.
And what does this accomplish? Valjean brings two young people together.
Somehow, that doesn’t seem so grand in the scheme of things. Bringing young people together isn’t that hard — they usually do it pretty well on their own.
But I really enjoyed the performance. The only downside was the annoying girl sitting next to us before the show who felt the need to tell her friend, and apparently everyone else in a 20-foot radius, how she is “GOING TO FORT MYERS FOR SPRING BREAK” and how “MY BOYFRIEND BORROWED MY CAR, AND IS PROBABLY WRECKING IT AS WE SPEAK” because “HE’S FROM GEORGIA AND ISN’T USED TO SNOW THE WAY WE ARE, GROWING UP IN FORT WAYNE.”
I’ve been doing a lot with podcasting recently. Part of my job includes managing a website for a radio show produced by the university. My boss thought it would be a cool idea to set up a podcast for the show’s website. Which is a little surprising, because our regular listening demographic (middle-aged women) is totally different from that of the usual podcast enthusiast (youngish men, ham radio geeks). So I wonder how well this will work out?
I’ve actually run into a few logistical problems, the main one being a lack of space on our server. We already have streaming audio for our interviews online — they’re hosted on a dedicated streaming server. However, to make a podcast, we need to put MP3 files on our regular web server so that they can be downloaded, rather than streamed.
And therein lies the problem: we have a 100MB quota on the regular web server. At first I tried a hack with symbolic links, but that didn’t work. So in the end, I decided to podcast segments from only the two most recent shows. If people want to listen to previous shows, they’re all still available in streaming media on the website anyway.
On a personal level, I’m a little lukewarm about podcasting. Part of this has to do with the fact that I usually prefer to read things, rather than listen to them. I was never much into talk radio, for example (other than This American Life and PHC). Most podcasts I’ve heard tend to be people’s rants on miscellaneous topics — generally, the sort of thing I’d usually read in a blog. With blogs — particularly if you’re using an RSS aggregator with large numbers of blogs or news sites — you can skip topics that you’re not all that interested in, or scan quickly through long blocks of text. Which you can’t really do as effectively with audio.