Overpass Experiences The Eric Wroolie Blog

Social Media Fatigue

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything.  I can’t really say that I’ve been too busy—I’ve been enjoying the summer.  Since the kids got out of school, it’s difficult to get much work done.  So, everything is on hold until September.

I haven’t even been tweeting lately.  I guess I feel social media fatigue and am waning a little on Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.  Everything I think of to write about seems too mundane to write once I start typing it.  So, I don’t write it.  This is not what a blog is all about.  A blog should allow you to write what you want regardless of whether it is worthy of someone’s attention—if they want to read it, they will (or won’t).  I seem to be experiencing an inexplicable self-consciousness whenever I start writing something lately. It will pass soon, I’m sure.

On the tech side, I’ve been playing around with Silverlight a lot.  I have a hot and cold relationship with it.  Sometimes it seems like such a gimmicky technology which flies in the face of web standards.  At other times it seems like something that is so cool, you shouldn’t ignore it.  I’m getting a lot of agents calling me about WPF work in the banking sector—so it may be picking up soon (since WPF will probably lead to Silverlight work).

I just got back from a week-long holiday in Paris—well, actually most of it was spent at Disneyland.  I listened to some Michel Thomas French CDs before going over and tried to use French as much as possible with varying levels of success.  Despite learning Mandarin and Vietnamese, I failed the only semester I took of French in high school and always had trouble with masculine and feminine nouns (I had the same trouble when learning Hindi and Spanish).  I think I learned more in the past few weeks than I did that entire high school course.  Still, my French knowledge is really lacking—but having finally visited France, I am motivated to learn more of it.  It was a lot of fun, and very easy to travel to from London on the Eurostar.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, it’s time to get back to work.  I’m going to either start looking for more Overpass clients or find a contract somewhere.  The next few weeks will be pretty busy.

An update

So, immediately following my blog post about how great blogging is and how you should get a blog yourself, I go a month without posting anything.  Sometimes, although I have loads of energy, the things I think to write about seem either so trivial or so complicated that I don’t want to sit down and write them.

But here’s a patchy update on what is going on with me.

I’ve been working a bit over the last month.  I’m just doing some contract work while trying to get some business development going.  It’s funny when you’ve not been working a regular job for a while how un-natural it seems to get dressed up everyday and leave your normal life for 12 hours each day.

I’ve also been getting interested in meditation.  I’ve been meditating twice daily for two and a half weeks now.  It was difficult at first, but I’m getting better at it.  I’ve read so much, researched so much, and had so many experiences that I will write a post on this in the future.  I feel more calm and free from some of the anxiety I feel from time to time.  I’m really enjoying it, but it hasn’t been easy getting started (for me, at least).

I’m still getting up early.  I’m still running.  I still have my American accent, but am experimenting with using the word ‘fortnight’ more often.  Life is good.

One day we will will tell our grandchildren . . .

One day we will tell our grandchildren how difficult it was to look up information in a library when we were kids.

We will tell them about card catalogues and the Dewey decimal system.  We’ll tell them how we would look up a word in the dictionary and it would tell us to “see” another word.

Book Store

I’m not big on the viral email images that go around, but this one is pretty funny.  It was emailed to me, so I can’t take any credit for it (and it seems to be all over the web).

If you can't find the book you want you're probably shopping

at the ...................

Fast Food while Dairy Intolerant

Some members of my family are dairy intolerant.  This is usually fine when cooking at home (there are plenty of substitutes for milk products), but very difficult when going out.  During the Summer, I take my kids out on day trips around England and it is not always possible to prepare food in advance.  And, I love the junk food.  So, we'll go to a fast food place.

photo credit: MonsieurLui

The problem with dairy intolerance is that so many foods have milk (lactose, whey, or just "milk proteins") in their ingredients.  Common sense doesn't work when trying identify what has milk in it.  Most types of hot dogs, for example, include milk protein (but not all of them).  The tomato sauce on Pizza Hut pizzas include milk.  The BBQ ribs at TGI Fridays contain milk.  It has taken me a while to learn what to look out for.

If you have children that have (or you yourself has) an intolerance or allergy, you know how difficult this can be.  Last week, for instance, I stopped into a Subway and asked the store manager if their rib sandwich contained any dairy products.  He looked annoyed and told me that he had to read the ingredients on the box back in the freezer.  I asked him if he could do that.  He disappeared for a minute and returned with a giant white box which he read the side of.  "No, no milk," he said.  But I couldn't be sure if he was looking for the term "lactose" or "whey" or anything else which might include it.

Most fast-food chains make nutritional literature available online (although never usually available in the store).  I've printed out the documents for all the major chains which exists in the UK and pasted them all together.   I've found that printing all of the documents out (two pages to a sheet--double sided) and highlighting all the milk products makes going out for fast food a bit easier.  It's easy to keep this print-out in the car so we have it if we need it.

Here is a set of links of the big chains ingredient documents.  These are all American chains, but the links are to the UK sites (not sure if they vary in the UK).  If you have children with food intolerance, I hope you find this useful.

McDonalds

http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/static/pdf/food/OurFood-Booklet.pdf (pages 8-27 have ingredients listed)

Burger King

http://www.burgerking.co.uk/files/documents/ingredients.pdf

KFC

http://www.kfc.com/nutrition/pdf/kfc_allergens_april09.pdf

Pizza Hut

http://www.pizzahut.co.uk/media/77466/ingredients_list_starters_&_sides-0609.pdf

Dominos

http://www.takeafreshlook.co.uk/downloads/PizzaBasesToppingsIngredients.pdf