antipaucity

I shop at various grocery stores, and the cashiers generally look at my purchases a little askance: clementines, milk, ice cream, pot pies, beer, Ensure – they seem to get confused when I checkout with my selections.

I was raised with a thrifty mindset, but am not afraid to spend money for better quality.

For years I’ve preferred store brand cereals – corn flakes, raisin bran, cocoa puffs, cocoa crispies, rice crispies, and chex are all indistinguishable to me when comparing store brand and name brand. Some I can distinguish and just like the store brand more. Cheerios is the only notable difference – fake cheerios are NOT the same as the ones from General Mills.

Trader Joe’s raisin bran, for example, is cheaper than the name brand, has fewer calories, and (I think) tastes better than those from Post or Kellogg.

I don’t go out of my way to buy organic foods to make a statement. Many times I think they taste worse, or the relative percentage change in quality does not match the price percentage shift. Trader Joe’s raisin bran happens to be organic – but the fact that it tastes good and is inexpensive is more important.

I’ve been bitten several times by trying store brand macaroni and cheese. I picked-up a batch from Lowes Foods recently, and am hoping they’re not hideous like the ones from Winn Dixie were. But if they’re decent, then I have a source for less expensive than Kraft mac and cheese. My favorite is Prince brand, but those aren’t purchaseable in NC – and therefore I tend to stock-up periodically when I go home to NY.

Also, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the high quality of the canned strawberries I can get at my local dollar store. Yes. A dollar store. Most of the food they sell is high enough in sodium to make road ice quiver. But the canned strawberries at my local Dollar Tree near NC55 and NC54 are downright tasty – 90 calories per serving, with only three servings per can. That lines-up with my home-made applesauce for caloric value, and makes a nice shift.

They’re also not those supersized strawberries you find in most produce departments of grocery stores; the ones at Dollar Tree are about 1/2″ in diameter rather than 2″. The smaller size makes for what seems to be a more strawberryish strawberry than the giant ones from the supermarket.

Such experimenting has made me want to do more, and so now when I go shopping I try to compare not merely price or calories – but the taste quality. It leads to a lot of sampling, but being able to shave 10-50% off my grocery bill is a nice [eventual] payoff.

Today for lunch I popped out to M&S, which is a supermarket in the UK.

With my combo meal I got an M&S Cola. Right on the front it claims “no artificial colours”. And based on the ingredient list, I’ll go along with agreeing.

However, near the end of the ingredient list is ‘fruit and vegetable concentrate (black carrot and hibiscus)”. I never would have thought of putting either into a Cola, but it doesn’t taste bad. I’ve heard of both being in teas, but never a soda.

Who knew such a variety of sources can be utilized for flavoring?

I travel for work now, so I get to see lots of elevators. I’ve seen elevators that you pick the floor you want to go to outside the elevator, and then the elevator bank directs you to the one it thinks you should ride to get to your destination the quickest. I’ve seen simple elevators with numbers that light up. And I’ve seen ones that have no lights – they just open and you get on.

I noticed that the elevator lights at the customer site I’ve been assigned to the past couple weeks are arrows. But more importantly, when the elevator is going up, a green up arrow displays. However, when it’s going down, and red down arrow lights.

This got me contemplating what subliminal messages this might be conveying. Certainly one that jumps immediately to mind is that going to work is good, and leaving is bad.

It could also imply that before you leave you should STOP and make sure you have everything you need before going home.

But what about when you have meetings on another floor? Does the red light indicate it’s bad to go to the meeting? And, if so, does that mean meetings should always happen on your floor or higher?

How many other common, every-day objects play to preconceived notions of what we should or shouldn’t do?

I was making a change to a small table today: adding a field that wanted to be a varchar. The other fields that were of type char all magically changed to varchar when I was done with the alter statement that added one field.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to happen, but it was serendipitous for me, as I wanted to change the char fields to varchar anyway.

And, interestingly enough, if you have a table full of varchar fields and you try to add a char field, it will automatically switch it to match the varchar form, and not switch the varchars back to char.

I didn’t see anything in a quick search on mysql’s website about this behavior, so it’s either undocumented, my google-fu is weak, or it’s a bug.

While flying to Sunnyvale yesterday, I had the “privilege” to see a small wildfire from the air. It was very small, on the order of a couple acres, and somewhere nearish to Monterey, and close to the coast.

The orange smoke was quite striking from the air. Hopefully, firefighters have been able to get it contained by now, but it was definitely interesting to see from 30,000 feet.

…to bring you this update:

I just saw a guy climbing the side of the New York Times building here in Manhattan. Not sure if it’s the same guy who climbed the Eiffel Tower, but it was interesting.

Definitely not something you see every day.