Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I've been trying to bring in lunch more and more lately. Mainly so I don't go out, get more work done, lose some weight, and save some money from the cafeteria. I've tried Healthy Choice, Lean Cuisine, Stouffers, pretty much everything.

Just for the record, Lean Cuisine is by far the best. It may lack some flavor sometimes and the portions might be a bit small. But you know, I never feel hungry after. Plus pretty much everything is under 500 calories and low in fat and crap so it's not all bad.

I just had a Healthy Choice french bread pizza. Honestly, I don't think I'll be grabbing one of those again. The flavor is still in my mouth and I can't get rid of it. It's sort of weird tasting, metal / tomato / radioactive isotopes / bad onions. On the plus side it was only like 340 calories.

Sometimes I wish the cafeteria would just sell Lean Cuisines and call it a day. $2.50 per meal, sorted.

The cafeteria blows. It really does. I'm not saying they don't have days where the food tastes good and is a good value. What I am saying however is that it's just totally hit or miss. I'm pretty sure the B50 cafeteria at Microsoft is one of the few that can actually mess up a salad bar and sandwich.

As an example the other day I went to get a sandwich that I order pretty much every day, how in the world does the lady get tomato from green pepper or mayo from dijon mustard!? A day before that I went to get some salad, problem was, it was all half frozen and the chicken strips tasted like plastic. I typically walk by the pizza because you can literally see pools of oil sitting ontop of the cheese as the pizza warms under the lamps. Then there's the grill, about the only thing that usually goes right. Problem is that the lines are ridiculously long so you stand there for 15 minutes waiting for your burger. Vegetarian options are extremely limited as well. Typically there might be some soup, and maybe one tofu dish. Today there was a tomato soup. Yay, not. In fact while we're at it, lets look at the menu for today:

Breakfast	BC Breakfast Quesadilla		$2.25
	Banana Berry Smoothie Fresh Bananas and Strawberries Blended with Yogurt and Honey Protein Powder is Optional		$3.00
Soups of the Day	Old Fashioned Tomato (Vegetarian)		1.95/2.60/3.05
	Clam Chowder		1.95/2.60/3.05
Wild Greens	BC Baked Potato		$1.65
Pizza	Roasted Chicken, Sun Dried Tomato & Smoked Gouda Savory pizza topped with roasted chicken, sun dried tomatoes and gouda cheese		$1.90
	Julienne Vegetable and Sun dried Tomato Italian Marinated Vegetables with Tangy Sun dried Tomatoes and a blend of cheeses		$3.50
Deli	BC Santa Fe Chicken Pita		$4.75
Entrée	Swedish Meatballs over Egg Noodles Served with a Side and a Roll		$4.25
Grill	Beer Battered Fish and Chips Beer Battered Cod Filets, Served with French Fries		$5.35

Eurest the food service provider typically tries and come up with some fancy menu but more often than not can't get even the most basic dishes right. Any steamed or seasoned veg is usually dry and plain or soggy and the flavor is over bearing. It's just a total mess. Dom has said it was better when Microsoft subsidized the cost. I'd like to think so, since Eurest sure loves charging me $5.70 for a sandwich one day then $4.90 for the same exact thing the very next.

So sometimes I'll go out, problem is that B50 has next to nothing within walking distance, save a teriyaki and I think there's a deli up near that as well. That leaves driving. So you consume gas, take 20 minutes to get there and get back, the food is always better, most of the time cheaper, and overall more satisfying.

At this point though I honestly feel like my best option are the 3 for $8/9 Lean Cuisine meals that I get and can bring into work. Even they taste better, and they actually save me money, I get my food no matter what in under 8 minutes and it's a good size portion and I don't feel like crap after I eat it.

I know I'm not the only one, it's practically a running joke with people here in 50. I'm just amazed Eurest hasn't been thrown out with their bad food.

And finally for a company that has somewhere around $30 billion in cash laying around you'd think that Microsoft would be able to get lunch right.

Okay, I'm probably not being stalked, but sometimes I find some of the searches done that lead people to my site kinda weird. For the past week I've gotten multiple hits for the same "corey gouker" search done by the same IP around the same time. If it were coming from England, I'd think it were my crazy ex, but it's not. Plus I think I did a pretty good job making it clear that I didn't really want to hear from her again unless it was through PayPal returning the cash I paid out for a plane ticket. Dom's Zero Contact Procedure sorta worked I guess.

But seriously, when there's more information about you online than ever before how do you really control it? Sometimes I think people don't realize how easy it is to cross reference IP's, usernames, emails, locations, nick names, and any other one or two bit piece of information. With the right amount of digging and guessing it really isn't all that hard to find out just about anything you wanted to know about someone who lives a good portion of their life on the net.

Well, where does one start? First off the Internet really is endless. By the time I finish writing this diatribe there'll be another 1000 pages of content out there. There'll be a billion more forum posts, and trillions of instant messages sent. At which point does it become too much? At which point is the value added go down so greatly it becomes useless?

We've got Google, we've got Desktop Search, but what we don't all seem to have is an endless supply of brain capacity for all this information. At one time I remember this conversation with my gramps. He really didn't understand what I meant when I said I wanted to store everything and anything and never delete anything off the computer. I explained that because of the way I can do stuff on the computer I can access anything I want at any given time, it'd be a bit like Data in ST:TNG but just without the immediate access after thinking about it.

The problem I've encountered though is that through the desire to have all this information (for what reason I don't know), to have all this music and multimedia content (I don't even get through all of it); I've totally lost any real meaning in all of it. I've got emails since my days of dial up, chat logs since before chat logs even existed or MSN IM even existed for that matter, pictures from just about every point of my life, and more music and movies than anyone could possibly care to watch. But in all this "stuff", the one problem I see is that I lately I spend more time organizing, categorizing, and filtering the content than I do consuming it.

Desktop Search and Google has helped find what I'm looking for, but my personal content still needs to be tagged, this is especially true with music.

Maintaining this archive of information isn't cheap either. I've got over 1.3TB of data just sitting, collecting random magnetic waves in a server in a closet. This server is probably consuming at least $12/mo in electricity, if not more since during the summer months it can get to 99° in the office so it needs to be cooled. To keep this blog and all my information on the web I spend another $100/mo on a second Internet connection to have a static unfiltered IP.

It's also a huge headache and burden, someone like me tends to over complicate it as well. I need to make sure the data is secure so I do RAID-5 and have it all centrally stored. To save on multiple servers I have one to do everything, so this server acts as my file server, media hub, domain controller, active directory master, Exchange front and back end, SQL server, you name it this server does it.

I'm not sure if it's a total anal retentiveness or what, but this stuff just ends up taking up too much time and getting it all working is a big pain in the ass.

So I spend even less time enjoying everything, less time getting out doing stuff outside the apartment, and find my days are never long enough.

The one catch-22 in all this though. I've found that today nearly all my friends, almost every one of them except for the few I work with, I've met through the Internet. So it's probably like 98% of everyone I communicate with about life on a regular basis at this point I've either neither met in person or only met them in person after communicating for some time over the web. A part of me finds this interesting since well that's the way things are now. Another part finds it disturbing, though I guess it wouldn't be so bad if more of the people I considered close friends online lived in the same neck of the woods physically. Sadly it even seems like people I know who are local, well, I end up communicating with them more online than I do face to face.

I guess I've lost my point in all this. I suppose my main thought was, what has this all gotten me? How much of all this technology do I really use, how much do I really need? How would I really feel if I just gave it all up?