Author Archives: Alan V

Muffins!

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I made blackberry muffins today, since Safeway has blackberries for $1 this week. However, I wanted something relatively healthy, so I made them without oil or egg yolk.

1/2 cup fat free milk
1/4 cup + 2 tsp unsweetened applesauce
2 egg whites
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 container (~6 ounces) blackberries

Beat egg whites and mix in milk and applesauce. In a separate bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. Combine the liquids and dry ingredients, stirring until well mixed. Stir in blackberries. Fill cupcake cups and bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.

They came out really tasty.


Cooked blackberries look more like raspberries than blackberries. Weird.

Changes I would make after eating 3 (they’re really good and I can’t stop ahhh):
Cut up the blackberries so the muffins don’t end up with huge chunks in them.
Grease the pan and bake them without the paper because they are really difficult to peel off.

Lately I’ve been making tasty sandwiches for lunch with ham, spinach, and cheddar cheese. They’re really simple and really delicious.

Also, our rent is going down next year by about $240/month. That’s pretty nice.
The $120/month I save will almost cover food for me… since I’ve been cooking more often (I’ve eaten out once in the past 2 weeks), I’ve been spending far less on food and eating healthier. I suppose part of this is that I plan my meals around whatever is on sale that week and always save at least 50% on my bill each shopping trip, and stock up on nonperishable basics (soup, canned veggies, pasta) when they go on massive sale. Yay food.

Tomorrow I will be making salsa chicken II: baked chicken breast covered in spicy salsa and cheese. (Last time was salsa verde over chicken drumsticks.) I should go buy some rice to go with that or something.

…I wonder what would happen if I substituted applesauce for oil in things like rice-a-roni. This might be worth an experiment to see how terrible it is.

Life is awesome.

plsql fun

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Here’s a fun little question for those of you who aren’t experts at plsql…

Given this plsql code

procedure helper_method(
   iChange IN boolean,
   oValue OUT number
) IS
BEGIN
    IF iChange THEN
        oValue := 2;
    END IF;
END helper_method;

procedure do_test(
    oValue OUT number
) IS
BEGIN
    oValue := 1;
    --Checkpoint 0
    helper_method(true, oValue);
    --Checkpoint 1
    helper_method(false, oValue);
    --Checkpoint 2
END do_test;

and this java code (assuming the right frameworks for calling into plsql)

public void doTest() {
    IntOutParam out = new IntOutParam();
    sqlCall("do_test", out);
    System.out.println(out.getInt());
}

what is printed out when you replace the checkpoint comments with a RETURN; statement?
The answer surprised me… I actually stumbled across this at work today and it took me a while to figure out.

Replacing checkpoint 0 with RETURN; prints out 1, as expected.
Replacing checkpoint 1 with RETURN; prints out 2, as expected.
Replacing checkpoint 2 with RETURN; prints out 0. Huh?

Can you spot why and what the fix should be?
Hint: Swapping the order of the true/false calls would result in outputs of 1, 0, and 2 respectively.
Huge Hint: At checkpoint 2, the value of oValue is actually null.
See comments for the solution.

So yeah, now you know something to watch out for when programming in plsql :)

Freebies!

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I’ve been following consumerist lately, and have gotten quite a few free coupons. Today, I got a free 8×10 print at Walgreens, free 2-piece grilled chicken meal at KFC, and a free Kashi frozen meal at Safeway. Safeway also has a few good deals this week, including $1.77 milano cookies and $1 blackberries. Yay for cheap-or-free food-or-things. :D

Work has been exciting lately. I’ve been working on reskinning the login page for the past few days… it’s made me realize how behind I am on new webdesign paradigms. Apparently, everything nowadays is done with CSS and the HTML itself is very minimal (sometimes to the extent that the page without CSS looks like a plain text file–unformatted black text on a white background). This is all fine and good except it often involves hardcoding pixel values in the CSS. Unlike tables, which will grow to fit larger text, CSS-styled divs will do strange (and often undesirable) things. This led to a few hacks that I ended up doing to get stuff looking right after localization. Meh. I really need to do webdesign again.

Life has been good. I’ve been working a bit on a redesign of Student Wars v2 to make the cards cleaner (AKA less text). Eventually, I’m going to release the game freely (instead of behind a password) so more people can play. Whee.

Photo Firsts (Zach)

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Life has gotten an update that finishes it up until yesterday (May 1, 2009). Now I’ll need to go back and tag high school photos to keep updating. Bleh.

My first photo of Zach:

July 8, 2007 in front of Purnell/Warner.

Also, I’ve gone through and updated stats for everyone who has photo firsts so far and switched over to the new 4-month block format.
Edit: Those stats can be found here

Life and reflection

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Life has another update. It’s now complete up through May 2008, so we’re less than a year from present day. Kinda scary. At some point I need to start tagging high school photos so I can work backward in life.

The events in the photos are becoming more and more familiar as I browse through them, picking out the one to choose for a particular day. It’s making me miss the college experience, especially after going through graduation photos again and realizing that it was likely the last time that all of my closest college friends were (or will be) be together in the same place, since not everyone returns for Carnival.
In some ways, that’s what college is really about… the classes are good, sure… but it’s really about the people you meet and the relationships you form. The majority of people I spend time with now are people I knew (no matter how casually) from college. I miss that sense of constantly being around people and being able to easily meet new people. I miss being able to walk up a couple flights of stairs and have spontaneous games, or being able to quickly assemble a group for food on an hour’s notice.
Meh.

Work has seemed largely stagnant lately. I’ve been working almost entirely on bug fixes and test automation, and I’m getting rather bored of it. Unfortunately, I also seem to be in a sort of mental rut where I haven’t been able to come up with interesting projects or initiatives for myself to take on to change this.
This will hopefully pass but, in the meantime, I can’t help but feel like I don’t accomplish anything of value in the time at my desk.
The last time I coded for fun was the framework for life.alanv.org. I haven’t touched the rewrite of the main alanv.org code for a year, and haven’t worked on CMU Adventures in about that time. This really should change, but I just haven’t been having any bouts of inspiration.
It’s not even that I dislike my job (I love my job, and love my coworkers, and enjoy going in every day), just more that I feel uninterested in my current tasks, and don’t have any particular ideas on how to change that or on what I could be doing instead.

I’m glad there’s at least one thing in my life that is going (mostly) the way I want it to. As we close in on 25 months this Saturday, I hope I never lose sight of the things that truly matter in life.