264 posts tagged “qotd” (page 2)

I am a farmer who raise ducks and cows. The animals have a total of 9 heads and 26 feet. How many ducks and cows do I have?
Submitted by The BlueTie.

Seriously? This is the QoTD? A math problem?

5 ducks and 4 cows.

Come on now vox, you can do better than this.

How do you travel to and from work - personal vehicle, bus, subway/train, pedal power? What does it cost you per week in gas or fares?
Submitted by Jan.

I live relatively close to work. I drive my Nissan Rogue which averages around 25.1mpg and my commute is 7.5 miles.

So, calculating that out, a 1 way trip is roughly .2988 gallons of gas. 2 way trip is .5976 gallons. At a price of about $4.15/gallon, that means I pay $1.24 for a one way trip, $2.48 per day, and for a week I pay about $12.40.

President Bush lifted an executive order banning offshore oil drilling on Monday. Do you think this is a good solution to the high prices Americans are paying for gasoline?

No. No it's not. There's a sizable portion of Americans who think that we can all get cheaper gas if we tap our oil reserves. There's also a sizable portion of Americans who don't realize that any oil that we can produce is going to be a small drop in the bucket of what we consume. We can't meet our daily consumption with our untapped reserves. We're not sitting on some goldmine of oil here.

Sure, the prices might drop a bit...but not much, not enough. The only way out of this mess is to cut back on consumption, not increase production. Increasing production is only treating the symptom, not the disease. I don't have a huge problem with offshore drilling, but the minute they lift the ban on drilling in alaska...ugh.

It just bothers me that people think that we can rely on domestic oil and cut down on imports. They seem to think it's some conspiracy that we have all this oil and it would change the world if we would use it. But that's just short term thinking, and shoddy short term thinking at that. It's just the typical perceived easy way out that the masses tend to favor that got us into this in the first place.

How are you celebrating the 4th of July?

I will be going over to my friends place for an overnight stay. Lots of zombie related things are planned, 28 days later and Shaun of the Dead, plus I'll probably be playing some City of Heroes with my new zombie based character. Also, there will be some Silent Hill 2 which fits in with the theme. Well...not totally since that's not really a zombie related thing...but it's still horror type stuff.

It should be a good time and a good way to forget that the rest of this week ever happened. There's a reason I haven't done much blogging recently, but everything seems to have calmed down quite a bit now, so hopefully this long weekend will be good for relieving some stress.

What is a childhood memory that still haunts you?

I can't remember if this happened when I was suspended from school for a while (that one's a bit of a long story) or if it was when I was sick for a while and couldn't come in. I want to say it was in elementary school so I'd have to go with the sick angle. Anyway, I was out of school for a while long enough where the teachers had been sending me my homework so I wouldn't be too far behind.

And one day, the homework packet came complete with a number 2 pencil, unsharpened. My Mom ended up sharpening the pencil and we used it to do my math homework. But, a little further down in the packet was instructions on how to make a pinwheel for science class...using the pencil that we had just sharpened.

Well, I kinda freaked out because my Mom sharpened the "Science Pencil". And if I recall correctly, it took the teacher reassuring me that the pencil wasn't all that important to calm me down about the whole thing. But to this day, the memory of the science pencil that had been deprived of it's chosen destiny haunts me.

What would you like to accomplish this week?

I'd like to finish off the decluttering project in my bedroom but I'm not sure if that's going to happen. As it is right now, I'm stuck because I've run out of garbage can space to throw more bags of the stuff I'm tossing. So it may have to wait until next week to continue in force.

I'd also like to get back in the habit of exercising daily. I've been severely lax recently on this front and as a result my weight loss has totally stalled. So I need to get back on the bandwagon and see if I can drop another 10 pounds to get back to where I was when I fell off the bandwagon last time. 

And also I want to spend more time practicing my piano/keyboard playing. Because it's something I want to get good at but I haven't been putting enough time in to really get much of anywhere.

How many meals do you cook at home each week? What do you do for the other meals?

Usually 4 meals cooked at home per week. The remainder are as follows:

Saturday (or sunday) I'm usually over at my friends place or otherwise out and about with them and we grab dinner somewhere (or Wassy cooks). So that's one weekend day down. Sunday I generally go over to my parents for the homemade pizza my Mom makes, although sometimes I'll stay home and cook something myself.

Wednesday is the day Wassy comes over and we go out to dinner and do stuff that we're interested but Jay wouldn't really enjoy. Usually there's music listening or Anime watching.

So I only really cook 4 days a week. And I mean cook by the loosest definiton of the word.

Look at the first post you ever wrote on Vox. What important developments or changes have occurred in your life since then?
Submitted by Alexandra.

My first vox post was Happy Birthday IBM PC, which was about the anniversary of the PC, unsurprisingly enough. However, it took a few days for me to get really comfortable with what I put up here so for the first week or so, my first real blog post didn't happen until after that when my 4th gen iPod was flaking out.

However, since I started blogging on Vox the two big things were that I've graduated from college and I've gotten to know my friends better. I've been in a bit of a holding pattern for a couple years basically, so there hasn't been much major stuff going on.

There were a lot of smaller things though that changed my life in minor ways. include getting a couple new hobbies (fish and music playing more recently). My penguin obsession has also climbed to new heights and my obsession with Dream Theater has cooled off slightly.

I've stopped playing City of Heroes and started again. Also switched to a Mac for all my major computing needs which was a good thing because all of my other computers exploded at pretty much the same time.

What could we do to create a world with less violence?

I totally understand that what I'm about to say is hopelessly naive and reflects a world view that seems to be so far from the truth of what is possible as to be almost comical. But it's my view anyway.

In order to create a world with less violence, we need to get people to understand that we're all just people and we're all in this whole mess together. While there's cultural differences between different areas of the world, in the end we've all still got the same emotions, the same biological makeup, the same potentials, the same problems. Every human on the planet wants to find a way to survive and be happy. We all value family. (Speaking generally here, and ignore any psychological illnesses that is)

Which is why I don't think there's a justifiable reason for war. It's all because one guy wants that little bit of land those other people are sitting on over there. Or they want something the other people have. And it's justified because the people "over there" are different than us over here. So they must be evil. And nobody ever takes the time to really get to know the people they're demonizing because then they couldn't demonize them. Because they would realize that they're not really that different after all.

The artificial division of the world into separate countries and the development of the nationalism that comes along with that is one of the biggest problems facing the human race right now. And I really hope that at some point, as a whole, we can transcend our perceived differences. But I think we'll probably blow ourselves up long before that would ever be possible.

So, I think that's about enough depressing blog posting for one day.

What's your favorite type of cheese? Or, if you don't like cheese, why not?
Submitted by Draegon Scribe.

When the question of what kind of cheese comes up, I generally prefer Swiss or Provolone on sandwiches. I'm ok with American but it's definitely not my favorite type of cheese. For general cheese eating though, I do like a good slice of Vermont Sharp Cheddar.

I've also tried Munster (after a conversation with a friend where I was called a heathen for never having tried it) recently which I do also like.