Stef and I tried out eating vegan for Lent this year. It’s definitely a lot harder to eat vegan than it is vegetarian. This is especially true when you don’t cook much. And who’s got time to cook? Nearly every restaurant has vegetarian options, but it’s very difficult to get something that’s completely vegan. It seems like everything has either milk, butter, egg, or honey in it.

Thank goodness for Lovin’ Spoonfuls [http://lovinspoonfuls.com]! We ate there often. We also found a good Vegan pizza place that’s just around the corner from our place. We also found vegan options at:
*Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizza
*Magpies Pizza
*Pei Wei
*Chipotle
*Chopped (the hot Thai peanut dressing is vegan!)
*sandwiches at The Co-Op on 4th and the Shop Natural Market on Tool Ave
*Zivaz (after highly modifying how the tofu fajitas come)
*Jamba Juice (try the vegan apple cinnamon pretzel)
*Xoom Juice (all their drinks can be made non-dairy)
*Epic Cafe (lots of vegan pastries)
*Bentley’s (by the UofA. fantastic veggie burger, get it with the garlic spread in place of the mayonnaise)
*The Cup at Hotel Congress (Awesome vegan French toast, but why do they serve it with a side of butter?!)
*Govinda’s (great Sunday brunch buffet. All vegetarian with many vegan options)
*Casbah on 4th

Now that Lent is over it’s nice to be a less limited on food options. We’re going out for Mexican tonight. We really missed it. It’s hard to eat Mexican without cheese. It was a good experience and I am going to try to limit my egg and dairy consumption, but I don’t foresee completely eliminating it again anytime soon.

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So I talked to this psychic guy this weekend. I don’t normally give psychics much credence, but this guy sure hit the nail on the head. I need to start my business that I’ve had in my head for almost a year now. I just met with some people to help them with a change on their site and it completely charged me up. It always does. To go out into the world and set people up with my point and click solution is what I want to do. I should make it my goal this weekend to work on the software for it some more.

You know what my problem is. I always have ideas in my head. When I look at something I see it for what it could be. Sometimes I try to work really hard to make things into my visions for them. Other times I feel completely overwhelmed by everything I want to do. Ultimately this all just leads to me getting depressed that I’m not accomplishing enough. I think I send too much time working on things that I have to work on and not things that I want to work on. This causes me to be very unproductive. I need to rearrange my life so I’m only working on things that I want to do.

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I’m finally regaining coherence after a week of sleep depravation. I went to Cambridge last week for a User Interface conference. The conference had its ups and downs, but over all I did learn some interesting things that I can apply to my job. I spent the first part of the week hanging out at pubs with some friends that my coworker Kim had met last year. They were a fun group and a nice escape from the usual corporate drones that populated the conference.

On the last night I was there I went out on my own to do a little exploring. I ate at a yummy vegan pizza shop, then headed to a club across from Fenwick park for some dancing. The club sucked. I think almost everyone was 18 and apparently nobody had ever explained the concept of beat matching to the DJ. I jetted out of there and over to a little bar that a cool cat on MySpace recommended to me. It looked like a good time, but it was 1AM and they were packing up. I decided to skip the T and walk back to my hotel. On the way I passed a bar with some thumpin music and decided to check it out. There was a really good local D&B DJ. And by really good, I mean, I don’t usually get into D&B, but I danced my ass off until they closed. Very intelligent music, but I guess that what you’d expect when your at a bar half way between Harvard and MIT.

Got into freezing cold Cleveland the next day. Had a nice lunch with my mom, Stef’s mom, and Stef. Spent the night with Henry at his new place in Willoughby. Went to Melissa’s wedding the next day. Great wedding and a beautiful day for it. It was outside and a little chilly, but the sun was out and the ceremony was very nice. We went to the Goahead monthly Saturday night and it was a great time. I’ve very impressed with how far they’ve come. The decorations were fantastic and the new hardcore-industrial-dark-psytrance producer in town, Xyla, played a set that was a fire breathing breath of fresh air for our Goahead scene. It was so nice to get to spend the night with good friends. It was sad to have to go back in the morning, but it’s defiantly nice to be back and catching up on sleep.

Stef and I can’t wait for Christmas when we’ll have a long 10 days to spend with family and friends. It will be here before we know it.

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Last weekend, without notice, eBay closed all 400 some of my auctions. They sent me some vague canned email stating that my listing were closed because I was trying to circumvent eBay fees. Everyone who was bidding on one of the auctions as well as customers that recently won and paid for one of my eBay auctions received a notice from eBay stating that I was in violation of an eBay policy and my listings were removed. WTF? I had customers contacting me freaking out thinking I just ripped them off. I later found out what the problem was. I had the URL to my website built into the banner image I used in my auctions. eBay didn’t like that. Once I knew this it took me all of 3 minutes to remove the URL from the image in Photoshop and re-upload it to my webserver. It would have been nice if they would have just told me to fix it to begin with instead of trying to wreck my business.

I lost a ton of sales from this and my reputation with my customers was tainted. I had to do something. And I did. I marked all the items on my website half off and email thousands of my past customers to announce my “eBay sucks” sale. The response was fantastic. I had so many customers email me back to give me their support and in some cases their own story about how eBay screwed them over that it took me days to read all of them. The sale was also a big hit. I made enough sales from it to cover my loss of eBay sales from the closed auctions.

But wait there’s more. Since eBay closed all my auctions, including my store items, they had to credit me back the eBay fees for them. They not only had to credit back my listing fees, but also my final value fees because they emailed customers who had won auctions to tell them I was bad and they didn’t have to pay me. They emailed customers that had won auctions and paid for them months and months and months ago. The end result, I received a credit of over $800. So this all started with them thinking that I was trying to circumvent fees and it ends with them crediting me back for eight hundred buck of the fees. That sure makes a lot of sense, don’t it? Thanks eBay!

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When I was young people told me what it was and I believed them. What they said had to be true because they were adults and adults knew everything. Now that I’m an adult I realize that adults aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. As an adult I have dismissed their logic. I feel that I do understand it. It, however, cannot be logically expressed. It is not a logical process and cannot be reached by logic. Logic, art, and other means of expression

can only infinitely approach it. Like a point traveling along an asymptote, the more I try the closer I will get, but I never reach where I’m trying to go. But math is logic and logic can’t explain it. The only way to escape the bounds of the graph is to let the graph paper go.

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Gaian Mind was once again a blast, despite the rain. It was a weekend filled with music, dancing, swimming, stomping in mud puddles, and drinking meed while watching the rain come down. Living in the desert for 7 months and then camping in a rainy woods is quite a shock to the system. Fortunately the rain held off during the music. There was significantly more people there this year so we were camped way back in the members only area. We had a quite little place tucked back in the woods. It was a nice secluded hang out, but it made it a little harder to be a part of what was going on. We did catch the closing ceremony this year which was nice to be a part of. If GM get any more people it’s going to out grow Four Quarters. That would be sad, the place is very nice.

It was really nice to hang out with old friends, it was like we had never left. We decided to get a hotel for Sunday night instead of camping another night. We really wanted to take a nice shower before flying home. Then we almost missed our plane with some bad directions landed us in downtown DC during rush hour and the highway back to the airport was closed due to a mud slide. That was stressful.

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Last night was the Club Crawl here in Tucson. They shut down downtown and for $10 you could bounce around to all the clubs and hear all kinds of different music (as long as it was rock music). They even had stages setup in the streets. We ended up staying until 2am when everything closed down. Great fun.

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The Consciousness convention was absolutely awesome. I wish I could have gone to the whole thing. (Maybe next year). I went to a 4 hour lecture on intracellular and quantum aspects of consciousness. They used lots of big words that I didn’t understand, but for the most part I did understand what they were talking about and I learned a ton about the very fundamental construction of what our consciousness is.

Steward Hameroff was the presenter that I went to see and he didn’t disappoint. His co-presenter Nancy Woolf took on the intercellular part of the lecture which I was slightly less interested in. Dr Hameroff is a anaesthesiologist and I believe a professor at the U of A. He talked about consciousness and losing it thru anaesthetic gasses. He provided a very interesting argument against classical neural networks alone being the building blocks of consciousness. (This should be very interesting to any computer/scifi geek). It takes a certain amount of time for our brain to react. By the time the neural network of our brain has processed a thought, that thought is in the past. So basically, there is no “now” in a neural network. To “be here now” your brain really needs to transcend time, enter quantum mechanics.

To quicky summarize the lecture:
Microtubules in nerve cells contain quantum particles in superpositioned states. Consciousness occurs when the state collapses into a single value. This happens in a cyclical cycle that can actually be measured by sensors placed on the head. The cycle is the gama frequency and is typically around 20 to 30Hz. Very interestingly, during meditation, Tibetan monks have the highest gama frequency ever measured (around 100Hz). Also interesting, if consciousness comes from quantum particles in our brains, these particles could be quantomly entangled with particles in other people’s brains. This would create a collective consciousness.

If you find any of this interesting, I’d urge you to check out the conference next year. See: http://consciousness.arizona.edu

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It’s been a busy last few weeks. For those keeping track, here’s a summary of the latest happenings around the Nolletti house.

The House
The house sale is a done deal. Hope the new owners are enjoying it. I’m definitely enjoying not having a house to have to keep up. We’d like to buy a place around here, but housing prices have gotten insane. I really wanted a downtown loft, and there are lots of new ones going it. But they are all around $250/sqft! So unless they are selling just a closet, we’re going to have to do some lookin.

Transportation
One of my goals in moving was to live lighter. To help facilitate that Stef and I are getting scooters. We’re going to keep her car, but I think I’m going to sell mine. I picked up her scooter at a dealer last night, but am having trouble finding the one I want.

Summer Fun
Plans are coming together for this summer. We have 4 friends coming to visit with us next month, and we have airline tickets and admission tickets for Cochlea, Gaian Mind, and also a weekend back home to go to a cousin’s wedding.

DJ
After a short bit of playing with our friend, Jeremy’s new CDJ’s, Stef and I decided that we had to get some too! I just ordered a gently used pair that I hope to be getting next week. Who know’s, we might become superstar DJ’s. (Yeah right). We also picked up a 3 channel mixer for them so we can mix in the notebook computer. Stef has been having fun playing with a program called Tracktor.

Work
Work has been keeping me really busy. I love it though (most of the time). I suppose I should be getting back to it now.

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